vision and doctrine in four quartets

Vision and Doc trine in Four Quartets

GRAHAM HOUGH

When people say that they find a deep organic unity in The Waste Land what they mean is that they have got used to it. We know now that the arguments adduced in its defence during the controversial years were almost all off the mark. It is not an elliptical narrative with the connecting links missed out. It is not the stream of consciousness of Tiresias. It is not to be homogenised by reference to fertility myths. Its major form is hardly the result of conscious design at all, and what conscious design there is, is not the author’s. The difficulties are still there as they always were, but they have ceased to matter. We have stopped looking for principles of organisation that are clearly absent. We respond to the poetry in detail, to the sombreness and brilliance of its images, to the precisions and in- cantations of its verbal surface, and find, if we do not look too hard, that mere familiarity leads us to see another mode of order-one that is present in all poetry but had never been used as the sole support of a long poem before. And this is as it should be. The process of coming to know a poem is like the process of coming to know a person. Getting to know a difficult poem is like getting to know a difficult person. It is when the lacks, the silence, the abrupt- ness and the strangeness have ceased to strike us that real knowing, friendship or its opposite-not mere knowing about-an begin, and deepen. This has happened with The Waste Land. Bizarre and monstrous as it appeared to many half a century ago it is now hardly a stranger denizen of our poetic world than Gray’s Elegy or The Vaniry of Human Wishes. On the face of it the Four Quartets should have presented a less awkward challenge. They came at the end of Eliot’s career, when his methods were well known. They are far closer to the ordinary conventions both of lyric versification and discursive writing than the earlier poems. Yet they have not been so easily absorbed. We hear a babel of discordant judgments upon them, both in gross and in detail. A reader of the published criticism, faced with almost hagiographical acceptance on the one side and sour detraction on the other, is likely to experience some bewilderment; and this impression is reinforced in general discussion.

Can we do anything to compose our minds on this difficult subject? I should like to try, starting as far as possible from agreed or reason- ably demonstrable positions. I do not want to write a review of the criticism as such, but it will be necessary to test some of the more influential judgments that are before US.^ In doing so we may not

‘Nearly all the material I refer to is to be found in the Casebook on the Four Quartets, ed. Bernard Bergonzi.

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only learn something about the Quartets but also perhaps something about the achievements and possibilities of poetry in our time.

I think we should begin by recognising the authority and dignity of Eliot’s literary position by the time the Quartets were completed. His earlier poetry and the impressive body of his criticism had won him not indeed an undisputed assent but certainly a place of con- siderable eminence and an undisputed title to respect. The Four Quartets were clearly his most deeply considered statement on philosophical and religious matters that had occupied him all his life; and obiter dicta in his later critical essays make it plain that their technical problems had been equally deeply pondered. Such an utterance from such a man asks for careful and serious reading, and, if there are to be reservations, due diffidence in dissent. So I find something wrong in the testy knuckle-rapping of Donald Davie’s discussion of The Dry Salvages. But nothing in Eliot’s earlier work had established him in the position of an unquestionable sage; indeed some of his writing on social matters had given good reason to doubt the comprehensiveness of his wisdom and his judgment. So I find something wrong too in the unargued and un- criticised assumption by R. W. Flint and others that the Quartets are the poetry of a profound religious philosopher. In more ways than one the Quartets are Mr. Eliot’s Excursion.

There can be little doubt-simply as a matter of fact, whether it ought to be so or not-that the radical difficulty is doctrinal. It is often said, as Davie says, that ‘the religiously inclined applaud the Quartets, the more or less militantly secular and “humanist” decry them. As simple as that.’ It ought not to be as simple as that. The speculations on time that play so large a part in the poem are not matters of faith and morals. The secularist has no need to reject them, and the Christian is not obliged to accept them. The devalua- tion of ordinary human endeavour that appears more conspicuousIy in the Quartets even than in the earlier poetry is sometimes described as Augustinian; but it often looks more Manichean, and it has been shared by purely secular thinkers. None the less, the Quartets are among other things doctrinal and dogmatic works. They make pronouncements about the nature of the world and human life; they enjoin us to behave and believe in certain ways. They are Christian, and Christian of a severely special kind; and in an age like ours that must make their impact problematic. It is not a question of generalised spirituality or sympathy with ‘the religious outlook‘, whatever that is. The Quartets assume a definite doctrine about the nature of the world and human history-a doctrine that our culture does nothing to sustain.

It is widely felt that Eliot’s early criticism, especially the Dante essay, has settled the question of poetry and belief, and that as readers of poetry we should be no more troubled by it. ‘You are not called upon to believe what Dante believed‘ : you are called upon

Vision and Doctrine in ‘Four Quartets’ 109

to suspend both belief and disbelief and get on with understanding the poetry. But the problem with a contemporary poet is really different. It is not possible for a twentieth-century reader to believe what Dante believed. We know too many things that the thirteenth- century did not. Dante’s allegory of the spiritual condition of man is inextricably entangled with medieval physics and cosmology, and he believed the one as much as the other. Eliot’s criticism gives us an outline, though only an outline, of the process by which we must read Dante-or give up reading him altogether. We may accept the allegory of moral experience and see the cosmology as a myth. More probably we accept neither. How many modern readers of Dante believe that the fate of the soul for all eternity is determined by its state at the moment of death? But Dante’s system is a majestic and ordered belief; it was once the belief of our whole culture. It is part of the heritage of our civilisation to be able to enter imaginatively into this system. We can do so because it is self-coherent. Cosmology and moral allegory are all of a piece. It is perfectly compatible with a world-view constricted to a few thousand years and centred in our own planetary system to believe that everything of importance happened on earth, the centre of that system, and that history is ordered around one central event, the Incarnation, precisely located a certain number of centuries past. But Eliot is a man of our time. His physics and cosmology are those of our time. He does not believe that the world was created in 4,000 B.C., or that the earth is the centre of the cosmic system. Yet he believes and requires us to accede to the belief that the central event in universal history occur- red in Palestine in the reign of the emperor Augustus. It is almost certainly the case that to most of Eliot’s readers this belief is highly implausible; they find it incompatible with other things that they know to be true, and they cannot easily imagine the state of mind of a man who knows what Eliot cannot help knowing and believes what he says he believes. This is a difficult situation, but the difficulty for the serious reader of poetry is more comprehensive still. It involves the whole relation of poetry and poetic belief to the state of knowledge and culture in its time. The Christian view of history, implied throughout the Quartets, no longer has the support of the dominant culture. The poem can no longer draw on that vast store of unquestioned assent. It must create out of its own resources a validation that to Dante was simply given.

