PARTISAN REVIEW
And there are also other indications too detailed for my present
purpose. However, the last quotation, and especially the line, "The
purification of the motive," suggest a consideration of what standards
were involved in Eliot's initial evaluation of the history of English
poetry and his subsequent revaluation.
They can
be
named in a summary and incomplete way as fol–
lows: first, actuality; second, honesty (closely connected with actual–
ity and with the "purification of motive" of which I have just spoken) ;
third, the purification and maintenance of the English language;
fourth, the dramatic sense, which I shall try to define in a moment;
fifth, the quality of the versification.
Needless to say, this list is not by any means exhaustive and
obviously each of these sought-for qualities overlaps and interconnects
with the others. For example, the sense of the actual is necessary to a
poet's being dramatic; a sensitivity to the manifold possibilities of
versification cannot really be separated from a desire to purify, main–
tain and sustain the English language.
Let me now try briefly to define and illustrate each of these
qualities as they manifest themselves in Eliot's criticism of English
poetry. First, the sense of the actual, which is perhaps the most difficult
of all to define, since whenever we attempt to define anything, we
must do so by referring to the actual and perhaps by merely pointing
to it.
An illustration, not from Eliot himself, but from James Joyce,
who in so many ways is profoundly close to Eliot as an author, may
be
useful. A would-be novelist came to Joyce with a manuscript of a
novel she had just finished, telling Joyce that she would like his opinion
of the novel and saying that only one other person had read the book,
the porter of the hotel in which she was living. "What did the porter
say?" Joyce inquired. "He objected to only one episode," replied
the female novelist. "The episode
in
which the lover finds the locket
of his beloved while walking in the woods, picks it up, and kisses it
passionately." "What was the porter's objection?" said Joyce. "He
said," she replied, "that before kissing the locket passionately, the
lover should have rubbed it against his coat to get the dirt off it."
"Go back," said Joyce, "to that porter. There is nothing I can tell
you that he does not already know." This too is not as complete a
pointing to the actual as one might wish, since the actual might
be
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