T.
S. ELIOT
found and permanent moral value and horror." Thus we can see how
a poet's honesty is, in fact, very often a concern with morality, with
the actuality of morality. Yet this moralism must be distinguished
carefully from that overt didacticism which has spoiled the work of
many great artists such as Tolstoy and resulted in the censorship of
more than one masterpiece. Notice I have said the actuality of
morality rather than simply morality as such. A further elucidation
is to be found in Eliot's dis.cussion of Hamlet, a character who suf–
fered, says Eliot, from "the intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without
an object or exceeding its object, which every person of sensibility
has known.... The ordinary person puts such feelings to sleep, or
trims down his feelings to fit the business world. The artist keeps
them alive.... " In
Hamlet
Shakespeare "tackled a problem that
proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all, is an insoluble
puzzle; under the compulsion of what experience he attempted to
express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know." To conclude
that
Hamlet
is a failure, as Eliot does, though it
is
the most read,
performed, and studied of all plays, seems to me to have a curious
notion of success. To inquire as to why he wrote the play at all is in–
comprehensible in view of the remarks Eliot makes about the artist's
effort to deal with emotions which are ecstatic, terrible, and inex–
pressibly horrifying. But I am not concerned so much with the wrong–
ness of Eliot's judgment in an essay written as early as 1919 as I am
concerned with the relation of these remarks to the honesty of the
poet and the actuality of moral existence, to which these remarks
point.
The poet's honesty, and thus his morality, consists in his ability
to
face the ecstasy and the terror of his emotions, his desires.. his fears,
his
aspirations, and his failure to realize his and other human beings'
moral allegiances. Thus the morality of the poet consists not in teach–
ing
other human beings how to behave, but in facing the deepest
emotional and moral realities in his poems, and in this way making it
~ble
for his readers to confront the total reality of their
existe~ce,
physical, emotional, moral and religious.
As
Eliot says in one of his poems, "Mankind cannot bear very
much reality," and Eliot looks always for those qualities in a poem
which are likely to help the reader to see reality, if not to bear it.
129