Of course Eliot has many readers who are believers, and for them there is no prima facie difficulty-though I think a natural sympathy tends to blind them to real difficulties of interpretation in detail. For others the difficulties are formidable. Denis Donoghue, writing as a Christian, though one of a rather different complexion from Eliot’s, remarks accurately but grimly ‘How the non-believer reads this poem I cannot say. It may be possible to skim off the poetry, leaving whatever remains, thereby turning upside-down Eliot’s own

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motto that the poetry does not matter.’ For non-believing readers the difficulties can be seen to concentrate themselves in the antithesis that in one form or another lies at the heart of the poem, the antithesis between words and the Word. For such readers all words are the words of man-man as Wallace Stevens describes him: ‘This happy creature-It is he that invented the Gods. It is he that put into their mouths the only words they have ever spoken.’ The stumbling-block appears bluntly at the beginning, in the first epigraph from Heraclitus: 70; X ~ Y O V ~ ‘ : ~ V T O S EUVO; [&;ouolv O E ~ohXal &S X a v ~ ‘ X O V Z E S +pP6vyxu ‘The Logos is common to all, but most men live as though they had an understanding of their own.’ We may not know exactly what Heraclitus meant by this, but we know pretty exactly, from accumulated places in his previous writings, what Eliot means by citing it. He means that the logos has been made manifest and that it is only by perversity or wilful self-blinding that men follow their own understanding. The second part ofthis assertion is certainly untrue; but to leave that aside, Eliot’s position here is highly inimical to the proper reception of his poetry. It is a signpost at the entrance, warning off the greater part of his potential readers, and letting the others in on the wrong terms. The poetry of private devotion like Ash Wednesday does not incur these limitations, for it makes no assertions, addresses no one, asks nothing of its readers, but offers them, if they wish to take it, the opportunity of following an experience. Parts of the Quartets are of this kindf but the poem as a whole occupies a position of dogmatism. And I think we must add-since Christianity as a matter of historic fact is no longer the Faith, common to all, but a sect among other sects --of sectarian dogmatism. This is probably more repugnant to those whose position is partly coincident with Eliot’s than to those who are wholly opposed. If you do not believe that there is a logos common to all you can I suppose take Eliot’s position as an interesting and impressive sub-variant in the spectrum of human opinions. It is another class of readers that is most likely to be repelled. I mean those who believe that there is a logos common to all; that it has not been made manifest, but is hard to discern; and that the only way a man can discern such fragments of it as are ever likely to be discernible is to live according to his own understanding. His own understanding includes anything he can learn from the understanding of others, and it includes much that must be learnt from other sources than the logos as Eliot conceives it. To readers who think like this there is something quietly hectoring, something covertly assuming, in the authority invoked in many parts of the Quartets. This is not felt in the places where the poetry seem to carry its own authority. But there are places where this is not the case, for the quality of writing in the Quartets is uneven. In part at least it is designedly so, for Eliot does not wish to attract the reader into a merely provisional or imaginative assent. ‘The poetry does

Vision and Doctrine in ‘Four Quartets’ 11 1

not matter’; and the only assent he is interested in is assent of another kind-the kind vindicated in Newman’s Grammar. And a question arises about how far this assent is earned by the poem itself-and how far it could be.

2 The Four Quartets are often described as a meditation on time,

and it is in the speculative passages on time that the philosophical difficulty of the poem is supposed to reside. It is indeed difficult in places, more difficult than has been allowed, to determine what Eliot is actua ly saying about time; and as so much of the Quartets is in the discursive mode this is a question that does genuinely arise, as it did not in the earlier poems, with their dramatic and imagist methods. The difficulties are not elucidated by reference to older philosophical doctrines-time as seen by Heraclitus, St. Augustine, the Neoplatonists or Bergson. Doubtless Eliot was aware of all of them, but he is not writing a summa of philosophical opinion, and the unassertive nature of the speculative passages forbids us to believe that he was resting on the authority of received philosophical positions, or even employing them seriously as points of reference. Later we must question some of the obscure and apparently conflicting passages; but before doing that we can recog- nise that there is one major form of the antithesis running through the whole poem: we could describe it as the antithesis between chronos and kairos-time as pure durke, and time as ‘due time’, the special or critical moment. More precisely, the contrast is between time as meaningless flux and the isolated, unpredictable moments of significance, which are located within the flux but seem to stand outside it. The first is seen regularly as fretted, worrying, trivial and dull; the second as charged with meaning, even with revelation. The theme is a familiar one in modern literature, and whole theses have been written on the function of the ‘epiphany’ in Joyce and others. In an age with few doctrinal certainties much has to be made of these fragmentary moments of illumination. This must be so if they are all we have-

The moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall.

