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ROMANTICISM and the "DISSOCIATION of SENSIBILITY" a STUDY of CHARLES BAUDELAIRE and T.S. ELIOT by ANGELIKA MARIA MAESE

ROMANTICISM and the "DISSOCIATION of SENSIBILITY" a STUDY of CHARLES BAUDELAIRE and T.S. ELIOT by ANGELIKA MARIA MAESE

ROMANTICISM AND THE "DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY"

A STUDY OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE AND T.S. ELIOT

by

ANGELIKA MARIA MAESER

B.A., University of British Columbia, 1970

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Date fa^X* /f7t ABSTRACT

This study attempts to determine what is the basic feature of and in what relation to it Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot stand.

Since few terms are as misunderstood and as weighed down with numerous and contradictory meanings as Romanticism, this thesis begins by trying to "reconstruct the Romantic situation" and turns to its major aesthetician, , in order to discover in what the revolutionary new outlook consisted. The fundamental characteristic of Romanticism, that which distinguishes it from all other literary and cultural movements, is here maintained to be the awareness of fragmentation, of division, and of chaos. The great important realization of Romanticism was of the modern world's and man's fragmentation and disunity in contrast to the wholeness and order of the distant past. The task which it assigned itself was to strive for a reintegration of the severed forces — Spirit and Nature — in a new synthesis that would, in turn, create a new man and a new world. In seeking to achieve this harmony, Romanticism turned to symbol, myth, and religion.

Two of the most important and influential of the modern age, Baudelaire and Eliot, were deeply entrenched in the

Romantic Weltanschauung and tradition, although while the former was consciously and progressively so, the. latter was an unconscious and reactionary Romantic. Both poets continue that tradition by virtue of their essential awareness of the duality of man or, in Eliot's ii

phrase, of the "dissociation of sensibility". The two fundamental principles of life and art, Spirit and Nature, are continually operative in their work and strive for harmony in their conflict.

The conclusion to which this thesis comes, however, is that neither fully realized the Romantic goal: the harmony of Spirit and Nature. The two forces co-habit in their verse, but never surpass conflict in a higher third synthesis. The reason for this failure, it is maintained, is their misunderstanding of

Nature. Both poets were hostile to and biased against Nature, preferring the exclusiveness of the Spirit. As a result, Baudelaire sought the way of transformation of Nature and Eliot the way of sublimation of Nature.

With Eliot Romanticism came -to a dead end, disavowing itself consciously yet tormented by its ever-pressing vision of the fragmentariness of man and art. Eliot, sought to heal the Romantic agony in a way which was not unorthodox for Romantics — conversion and conservatism. But the dilemma which the Romantic vision reveals so clearly — the dissociation of Spirit and Nature '•— has' not thus been solved for modern man. This thesis maintains that Nature must be re-examined and re-understood for to receive a new lease on life in our day. Only thereby will Romanticism once again find a new opening for creation..

Supervisor TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter I The "Dissociation of Sensibility" and Romantic Aesthetic

Chapter II

Baudelaire and the Revolt Against Nature

Chapter III Baudelaire and the Transformation of Nature

Chapter IV Baudelaire's Dualism and Christianity

Chapter V

T. S. Eliot and the Conflict Between Spirit and Nature

Chapter VI : "Chaos and Eros"

Chapter VII T. S. Eliot and the Christian Solution

Chapter VIII

The Poems: "The Hollow Men" to -Four Quartets

Part I

Part II

Chapter IX

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography Introduction

The plan of this thesis has changed greatly since I first

conceived of writing about Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot. I had intended originally to discuss the "dissociation of sensibility"

as Eliot coined it in terms of the dualism between Spirit and Nature,

or mind and matter, that coalesced into a system in the seventeenth

century. I was perfectly prepared at that time to accept Eliot's

judgement that prior to that age, there had existed a unity and wholeness in art (and man) that was absent from the present.

Then came the decisive change in point of view. With the

reading of Friedrich Schlegel, purely by chance I might add, I

realized that I too had fallen into the 'Romantic fallacy" of believing that prior to a certain point in history., there existed

unity and wholeness. As I.followed Schlegel's development from a youthful nostalgic Classicist, I made with him the revolutionary

change in point of view that the Romantic Anschauung characterized.

