age to be specifically wrong. Thus it is one thing to
say that the religious denial of the world is purely
theoretical,
and that in the main religion accomo-
dates itself to fascism as it has accomodated itself
to capitalism. But to claim that Eliot's play is fascist
is something else again. All we can s4Y is that though
its internal drive is really against all politics, in a
sense its social use is nevertheless political. In essence
the spiritual slavery promulgated by the Church is
but the ideological reflex of real social slavery, in
the flesh. But historic facts of this order cannot ex-
cuse the frivolity of some Marxist critics, who make
a practice of skipping intrinsic stages and distinctions
in order the more easily to blur the difference be-
tween the specific content of a work of art and its
possible objective effects, which more often than not
are rather vague and remote.
Moreover,
criticism
that discards such basic distinctions must end in
equating literature with life. And the failure to dis-
tinguish between literature and life is almost as
bad as the failure to see their close and necessary
relationship.
To my mind, in
j\1 urder in the Cathedral
Eliot
has written his best poetry since
The Waste Land.
Its magnificent lucidity, so much in contrast to the
symbolic mazes of his previous devotional
verse,
mirrors itself in a trembling and dolorous music.
The diction is lyrical, yet dry and firm, its slight
biblical cast and rare ecclesiastical phrase tempered
by the neutral words of current speech. The obliga-
tions of a definite historical
theme as well as the
clear pattern imposed by the dramatic medium seem
to have prevented the poet from clawing his way
through caverns of history and mythology,
as is his
wont. If
The fVaste Land
was written in water, this
new poetry is cut into stone.
The structure,
too, is simple and ingenuous.
Thomas Becket returns to Canterbury after a long
exile abroad.
The first conflict represented is self-
conflict, with Becket's soul as the arena, when he
casts out the devils within himself,-the
four tempt-
ers arguing earthly pleasure, ambition, treason and
pride. After the
entr'acte
of the Christmas morning
sermon,
in which Becket heeds the summons of
martyrdom and resigns himself to die, the main
conflict comes to a head. The four knights appear-
messengers of the king, figures out of earth, cruel
and lustful-who kill Becket as they blaspheme.
At
once a metaphorical
curtain is dropped on the his-
toric scene as the knights step out of their parts and
address the audience in the corrupt and ingratiating
speech of modern politics. This is the continuation
of blasphemy,
ironically transposed into the typical
cliches of British respectability and parliamentary
eyewash. After having heard the lofty incantation:
Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still
unshapen:
I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight,
12
etc., or the lyric beat of a line like:
The New Yea:r waits, breathes, waits, whispers
tn
darkness,
we hear the honorific vocabulary of meetings in
sentences like: "In the answer to these questions l}es
the key to the problem," or, "I have nothing to
add along their particular lines of argument." Here
the poetry of exaltation takes the cure in the prose
of private convenience and genial demagogy.
The
result is comic relief, a vertiginous reversal of tone
and tempo. In an instant the reader or spectator,
laughing cynically,
turns hard-headed and a bit
rowdy. The final chorus, intoning a beatific vision,
sounds uninspired,
as dull as a hymn or a patriotic
ode. The spell has been broken. The poet wanted
to show us the sameness of history,
that nothing
changes, but history threw him aside to repeat itself
as farce. No doubt this interlude has its logic within
the play's orthodox scheme, yet the effect is as if
someone had pulled up a blind and instead of Dante's
gloomy visage we had caught a glimpse of Sweeney's
grinning mug. Or perhaps it is that small house
agent's clerk we sec, "the young man carbuncular" of
the celebrated typist's episode, on his way for another
bout of love? Can it be that Eliot's religion is really
a form of wilful esthetics? If so he is man enough to
be damned,
and we shall not be prevented "from
praying for his repose."
It has been said that every work of art is an act
of collaboration between reader and creator.
Let
us measure, then, the truth of that statement against
Eliot's play. Did our sensibility really respond to
the desiccated pattern of theological
salvation? It
cannot be that we were pleased by the stale art of
the old-time vamps! No, it is not Becket and the
women of Canterbury,
the knights and the tempt~rs,
but we ourselves who are here represented.
The pat-.
tern has been rent asunder by a tragedy altogether
temporal-and to the poet perhaps both absurd and
terrifying-giving
the play overtones and meanings
in another sphere, one close to our interests and
desires.
I believe that the chorus in this play, chanting the
doom of man, develops a language and a meaning
for that doom much in excess of its presupposition
in the dogma of man's sinful nature and the need
for expiation. Are we listening to the mournful cry
'of a doom "out of time," born in the jungle of pre-
history, whence the religious ethos springs? or is this
a doom posthumous to theology, very much in our
own time?
Sweet and cloying through the dark air
F ails the stifling scent of despair ...
or:
H ere is
110
continuing cit)', here is no abiding stay.
III the wind, ill the time, uncertain the profit,
certain the danger.
o
late late late, late is the time, late too late, and
rollen the year,.
JUNE,
193 6