As R. W. Flint has remarked ‘Eliot’s epiphanies continue to be somewhat tenuous in content, and doggedly secular, at least in outward appearance.’ So far he is in tune with the imaginative habits of his age. But to Eliot as the exponent of a Christian philo- sophy it is not enough that the moments of illumination shall remain unattached and unexplained. In the second part of Burnt Norton ZZ these moments with their heightened consciousness are explicitly connected with the motionless cause of all motion, ‘the


still point of the turning world’. The still point without which there would be no dance is Aristotle’s unmoved mover; and by its moral setting in these lines, by the mention of heaven and damnation, it is equated with the God of Christianity. The still point is a spatial metaphor, but through most of the poem the same concept is expressed in temporal metaphors. The most explicit statement of this kind occurs not in the Quartets but in the seventh chorus from The Rock:

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time, A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:

transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,

without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

That is the moment of the Incarnation, an event in history whose meaning comes from outside history, referred to in The Dry Salvages V as ‘The point of intersection of the timeless with time.’ It is a moment when a meaning from outside time is injected into the temporal process ; and because the meaning is timeless it thenceforth becomes immanent in all time, and the fact of the Incarnation can be perceived in every moment-by the saint, with his ‘lifetime’s death in love,/Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender’. But for those who are not saints

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for

For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses.

So the secular epiphanies that Eliot shares with many other imaginative minds of his age are explicitly linked by him with the central Christian mystery. They are glimpses, partial revelations of that mystery.

I have referred (tastelessly perhaps but for my purpose necessarily) to the difficulties the doctrine of a historical incarnation presents to the modern mind, and I will say no more about it. There is a further difficulty, though, more internal to the poetry. An admirable passage from Lionel Trilling’s recent book Sincerity and Authenticity puts the point with great clarity, and the more compellingly because it occurs in the course of a different argument:

The assumption of the epiphany is that human existence is in large part compounded of the dullness and triviality of its routine, devitalised or

Vision and Doctrine in ‘Four Quartets’ 113 paralysed by habit and the weight of necessity, and that what is occasionally shown forth, although it is not divinity as the traditional Christian meaning of the term would propose, is nevertheless appropriate to the idea of divinity: it is what we call spirit.

Eliot’s secular epiphanies-the laughter of children, the glimpses of natural beauty, the intimations of music-are indeed revelations of ‘what we call spirit’, but they have no manifest or necessary connection with divinity in its Christian meaning, still less with the specific Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. They have no doctrinal authority. There is even a kind of Christian spirituality that would regard any such connection as wholly illusory. It is precisely here that the imagination of the Christian poet is presented with its special opportunity and its special challenge. It is for the poetry to make this link, if it is to be made at all, between the temporal, sensory illumination and the timeless Christian revelation. It is for the poetry to make it valid and real. And I believe it is here that the poetry of the Quartets falls short of its purpose.

The difficulty about a doctrine of immanence, for the saint as well as for most of us, is to make it authentically a doctrine of immanence-to see God in all things, not only in favoured spots at favoured moments. It is the same for natural religion as for doctrinal Christianity.

A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things

must, if it is to be what it is said to be, really roll through all things- through the gasworks and the Prudential Insurance building as well as the more picturesque portions of the Lake District. The timeless immanent in time must be present in Gloucester Road tube station as well as in the rose-garden of Burnt Norton. Yet the pervading pattern of imagery in the Four Quurtets works steadily against the recognition of this real presence. The emptiness, futility and ugliness of the time-bound life is unremittingly enforced.

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind (B.N.111)

Even the more sympathetically observed life of our rustic fore- fathers is seen as mere aimless succession:

The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death. (E.C.1)


In the individual life the repetitive round leads to no increase of wisdom-‘Only the knowledge of dead secrets’; the course of events has no destination-‘only the ground-swell, that is and was from the beginning’. ‘History is a pattern of timeless moments’; yet the timeless moments are rare and fleeting, and seem to do nothing to redeem the long stretches of insignificance in between. This has serious consequences for the Quartets, for it means that nothing in the poem underwrites or guarantees the provenance of these moments of illumination. Nothing outside the poem either, for there is no Christian doctrine, no cultural universal, that can guarantee it. For all we are given by the poetry, they may remain merely aesthetic or psychological phenomena. There is a kind of natural religion, there is even a kind of Christian natural sacramentalism, for which everything that lives is holy; but this is not the temper of Eliot’s feeling. The configuration of his imaginative life in the Quartets seems to work against that which he wishes to assert.

It is notable that in Ash Wednesday the enchantingly beautiful moments of natural vision (the pastoral scene in I11 and the sea- landscape in VI) are seen as things to be passed by or renounced. Their almost unbearable poignancy (I am speaking now of poetry, not of doctrine) is derived from the feeling of the first line of the poem-‘Because I do not hope to turn again.’ That does not abolish the hope, the possibility, that such moments of natural illumination may ultimately be redeemed. But the Four Quartets are no Paradiso; and I cannot feel that their redemption is accomplished within the confines of the poem. Indeed their position in the structure of the Quartets makes this impossible. Their reality needs to be guaranteed by a greater reality equally assured, if less immediate. But this relation has been turned upside clown. In the Quartets the timeless moments are asked to guarantee another, barely apprehensible reality with which their connection is never made real.

The approach to the meaning restores the experience.

But is the meaning of the moment in the rose-garden, the children’s laughter, what it is suggested to be? The mere fact that we can ask the question points to a defect or a limitation in the imagist method on which Eliot still partly relies. The pure images without conceptuai framework of the earlier poetry are not expected to do more than is possible. They are what they are, they bring with them their cluster of related feelings, and they lay no claim to be symbols of another order of reality. They take their place in a tapestry of images that has no further structural principle, attempts no statement, gives simply the emotional equivalent of thought. All this is true to Eliot’s early poetic doctrine. But clearly the Quartets have other aspirations. They present themselves as a philosophical poem; and the images must bear not only more weight, but weight of a different order of

Vision and Doctrine in ‘Four Quartets’ 11 5

magnitude altogether. They must be transformed into something more than images. How does traditional poetry accomplish this transformation of the sensory into the symbol of an immaterial reality? There is I think a clear answer, true for most poetry of our culture. It is by assigning the sensory images a structural position in a myth, an intelligibly constructed fable-using the words myth and fable in their most neutral sense, the sense that is nearest to plot. The myths may lay various degrees of claim to historical or factual foundation; for the imaginative life of poetry this is a matter of complete indifference. No one cares or needs to care what sort of credence Dante gave to his account of the topography of hell. Milton’s Eden loses none of its meaning when belief in its physical location is gone.