The "dissociation of sensibility", I then saw, was not

simply a modern reality; it had existed throughout time, only past

time had become idealized as a kind of Golden Age to which the modern

Age of Iron could never compare. Rather than futilely rebelling

against that reality of fragmentation and chaos, the Romantic came

to accept and to affirm it. His task lay in re-shaping the chaos

that stretched out before his gaze and in striving for a reconcilia•

tion of the severed forces, Spirit-and Nature. Of course, everything

fell immediately into a new shape. Eliot was clearly a Romantic 2

despite himself and Baudelaire one of the most advanced of the

Romantic poets. Rather than continue to base my thesis on a fallacy, I had no choice but to re-write the whole thing, except the analysis of Eliot's final poems. In the following study there will, I hope, emerge three things:

(1) the significant new awareness that was.the basis

of Romanticism.

(2) the place of Baudelaire and Eliot in.the Romantic

tradition. and (3) the vital importance of a new conception of Nature.

The latter, especially, seems important to me, for after studying

the development of modern (nineteenth to twentieth century) poetry and the two poets who stand as beacons in that dark night of art,

Baudelaire and Eliot, it becomes increasingly clear that the most crippling factor in the modern sensibility is its severance from

Nature; as will be seen in the course of this work, I view Nature

in its wider sense, that is not merely as external nature, but as

a principal life-force operative within the human being. Nature,

I have maintained, is one half of the psychic equation; the other half being Spirit. Now these two principles, as we shall see, have

long been in conflict and open or secret hostility to one another.

Nature has so far been the defeated party, but I do not believe it

is too late to resusciate the_abused victim or to resurrect the

corpse of Nature back to new life. But these opinions will await

the Conclusion where I have developed them more fully into a

projected possibility for the future of Romantic art. 3

My thesis is divided into nine chapters, including the

Conclusion, according to the following plan: The first chapter outlines the subject under discussion and relates the "dissociation of sensibility" to Romantic aesthetic. The next three chapters deal with Baudelaire — the revolt against Nature, the transforma--

tion of Nature, and his dualism and Christianity.. Chapters five to eight concern T. S. Eliot— the conflict between' Spirit and

Nature, The Waste Land: "Chaos and Eros", and the Christian solution. Chapter eight is considerably longer than the foregoing, but I have found it necessary to keep this division in order to give the attention merited by Eliot's last poems. Finally, chapter nine sums up my conclusions regarding the foregoing material and attempts to indicate what should be the future direction of art. CHAPTER I

THE "DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY" AND ROMANTIC AESTHETIC

When T. S. Eliot wrote, "In the seventeenth century a dis• sociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered... he was making an observation about which had already been anticipated by his Romantic predecessors. The "dissociation of sen• sibility", that mark of Cain on the modern consciousness, is but a new term for the old duality which the Romantics were the first to notice and to emphasize as the distinguishing feature of their age.

Eliot described this dissociation as the separation of "feeling" and "language", or substance and form, and considered it the aim of

the poet to attempt a reconciliation of these two aspects of art.

While the choice of the seventeenth century for a marking-off point

does not seem to be an arbitrary and inconsequential one judging from the history of ideas, it nevertheless is not as important to

locate the exact time of the supposed dissociation as to note the belief that it has taken place. What we are here confronted with is the view that there has existed at one time in the past—it may be the Graeco-Roman, the Medieval, or the generally pre-modern— a unity, a wholeness, and a completeness that is absent in the pres• ent.' In contrast to this previous age, whose boundaries vary, the modern is marked by a fatal dualism which not only leaves its imprint on art but also brands the artist with its curse. If we ask what 5

is the secret of the pre-modern wholeness, Eliot will answer in agreement with the Romantics that it is a homogenous world-view provided by religion, myth, or ; usually all three are found together.

Two questions we must deal with when we invoke the term

Romantic in this context are does such a thing as a Romantic aes• thetic exist, and does the consciousness of dualism constitute an essential feature of Romanticism? Looking at the English Romantic movement we may very well deny the first proposition, for nothing even closely resembling a philosophy of art, of Romantic art, appears.

