ELIOT AS INTERNATIONAL HERO
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struck down every class in society: "What you get married for,
if
you don't want children?" And then we witness the seduction of the
typist; and then other aspects of the sickness of love appear when,
on the Thames bank, three girls ruined by love rehearse the sins of
the young men with whom they have been having affairs. In the last
part of the poem, the impossibility of love, the gulf between one
human being and another, is the answer to the command to give,
that is o say, to give oneself or surrender oneself to another human
being in the act of making love.
Elsewhere love either results in impotence, or it is merely copu–
lation. In "The Hollow Men," the hollow men are incapable of
making love because there is a shadow which falls between the desire
and the spasm. The kinship of love and belief is affirmed when the
difficulty of love and of religious belief are expressed in the same
way and as parallels, by means of a paraphrase and parody of the
Lord's Prayer. In "Sweeney Agonistes," Sweeney returns to say that
that there is nothing in love but copulation, which, like birth and
death, is boring. Sweeney's boredom should be placed in contrast
with the experience of Burbank, who encountered the Princess Volu–
pine in Venice, and found himself impotent with her. A comparison
ought also to be made between Sweeney and the protagonist of one
of Eliot's poems in French who harks back to a childhood experience
of love: "I tickled her to make her laugh. I experienced a moment
of power and delirium." Eliot's characters when they make love either
suffer from what the psychoanalysts term "psychic impotence," or
they make love so inadequately that the lady is left either hysterical
or indifferent when the episode is over. The characters who are potent
and insensitive are placed in contrast with the characters who are
impotent and sensitive. Grishkin has a bust which promises pneumatic
bliss, while Burbank's .kind, the kind of a man who goes to Europe
with a Baedeker, has to crawl between the dry ribs of metaphysics
because no contact possible to flesh is satisfactory. The potent and
the insensitive, such as Sweeney, are not taken in by the ladies, the
nightingales and the whores; but Burbank, like Agamemnon, is
betrayed and undone.
This synoptic recitation might be increased by many more ex–
amples. Its essence is expressed perfectly in "Little Gidding": "Love
is the unfamiliar name." But we ought to remember that the diffi–
culty of making love, that is to say, of entering into the most intimate
of relationships, is not the beginning but the consequence of the whole
character of modem life. That is why the apparatus of reference
which the poet brings to bear upon failure in love involves all history