We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie, Christs Crosse, and Adams tree, stood in one place.

These lines of Donne lose none of their immense power if we actually think that neither stood in any place at all. Power and meaning are guaranteed by the self-coherence of the myth. Imagist poetry renounces this time-honoured source of strength. The images are left to stand alone, or with such fragments of allusive reference as may chance to adhere to them. Freshness, immediacy, a shedding of well-worn studio props-all this was achieved by such a method. But it entails a limitation on the functional range of images. They must work by their own immediate impact, unassisted by their place in a total structure. In the key parts of the Quartets, in almost all the parts of greatest poetic intensity, this is still Eliot’s method as much as in the earlier poems. The rose-garden, the children’s laughter and the bird-call of Burnt Norton, the moment of dawn, heat and silence in East Coker, the river and the sea of The Dry Salvages, the midwinter spring of Little Gidding, the gnomic lyrics of B.N.11 and IV, E.C.11 and L.G.11-all these belong to the imagist mode. They are passages of great verbal beauty and precision, fragmentary in content and uncertain in their reference. (If anyone doubts this last observation Iet him consult some of the rival explications of B.N.1 and 11). But these are not now offered as fragments of a ruined edifice, or fragments shored against our ruins. They are the timeless moments of vision out of which history, individual and social is made. The tenuity of content and uncertainty of application in the images of The Waste Land were positive contributions to the total effect, and to explain them would be to spoil their power. In the Quartets they demand to be explained, or at least functionally situated in the pattern of the whole. Since he has forsworn the use of a presiding myth, what is Eliot’s method of incorporating them in a long philosophical poem?

The method, as everyone knows, is to embed these nuggets in a framework of discourse which offers to explain, to comment on or


to connect them. Sometimes this is plain prose discourse, in vocabulary, ordonnance and rhythm-verse only by typographical con- vention. Sometimes it is a delicately skilful exercise in the difficult art of ratiocinative verse. It is always-obviously and of set purpose -on a different level stylistically and emotionally from the imagist epiphanies. It is pretty much an open question how far poetry can move in the direction of discursive prose without losing its right to inhabit a poetic context. I suppose most readers would agree that the second part of D.S.11 moves too far; but I think there can be little doubt, with so conscious a craftsman as Eliot, at this stage of his maturity, that it was meant to be as it is. To be honest, and merely autobiographical, I find that my reaction to the discursive parts of the Quartets is very variable. A passage can seem at one time flat and insipid, at another time suffused by a patient thoughtfulness that even manages to animate the rhythm. There is one kind of popular lecturer who must make everything interesting at whatever cost in crudity and false simplification. There is another kind who is willing to say, overtly or by implication ‘This is going to be difficult and possibly dull, but it is important that you should understand it.’ A dangerous and unpromising attitude for poetry, but one that is worthy of respect. Eliot is willing to adopt it-sometimes with a touch of wry self-irony.

You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?

The proper response to this is the one that is implicitly demanded : we must not look for ecstasy but must pay close attention to what is being said. We might begin by questioning the passages on time, with their tentative explorations and suggestions and their implied doctrines.

3 The alternation of image and discourse is roughly parallelled by

the antithesis that lies at the heart of the poem-the antithesis between the life in time and certain ‘timeless moments’. The life in time is mostly (though not always) presented in discursive and reflective passages, sometimes coming very near to plain prose discourse : the presentation of the timeless moments is generally lyrical in manner, imagist in method, and often obscure. I would gladly avoid the word symbol, that indigestible bone of contention; but the timeless moments in the Quartets often affords almost pure examples of the symbolist aesthetic-the presentation in non- logical images and unparaphraseable verbal forms of experiences otherwise unrepresentable. The discursive passages, on the other hand, utter propositions, of an apparently philosophical, moral or psychological nature; and a necessary part of the interpretation of


the poem is to ask what they say. Let us examine the passages on time from this point of view.

A careful (or even a not very careful) reading of the Quartets should dispel the notion that they propose any metaphysical doctrine about the nature of time. Several different conceptions of the nature of time are successively or repeatedly entertained. None is finally asserted; and they could not all be, for they are not compatible with one another. None is finally rejected either; and this should give us a clue to their status. They are not philosophical propositions, though they may sometimes look like that. And it goes without saying that they are not bits of meat thrown to the dog while the ‘poetry’ does its work on him, as ideas in poetry were said to be in Eliot’s early criticism. That was always a dubious and inadequate doctrine, and by this time Eliot had long outgrown it. The reflections on time are the subjective impressions that cluster round an unsolved mystery, sometimes tormenting, more rarely consoling; all seriously entertained, for they all press upon the mind as possibilities; but the purport of the text is not to decide among them. Indeed since time presents a notorious philosophical imbroglio to speak of the poem as a meditation on time and timelessness may be seriously misleading. It is that, but it is only that so far as it contributes to the answering of a question better put in other terms-how to reconcile the life of quotidian events and actions with the life of values. This is a moral and religious question; and it is only as steps and stairs towards the moral and religious question that the apparently philosophical questions about time are of importance.

However, we must analyse them as they present themselves; and if this seems a crude operation it is better than merely avoiding the awkward questions.

1. A dominant and recurrent idea is time as pure durie, something that simply goes on, goalless and insignificant-contrasted with timeless reality, the locus of meaning and value. In B.N.111 ‘time before and time after’ is characterised by disaffection and distraction, ‘filled with fancies and empty of meaning’. It is associated with unwholesome lungs and unhealthy souls. It is a ‘waste sad time’. Faces are strained and time-ridden, as if by a prolonged nightmare. This mere durie offers no development or progress, and if we imagine that wisdom comes with time we deceive ourselves (E.C.11; D.S.11; and the terrifying ‘gifts reserved for age’ at the close of L.G.11). Experiences of value are entirely cut off from the life in time: ‘I can only say there we have been . . . I cannot say how long, for that is to place it in time’, and ‘to be conscious is not to be in time’ (B.N.10.