What we discover, as so many critics in search of a Romantic theory have already found, is a set of common features abstracted from the writings of several major poets: the prefaces of Wordsworth, the

Biographia Literaria of Coleridge, the Defense of Poetry of Shelley, the letters of Keats and Blake, plus the aphorisms of the latter.

These abstracted features—"change, imperfection, growth, diversity,

2 the creative imagination, the unconscious", -according to M. Peckham— constitute a stock feature of articles and books on the subject but quickly degenerate into platitudes and catch-all phrases, as a look 3 at Jacques Barzun's compilation will show us. Unfortunately, for lack of any tangible aesthetic to consult such a process of deductive reasoning has had to supply the details of the Romantic tableau. The position finally arrived at by Peckham, after many thoughts on the subject of Romantic theory, is that a "construction of the Romantic situation is necessary^, but that he despairs of living "to see it".

The basic problem that the critic of English Romanticism 6

has had to face is the lack of a theoretician of the movement; as

a result, he has been thrown back upon his own ingenuity and wit

to construct a theory that will, hopefully, cover talents as diverse

as Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron. With the tables so unnaturally

turned, the critic has had to supply what—unless he is also a poet—

is not in his power to do—provide a theory of Romantic art. Hap•

pily, the situation is brighter when we turn to Germany which is,

after all, the home of the movement. That country's soil turned

up a poet-thinker who not only set the wheels of Romanticism moving but who also provided the theory for it, Friedrich Schlegel. Ac•

cordingly, it is to that source where we must turn for a Romantic

aesthetic. In his works we find an extraordinarily early anticip•

ation of features which will eventually and variously be picked up

by different poets in England and . To our first question,

we can then answer: yes, a Romantic aesthetic does exist, but we

must turn to Germany to find it totally expressed. In Schlegel's writings we can see the evolution of thought whose beginning is the

consciousness of duality or fragmentation and whose end is the re•

conciliation of duality in a religio-mythical-symbolic complex. By

following his development we can perhaps reconstruct the "Romantic

situation" and discern the importance of the concept of modern

fragmentation in the Romantic world-picture.

As early as 1794, F. Schlegel complained of the disunity

of modern poetry as contrasted with the wholeness and beauty of Greek

art. Importantly, too, the deficiency of modern art had its parallel

in the life of man.' 7

Dieser Zusammenharig gegen unsere Zerstuckelung, diese reinen Massen gegen unsere unendlichen Misch- ungen, diese einfache Bestimmtheit--, gegen unsere kleinliche Verworrenheit sind Ursache, dass die Alten Menschen im hohern Styl zu seyn scheinen. ...Und eben in der Kunst is auch unsere Verworren• heit und Zerstuckelung am offenbarsten. ...Trostlos und ungeheuer steht die Lucke yor uns: der Mensch is zerrissen, die Kunst und das Leben.sind getrennt.—Und dies Gerippe war einst Leben! Es gab eine Zeit, es gab ein Volk, wo das himmlische Feuer der Kunst, wie die sanfte Gluth des Lebens beseelte Leiber durchdringt, das All der regen Menschheit durchstromte!5

Although Schlegel was at this time in what is known as his Classical period and was soon to champion the modern which he here rejected, he retained his sense of the duality-of modern man and art as is seen from a,much later Athenaum fragment in which he speaks of the "un- begreiflichere angeborne geistige Duplizitat des Menschen".^ The ideal aim and task of Romantic art became for him the union of an• cient and modern elements,- the perfected letter or "vollendeten

Buchstaben" of the former and the evolving spirit or "werdenden

Geist" of the latter.7 While it is impossible here to give a complete account of Schlegel's Romantic aesthetic, several points of it may be touched upon to give an. indication of his pioneer genius and the in• debtedness which later owe him.

In the famous Athenaum • fragment #116, he states the decisive difference between modern, and that of the past.

