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[MR. RICHARDS is a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the author of a much-discussed book on The Principles of Literary Criticism, in which he outlined a radically scientific approach to æsthetic problems.]

WE too readily forget that, unless something is very wrong with our civilization, we should be producing three equal poets at least for every poet of high rank in our great-great-grandfathers' day. Something must indeed be wrong; and since Mr. Eliot is one of the very few poets that current conditions have not overcome, the difficulties which he has faced, and the cognate difficulties which his readers encounter, repay study.

Mr. Eliot's poetry has occasioned an unusual amount of irritated or enthusiastic bewilderment. The bewilderment has several sources. The most formidable is the unobtrusiveness, in some cases the absence, of any coherent

1 From the New Statesman (London Independent weekly), February 20

intellectual thread upon which the items of the poem are strung. A reader of Gerontion,' of 'Preludes,' or of 'The Waste Land,' may, if he will, after repeated readings, introduce such a thread. Another reader after much effort may fail to contrive one. But in either case energy will have been misapplied. For the items are united by the accord, contrast, and interaction of their emotional effects, not by an intellectual scheme that analysis must work out. The only intellectual activity required takes place in the realization of the separate items. We can, of course, make a 'rationalization' of the whole experience, as we can of any experience. If we do, we are adding something which does not belong to the poem. Such a logical scheme is, at best, a scaffolding that vanishes when the poem is constructed. But we have so built into our nervous systems a demand for intellectual coherence, even in poetry, that we find a difficulty in doing without it.

This point may be misunderstood,

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for the charge most usually brought against Mr. Eliot's poetry is that it is overintellectualized. One reason for this is his use of allusion. A reader who in one short poem picks up allusions to The Aspern Papers, Othello, 'A Toccata of Galuppi's,' Marston, Phoenix and the Turtle, Antony and Cleopatra (twice), "The Extasie,' Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Ruskin, feels that his wits are being unusually well exercised. He may easily leap to the conclusion that the basis of the poem is in wit also. But this would be a mistake. These things come in, not that the reader may be ingenious or admire the writer's erudition (this last accusation has tempted several critics to disgrace themselves), but for the sake of the emotional aura which they bring. Allusion in Mr. Eliot's hands is a technical device for compression. 'The Waste Land' is the equivalent in content to an epic. With out this device twelve books would have been needed. But these allusions and the notes in which some of them are elucidated have made many a petulant reader turn down his thumb at once.

This objection is connected with another, that of obscurity. To quote a recent pronouncement upon "The Waste Land' from Mr. Middleton Murry: "The reader is compelled, in the mere effort to understand, to adopt an attitude of intellectual suspicion, which makes impossible the communication of feeling. The work offends against the most elementary canon of good writing: that the immediate effect should be unambiguous.' Consider first this 'canon.' What would happen, if we pressed it, to Shakespeare's greatest sonnets or to Hamlet? The truth is that very much of the best poetry is necessarily ambiguous in its immediate effect. Even the most careful and responsive reader must reread and do hard work before the poem forms itself

clearly and unambiguously in his mind. An original poem, as much as a new branch of mathematics, compels the mind which receives it to grow, and this takes time. Anyone who upon reflection asserts the contrary for his own case must be either a demigod or dishonest; probably Mr. Murry was in haste. His remarks show that he has failed in his attempt to read the poem, and they reveal, in part, the reason for his failure-namely, his own overintellectual approach. To read it successfully he would have to discontinue his present self-mystifications.

The critical question in all cases is whether the poem is worth the trouble it entails. For 'The Waste Land' this is considerable. There is Miss Weston's From Ritual to Romance to read, and its 'astral' trimmings to be discardedthey have nothing to do with Mr. Eliot's poem. There is Canto xxvi of the Purgatorio to be studied the relevance of the close of that canto to the whole of Mr. Eliot's work must be insisted upon. It illuminates his persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation as religion was the problem of the last. There is the central position of Tiresias in the poem to be puzzled out- the cryptic form of the note which Mr. Eliot writes on this point is just a little tiresome. It is a way of underlining the fact that the poem is concerned with many aspects of the one fact of sex, a hint that is perhaps neither indispensable nor entirely successful.

