The Waste Land

  oneself, that there are times when it is desirable to be seen and times

  when it is felicitous to vanish.

  But Strawinsky, Lucifer of the season, brightest in the firmament,

  took the call many times, small and correctly neat in pince-nez. His advent

  was well prepared by Mr. Eugene Goossens—also rather conspicuous this

  year—who conducted two Sacre du Printemps concerts, and other Strawin-

  sky concerts were given before his arrival.4 The music was certainly too

  new and strange to please very many people; it is true that on the first

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  1 8 9

  night it was received with wild applause, and it is to be regretted that only

  three performances were given. If the ballet was not perfect, the fault does

  not lie either in the music, or in the choreography—which was admirable,

  or in the dancing—where Madame Sokolova distinguished herself. To

  me the music seemed very remarkable—but at all events struck me as

  possessing a quality of modernity which I missed from the ballet which

  accompanied it. The e¤ect was like Ulysses with illustrations by the best

  contemporary illustrator.

  Strawinsky, that is to say, had done his job in the music. But music

  that is to be taken like operatic music, music accompanying and explained

  by an action, must have a drama which has been put through the same

  process of development as the music itself. The spirit of the music was

  modern, and the spirit of the ballet was primitive ceremony. The Vegetation

  Rite upon which the ballet is founded remained, in spite of the music, a

  pageant of primitive culture. It was interesting to any one who had read

  The Golden Bough and similar works, but hardly more than interesting.5

  In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even The

  Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining

  myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a

  continuation. In everything in the Sacre du Printemps, except in the music, one missed the sense of the present. Whether Strawinsky’s music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the

  rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of ma-

  chinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the

  underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to

  transform these despairing noises into music.

  Mr. Bernard Shaw

  It is not within my province to discuss Back to Methuselah, but the appear-

  ance of the book may make some observations on Mr. Shaw not imperti-

  nent, and it is an advantage for my purpose that the book is as well known

  in America as it is here.6 A valedictory tone in this book (already noticed

  by Mr. Seldes) is not inapposite to a successful season of his plays by Mr.

  Macdermott’s company.7 Blanco Posnet is now running at the Court Theatre.8

  The recognition indicated by this success implies perhaps that Mr. Shaw

  has attained, in the most eulogistic sense of his own term, the position

  of an Ancient.9

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  e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e

  Seven years ago, in 1914, when Mr. Shaw came out with his thoughts

  about the War, the situation was very di¤erent.10 It might have been pre-

  dicted that what he said then would not seem subversive or blasphemous

  now. The public has accepted Mr. Shaw, not by recognizing the intelligence

  of what he said then, but by forgetting it; but we must not forget that at

  one time Mr. Shaw was a very unpopular man. He is no longer the gadfly

  of the commonwealth; but even if he has never been appreciated, it is

  something that he should be respected. To-day he is perhaps an important

  elder man of letters in a sense in which Mr. Hardy is not. Hardy represents

  to us a still earlier generation not by his date of birth but by his type of

  mind.11 He is of the day before yesterday, whilst Shaw is of a to-day that

  is only this evening. Hardy is Victorian, Shaw is Edwardian. Shaw is there-

  fore more interesting to us, for by reflecting on his mind we may form

  some plausible conjecture about the mind of the next age—about what,

  in retrospect, the “present” generation will be found to have been. Shaw

  belongs to a fluid world, he is an insular Diderot, but more serious.12 I

  should say—for it is amusing, if unsafe, to prophesy—that we shall de-

  mand from our next leaders a purer intellect, more scientific, more logical,

  more rigorous. Shaw’s mind is a free and easy mind: every idea, no matter

  how irrelevant, is welcome. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, the “Pref-

  ace” to Methuselah would have seemed a cogent synthesis of thought in-

  stead of a delightful farrago of Mr. Shaw’s conversation about economics,

  politics, biology, dramatic and art criticism. It is not merely that Mr. Shaw

  is wilful; it is also that he lacks the interest in, and capacity for, continuous

  reasoning.

  Mr. Shaw has never cajoled the public; it is no fault of his that he has

  been taken for a joker, a cleverer Oscar Wilde, when his intention was al-

  ways austerely serious.13 It is his seriousness which has made him un-

  popular, which made Oscar Wilde appear, in comparison, dull enough to

  be a safe and respectable playwright. But Shaw has perhaps su¤ered in a

  more vital way from the public denseness; a more appreciative audience

  might have prevented him from being satisfied with an epigram instead

  of a demonstration. On the other hand Mr. Shaw himself has hardly under-

  stood his own seriousness, or known where it might lead him: he is some-

  how amazingly innocent. The explanation is that Mr. Shaw never was

  really interested in life. Had he been more curious about the actual and

  abiding human being, he might have been less clever and less surprising.

  l o n d o n l e t t e r , s e p t e m b e r 19 2 1

  1 9 1

  He was interested in the comparatively transient things, in anything that

  can or should be changed; but he was not interested in, was rather im-

  patient of, the things which always have been and always will be the same.

  Now the fact which makes Methuselah impressive is that the nature of the

  subject, the attempt to expose a panorama of human history “as far as

  thought can reach,” almost compels Mr. Shaw to face ultimate questions.14

  His creative evolution proceeds so far that the process ceases to be progress,

  and progress ceases to have any meaning. Even the author appears to be

  conscious of the question whether the beginning and the end are not the

  same, and whether, as Mr. Bradley says, “whatever you know, it is all one.”15

  (Certainly the way of life of the younger generation, in his glimpse of life

  in the most remote future, is unpleasantly like a Raymond Duncan or

  Margaret-Morris school of dancing in the present.)16

  There is evidence that Mr. Shaw has many thoughts by the way; as a

  rule he welcomes them and seldom dismisses them as irrelevant. The

  pessimism of the conclusion of his last book is a thought which he has

  neither welcomed nor dismissed; and it is pessimism only because he

>   has not realized that at the end he has only approached a beginning, that

  his end is only the starting point towards the knowledge of life.