Die romantische Poesie is eine progressive Univer- salpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bio?, alle getrennte Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen, und die Posie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in in Beruhrung zu Setzen. Sie will, und soli auch Poesie und Prosa, Genialitat und Kritik, Kunstpoe- sie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig, und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen, den Witz poetis- 8

ieren, und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegnem Bild- ungsstoff jeder Art anfullen und sattigen, und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen. Sie umfa/St alles/ was nur poetisch ist, vom groPten wieder mehre "Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme der Kunst, bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Ku0, den das dichtende Kind caushaucfttj'in kunstlosen Gesang. . . . Andre Dichtarten sind fertig, und konnen nun vollstandig zergliedert werden. Die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden; ja das ist ihr eigent- liches Wesen, daPsie ewig nur werden, nie voll- endet sein kann. Sie kann durch keine Theorie erschopft werden, und nur eine divinatorische Kritik diirfte es wagen, ihr Ideal charakterisieren zu wollen. Sie allein ist undenlich, wie sie allein frei ist, und das als ihr erstes Gesetz anerkennt, da die Willkur des Dichters kein Gesetz uber sich leide. Die romantische Dichtart ist die einzige, die mehr als Art, und gleichsam die Dichtkunst selbst- ist: denn in einem gewissen Sinn ist oder soil alle Poesie romantisch sein.

II "

Later, in the Gesprach Uber die Poesie, he places his finger on the missing element in modern art that would, if restored, enable a re• unification of the dissociation to occur. Aus dem Innern herausarbeiten das alles muf der moderne Dichter, und viele haben es herrlich_getan, aber bis jetzt nur jeder allein, jedes Werk wie eine neue Schopfung von vorn an aus Nichts. Ich gehe gleich zum Ziel. Es fehlt, behaupte ich, unsrer Poesie an einem Mittelpunkt, wie es die Myth- ologie fur die [die Poesie] der Alten war, und alles Wesentliche, worin die moderne Dichtkunst der antiken nachsteht, la£t sich in die Worte zusammenfassen: Wir haben keine Mythologie. [Mythologie, keine gelt- ende symbolische Naturansicht, als Quelle der Fan- tasie, und lebendigen Bilder-Umkreis jeder Kunst und Darstellung. ] Aber setze ich hinzu, wir sind nahe daran eine zu erhalten, [erhalten, nicht blo£ jede alte Symbolik zu verstehen, sondern eben dadurch auch eine neue fur uns wieder zu gewinnen;] oder vielmehr es wird Zeit, da/5 wir ernsthaft dazu mit- wirken wollen, eine hervorzubringen. Denn auf dem ganz entgegengesetzten Wege wird sie uns kommen, wie [als] die alte ehemalige, uberall [welche uberall] die erste Blute der jugendlichen Fantasie [war], sich unmittelbar anschlie^ehd "uhd^ anbildend an das Nachste, Lebendigste der sinnlichen Welt. Die neue Mythologie [Symbolik] mu£ im Gegenteil 9

aus der tiefsten Tiefe des Geistes herausgebildet werden; es mvfi das kunstlichste aller Kunstwerke sein, derm es soil alle andern umfassen, ein neues Bette und Gefa£ fur den alten ewigen Urquell der Poesie und selbst das unendliche Gedicht, welches die Keime aller andern Gedichte verhullt.9

The new "symbolic" art would be for its own time what Dante's was to the Middle Ages; it would be both symbolic (mythical) and realistic.

The poet who attempts this tremendous undertaking would, like Dante, have to have "only One Poem in his mind and heart, and would often have to doubt whether it were even possible to accomplish. Were he to succeed, however, he would have done enough.""^ Even in his late writings, Schlegel retained the notion of the fragmentation of modern man and, in the Philosophie der Sprache, outlined a theory of the four-fold division of consciousness. Writes Hans Eichner, the editor of his collected works: .