When all this has been done by the reader, when the materials with which the words are to clothe themselves have been collected, the poem still remains to be read. And it is easy to fail in this undertaking. An attitude of intellectual suspicion' must certainly be abandoned. But this is not difficult to those who still know how to give their feelings precedence to their thoughts,

who can accept and unify an experience without trying to catch it in an intellectual net or to squeeze out a doctrine. One form of this attempt must be mentioned. Some, misled no doubt by its origin in a Mystery, have endeavored to give the poem a symbolical reading. But its symbols are not mystical, but emotional. They stand, that is, not for ineffable objects, but for normal human experience. The poem, in fact, is radically naturalistic; only its compression makes it appear otherwise. And in this it probably comes nearer to the original Mystery which it perpetuates than transcendentalism does.

If it were desired to label in three words the most characteristic feature of Mr. Eliot's technique, this might be done by calling his poetry a 'music of ideas.' The ideas are of all kinds, abstract and concrete, general and particular, and, like the musician's phrases, they are arranged, not that they may tell us something, but that their effects in us may combine into a coherent whole of feeling and produce a peculiar liberation of the will. They are there to be responded to, not to be pondered or worked out. This is, of course, a method used intermittently in very much poetry, and only an accentuation and isolation of one of its normal resources. The peculiarity of Mr. Eliot's later, more puzzling, work is his deliberate and almost exclusive employment of it. In the earlier poems this logical freedom appears only occasionally. In 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' for example, there is a patch at the beginning and another at the end, but the rest of the poem is quite straightforward. In 'Gerontion,' the first long poem in this manner, the air of monologue, of a stream of associations, is a kind of disguise, and the last two lines,

Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season,

are almost an excuse. The close of 'A Cooking Egg' is perhaps the passage in which the technique shows itself most clearly. The reader who appreciates the emotional relevance of the title has the key to the later poems in his hand. 'The Waste Land' and 'The Hollow Men' (the most beautiful of Mr. Eliot's poems, if we reserve a doubt as to the last section, astonishing though it is) are purely a 'music of ideas,' and the pretense of a continuous thread of associations is dropped.

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How this technique lends itself to misunderstandings we have seen. But many readers who have failed in the end to escape bewilderment have begun by finding on almost every line that Mr. Eliot has written - if we except certain youthful poems on American topics that personal stamp which is the hardest thing for the craftsman to imitate and perhaps the most certain sign that the experience, good or bad, rendered in the poem is authentic. Only those unfortunate persons who are incapable of reading poetry can resist Mr. Eliot's rhythms. The poem as a whole may elude us while every fragment, as a fragment, comes victoriously home. It is difficult to believe that this is Mr. Eliot's fault rather than his reader's, because a parallel case of a poet who so constantly achieves the hardest part of his task and yet fails in the easier is not to be found. It is much more likely that we have been trying to put the fragments together on a wrong principle.

Another doubt has been expressed. Mr. Eliot repeats himself in two ways. The nightingale, Cleopatra's barge, the rats, and the smoky candle-end, recur and recur. Is this a sign of a poverty of inspiration? A more plausible explanation is that this repetition is in part a consequence of the technique above described, and in part something which many writers who are not accused of

poverty also show. Shelley, with his rivers, towers, and stars, Conrad, Hardy, Walt Whitman, and Dostoevskii spring to mind. When a writer has found a theme or image which fixes a point of relative stability in the drift of experience, it is not to be expected that he will avoid it. Such themes are a means of orientation. And it is quite true that the central process in all Mr. Eliot's best poems is the same: the conjunction of feelings which, though superficially opposed, as squalor, for example, is opposed to grandeur, yet tend as they develop to change places and even to unite. If they do not develop far enough the intention of the

poet is missed. Mr. Eliot is neither sighing after vanished glories nor holding contemporary experience up to scorn.

Both bitterness and desolation are superficial aspects of his poetry. There are those who think that he merely takes his readers into the Waste Land and leaves them there, that in his last poem he confesses his impotence to release the healing waters. The reply is that some readers find in his poetry not only a clearer, fuller realization of their plight, the plight of a whole generation, than they find elsewhere, but also through the very energies set free in that realization a return of the saving passion.

