BOOKS
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Gregory becomes a "very great Pope" and a very human Pope-in
fact, almost a humanist in papal robes interpreting the Christian dogma
in a very human, unorthodox manner. He is a very special person
throughout the book, his marks of distinction being not only intelligence,
beauty, melancholy sadness or a certain rashness (like Oedipus), but
especially a strange capacity for the most intense concentration, a with–
drawal into mysterious inner resources, whereby intelligence and physical
strength are joined to create a power which is irresistible in his contacts
with men as well as in the ordeal of his self-imposed penance. The act
of divine grace has, as it were, its human counterpart in Gregory's
capacity for mobilizing those inner resources which enable him to
transcend the deepest despair and suffering.
Thus if I understand the allegory correctly, it seems to me the
author wants to say something like this: Here is presented to you
a tale of double incest, a monstrous tale, the greatest misfortune or sin
that can befall human beings, the most deadly threat to a "human"
way of life. Here is also presented to you a way of "salvation,"
i.e.,
a
way in which this monstrous tale, these dangerous impulses and frightful
sufferings, this deadly threat can be transformed into symbols of human
culture and civilized man (the Church and the "very great Pope"),
because the deepest despair into which these anti-human forces can
throw us also can and does mobilize, intensify, and heighten those
powers in man by which he overcomes them. "Miracles" or "acts of
grace" would then be merely different names to describe this process
of transformation or sublimation, in short, the "humanization" of man.
If
something like this is the "deeper" meaning of the book it is
perhaps most adequately realized in the last and best chapter in which
Pope Gregory grants audience and absolution to his mother-wife and
in which he transcends sin and despair, Christian theology and Gothic
romance with the simple
human
statement (his last): "Everything has
its limits: the world is finite." But I doubt whether the scenes, events,
and characters in the remainder of the novel are, in Eliot's terms, ade–
quate "objective correlatives" for the expression of such a universal
sentiment. To achieve this end, I think, the book as a whole would
have to rise, in content and form, to the simple moving grandeur of
the last scene. And this it does not do. Instead it presents, as I said
in
the beginning, a tableau or tapestry of characters and situations all of
which, despite the ironic detachment of the author, are so vividly and
literally woven into the background of a medieval Christian romance
that they seem to be as far removed from the world of our meanings as
the tales from the Arabian nights. Moreover, the characters of
the