This divided consciousness is the result of a deterioration that first set in with the Fall of Man and has vitiated human thought and action ever since. Earlier ... he had found a similar imbalance and a similar dissociation of the faculties to be characteristic of the modern, "artificial" civilization as a whole, and had advocated a synthesis of science and art, philosophy and poetry, of reason and imagination, that would restore the primeval harmony still to be found with the Greeks. As early as 1799, he had singled out religion as the core and focus of such a synthesis.H

Much later in France, Baudelaire's aesthetic was grounded on the same convictions. "II est vrai", he writes, "que la grande 12 tradition s'est perdue, et que la nouvelle n'est pas faite.". And again, "La dualite de l'art est une consequence fatale de la dualite 13 de l'homme." Realizing that the artist could not return to the past and still be true to his own epoch, but that it lacked the type of 10

ancient beauty and completeness, Baudelaire was compelled to

formulate a theory of beauty which took imperfection and rela•

tivity into consideration; moreover, which made it the essential

feature of Romantic or modern art. And here is, I think, a clue to the situation in which the Romantics found themselves and with which they either had to find a way to cope and move on, or to ignore it and remain devoted to the past whose art could not possibly be re-created in the conditions of the present. Lovers of beauty, they had been enamoured of the perfection of the ancients and been educated by the controlling Enlightenment taste to imitate those masters. But how must a sensitive mind, not to say a genius, have suffered and found himself in a dilemma when he beheld the vast gulf that separated the older ages from the present! The historical conditions of the ancients were not his

conditions, the sensibility of Greece and Rome was not the sens• ibility of Germany and France. The Enlightenment had tried to re•

create such a situation, but it remained an artificial and simulated

one; and this the vanguard of intelligences came to realize. "Now

this mighty, static metaphysic, which had governed perilously the

thoughts of men since the time of Plato, collapsed of its own in•

ternal inconsistencies in the late eighteenth century — or collapsed

14

for some people." What we see in the conversion of of

a Schlegel is the coming to terms with a present historical and

cultural reality. Such a step was nothing less than revolutionary

and courageous because it entailed recasting an entire body of values.

If the present was imperfect and fragmented when compared to antiquity, 11

and if antiquity was the model or ideal of beauty and perfection, then what was demanded of the modern poet was nothing less than the changing of his ideal. Henceforth, imperfection and disunity and chaos, even ugliness (compared to the old standard), had to be incorporated into the new aesthetic. This is precisely what

Schlegel did, and what Baudelaire did after him as weishall see.

Before Romanticism could get off the ground, a new ideal had to replace the Classical and Neo-Classical one, an ideal which took the duality of modem man and his art into consideration and raised it to the power of a first principle; but this consciousness of fragmentation or "dissociation of sensibility" could only come into being because of the comparison, with Classical art. Held up beside the ancients, modern art seemed deficient, lacking in unity of being, and the only way it could win acceptance was to re-make its vices into virtues. Thus We see how the first formulation of a Romantic aesthetic was intimately allied with the awareness of the imperfection and fragmentation of modern life and art as opposed to the perfection and integrity of the ancients.

*

Was the "dissociation of sensibility", the consciousness of duality, a Romantic fiction, then, that simply arose out of the unfortunate comparison of the modern age with antiquity? Was clas• sical man truly such a model of wholeness and unity as the moderns have always believed, or did historical distance merely give him the advantage of relative anonymity? Even in posing this question Schlegel has anticipated us, for in his.post-Classical, post-"Objektivitatswut", 12

he wondered:

Hat man nicht bei Untersuchung der altesten griechischen Mythologie viel zu wenig Rucksicht auf den Instinkt des menschlichen Geistes zu parallelisieren und zu antithesieren genommen? . . .15-

The Classical period became for the European of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the nail on which to hang his ideal of unity. Neo-Classicism was copying and emulating an idealized antiquity, and this we must remember if we are to real• ize the nature of\the Romantic break-through. What a pioneer of thought like Schlegel, and many persons after him, first understood with such a startling clarity is that duality and fragmentation are not the hallmarks just of modern man, but of man of every age.

Not unity and regulated oneness is the real state of man, but diversity and mahifoldness; and to this observation the Classical world of gods lent proof. At this point, the Neo-Classical pretense was broken through; reality did not accord with the Enlightenment conception of man and beauty. Rather than having been a whole and perfect creature, the man of antiquity was just as torn by passions and contradictions; disunity has always been the reality which man has sought to change, and wholeness the goal to which he has aspired.

