four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb.
And, above all, there is no rhetoric, although there is Elizabethan
reading in the background. Were I a French critic, skilled in their
elaborate art of writing books about books, I should probably go to some
length discussing Mr. Eliot's two sorts of metaphor: his wholly
unrealizable, always apt, half ironic suggestion, and his precise
realizable picture. It would be possible to point out his method of
conveying a whole situation and half a character by three words of a
quoted phrase; his constant aliveness, his mingling of very subtle
observation with the unexpectedness of a backhanded cliché. It is,
however, extremely dangerous to point out such devices. The method is
Mr. Eliot's own, but as soon as one has reduced even a fragment of it to
formula, some one else, not Mr. Eliot, some one else wholly lacking in
his aptitudes, will at once try to make poetry by mimicking his external
procedure. And this indefinite "some one" will, needless to say, make a
botch of it.
For what the statement is worth, Mr. Eliot's work interests me more than
that of any other poet now writing in English.[2] The most interesting
poems in Victorian English are Browning's "Men and Women," or, if that
statement is too absolute, let me contend that the form of these poems
is the most vital form of that period of English, arid that the poems
written in that form are the least like each other in content. Antiquity
gave us Ovid's "Heroides" and Theocritus' woman using magic. The form of
Browning's "Men and Women" is more alive than the epistolary form of
the "Heroides." Browning included a certain amount of ratiocination and
of purely intellectual comment, and in just that proportion he lost
intensity. Since Browning there have been very few good poems of this
sort. Mr. Eliot has made two notable additions to the list. And he has
placed his people in contemporary settings, which is much more difficult
than to render them with mediæval romantic trappings. If it is permitted
to make comparison with a different art, let me say that he has used
contemporary detail very much as Velasquez used contemporary detail in
"Las Meninas"; the cold gray-green tones of the Spanish painter have, it
seems to me, an emotional value not unlike the emotional value of Mr.
Eliot's rhythms, and of his vocabulary.
James Joyce has written the best novel of my decade, and perhaps the
best criticism of it has come from a Belgian who said, "All this is as
true of my country as of Ireland." Eliot has a like ubiquity of
application. Art does not avoid universals, it strikes at them all the
harder in that it strikes through particulars. Eliot's work rests apart
from that of the many new writers who have used the present freedoms to
no advantage, who have gained no new precisions of language, and no
variety in their cadence. His men in shirt-sleeves, and his society
ladies, are not a local manifestation; they are the stuff of our; modern
world, and true of more countries than one. I would praise the work for
its fine tone, its humanity, and its realism; for all good art is
realism of one sort or another.
It is complained that Eliot is lacking in emotion. "La Figlia che
Piange" is an adequate confutation.
If the reader wishes mastery of "regular form," the "Conversation
Galante" is sufficient to show that symmetrical form is within Mr.
Eliot's grasp. You will hardly find such neatness save in France; such
modern neatness, save in Laforgue.
De Gourmont's phrase to the contrary notwithstanding, the supreme test
of a book is that we should feel some unusual intelligence working
behind the words. By this test various other new books, that I have, or
might have, beside me, go to pieces. The barrels of sham poetry that
every decade and school and fashion produce, go to pieces. It is
sometimes extremely difficult to find any other particular reason for
their being so unsatisfactory. I have expressly written here not
"intellect" but "intelligence." There is no intelligence without
emotion. The emotion may be anterior or concurrent. There may be emotion
without much intelligence, but that does not concern us.
_Versification:_
A conviction as to the rightness or wrongness of _vers libre_ is no
guarantee of a poet. I doubt if there is much use trying to classify the
various kinds of _vers libre_, but there is an anarchy which may be
vastly overdone; and there is a monotony of bad usage as tiresome as any
typical eighteenth or nineteenth century flatness.
In a recent article Mr. Eliot contended, or seemed to contend, that good
_vers libre_ was little more than a skilful evasion of the better known
English metres. His article was defective in that he omitted all
consideration of metres depending on quantity, alliteration, etc.; in
fact, he wrote as if metres were measured by accent. This may have been
tactful on his part, it may have brought his article nearer to the
comprehension of his readers (that is, those of the "New Statesman,"
people chiefly concerned with sociology of the "button" and "unit"
variety). But he came nearer the fact when he wrote elsewhere: "No
_vers_ is _libre_ for the man who wants to do a good job."
Alexandrine and other grammarians have made cubbyholes for various
groupings of syllables; they have put names upon them, and have given
various labels to "metres" consisting of combinations of these different
groups. Thus it would be hard to escape contact with some group or
other; only an encyclopedist could ever be half sure he had done so. The
known categories would allow a fair liberty to the most conscientious
traditionalist. The most fanatical vers-librist will escape them with
difficulty. However, I do not think there is any crying need for verse
with absolutely no rhythmical basis.
On the other hand, I do not believe that Chopin wrote to a metronome.
There is undoubtedly a sense of music that takes count of the "shape" of
the rhythm in a melody rather than of bar divisions, which came rather
late in the history of written music and were certainly not the first or
most important thing that musicians attempted to record. The creation of
such shapes is part of thematic invention. Some musicians have the
faculty of invention, rhythmic, melodic. Likewise some poets.
Treatises full of musical notes and of long and short marks have never
been convincingly useful. Find a man with thematic invention and all he
can say is that he gets what the Celts call a "chune" in his head, and
that the words "go into it," or when they don't "go into it" they "stick
out and worry him."
You can not force a person to play a musical masterpiece correctly, even
by having the notes "correctly" printed on the paper before him; neither
can you force a person to feel the movement of poetry, be the metre
"regular" or "irregular." I have heard Mr. Yeats trying to read Burns,
struggling in vain to fit the "Birks o' Aberfeldy" and "Bonnie
Alexander" into the mournful keen of the "Wind among the Reeds." Even in
regular metres there are incompatible systems of music.
I have heard the best orchestral conductor in England read poems in free
verse, poems in which the rhythm was so faint as to be almost
imperceptible. He read them with the author's cadence, with flawless
correctness. A distinguished statesman read from the same book, with the
intonations of a legal document, paying no attention to the movement
inherent in the words before him. I have heard a celebrated Dante
scholar and mediæval enthusiast read the sonnets of the "Vita Nuova" as
if they were not only prose, but the ignominious prose of a man devoid
of emotions: an utter castration.
The leader of orchestra said to me, "There is more for a musician in a
few lines with something rough or uneven, such as Byron's
There be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like thee;
than in whole pages of regular poetry."
Unless a man can put some thematic invention into _vers libre_, he would
perhaps do well to stick to "regular" metres, which have certain chances
of being musical from their form, and certain other chances of being
musical through his failure in fitting the form. In _vers libre_ his
musical chances are but in sensitivity and invention.
Mr. Eliot is one of the very few who have given a personal rhythm, an
identifiable quality of sound as well as of style. And at any rate, his
book is the best thing in poetry since ... (for the sake of peace I will
leave that date to the imagination). I have read most of the poems many
times; I last read the whole book at breakfast time and from flimsy
proof-sheets: I believe these are "test conditions." And, "confound it,
the fellow can write."