2. B.N.1 entertains the idea that ‘all time is eternally present’. It is not quite clear what meaning we are to attach to this. It is an Augustinian doctrine (Confessions XI) that our consciousness of both past and future exists only in the present; so there is a sense in


which only the present is real. And there is another conception, much canvassed in a not wholly serious way in the thirties and forties because of Dunne’s popular book An Experiment with Time-that the past still exists and the future already exists, and that our shifting present simply travels along a pre-existent series. I am not sure what this could mean; but at all events if the future already exists free will seems to be threatened; and that I think must be what is intended here, for the passage goes on to say

If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

To redeem the time means to make the most of the time, to embrace every opportunity for right action; and it also surely includes the intention of atoning for the past, and making resolutions for the future. If all time is simultaneously spread out like a map these intentions and resolves are illusory.

E.C.1, ‘In my beginning is my end’, also seems haunted by the ghost of this thought, that all time is eternally present and free will an illusion-a kind of sinister timelessness. This idea is not pervasive in the Quartets, but it seems prominent because it occurs at the opening of the poem, and it remains as a disquieting hint in the background.

3. Emotionally though not logically connected with this is the feeling of time as cyclical, an endless round of growth and decay. Sweeney had been haunted by it years before.

That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all Birth and copulation and death.

That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks, Birth and copulation and death.

..................................

This appears in a less horrifying form, as a resigned and vaguely unhappy cycle running through E.C.I.

The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

The two ‘timeless moments’ in this movement of the poem-‘Now the light falls / Across the open field . . .’ and ‘Dawn points, and another day . . .’-are not like most of the epiphanies, revelations of eternal value, but again a kind of sinister timelessness, a silence with uneasy overtones.

4. Still negative and threatening in its force, we have a different conception in D.S.1, where the sea-imagery seems to stand for the vast immeasurable expanse of cosmic time, or for the whole cosmic process, in which ‘our time’, time as experienced by human creatures,


is a small and insignificant episode. This is in part a justification for the sense of time as meaningless durke. We are right to feel it as meaningless, as in B.N.111, although it seems so long and causes so much anxiety, because all that we can know of time is insignificant in the vast time-scale of the universe, the endless ground-swell, announcing itself in the last line of D.S.1 by the tolling of the bell.

5 . A quite different idea, that appears fully only once in the poem and has little repercussion elsewhere, is that of time as discontinuous. It is glanced at in E.C.11-‘The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / For the pattern is new in every moment’: but the complete development is reserved for D.S.111.

this thing is sure That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus.

............................................

This is puzzling, for the doctrine, surely the reverse of cheering, is presented in a tone of vague hortatory encouragement. The moral deduction from it is that ‘the time of death is every moment’, since one self dies and is succeeded by another-therefore act rightly in the present. This seems an impossible doctrine philosophically, for if the time of death is every moment there is no subsistent self to be the subject of moral action, and no one to be warned or en- couraged.

6 . The Augustinian interpretation of the idea that all time is eternally present-that is to say that time past and time future have their meaning only in time present. Glanced at, perhaps, in the opening lines of B.N.1 this becomes quite explicit in the closing lines of the same movement: ‘Time past and time future . . . / Point to one end, which is always present’. This is less a metaphysical than a moral observation-that our past deeds and our future prospects should enter into our deliberations only as they affect our present duties. This is probably alluded to again in E.C.V- ‘A lifetime burning in every moment’ and plays some part in the Krishna and Arjuna passage of the obscure D.S.111.

7. Time as pure durke contrasted with the timeless moments appears in other places not as merely meaningless, but as the necessary field of operation of human life, through which alone the intuitions of value can be recaptured. In B.N.11, ‘But only in time can the moment . . . / Be remembered . . . / Only through time, time is conquerr:d.’ In B.N.V love can be caught in the limitations of time; and in D.S.V, after a recapitulation of ‘unattended moments’, hints and guesses at eternity, the rest is seen not as meaningless dure‘e, but as a life of duty and discipline.


8. Lastly, in L.G. pervasively, but especially in V, the closing movement of the Quartets, history itself is seen as the field of operation of human endeavour, though it is not a progress, and there are no achievements, beginnings or ends. History is described as a pattern of timeless moments. I do not very well see how history can be this.

When they are set down flatly side by side as above I think we can see that these reflections on time do not constitute a dialectic, and the poem does not make a choice or come to a decision between them. They are not so much doctrines as moods, feelings about time that intermittently haunt the sensibility and the imagination, and haunt it with very varying degrees of seriousness. The idea of time as discontinuous, with its implicit denial of the subsistent self, flits across the consciousness in E.C.11, but is not sustained by the reflective tenor of the poem as a whole. It is however developed at some length in D.S.111, the movement beginning ‘I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant.’ I sometimes wonder whether one ought to say things like ‘I sometimes wonder’ in a reflective poem. The limpness, the absence of conviction, the lack of pressure in this phrase has a fatally deflating effect on what follows, apart from the fact that it is almost certainly not what Krishna meant.’ And the succeeding imagery about travellers on railway trains and liners is a feebly elaborated version of a thought that was never strongly enough held.

The passages that deny the coming of wisdom with time are uncertain. When merely expository they are flat and vacillating. ‘There is, it seems to us, 1 At best, only a limited value . . .’ (E.C.11); ‘It seems, as one becomes older, 1 That the past has another pattern, I And ceases to be a mere sequence- / Or even development’ (D.S.11). The commas and qualifications suggest not the slow march of a rich meditation, but a flaccid hesitancy. Yet the same root thought blazes into a savagely ironical fury when it is realised as experience in L.G.11.

