BOOKS
ll5
The world of the play is the world of
The Waste Land:
a world
inhabited by thoroughly respectable upper-class English ladies and gen–
tlemen, "people to whom nothing has ever happened," and who conse–
quently "cannot understand the unimportance of events," people whose
"life" is "the keeping up of appearances. The making the best of a
bad job."
But to Harry, the young head of the family, something has happened,
something which breaks through the death-in-life in which he has lived,
and his return to the family home completes his birth into the real world.
At
the end of the play, like Arnaut, he is, with joy, committing himself to
the purgatorial flame, but he
d~spairs
of making the family understand
what has happened to
him,
and why he cannot take up his place as head
of the family and master of Wishwood. As he says late in the play
... when one has just recovered sanity,
And not yet assured in possession, that is when
One hegins to seem the maddest to other people.
His is essentially the position of the protagonist at the end of
The Waste
Land-"Hieronymo's mad againe."
But Harry's difficulty is Eliot's difficulty. The audience for whom he
writes are quite as secularized as are the characters of the play, and they
are far more hard-boiled in their rationalism. They are not more likely to
understand the treatment of the relation of time to eternity expressed in
Burnt Norton;
they are even less likely to he sympathetic with it. Eliot has
set himself a very difficult task in the play. For many readers, Harry's
action will he quite incredible, and the play will consequently he murky
and dull-another instance of Eliot's retreat into Anglo-Catholic mysticism.
But precisely because Eliot has faced this basic problem frankly, the
play
is
a triumph. The dramatic fact, kept steadily in focus, is Harry's
awareness that, intense and meaningful as the experience is to him, it is
quite impossible for his uncles and aunts to understand it. There is even a
grim humor in the fact that the revelation has come through Harry's sin
(One remembers Eliot's comment in the essays, "and it is better in a para–
doxical way to do evil than to do nothing; at least we exist."). Harry is
conscious of the humor, just as he is willin·g to entertain the belief that he
may he mad. The play does not turn into preaching. It remains focused on
Harry's exploration of his experience.
It is symptomatic of the play's closeness of texture that one cannot
separate QUt gobbets of poetry and have them retain the intensity which
they undoubtedly possess in the context. The poetry is very closely inte–
grated with the other elements of the play. The verse is one which allows
Eliot to shift from the casual, fatuous, after-dinner conversation into the
passionate language of Harry's colloquies with Agatha. There is a sense of
dramatic acceleration, hut not of strain; and this, in part, of course, is
because the contrast is not superficial and external, hut a part of the cen–
tral
dramatic fact. The contrPsts occur, therefore, at the proper level, and