Now the Romantics could affirm their condition without shame and realize that man is only and always in a state of "becoming". This is perhaps the main feature of the new Romantic aesthetic, that it

combines the ideal with reality, being and becoming, in a revolu• tionary synthesis and frees man once and for all from a false, im• posed unity. The ideal of wholeness and perfection is not lost sight of, but it is now seen as only a potential, a hypothesized x, 13

toward which man and art are always moving but which they can never completely attain in this life. From the skeleton of this

Romantic aesthetic as I have sketched it, we can see the implica•

tions of this new outlook — all of which have not even yet been realized. Romantic art allows for an infinite expansion and for many variations; that is the beauty of it. We may honestly say

that Romantic art has not been exhausted according to the aesthetic formulated for it by Schlegel. What we do note/..however, is that it is fundamentally based on the consciousness of man's fragmentariness, duality, and.imperfection. This is its ever- refreshing hold on reality; this is what prevents it from ever getting too far away from life. Rather than reject that reality when it sees it, Romantic art affirms it — I will not say gladly, but at least courageously — and holds before it the vision of the ideal potential unity. Not all the Romantic writers were to seize upon the radical truth of this art; few ever penetrated to its utmost depths or soared to its farthest heights. In the following

chapters I hope to reveal the manner in which two of the most eminent poets of the modern age deal with the "dissociation of sensibility" and what place they occupy in the Romantic tradition-.

Needless to say, I cannot consider my subjects — Baudelaire and

Eliot — outside it, but if any doubts exist at this stage they will hopefully be clarified in the end. Footnotes

Chapter I

1. T.'S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected , 5th ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), p. 247.

2. Morse Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," The Triumph, of Romanticism: Collected Essays, 1st ed. (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), p. 14.

3. Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, 2nd ed. 1943, rev. rpt. (New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1961), pp. 155-168.

4. Peckham, "Romanticism: the Present State of Theory," p. 83.

5. F. Schlegel, "Uber die Grenzen des Sch'dnen," Seine Prosaischen Jugendschriften, ed. by J. Minor, 1st ed. (Wien: Carl Konegen, 1906), pp. 21-23.

6. F. Schlegel, "Athenaum Fragmente," no. 162, Kritische Friedrich- Schlege1-Ausgabe, vol 2:1, ed. by Hans Eichner, 1st ed. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1967), p. 190.

7. F. Schlegel, "Lyceums Fragmente," no. 93, K.A., p. 158.

8. F. Schlegel, "Athenaums Fragmente," no. 116, K.^A. , pp. 182-3.

9. F. Schlegel, "Gesprach Uber die Poesie," K^A., p. 312,

10. F. Schlegel, "Gesprach...," K.A. , p. 327.

11. Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel, 1st ed. (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970), p. 138.

12. C. Baudelaire, "Salon de 1846,".Oeuvres, 1st ed. (: Librairie Gallimard, 1954), p. 677.

13. Baudelaire, "La Peintre de la Vie Moderne," Oeuvres, p. 883.

14. M. Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," p. 9.

15. F. Schlegel, "Athenaum Fragmente," no. 162, K.A., p. 190. German Translations

Chapter I

(The following translations are my own.)

#5. This cohesion in contrast to our fragmentation, these pure forms in contrast to our unending mixtures, this simple precision in contrast to our trivial confusion are reason to consider the ancients as having the higher style. ...And especially in art is our confusion and fragmentation the most obvious. ...Hopeless and terrible the chasm stands before us: man is torn apart, art and life are divided. —And this skeleton was once life! There was a time, there was a people, when the gentle glow of life, penetrated bodies with souls, when the All flowed through an' animated humanity.

#6. more incomprehensible inborn spiritual duality of man

#8. Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its purpose.is not simply to reunite all the separated classes of poetry and to put poetry once again in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It wants, and should also, soon mix, soon smelt, geniality and criticism, art-poetry, nature-poetry, make poetry alive and social, and life and society poetic, poetize wit, and fill and satisfy the forms of art with the pure form-stuff of every art. It encompasses everything that is poetic, from the largest systems-within-systems of art, to the sigh, the kiss, that the poetizing child exhales in artless song. ...Other poetic styles are finished and can now be fully dis• membered. The Romantic poetic art is still in the process.of becoming; yes, that is its essential being, that it can eternally only become, never be completely finished. It can be created through no theory, and only a divinatory criticism could dare to wish to characterize its ideal. It alone is un• ending, as it alone is free, and that because it recognizes as its first law that the free will of the poet tolerates no law over itself. The Romantic poetic art is the only one that is more than art and that at the same time is poetic art itself, for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be Romantic.

