20
PARTISAN REVIEW
correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that
particular
emotion; such that
when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked." A set of objects, a situation,
a chain of events isn't the same as Davie's "a fable or an 'unreal' land–
scape, or the arrangement of images." I take Eliot's "formula of that
particular
emotion" to coincide with Langer's "morphology." I wish I
knew more securely what Eliot means by "which must terminate in sen–
sory experience." Presumably he has in mind a reader's experience or an
audience's: the chain of events must come home in the form of sensory
experience-not merely in the belatedness of discursive or conceptual
terms-to anyone who pays attention. In the essay on
Hamlet
and
again in the one on Tourneur, Eliot is trying to find a relatively imper–
sonal way of saying that a particular emotion should not be allowed to
exceed the situation that provoked it. The idea he arrives at is a trian–
gular one. Instead of trying to express the emotion directly and at once,
a poet or a dramatist should turn aside from it and imagine "a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events" and so forth:
The cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity, expressed con–
summately in
The Revenger's Tragedy,
are immature in the respect
that they exceed the object. Their objective equivalents are charac–
ters practising the grossest vices; characters which seem merely
to
be spectres projected from the poet's inner world of nightmare,
some horror beyond words.
Not that Tourneur shouldn't have written
The Revenger's Tragedy
as he
did. The play is "a document on humanity chiefly because it is a docu–
ment on one human being, Tourneur; its motive is truly the death
motive, for it is the loathing and horror of life itself." Further: "To have
realized this motive so well is a triumph; for the hatred of life is an
important phase-even, if you like, a mystical experience-in life
itself." But the triumph is consistent with Tourneur's immaturity, his
failure to submit his feelings to the discipline by which their morphol–
ogy might be registered. Morphology is the higher perspective in which
a feeling, desire, or passion is understood. Tourneur did not put himself
to the ethical labor of understanding his feelings; he sought only to
express them.
Davie chose, as an example of syntax-as-music, the first lines of
"Gerontion":