  The book may for a moment be taken as the last word of a century,

  perhaps of two centuries. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were

  the ages of logical science: not in the sense that this science actually made

  more progress than the others, but in the sense that it was biology that

  influenced the imagination of non-scientific people. Darwin is the repre-

  sentative of those years, as Newton of the seventeenth, and Einstein perhaps

  of ours. Creative evolution is a phrase that has lost both its stimulant and

  sedative virtues. It is possible that an exasperated generation may find

  comfort in admiring, even if without understanding, mathematics, may

  suspect that precision and profundity are not incompatible, may find ma-

  turity as interesting as adolescence, and permanence more interesting

  than change. It must at all events be either much more demoralized intel-

  lectually than the last age, or very much more disciplined.

  t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s 1

  b y c o l l e c t i n g t h e s e p o e m s from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance.2 Certainly the

  reader will meet with many poems already preserved in other antholo-

  gies, at the same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian

  Townshend or Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included.3 But the function

  of such an anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury’s ad-

  mirable edition of Caroline poets nor that of the Oxford Book of English

  Verse. 4 Mr. Grierson’s book is in itself a piece of criticism, and a provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so many

  poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible, as

  documents in the case of “metaphysical poetry.” The phrase has long done

  duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The

  question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in

  our own times we should say a “movement”), and how far this so-called

  school or movement is a digression from the main current.

  Not only is it extremely diªcult to define metaphysical poetry, but

  diªcult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The

  poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer

  than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very

  close to that of Chapman.5 The “courtly” poetry is derivative from Jonson,

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  t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s

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  who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with

  the sentiment and witticism of Prior.6 There is finally the devotional verse

  of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti

  and Francis Thompson);7 Crashaw, sometimes more profound and less

  sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns through the Eliza-

  bethan period to the early Italians. It is diªcult to find any precise use of

  metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and

  at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these

  poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is some-

  times considered characteristically “metaphysical”: the elaboration (con-

  trasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage

  to which ingenuity can carry it.8 Thus Cowley develops the commonplace

  comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (“To Des-

  tiny”), and Donne, with more grace, in “A Valediction,” the comparison

  of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the

  mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid

  association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of

  the reader.

  On a round ball

  A workeman that hath copies by, can lay

  An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,

  And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,

  So doth each teare

  Which thee doth weare,

  A globe, yea world by that impression grow,

  Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow

  This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.9

  Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first

  figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer’s globe to

  the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne’s

  most successful and characteristic e¤ects are secured by brief words and

  sudden contrasts:

  A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,10

  where the most powerful e¤ect is produced by the sudden contrast of as-

  sociations of “bright hair” and of “bone.” This telescoping of images and

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  e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e

  multiplied association is characteristic of the phrase of some of the drama-

  tists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is

  frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources

  of the vitality of their language.11

  Johnson, who employed the term “metaphysical poets,” apparently

  having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them

  that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”12 The

  force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact

  that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of

  styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleve-

  land to justify Johnson’s condemnation.13 But a degree of heterogeneity

  of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is

  omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for illustration such a line as:

  Notre âme est un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie;14

  we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (“The Vanity

  of Human Wishes”):

  His fate was destined to a barren strand,

  A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;

  He left a name at which the world grew pale,

  To point a moral, or adorn a tale,15

  where the e¤ect is due to a contrast of ideas, di¤erent in degree but the

  same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one

  of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written

  in any other age), the “Exequy” of Bishop King, the extended comparison

  is used with perfect success; the idea and the simile become one, in the

  passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead

  wife, under the figure of a journey:

  Stay for me there; I will not faile

  To meet thee in that hollow Vale.

  And think not much of my delay;

  I am already on the way,

  And follow thee with all the speed

  Desire can make, or sorrows breed.

  Each minute is a short degree,

  t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l p o e t s

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  And ev’ry houre a step towards thee. br />
  At night when I betake to rest,

  Next morn I rise nearer my West

  Of life, almost by eight houres sail,

  Than when sleep breath’d his drowsy gale . . .

  But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum

  Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;

  And slow howere my marches be,

  I shall at last sit down by Thee. 16

  (In the last few lines there is that e¤ect of terror which is several times

  attained by one of Bishop King’s admirers, Edgar Poe.)17 Again, we may

  justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert’s “Ode,” stanzas which

  would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical

  school:

  So when from hence we shall be gone,

  And be no more, nor you, nor I,

  As one another’s mystery,

  Each shall be both, yet both but one.

  This said, in her up-lifted face,

  Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,

  Were like two starrs, that having faln down,

  Look up again to find their place:

  While such a moveless silent peace

  Did seize on their becalmed sense,

  One would have thought some influence

  Their ravished spirits did possess.18

  There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the

  stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits John-

  son’s general observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cow-

  ley. A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same

  time borrowed from and given to the world “becalmed”; but the meaning

  is clear, the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the lan-

  guage of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George

  Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go—a simplicity emu-

  lated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the

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  e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e

  sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is

  not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The e¤ect, at its best, is

  far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray.19 And as this fidelity induces

  variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt

  whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally

  the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell’s “Coy Mistress” and Crashaw’s