#9. The modern poet must create out of himself, and many have done it admirably, but until now each one only alone, every work being like a new creation ex nihilo. I will get right to the point. There is lacking, I maintain, in our poetry a centre, such as was mythology for the ancients, and everything essential wherein the modern poet is inferior to the ancients' can be summarized in these words: We have no mythology. [Mythology: no significant symbolic view of nature as source of the imagination and living image-orbit of every art and representation.] But, I add, we are near to receiving one [not simply the old symbolism, to be understood here, but even to win for ourselves a new one], or it will increasingly become time for us to work together earnestly for one, to bring, one forth. For it will come to us on a wholly opposite way than the recent old one which was, moreover, the first bloom of the;;.' youthful imagination and will incommunicably connect itself to and reflect the next most living thing of the physical world. The new mythology [Symbolism] must on the contrary be formed out of the deepest depths of the spirit; it must be the most artificial of all works of art, for it should encompass all others, be a new channel and container for the old eternal source of poetry, and be itself the infinite poem which contains the germ.of all other poems. (Note: The square brackets indicate Schlegel's own later appended comments.)

Have we not in the investigation of the oldest Greek'mythology taken too little consideration.of the instinct of the human spirit to parallelize and to antithesize? CHAPTER II

BAUDELAIRE AND THE REVOLT AGAINST NATURE

It is not the least of associated with Baudelaire that the poet-critic who best comprehended the spirit of Romantic• ism and based his art upon it should have been hostile to the one principle that became its ensign — Nature. In order to understand

Baudelaire's antipathy toward Nature, and I mean here not only the external aspect of it but also its symbolic or ideal value, we must look at two things: firstly, his own native sensibility which was undivided only in its total disposition toward the absolute, and, secondly, the meaning, or emotional-intellectual significance of the concept of Nature in the France.(and, ultimately, Europe) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When we have explored these two points there will emerge, I think, not a picture of an anti-

Romantic (as Eliot assumed) but of an artist who was the first to see the contradiction within the Romanticism of his . time and who, paradoxically, in denouncing Nature5 remained an absolutely logical

Romantic.

"If once one-has a love affair with the Absolute and cannot refrain from it, then there remains no way out but constantly to contradict oneself and to unite opposite extremes.""'" So wrote

Schlegel and amazingly anticipated the dilemma that was to be

Baudelaire's throughout his lifetime. Sensibility is such a private and unique attribute that even psychology cannot successfully explain 15

it, although it may seek in personal history the causal links

that forged the mature being. I prefer, however, to think of sensibility as the unique seed of the individual that, whatever soil it is placed in and whatever care it gets or does not get, will despite all conditions grow either into a pansy or a rose

or whatever is its inner nature to-be. For this reason, attempts

to explain Baudelaire's "spleen" and nature antipathy by psych•

ological methods leading into the labyrinths of an Oedipus Complex 2

and.other disorders tell but a partial story and cannot ultim•

ately account for the essential germ of the subject. Baudelaire's

entire sensibility was purely spiritual, a fact that no one can

fail to notice who has given him attention. From the very begin• ning there is present in his character a search, a longing, for

the ideal, for the Absolute.. In childhood, this already manifests

itself as the propensity to day-dream and to seek refuge from the

uglier unpleasantries of daily life: in the magical and exotic 3

dreams of the imagination. As J. Melancon has rightly pointed

out: "L'esprit ne lutte done pas contre le reve, comme le pense

le philosophe, mais contre la chair, 1'action et. la realite , 4

exterieure. II s'oppose au naturel." Baudelaire's intense spir•

itual disposition, that only entrenched itself more firmly and made

life less tolerable as time went on, was bound to call up its con•

trary, and hence ensued that bitter struggle within him between

spirit and nature or, as he was always to refer to it in Les Fleurs

du Mai, "entre Dieu ou Satan", "enfer ou ciel". Everything in those

poems speaks of poetic evasion, of ^rising on the wings of the spirit 16

above the earthbound or natural. To take but one excellent example of this propensity toward the Absolute and the attend•

ant polarization of opposites, "Elevation"5 describes the poet's

imaginary, spiritual flight above the farthest regions of the

cosmos, and how at home his spirit is in this etheral element.

