BOO KS
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have some of the sardonic savagery of
Sweeney Agonistes;
but the
characters, their actions, and their language are colorless and abstract
-there is none of Sweeney's nightmare intensity in it.
If
one thinks over the series of Mr. Eliot's plays, one is inevitably
reminded of Henry James's adventures in practical playwrighting.
It
is true that Mr. Eliot has certain gifts which James lacked, especially an
intellectual inclusiveness which augurs well for his success. There is
something theatrical and entertaining about the play of his fine mind
even in his soberest critical essays; and if he continues in the direction
indicated by
The Cocktail Party
he may invent a superior form of in–
tellectual entertainment, akin to Shaw's, but more theologically and
philosophically sophisticated. But if one takes his completed plays as a
series of efforts to make a commercially viable poetic drama, what they
have to teach us is James's melancholy lesson allover again: it is neces–
sary to eliminate the cargo in order to save the ship; the medium of
the entertainment industry is too light to sustain much poetry.
The
Cocktail Party
floats in the near-vacuum of Times Square more
triumphantly than
Murder in the Cathedral,
but it carries far less poetry
and far less drama.
But Mr. Eliot's understanding of poetic drama is not limited to
his tactics as a practical playwright. On the contrary, it appears to
be deepening, at the same time that his plays grow thinner. At the end
of
his
lecture he summarizes his understanding of the lost art of poetic
drama in a passage which shows very clearly how far that understanding
now reaches:
I should not like to close, however, without attempting to set before
myself, and, if I can, before you, though only in dim outline, the ideal
toward which it seems to me that poetic drama should strive. . . .
It
seems to me that beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives
of our conscious life when directed toward action-the part of life
which prose drama is wholly adequate to express--there is a fringe of
indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of
the corner of the eye and can never completely focus; of feeling of
which we are only aware in a kind of temporary detachment from ac–
tion. There are great prose dramatists--such as Ibsen and Chekhov–
who have at times done things of which I would not otherwise have
supposed prose to be capable, but who seem to me, in spite of their suc–
cess, to have been hampered in expression by writing in prose. This
pe–
culiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its
moments of greatest intensity. At such moments we touch the border
of those feelings which only music can express. We can never emulate
music, because to arrive at the condition of music would be the annihila–
tion of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry. Nevertheless, I have
