BOO KS
583
In general, it seems to me that Mr. Eliot is coming, though very
reluctantly, to see that drama is a different art from lyric poetry, and
that it cannot therefore be understood as merely a special instance of
versification. He is much more disposed now, than he was thirty years
ago, to look beneath the language of drama to the action (the
«mota
spirital")
of the characters, from which their words come. This tendency
is very evident if one compares his remarks on
Hamlet
in this lecture
with the famous essay on that play which he published in 1919. But as
his understanding of drama has deepened, his preoccupation with
"practical playwrighting" has increased; and the lessons he has learned
from the entertainment industry, as revealed in his plays and what he
says about them, confuse and even contradict his growing sense of what
poetic drama might be at its best.
In considering his own plays, Mr. Eliot does not mention
Sweeney
Agonistes,
which I regret, because that play, or fragment, remains the
most powerful and promising piece he has written for the stage. He
starts with
Murder in the Cathedral.
He regards it as a success, on
the whole, given the special occasion and the limited purpose for which
it was written. He modestly points out that the subject is remote enough
to be acceptable as "poetic," and that the church audience was willing to
be piously bored, yet capable of being surprised. But he explains that,
for him, the play was a dead end, just because of its special subject and
occasion. In writing it he solved none of the general problems of
poetic drama in our time. A style-which, at that time, still meant for
him
chiefly a kind of versification-was still to be found; a style capable
of reaching the unregenerate general public, and of dealing with a
contemporary theme.
In
Family Reunion
he resolutely tackled these problems: took a
contemporary story and setting; diminished the role of the chorus
(which is so important in
Murder in the Cathedral)
and above all
brought his verse as close as possible to colloquial speech. He is still
pleased with the verse: "What I worked out," he says, "is substantially
what I have continued to employ: a line of varying length and varying
number of syllables, with a caesura and three stresses." He believes that
the first act is good, and that the diminution of the chorus' role was
a step in the right direction; but on the whole he now dislikes
Family
Reunion.
Its comparative failure led him to try to take the question
of
dramatic
form more seriously; "In retrospect, I soon saw," he tells us,
"that I had given my attention to versification at the expense of plot and
character." And he decided that "the deepest flaw of all was in a
failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modem situation."