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon y o u lifetimes effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment. . . T h e reference is to Bhagavud Gita IZ, where Krishna tells Arjuna to act without attachment to the fruits of action. The problem for Indian ethics is how to live in the world without continuing the chain of causation, karma, which is a hindrance to enlightenment and deliverance. The answer (in this school of Hindu thought) is that to live in the world we must act, but by non-attachment we can act-without-acting, without setting up a causal chain. Eliot ‘sometimes wonders’ whether Krishna meant ‘among other things’ that the future fruits of action are injifferent because they belong to a different self from the self who acts now. I cannot see how Krishna can have meant this. Buddhist thought denies the existence of the substantial self; but the thought of the Gifa strongly asserts it.


These lines and those that follow are the most powerful and outspoken passage of self-analysis in all Eliot’s work, without any of the shadow-play of personae and literary allusion that disguise such moments of tormented vision in the earlier poetry.

The idea of all time as co-existent is not strongly or frequently entertained. It appears as a hint of unease in the richly and beautifully organised tapestry of B.N.1; and perhaps as a hint not much more than verbal in the ‘In my beginning is my end’ of E.C.I.

The feeling that vibrates through the whole poem is the unmeaning emptiness of the life in time; whether as pure dude in B.N.111, as cyclic repetition in E.C.1, or as unmanageable inhuman vastness in the sea imagery of D.S.I. In each a rhythmical form and a self- consistent body of imagery is created-the grey windy dullness of the London tube in B.N.111; the habitual, not ungenial but ultimately goalless natural cycle of E.C.1; the collection of unrelated, inhuman fragments thrown up by the endless ground-swell of D.S.I. With these are associated other passages-‘0 dark dark dark . . .’ of E.C.111, ‘To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits . . .’ of D.S.V, where this ground-bass of near despair is elaborated into a short fantasia on the emptiness of the common social lot. Above all there stands the superb fire-raid episode of L.G.11, where the generalising moods and images become individual and specific, in the reciprocal survey by two interlocutors of a lifetime’s shared endeavour. Here again, and this time more powerfully, the appropriate rhythmical form is created-a modernised and anglicised version of Dantesque terza rima. And here, uniquely in the Quartets, there is a fable, ,a narrative with characters, in marked contrast with the discourses, imagistic progressions, or lyrical visionary modes of the rest of the poem.

4 In each of these three places where the immediacy and emptiness

of the actual world is presented it is relieved by the glimpse or promise of a way out. In E.C.111

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

In D.S.V, ‘to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time’. In L.G.11, the possibility of being ‘restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer’.

There are two longer and more formal recognitions of another possibility for the life in time: first (D.S.V) that as a life of duty and discipline it is the necessary field of individual endeavour; second (L.G.V) that as history it is the necessary field of collective endeavour. They are not alike. D.S.V is like a resigned and less vivid version of Hopkins’s ‘sheer plod / Makes plough down sillion shine.’ Indeed it is even more like Arnold’s

122 Critical Quarterly But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

We can respect this, but as Arnold himself said about this kind of poetry we are not animated by it. The second passage (L.G.V) if analysed as statement is extremely obscure, but it is clearly the em- bodiment of a mood in which the local, the temporal and the individual-England, history, the personal life of the speaker-are all united in a mood of acceptance. It is the climax, the conclusion of the poem, and it is notable that it is a mood, rather than a thought- out position or a confession of faith. The idea of the ‘mood‘ has suffered an eclipse since Yeats wrote about it in the nineties; but what he said then has I believe a relevance to Eliot’s poetry:

Literature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition, observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so merely to make us partakers of the banquet of the moods. It seems to me that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All . . .

Eliot said of The Waste Land ‘To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.’ Or in other words, the expression of a mood. That is self-deprecation carried too far, but it tells us something about Eliot’s poetic procedure that is borne out by much positive evidence. This is not the place to go into the history of the MSS, but what they reveal, again and again, is that Eliot under the domination of a mood or a community of moods, would write much verse, often fragmentary or in unconnected passages, and that the ultimate poem as it comes into the light of publication is a selection and re-arrangement of these separate but related pieces. The Hamlet passage in Prufrock was written much earlier and in- corporated into the poem by an afterthought; Gerontion was thought of as a prologue to The Waste Land; Phlebas the Phoenician, originally written in French, formed part of quite a different poem; and so on. This method of composition had never been fully available to poets of earlier times. It is a discovery of modernism that images, musical fragments, moments of feeling or vision, can be simply juxtaposed and go to form a structure of a kind that had been hitherto unobserved, obscured by the narrative or discursive logic on which poetry had formerly relied.

I thought once, and I think I still think, that this mode of composition limits the possibilities of poetry by isolating it from the logic of other kinds of human utterance. For Eliot it seems to have been the only way of arriving at a free-standing artefact that can go away and live apart from the life of its creator. His early criticism shows how strongly he felt this kind of independence to be required of the poem. Yet other and less guarded passages show how his


poetry in detail, at the actual moment of conception, rises from profound, obscurely apprehended inner necessities. Mr. C. K. Stead has brought this into prominence by quoting in his admirable study The New Poetic a central but neglected passage from ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’.

What you start from is nothing so definite as an emotion, in any ordinary sense; it is still more certainly not an idea . . . I would go a little further. In a poem which is neither didactic nor narrative, and not animated by any other social purpose, the poet may be concerned solely with expressing in verse-using ail his resources of words, with their history, their conno- tations, their music-this obscure impulse. He does not know what he has to say until he ha.v said it.

And Mr. Stead goes on to argue, in terms that to my mind carry complete conviction, that in most of his poetry and in all his best poetry, this was Eliot’s essential creative process. The emphasis in the early criticism on wit, intelligence, impersonality and conscious control was a defence against his tendency rather than a description of his own actual procedure.

