Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  for fusing into a single phrase, two or more diverse impressions .

  . . . in her strong toil of grace

  of Shakespeare is such a fusion ; the metaphor identified itself

  with what suggests it; the resultant is one and is unique :

  1 5 5

  APPREC I ATI ONS O F I N D I V IJ> U A L AUTHORS

  1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0

  ·

  Does the silk worm expend her yellow labours ? . . .

  Why does yon fellow falsify highways

  And lays his life between the judge's lips

  To refine such a one ? keeps horse and mm

  To beat their valours for her ?

  Let the common sewer take it from distinction . . . .

  Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us . . . .

  These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual

  slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new

  and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt

  into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the

  senses, a development of the English language which we have

  perhaps never equalled. And, indeed, with the end of Chapman,

  Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, Donne we end a period when the

  intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation became word and word was sensation. The next period is the period of Milton (though still with a Marvell in it) ; and this period is

  initiated by Massinger.

  It is not that the word becomes less exact. Massinger is, in a

  wholly eulogistic sense, choice and correct. And the decay of the

  senses is not inconsistent with a greater sophistication of language. But every vital development in language is a development of feeling as well. The verse of Shakespeare and the major Shakespearian dramatists is an innovation of this kind, a true mutation of species. The verse practised by Massinger is a different verse

  from that of his predecessors ; but it is not a development based

  on, or resulting from, a new way of feeling. On the contrary, it

  seems to lead us away from feeling altogether.

  We mean that Massinger must be placed as much at the beginning of one period as at the end of another. A certain Boyle, quoted by Mr. Cruickshank, says that Milton's blank verse owes

  much to the study of Massinger's.

  In the indefinable touches which make up the music of a verse [says

  Boyle], in the artistic distribution of pauses, and in the unerring choice

  and grouping of just those words which strike the ear as the perfection

  of harmony, there are, if we leave Cyril Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy

  out of the question, only two masters in the drama, Shakespeare in his

  latest period and Massinger.

  This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have preferred

  Tourneur's secondary work to his Revenger's Tragedy, and one

  must think that he had never glanced at Ford. But though the

  1 56

  P H I L I P M ASS I NG E R

  appraisal be ludicrous, the praise is not undeserved. Mr. Cruickshank has given us an excellent example of Massinger's syntax : What though my father

  Writ man before he was so, and confirm'd it,

  By numbering that day no part of his life

  In which he did not service to his country;

  Was he to be free therefore from the laws

  And ceremonious form in your decrees ?

  Or else because he did as much as man

  In those three memorable overthrows,

  At Gramon, Morat, Na11cy, where his master,

  The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes

  I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life,

  To be excused from payment of those sums

  Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal

  To serve his country forced him to take up ?

  It is impossible to deny the masterly construction of this passage ;

  perhaps there is not one living poet who could do the like. I t is

  impossible to deny the originality. The language is pure and

  correct, free from muddiness or turbidity. Massinger does not

  confuse metaphors, or heap them one upon another. He is lucid,

  though not easy. But if Massinger's age, 'without being exactly

  corrupt, lacks moral fibre', Massinger's verse, without being

  exactly corrupt, suffers from cerebral anaemia. To say that an

  involved style is necessarily a bad style would be preposterous.

  But such a style should follow the involutions of a mode of perceiving, registering, and digesting impressions which is also involved. It is to be feared that the feeling of Massinger is simple

  and overlaid with received ideas. Had Massinger had a nervous

  system as refined as that of Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, or

  Ford, his style would be a triumph. But such a nature was not at

  hand, and Massinger precedes, not another Shakespeare, but

  Milton.

  Massinger is, in fact, at a further remove from Shakespeare

  than that other precursor of Milton - John Fletcher. Fletcher was

  above all an opportunist, in his verse, in his momentary effects,

  never quite a pastiche ; in his structure ready to sacrifice everything to the single scene. To Fletcher, because he was more intelligent, less will be forgiven. Fletcher had a cunning guess at

  feelings, and betrayed them ; Massinger was unconscious and

  innocent. As an artisan of the theatre he is not inferior to Fletcher,

  and his best tragedies have an honester unity than Bonduca. But

  the unity is superficial. In the Roman Actor the development of

  157

  APPRECI A T I ONS O F I N D I V I D.U A L AUTHORS · 1 9 I !S- 1 9 3 0

  parts is out of all proportion to the central theme ; in the Unnatural Combat, in spite of the de_ft handling of suspense and the quick shift from climax to a new suspense, the first part of the

  play is the hatred of Malefort for his son and the second part is his

  passion for his daughter. It is theatrical skill, not an artistic

  conscience arranging emotions, that holds the two parts together.

