FOR
t.4
AN D HALL U
C I NAT ION
639
ought not; go to the limit
in
"tracing a certain fact." In a good
poem, he says, there must
be
a "precise fitness of form · and
matter ... which means also a balance between them." Like
Dostoevsky, Eliot refers to Shakespeare, but points out that in
a Shakespearean song, "the form, the pattern movement, has a
Solemnity of its own, however light .and gay the human emotion
concerned, and a gaiety of its own, however serious or tragic the
emotion." The form, in short, carries its own independent feel–
ings, which play against the feeling aroused by the subject; and
the artist, according to Eliot, is most interested
in
the "fitness"
of these contrasting feelings to each other, so that a "balance"
may be reached.
If
this is the case, the form of a literary work acts direCtly
contrary to Dostoevsky's desire to get to the bottom of a particu–
lar state of affairs. Indeed, the very function of form would be
to cut across the reaction aroused by the subject and suspend the
mind in a riptide of feelings belonging to art itself.
In emphasizing balance Eliot is consistent with the attitude
of literature toward truth throughout most of its history. For it is
clear that writers have not, traditionally, regarded themselves as
"crusaders against mystification. Their way has been rather to
appropriate illusions inherited in the patterns of story-telling and
in
the usages of words and to contribute to deepening them. It is
Ilot by chance that the meaning of "form" and the meaning of
"hallucination" overlap in their connotations of an appearance
or "show" without substance. There is a natural alliance between
art and deception; and one needs no prompting from modern
radicalism to see this alliance as the ideal extension of the rela–
"tion of the arts to their historic patrons: courts, priesthoods and,
in more recent times, capitalists and bureaucrats.
1
The celebrated
1.
Writing about the traditional attitude toward the Nude, Paul Valery ob–
served: "Everyone had a muddled conviction that neither the State, nor
. the Law, nor Education, nor Religion, nor anything else that was serious,
could
function
if the truth were entirely visible." (His italics)."
Degas,
Manet, Morisot.
Pantheon Books. $3.50.