5 Like most of Eliot’s earlier work the Four Quartets arose from

embryonic fragments not originally conceived as parts of the ultimate structure at all. After the composition of The Rock Eliot became deeply concerned with dramatic poetry-that brilliant public light that has allured so many inner-directed poets, and to so many has proved an [qnis fatuus. He wrote Murder in the Cathedral, and there were lines and fragments discarded from it, condemned by the producer as undramatic. ‘However’, he tells us, ‘these fragments stayed in my mind, and gradually I saw a poem shaping itself around them; in the end it came out as “Burnt Norton”.’ He then returned to the drama and wrote The Family Reunion; and ‘Burnt Norton’ might have remained alone if the war had not diverted attention from dramatic writing. As it was, his energies were turned inward by the circumstances of the time, and ‘East Coker’ was the result. *It was only in writing “East Coker” ’ he says ‘that I began to see the Quartets as a set of four.’ So the Quartets in their inception were no more a premeditated design than The Waste Land or Ash Wednesday.

The above is Eliot’s own account of the genesis of the Quartets, and so far as it goes it is authoritative. But it is far from complete. It can hardly be an accident that ‘Burnt Norton’ reproduces the five-part structure of The Waste Land. Indeed the formal resemblance goes farther than this, for ‘Burnt Norton’ regularises the internal dichotomies found in rudimentary form in parts I, 11, I11 and V of The Waste Land, and repeats the constitution of part IV as a short isolated lyric. Yet merely by being the reproduction of an earlier


pattern ‘Burnt Norton’ becomes a pattern of another kind. We know that the final form of The Waste Land, however happy the result, was largely fortuitous. Besides Eliot’s own dubieties and pentimenti its ultimate shape was given by the excisions of Pound. There is all the difference in the world between this conformation by colla- borative accident and the deliberate adoption of the same form in ‘Burnt Norton’. And when we find that, with a slight alteration in ‘Little Gidding’, the same pattern is followed in all the other quartets, it can justly be said, as Hugh Kenner says, that the five-part structure of ‘Burnt Norton’ is ‘raised by iteration to the dignity of a form.’ It is also to be noted that except for the simple quatrains in Poems 1920 it is the first predetermined form that Eliot has ever used. And this brings with it a radical change in method, and in the constitution of the poem as it finally appears.

Eliot’s former method (followed with variations in Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday) involves the composition of a variety of discontinuous verse entities, under the dominance of a mood or a community of moods; or, as we might say, within the perimeter of a single field. These entities come as they come, each the expression of a ‘dark embryo’ which remains undefined until the expression arrives. It is hardly appropriate to call them fragments, yet they are neither complete wholes nor parts of a predetermined structure; and the poem in which they are ultimately to belong is achieved by composing them into a whole that takes its form simply from the nature and succession of the parts. There are no bridge passages or merely structural connections, none of the not-quite-poetry that a long poem built on traditional lines has always required. Hence the extreme concentration of all Eliot’s poetry before the Quartets. There may be incongruities, and occasionally lapses of taste; but there is no waste matter, no un- interesting connective tissue, none of the mere machinery of getting from place to place. And it is perhaps this more than anything else that makes the special quality, the haecceitus of Eliot’s finest work. Now in a poem of predetermined form this quality is not likely to be attained. The agreed symmetry demands a passage of a certain kind at a certain place. If such a passage has not simply arrived in obedience to an inner compulsion it has to be supplied by an in- fusion of the conscious will. With a poet as accomplished and scrupulous as Eliot by this time was, we can usually be sure that what is supplied will be of adequate craftmanship and dignity; but it is idle to suppose that the special quality of intensity, compelling and compelled, that we find in Eliot’s early verse will be everywhere present. And this I believe is what happens in the Quartets; and this is why, though they must everywhere command respect, they leave as a whole a certain sense of disappointment.

This is not of course simply a formal matter-or rather no formal matter is simply a formal matter. The decorous and dogmatic


stance of Eliot’s criticism has obscured the extent to which his earlier poetry is poetry of exploration. ‘He does not know what he has to say until he has said it.’ Even in Ash Wednesday the dialectic of negative and positive mysticism, of the self that affirms before the world and the ljelf that denies between the rocks, remains unsettled to the last. And this position, however far it falls short of inner peace and certitude, is exactly in conformity with the poetic pro- cedures that are most natural to him. But by the time the Quartets came to be written Eliot’s mind had been governed for many years by an orthodox and dogmatic religion, publicly confessed. The course and destination of his thought is predetermined to a degree quite unforeseeable from his earlier work. His spiritual development having taken the course it did it is impossible for him to write on the themes of the Quartets without being to some degree didactic. He is bound to know in large measure what he has to say before he has said it.

This does not imply that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, that there is more faith in honest doubt, etc. We can imagine the scorn with which Eliot would have met any such suggestion; but we need not imagine it-for this is not the suggestion that is being made. What I do want to suggest is that the predetermined doctrine, expressed appropriately enough in a predetermined form, that we find in the Quartets is not in harmony with Eliot’s natural and intrinsic poetic methods. So far as the Quartets were written in response to the old obscure pressures, so far as they assume, as before, non-logical and unpredictable forms, they are on the level of Eliot’s finest poetry. So far as they were composed to fit the demands of formal symmetry or a moral-doctrinal scheme they are on a lower level; and so far as the uncommitted reader of poetry experiences a partial disappointment, his disappointment has an objective correlative in the quality of the verse. Of course the next question is just how far this takes us: which

are the primary and authentic parts of the Quartets, and which the passages of bridge work, necessary doctrine, or more or less in- organic completion of the formal pattern? And of course it is unanswerable in the terms I have been using. I have spoken of Eliot’s creative processes because he does so himself, and what he tells us helps to account for certain differences between the earlier and the later poetry. But the processes are in themselves uninspect- able, and the poetry must ultimately be judged, as Eliot always insisted, by its own inspectable qualities. Reference to the author’s inner creative life can be no more than a guiding pressure in the background. There is much dispute about the intrinsic quality of the poetry of the Quartets; but perhaps by now we can sketch out some areas of possible agreement. ‘Burnt Norton’, where the form and direction of the Quartets as a whole was as yet unforeseen, is the most homogeneous in texture and the most complete. The expository passages arise most naturally and harmoniously from