  In the Duke of Milan the appearance of Sforza at the Court of his

  conqueror only delays the action, or rather breaks the emotional

  rhythm. And we have named three of Massinger's best.

  A dramatist who so skilfully welds together parts which have no

  reason for being together, who fabricates plays so well knit and so

  remote from unity, we should expect to exhibit the same synthetic

  cunning in character. Mr. Cruickshank, Coleridge, and Leslie

  Stephen are pretty well agreed that Massinger is no master of

  characterization. You can, in fact, put together heterogeneous

  parts to form a lively play ; but a character, to be living, must be

  conceived from some emotional unity. A character is not to be

  composed of scattered observations of human nature, but of parts

  which are felt together. Hence it is that although Massinger's

  failure to draw a moving character is no greater than his failure to

  make a whole play, and probably springs from the same defective

  sensitiveness, yet the failure in character is more conspicuous and

  more disastrous. A 'living' character is not necessarily 'true to

  life'. It is a person whom we can see and hear, whether he be true

  or false to human nature as we know it. What the creator of

  character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen

  sensibility ; the dramatist need not understand people ; but he

  must be exceptionally aware of them. This
awareness was not

  given to Massinger. He inherits the traditions of conduct, female

  chastity, hymeneal sanctity, the fashion of honour, without either

  criticizing or informing them from his own experience. In the

  earlier drama these conventions are merely a framework, or an

  alloy necessary for working the metal ; the metal itself consisted of

  unique emotions resulting inevitably from the circumstances,

  resulting or inhering as inevitably as the properties of a chemical

  compound. Middleton's heroine, for instance, in The Changeling,

  exclaims in the well-known words :

  Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,

  To shelter such a cunning cruelty

  To make his death the murderer of my honour!

  The word 'honour' in such a situation is out of date, but the

  emotion of Beatrice at that moment, given the conditions, is as

  permanent and substantial as anything in human nature. The

  rs8 .

  P H I L I P M ASSI N G E R

  emotion of Othello in Act V. is the emotion of a man who discovers that the worst part of his own soul has been exploited by someone more clever than he ; it is this emotion carried by the

  writer to a very high degree of intensity. Even in so late and so

  decayed a drama as that of Ford, the framework of emotions and

  morals of the time is only the vehicle for statements of feeling

  which are unique and imperishable : Ford's and Ford's only.

  What may be considered corrupt or decadent in the morals of

  Massinger is not an alteration or diminution in morals ; it is

  simply the disappearance of all the personal and real emotions

  which this morality supported and into which it introduced a kind

  of order. As soon as the emotions disappear the morality which

  ordered it appears hideous. Puritanism itself became repulsive

  only when it appeared as the survival of a restraint after the feelings which it restrained had gone. When Massinger's ladies resist temptation they do not appear to undergo any important emotion ;

  they merely know what is expected of them ; they manifest themselves to us as lubricious prudes. Any age has its conventions ; and any age might appear absurd when its conventions get into the

  hands of a man like Massinger - a man, we mean, of so exceptionally superior a literary talent as Massinger's, and so paltry an imagination. The Elizabethan morality was an important convention ; important because it was not consciously of one social class alone, because it provided a framework for emotions to

  which all classes could respond, and it hindered no feeling. It was

  not hypocritical, and it did not suppress ; its dark corners are

  haunted by the ghost of Mary Fitton and perhaps greater. It is a

  subject which has not been sufficiently investigated. Fletcher and

  Massinger rendered it ridiculous ; not by not believing it, but

  because they were men of great talents �·ho could not vivify it ;

  because they could not fit into it passionate, complete human

  characters.

  The tragedy of Massinger is interesting chiefly according to the

  definition given before ; the highest degree of verbal excellence

  compatible with the most rudimentary development of the senses.

  Massinger succeeds better in something which is not tragedy ; in

  the romantic comedy. A VerJ' Woman deserves all the praise that

  Swinburne, with his almost unerring gift of selection, has bestowed upon it. The probable collaboration of Fletcher had the happiest result ; for certainly that admirable comic personage, the

  tipsy Borachia, is handled with more humour than we expect of

  Massinger. It is a play which would be enjoyable on the stage.

