94
PARTISAN REVIEW
"a gaiety that is being, not merely knowing." The dramatic in Stevens
is most immediate in the casual attack of his comic mood:
A long time you have been making the trip
From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,
Bringing the lights of Norway and all that
...
An opening of portals when night Mds,
A
running forward, arms stretched out as drilled,
Act I, Scene 1, at a German Staats-Oper.
The comedy of the first and last periods is ringing with the silver
laughter of the Meredithian faun; there are often the eruptive imag–
ery, the riotous language, the springing delight over the victim, the
intellectual tensions of
The Egoist.
The moments of high comedy in
"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" indicate how defensive are the ironies
of "The Love Song of
J.
Alfred Prufrock." The gaucherie of Prufrock
is Eliot's gaucherie-Stevens, without being so ironic, is perhaps more
completely the master of absurdity. "The Comedian as the Letter C"
may, indeed, mistake pomposity for wit, but even here the buoyancy
of spirit carries the elephantine Carlylese jargon.
The euphoria of Stevens
ic;
least forced when, surprised by the
pleasures of merely circulating, he contends with his ideas in the guise
of fat Jocundus.
His commitment to "a land beyond the mind," however, and
to going round and round is failure to possess a myth. The task was
in any case impossible. One understands why Stevens seizes upon thr.
thesis of the late Henri Focillon that
Unless and until it actually exists in matter, form is little better
than a vista of the mind, a mere speculation upon a !!pace that
has been reduced to geometrical intelligibility.... Without mat-
ter art could not .exist.... The old antitheses, spirit-matter,
matter-form, obsess men.... The first duty of any one who
wishes to understand anythil)g whatsoever about the life of
forms is to rid himself of these contradictions of pure logic....
These forms can be equated with the fictions that are feelings–
delusive fictions when one meets essential prose, and becomes aware
that
There are these sudden mobs of men
...
An immense suppression
...
These voices crying without knowing for what
...
Here
is
"fact" as Stevens is presumably not contented to have
it.
He
cannot "evade" or abdicate what Eliot calls moral responsibility;
nor can his mind find itself in an alien world. He can offer only notes
toward a supreme fiction.