INTERESTING PEOPLE1

BY CATHERINE CARSWELL

My friend from Cambridge-she did very well at Newnham twenty years ago was disappointed with the hotel. We had been there a week, and she had not seen one single 'interesting' person. The Colonel, for example, and she indicated with her horn-rimmed spectacles that part of the lounge where a group of pretty girls almost concealed a certain lively and elegant figure from view, was n't the Colonel typical of

the banality of the place?

For a moment I relived the terrible experience which, more than once, had been mine at 'evenings' given by this same friend in her Bloomsbury flatthe sensation that my hair was being rapidly streaked with gray, that my stiffening face was forming indelibly

1From the Manchester Guardian (Independent Liberal daily), February 13

deep lines, while I did my best to converse with 'such an interesting man, my dear,' or 'such an extremely interesting woman, you really must meet her.' And meanwhile I watched the Colonel's admirers drift like butterflies to some other flower, and I saw the brightness on his face lapse into a set anxiety. It seemed unlikely that the hotel ever troubled him with a bill. He was well worth his keep to any intelligent management. An exquisite dancer and with a little champagne in him . . did you see him throw those three cartwheels running across the ballroom floor on New Year's Eve? Why, a man of half his age might envy... His age yes, perhaps that was what made him look at times as if he heard the howling of a wolf pack. Fifty-nine next birthday. And

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after that third cartwheel the pain in his thigh had made him realize it suddenly. Fifty-nine. It would n't be so bad if he could be sure that there were as many pounds to his credit in the bank. And the hotel season was nearly over. Not that hotel food or late hours really agreed with him. For the first time in his life he had been sleeping badly. But what else was there for him now but hotels? Dancing and tennis in summer .. dancing and skating in winter. . . the Colonel is so good at everything . . . and so jolly . . . such a darling, in fact. . . .

Yet, I had been reading a novel by Mr. Aldous Huxley, and, with some nice little observations and additions of my own, I was mentally presenting that author with a character for future use. Or, upon further consideration, perhaps the Colonel ought to have been returned to Chekhov, because people in hotels are seldomer out of novels than out of plays and short stories. Anyhow, I hope I have made it clear that I am only claiming for myself the details, not the conception of the Colonel as a character.

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There again sat the garrulous old maid with her kindly-but rather willyou-walk-into-my-parlorish smile. Jane Austen, or possibly Chekhov. And there one of the vulgar family' whose behavior was such that certain other guests expressed surprise at their being tolerated in 'a hotel of this class.' Once more Jane Austen, or, of course, once more Chekhov. There, too, the titled but anxious mother of daughters, who, it was said, had already by her overpowering graciousness driven more than one eligible to seek a rival hostelry. Jane again, Tolstoi, Chekhov, almost anybody.

These and others I looked at. Interesting? Uninteresting? Which were they to be called? Not one but the very thought of whom must daily bore a

thousand intelligent minds. Not one but, at one time or another, must have deeply interested some master mind.

To converse with on current topics? Well, no. Sometimes one wonders if Jane would have been moved to write at all had not writing offered her an escape from the daily broadside of boredom to which her life was subject. Always one knows that there could be no hell of greater anguish devised for most novelists than an ink-and-paperless eternity to be passed in the company of their own characters. The fact remains, however, that, for us who come after, those great ones have sucked the deadliest poison of boredom out of every type which they have touched with their magic. It is a chastening reflection that not only individual types but whole sections of mankind have, at one time or another and for whole generations on end, been uninteresting to the rest. The poor have been uninteresting, the well-to-do have been uninteresting, governesses have been uninteresting, shopkeepers, children, savages, civil servants the searchlight of literature, in the shape of two quiet eyes that could see, has been turned on to them and has shown the rest of us to have been mistaken. We are all too apt to separate literature from life, and one of our many ways of doing it is to limit the benefit we receive from works of fiction to the actual reading of them and their enjoyment in retrospect. Yet in our daily lives, as well as in the lives of scores of thousands of persons who lack the time, the taste, or the opportunity to read stories of quality, the master story-tellers are continually present in some sort, alleviating, irradiating, recreating, what would be otherwise intolerably dull. Somehow, by devious and often muddy channels, the creative sympathy and what is the same thing the creative spite of the mas

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