DENIS DONOGHUE 13
of human passions: Dante's is one of those which one can only just
hope to grow up to at the end of life.
The sequence of three moments as Eliot described it is under Dante's
auspices. More than any other poet, Dante suggested to Eliot the possi–
bility of "redeeming the time," transforming mere
tempus
into
aevum
in
the light of what Eliot in the essay on Dante called "the high dream."
There, too, Eliot notes "how skilfully Dante expresses (in Canto XXX
of the
Purgatorio)
the recrudescence of an ancient passion in a new
emotion, in a new situation, which comprehends, enlarges, and gives a
meaning to it."
Conosco
i
segni dell'antica fiamma.
But it is in the essay
on Marston that Eliot indicates most clearly the three moments and the
pattern they ideally fulfill.
Marston's plays are mostly bad. Even
The Malcontent
is a poor thing
by comparison with the best of Webster, Tourneur, and Massinger. But
Eliot nonetheless feels that there is a quality of genius in Marston that
can't be indicated by quoting a few speeches. He thinks that Marston,
especially in
Sophonisha,
is saying "something else than appears in the
literal actions and characters whom he manipulates." Trying to articu–
late the "something else," Eliot writes:
It
is possible that what distinguishes poetic drama from prosaic
drama is a kind of doubleness in the action, as if it took place on
two planes at once... .In poetic drama a certain apparent irrele–
vance may be the symptom of this doubleness; or the drama has an
under-pattern, less manifest than the theatrical one. We sometimes
feel, in following the words and behaviour of some of the charac–
ters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane that we
know and on some other plane of reality from which we are shut
out: their behaviour does not seem crazy, but rather in conformity
with the laws of some world that we cannot perceive. More fitfully,
and with less power, this doubleness appears here and there in the
work of Chapman, especially in the two
Bussy D'Amhois
plays....
It is not by writing quotable "poetic" passages, but by giving us the
sense of something behind, more real than any of his personages
and their action, that Marston established himself among the writ–
ers of genius.
The difficulty Eliot felt in expressing this doubleness is at one with the
problem he confronted in writing
Sweeney Agonistes
and the play–
Murder in the Cathedral-he
was working on in
f934
when he wrote
the essay on Marston: how to present such characters as Sweeney and