  The form, however, of romantic comedy is itself inferior and

  decadent. There is an inflexibility about the poetic drama which

  is by no means a matter of classical, or neoclassical, or pseudo-

  1 59

  A P P R E C I A T I ONS O F I N D I V I !>UAL AUTHORS

  1 9 1 8- 1 93 0

  •

  classical law. The poetic drama might develop forms highly

  different from those of Greece or England, India or Japan. Conceded the utmost freedom, the romantic drama would yet remain inferior. The poetic drama must have an emotional unity, let the

  emotion be whatever you like. It must have a dominant tone ; and

  if this be strong enough, the most heterogeneous emotions may be

  made to reinforce it. The romantic comedy is a skilful concoction

  of inconsistent emotion, a revue of emotion. A Very Woman is

  surpassingly well plotted. The debility of romantic drama does

  not depend upon extravagant setting, or preposterous events, or

  inconceivable coincidences : all these might be found in a serious

  tragedy or comedy. I t consists in an internal incoherence of

  feelings, a concatenation of emotions which signifies nothing.

  From this type of play, so eloquent of emotional disorder, there

  was no swing back of the pendulum. Changes never come by a

  simple reinfusion into the form which the life has just left. The

  romantic drama was not a new form. Massinger dealt not with

  emotions so much as with the social abstractions of emotions,

  more generalized and therefore more quickly and easily interchangeable within the confines of a single action. He was not guided by direct communications through the nerves. Romantic

  drama tended, accordingly, toward what is sometimes called the

  'typical', but which is not the truly typical ; for the 0'Pical figure

  in a drama is always particularized - an individual. The tendency

  of the romantic drama was towards a form which continued it in

  removing its more conspicuous vices, was towards a more severe

  external order. This form was the Heroic Drama. We look into

  Dryden's 'Essay on Heroic Plays', and we find that 'love and

  valour ought to be the subject of an heroic poem'. Massinger, in

  his destruction of the old drama, had prepared the way for

  Dryden. The intellect had perhaps exhausted the old conventions.

  It was not able to supply the impoverishment of feeling . . . .

  160

  ANDREW MARVELL

  The tercentenary of the former member for Hull deserves not

  only the celebration proposed by that favoured borough, but a

  little serious reflection upon his writing. That is an act of piety,

  which is very different from the resurrection of a deceased

  reputation. Marvell has stood high for some years ; his best poems

  are not very many, and not only must be well known, from the

  Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse, but must

  also have been enjoyed by numerous readers. His grave needs

  neither rose nor rue nor laurel ; there is no imaginary justice to be

  done ; we may think about him, if there be need for thinking, for

  our own benefit, not his. To bring the poet back to life - the great,

  the perennial, task of criticism - is in this case to squeeze the drops

  of the essence of two or three poems ; even confining ourselves to

  these, we may find some precious liquor unknown to the present

  age. Not to determine rank, but to isolate this quality, is the

  critical labour. The fact that of all Marvell's verse, which is itself

  not a great quantity, the really valuable part consists of a very

  few poems indicates that the unknown quality of which we speak

  is pr
obably a literary rather than a personal quality ; or, more

  truly, that it is a quality of a civilization, of a traditional habit of

  life. A poet like Donne, or like Baudelaire or Laforgue, may

  almost be considered the inventor of an attitude, a system of

  feeling or of morals. Donne is difficult to analyse : what appears at

  one time a curious personal point of view may at another time

  appear rather the precise concentration of a kind of feeling

  diffused in the air about him. Donne and his shroud, the shroud

  and his motive for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not the

  same thing. The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more

  than a moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind which (from the same point of view) the later centuries seem to have been partly engaged in repudiating. But Donne would have been an individual at any time and place ; Marvell's best verse is the product of European, that is to

  say Latin, culture.

  Out of that high style developed from Marlowe through Jonson

  161

  A P P R E C I A T I O N S OF I N D I V I J;lUAL AUTHORS · 1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0

  (for Shakespeare does not lend himself to these genealogies) the

  seventeenth century separated tw9 qualities : wit and magniloquence. Neither is as simple or as apprehensible as its name seems to imply, and the two are not in practice antithetical ; both are

  conscious and cultivated, and the mind which cultivates one may

  cultivate the other. The actual poetry, of Marvell, of Cowley, of

  Milton, and of others, is a blend in varying proportions. And we

  must be on guard not to employ the terms with too wide a comprehension ; for like the other fluid terms with which literary criticism deals, the meaning alters with the age, and for precision

  we must rely to some degree upon the literacy and good taste of

  the reader. The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the

  great master of disgust. What is meant is some quality which is

  common to the songs in Comus and Cowley's Anacreontics and

  Marvell's Horatian Ode. It is more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch ; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath

  the slight lyric grace. You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats or