Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  the punctuation, inserting or removing a comma or a semi-colon

  to make an obscure passage suddenly luminous, dwelling on a

  single word, comparing its use in its nearer and in its most remote

  contexts, purifying a disturbed or cryptic lecture-note into lucid

  profundity. To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on

  the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for

  everything and exact ideas about nothing - when a word half

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  understood, torn from its place in some alien o r half-formed

  science, as of psychology, conceals from both writer and reader

  the meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt

  except the dogmas of sciences of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular philosophy, tends to

  become a language of tergiversation - Andrewes may seem

  pedantic and verbal. It is only when we have saturated ourselves

  in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find

  his examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent.

  Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it ; squeezing

  and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning

  which we should never have supposed any word to possess. In

  this process the qualities which we have mentioned, of ordonnance and precision, are exercised.

  Take, almost at random, a passage from Andrewes's exposition

  of the text, 'For unto you is born this day in the city of David a

  Saviour, which is Christ the Lord'. (Luke ii. 1 1). Any passage

  that we can choose must be torn violently from its context.

  Who is it ? Three things are said of this Child by the Angel. ( 1) He is

  'a Saviour'. (2) 'Which is Christ'. (3) 'Christ the Lord.' Three of his

  titles, well and orderly inferred one of another by good consequence.

  We cannot miss one of them ; they be necessary all. Our method on

  earth is to begin with great ; in heaven they begin with good first.

  First, then, 'a Saviour' ; that is His name, Jesus, Soter ; and in that

  Name His benefit, Salus, 'saving health or salvation'. Such a name as

  the great Orator himself saith of it, Soter, hoc quantum est ? Ita magnum

  est ut Iatino uno verbo exprimi non possit. 'This name Saviour is so great

  as no one word can express the force of it.'

  But we are not so much to regard the ecce how great it is, as gaudium

  what joy is in it ; that is the point we are to speak to. And for that, men

  may talk what they will, but sure there is no joy in the world to the joy

  of a man saved ; no joy so great, no news so welcome, as to one ready to

  perish, in case of a lost man, to hear of one that will save him. In danger

  of perishing by sickness, to hear of one will make him well again ; by

  sentence of the law, of one with a pardon to save his life ; by enemies,

  of one that will rescue and set him in safety. Tell any of these, assure

  them but of a Saviour, it is the best news he ever heard in his life.

  There is joy in the name of a Saviour. And even this way, this Child is a

  Saviour too. Potest hoc.facere, sed hoc non est opus Ejus. 'This He can do,

  but this is not His work' ; a farther matter there is, a greater salvation

  He came for. And it may be we need not any of these ; we are not

  presently sick, in no fear of the law, in no danger of enemies. And it

  may be, if we were, we fancy to ourselves to be relieved some other

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  way. But that which He came for, that saving we need all ; and none but

  He can help us to it. We have therefore all cause to be glad for the

  Birth of this Saviour.

  And then, after this succession of short sentences - no one is more

  master of the short sentence than Andrewes - in which the effort

  is to find the exact meaning and make that meaning live, he

  slightly but sufficiently alters the rhythm in proceeding more at

  large :

  I know not how, but when we hear of saving or mention of a Saviour,

  presently our mind is carried to the saving of our skin, of our temporal

  state, of our bodily life, and farther saving we think not of. But there is

  another life not to be forgotten, and greater the dangers, and the

  destruction more to be feared than of this here, and it would be well

  sometimes we were remembered of it. Besides our skin and flesh a

  soul we have, and it is our better part by far, that also hath need of a

  Saviour ; that hath her destruction out of which, that hath her destroyer

  from which she would be saved, and those would be thought on. I ndeed

  our chief thought and care would be for that ; how to escape the wrath,

  how to be saved from the destruction to come, whither our sins will

  certainly bring us. Sin it is will destroy us all.

  In this extraordinary prose, which appears to repeat, to stand

  still, but is nevertheless proceeding in the most deliberate and

  orderly manner, there are often flashing phrases which never

  desert the memory. In an age of adventure and experiment in

  language, Andrewes is one of the most resourceful of authors in

  his devices for seizing the attention and impressing the memory.

  Phrases such as 'Christ is no wild-cat. What talk ye of twelve

  days ?' or 'the word within a word, unable to speak a word', do not

  desert us ; nor do the sentences in which, before extracting all the

  spiritual meaning of a text, Andrewes forces a concrete presence

  upon us.

  Of the wise men come from the East :

  It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time

  of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and

  specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days

  short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, 'the very dead of winter'.

  Of 'the Word made flesh' again :

  I add yet farther ; what flesh ? The flesh of an infant. What, Verb11m

  infans, the Word of an infant ? The Word, and not be able to speak a

  word ? How evil agreeth this ! This He put up. How born, how

  entertained ? In a stately palace, cradle of ivory, robes of estate ? No ;

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  but a stable for His palace, a manger for His cradle, poor clouts for

  His array.

  He will not hesitate to hammei, to inflect, even to play upon a

  word for the sake of driving home its meaning :

  Let us then make this so accepted a time in itself twice acceptable by

  our accepting, which He will acceptably take at our hands.

  We can now better estimate what is this that we have called

  relevant intensity, for we have had enough of passages from

  Andrewes to recognize the extremity of his difference from

  Donne.

  Everyone knows a passage from a sermon of Donne's, which is

  given by Mr. Pearsall Smith under the title of 'I am Not all

  Here'.

  I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same

  instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done,
<
br />   you are not all here neither ; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you

  are thinking that you have heard a better sermon somewhere else of

  this text before ; you are here, and yet you think you could have heard

  some other doctrine of downright Predestination and Reprobation

  roundly delivered somewhere else with more edification to you ; you

  are here, and you remember yourselves that now yee think of it: This

  had been the fittest time, now, when everybody else is at church, to

  have made such and such a private visit ; and because you would bee

  there, you are there,

  after which Mr. Pearsall Smith very happily places the paragraph

  on 'Imperfect Prayers' :

  A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a feare of tomorrow's dangers, a

  straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an

  anything, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in

  my prayer. So certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things,

  perfect in this world.

  These are thoughts which would never have come to Andrewes.

  When Andrewes begins his sermon, from beginning to end you

  are sure that he is wholly in his subject, unaware of anything else,

  that his emotion grows as he penetrates more deeply into his

  subject, that he is finally 'alone with the Alone', with the mystery

  which he is seeking to grasp more and more firmly. One is reminded

  of the words of Arnold about the preaching of Newman.

  Andrewes's emotion is purely contemplative ; it is not personal,

  it is wholly evoked by the object of contemplation, to which it is

  adequate ; his emotions wholly contained in and explained by its

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  object. But with Donne there is always the something else, the

  'bafiling' of which Mr. Pearsall Smith speaks in his introduction.

  Donne is a 'personality' in a sense in which Andrewes is not : his

  sermons, one feels, are a 'means of self-expression'. He is constantly finding an object which shall be adequate to his feelings ; Andrewcs is wholly absorbed in the object and therefore responds

  with the adequate emotion. Andrewes has the got1t pour Ia vie

  spirituelle, which is not native to Donne. On the other hand, it

  would be a great mistake to remember only that Donne was called

  to the priesthood by King James against his will, and that he

  accepted a benefice because he had no other way of making a

  living. Donne had a genuine taste both for theology and for

  religious emotion ; but he belonged to that class of persons, of

  which there are always one or two examples in the modern world,

  who seek refuge in religion from the tumults of a strong emotional

  temperament which can find no complete satisfaction elsewhere.

  He is not wholly without kinship to Huysmans.

  But Donne is not the less valuable, though he is the more

  dangerous for this reason. Of the two men, it may be said that

  Andrewes is the more mediaeval, because he is the more pure,

  and because his bond was with the Church, with tradition. His

  intellect was satisfied by theology and his sensibility by prayer

  and liturgy. Donne is the more modern - if we are careful to take

  this word exactly, without any implication of value, or any suggestion that we must have more sympathy with Donne than with Andrewes. Donne is much less the mystic ; he is primarily

  interested in man. He is much less traditional. In his thought

  Donne has, on the one hand, much more in common with the

  Jesuits, and, on the other hand, much more in common with the

  Calvinists, than has Andrewes. Donne many times betrays the

  consequences of early Jesuit influence and of his later studies in

  Jesuit literature ; in his cunning knowledge of the weaknesses of

  the human heart, his understanding of human sin, his skill in

  coaxing and persuading the attention of the variable human mind

  to Divine objects, and in a kind of smiling tolerance among his

  menaces of damnation. He is dangerous only for those who find in

  his sermons an indulgence of their sensibility, or for those who,

  fascinated by 'personality' in the romantic sense of the word - for

  those who find in 'personality' an ultimate value - forget that in

  the spiritual hierarchy there are places higher than that of Donne.

  Donne will certainly have always more readers than Andrewes,

  for the reason that his sermons can be read in detached passages

  and for the reason that they can be read by those who have no

  interest in the subject. He has many means of appeal, and appeals

  to many temperaments and minds, and, among others, to those

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  capable of a certain wantonnes� of the spirit. Andrewes will never

  have many readers in any one generation, and his will never be

  the immortality of anthologies. Yet his prose is not inferior to that

  of any sermons in the language, unless it be some of Newman's.

  And even the larger public which does not read him may do well

  to remember his greatness in history - a place second to none in

  the history of the formation of the English Church.

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  from THOMAS M I DD LETON

  . . . Between the tragedies and the comedies of Shakespeare, anc..l

  certainly between the tragedies and the comedies of Jonson, we

  can establish a relation ; we can see, for Shakespeare or Jonson,

  that each had in the end a personal point of view which can be

  called neither comic nor tragic. But with Middleton we can

  establish no such relation. He remains merely a name, a voice, the

  author of certain plays, which are all of them great plays. He has

  no point of view, is neither sentimental nor cynical ; he is neither

  resigned, nor disillusioned, nor romantic ; he has no message. He

  is merely the name which associates six or seven great plays.

  For there is no doubt about The Changeling. Like all of the plays

  attributed to Middleton, it is long-winded and tiresome ; the

  characters talk too much, and then suddenly stop talking and act ;

  they are real and impelled irresistibly by the fundamental motions

  of humanity to good or evil. This mixture of tedious discourse and

  sudden reality is everywhere in the work of Middleton, in his

  comedy also. In The Roaring Girl we read with toil through a mass

  of cheap conventional intrigue, and suddenly realize that we are,

  and have been for some time without knowing it, observing a real

  and unique human being. In reading The Changeling we may

  think, till almost the end of the play, that we have been concerned

  merely with a fantastic Elizabethan morality, and then discover

  that we are looking on at a dispassionate exposure of fundamental

  passions of any time and any place. The usual opinion remains the

  just judgment : The Changeling is Middleton's greatest play. The

  morality of the convention seems to us absurd. To many intelligent readers this play has only an historical interest, and serves only to illustrate the moral taboos of the Elizabethans. The

  heroine is a young woman who, in order to dispose of a fiance to

  whom she is indifferent, so that she may marr
y the man she loves,

  accepts the offer of an adventurer to murder the affianced, at the

  price (as she finds in due course) of becoming the murderer's

  mistress. Such a plot is, to a modern mind, absurd ; and the

  consequent tragedy seems a fuss about nothing. But The Changeling is not merely contingent for its effect upon our acceptance of 189

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  Elizabethan good form or convention ; it is, i n fact, no more

  dependent upon the convention of its epoch than a play like A

  Doll's House. Underneath the convention there is the stratum of

  truth permanent in human nature. The tragedy of The Changeling

  is an eternal tragedy, as permanent as fEdipus or Antony and

  Cleopatra ; it is the tragedy of the not naturally bad but irresponsible and undeveloped nature, caught in the consequences of its own action. In every age and in every civilization there are

  instances of the same things the unmoral nature, suddenly

  trapped in the inexorable toil : of morality - of morality not made

  by man but by Nature - and forced to take the consequences of

  an act which it had planned light-heartedly. Beatrice is not a moral

  creature ; she becomes moral only by becoming damned. Our

  conventions are not the same as those which Middleton assumed

  for his play. But the possibility of that frightful discovery of

  morality remains permanent.

  The words in which Middleton expresses his tragedy are as

  great as the tragedy. The process through which Beatrice, having

  decided that De Flores is the instrument for her purpose, passes

  from aversion to habituation, remains a permanent commentary

  on human nature. The directness and precision of De Flores are

  masterly, as is also the virtuousness of Beatrice on first realizing

  his motives -

  Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,

  Or shelter such a cunning cruelty,

  To make his death the murderer of 111)' honour!

  Thy language is so bold and vicious,

  I cannot see which way I can forgive it

  With any modesty

  - a passage which ends with the really great lines of De Flores,

  lines of which Shakespeare or Sophocles might have been proud :

  Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose ?

  So soon may you weep me.

  But what constitutes the essence of the tragedy is something