the exquisite and obscure landscape-vision in the first movement. The lyrics (‘Garlic and sapphires’ and ‘Time and the bell’) are unparaphraseable triumphs of the auditory imagination in the familiar Eliotic way. We do not know what they have to say until they have said it, and then we do not need to ask. In each of the other quartets-in E.C.11, 111 and V, in D.S.11 and 111, in L.G.111 and perhaps even in V-there are passages of reflection, thoughtful and worthy of attention, where nevertheless the flaccid rhythm and inanimate vocabulary fail to rouse the thought to poetic life. ‘Tennyson and Browning ruminated’ Eliot had said, many years before. In these places he too seems to be ruminating-not necessarily a bad thing to do, but not what he had required his poetry to do in earlier days.

It might seem tempting to commend the ‘lyric’ passages and reserve dubiety for the discursive and expository ones. But this is not the way that the virtues of the poem divide themselves. Of ‘What was the late November doing’ (E.C.11). Eliot himself says ‘That was a way of putting it-not very satisfactory’. It looks indeed like an accomplished but conscious imitation of the brilliant ‘Garlic and sapphires’ from B.N.11. Of ‘The wounded surgeon’ (E.C.IV). I can only say that it seems to me the one positively bad section of the poem-a frigid and tasteless working-out, in a pseudo-seicento manner, of an unfelt and unhappily chosen conceit. ‘The dove descending’ in L.G.IV is again, though less unhappily, a willed evocation of Metaphysical mannerism, hardly adequate in movement or image to sustain its prominent position. The two lyrics in ‘Burnt Norton’, delicate and enigmatic, are I take it beyond question; so is the first stanza of ‘Ash on an old man’s sleeve’ in L.G.11. In the last two stanzas I think I see the will doing the work of the imagination. And in the sestina of D.S.11 we have (pace Donald Davie) a deliberate, beautiful formal invention, the repetitive chiming rhymes both intricately satisfying in themselves and precisely suited to this lament for lives of endlessly repeated toil. A poem that exists, surely, because it was called for by the formal scheme-and responds magnificently to the call. So the lyric portions of the Quartets show the same unevenness as the discursive ones. Some of the most completely crystallised ‘lyric’ moments occur not in formal lyric passages at all, but in the midst of verse of quite another kind- ‘Dawn points and another day’ in E.C.1, and ‘The wild thyme unseen’ in D.S.V.

As before in Eliot, some of the finest passages in the poem occur when thought and feeling crystallise around a natural scene, actual or imagined, as in the first movement of each quartet. And as before, some passages of ironic social observation, ‘0 dark dark dark’ in E.C.111, and ‘To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits’ in D.S.V, are dry, vivid and exact. The great unprecedented triumph of the poem is the fire-raid passage, the meeting with the


stranger in E.Ci.11. (Since there are so many surmises about the identity of this compound ghost, may I add my inalienable conviction that it mainly represents Ezra Pound-Pound seen as Brunetto Latini, also in hell-and that the scene gains greatly in power if we take it so.) Here the use of the imagist-enigmatic method is entirely abandoned, and the use of the persona or dramatic mask. Here, uniquely I think, Eliot returns to a central, non-modernist tradition of visionary narrative; and it is the most direct and outspoken piece of verse in all his work.

For the most part it is by its moments of vision that the Four Quartets live, in spite of an obstinate endeavour at another mode- and chiefly by moments of vision that have their starting point in the natural world. In the passages of discourse and opinion there is a steady depreciation of the natural life-yet it is only by hints and glimpses, momentary transfigurations of the natural life, that the more-than-natural illuminations are attained. These moments have nothing specifically Christian in their content, perhaps nothing specifically religious, in a traditional sense. They are, in Trilling’s phrase, ‘appropriate to the idea of divinity’, revelations of spirit; but they are n’o more dogmatic or doctrinal than that. They are juxtaposed with Christian sentiments and doctrine, but no more than juxtaposed. Equations are asserted between these poetic epiphanies and the Christian revelation, but they are no more than asserted; and it is the unauthorised, unexplained illuminations that are poeti- cally substantiated.

The poetic method that was intrinsic to Eliot’s imagination is at bottom unsuited to the kind of poem that the Quartets are trying to be. His is a symbolist, or post-symbolist, or modernist method; that is to say it springs historically from a post-Christian world, from a world that has lost a whole faith and can only live by gleaned and assembled fragments. Perhaps there is a fatal barrier by which no poet habituiited to writing in that mode could be a religious poet in the old sense:. It is striking that even in purely devotional poetry, even in Ash Wednesday, Eliot relies for his explicitly Christian formulations on fragments of liturgical prayer, quoted and unas- similated. They have their own poetry, but it is not his. The two poetics lie side by side, but they do not fuse. Eliot was a poet and a Christian, but he was never a Christian poet-as George Herbert was a Christian poet. His is not the poetry that can accept and love the manifest surface of the natural world, and use it and enjoy it, transfigured in the light of the religious apprehension. It is not the poetry that can accept the Christian myths and transmute them into its own substance. We are considering Eliot’s creative temper, but perhaps we should look farther than that. In Eliot the poetic imagination and the Christian confession do not interpenetrate; but it may be that they never could in this age, with the poetic resources available to it, and the knowledge that it cannot avoid.

128 CriticaI Quarterly

Virginia Woolf The Echoes Enslaved ALLEN McLAURIN A study of the novels and aesthetic ideas of Virginia Woolf in their historical and social context. It traces the interaction of the writers and artists who formed the Blooms- bury group, particularly between Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf. Dr McLaurin shows that Virginia Woolf’s preoccupations with the techniques of painting led her to explore the same ideas in her novels as Fry was concerned with in his art criticism. A3.N net

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