Au-dessus des etangs, au-dessus des vallees, Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers, Par dela le soleil, par dela les ethers, Par dela les confins des spheres etoilees,

Mon esprit, tu te meus' avec agilite, et, comme Un'bon nageur, qui se paW dans l'onde, tu sillonnes Gaiement 1'immensite profonde avec une indicible Et'male' volupte'.

His desire is to be far from "Ces miasmes morbides", the natural

antithesis to his spiritual flight.

Derriere les ennuis et les vastes chagrins Que chargent de leur poids 1'existence brumeuse, Heureux celui qui peut d'une aile vigoureuse S'elancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins!

The conclusion of the poem is reminiscent of Keats' "Ode to a

Nightingale" and Shelley's "To a Skylark", the bird -- in this

case a swallow — is considered lucky by Baudelaire because it

can take free flight from the earth and yet comprehend it far

better than man.

Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort La language des fleurs et des.choses muettes!

F. W. Leakey in his comprehensive study of the place of

external nature in Baudelaire's works thinks that the youthful poet

had a "feeling for nature", but that "the strain quickly dies out

in Baudelaire, never again to recur save in purely reminiscent

contexts."0 He accounts for this change, which he dates at around 17

1852, by three reasons: (1) "The Bonapartist coup d'etat of 2

December 1851 [which] had induced a revulsion from politics or

at least from all political action . . . ", (2) "preparation of his long article of March-April 1852.on Edgar Allen Poe, sa vie

et ses ouvrages, [which] will have impelled him to ponder, and

to begin to assimilate to himself, Poe's firmly anti-didactic

and anti-utilitarian theories . . . ", and (3) "in March 1852 he resolved to bring to an end his long and chequered relation•

ship with Jeanne Duval . • • ".^ However, Baudelaire's "feeling

for nature" never amounted to much, and the poems in which Leakey

sees this sentiment expressed are adolescent pieces and hardly

representative of the real poet. I am more inclined to believe

that at the adolescent stage his thoughts were only in the process

of forming and that the bulk of the .evidence for Baudelaire's nature antipathy .is to be found in his native sensibility which was always highly spiritual and which led to an aversion for any•

thing natural or earthy. As had said: "Spirit•

uality is not only Baudelaire's peak but also his bedrock. Every

great man uses certain words so personally that his whole being passes into them and charges them with their utmost meaning. Spirit

is the word for imperious genius that Baudelaire's stamped above

8

all others." Sensibility alone, nevertheless, cannot be made to bear the whole brunt'of an explanation of Baudelaire's revolt against

Nature. While it goes far to account for the emotional disposition

of the poet, there is one more principal factor to be taken into

account and that is responsible for shaping his aesthetic. 18

"La plupart des erreurs relatives au beau naissent de e s \ la fausse conception du XVIII siecle relative a la morale. La nature fut prise dans ce temps- la comme base, source et type de 9 tout bien et de tout beau possibles." In these words of Baudelaire are to be found, I think, the key to his aesthetic revolt. To understand what it entailed, we must review what the word Nature meant to the Enlightenment and, a little later, to the early

Romantics. France was, if we remember, the cradle of the European

Neo-Classic movement and in no other country did its spirit linger so long and tenaciously. That Romanticism should even have suc• ceeded in breaking down the Bastille of Enlightenment opinion, en• trenched firmly in the Academy, was roundly considered a triumph then and only a partial success by later scholars. Largely, the

Romantic influence —coming from.England in the form of Shakespeare,

Ossian, Sterne, Addison, Pope, Young, Fielding, Richardson — was strongly resisted and.the word Romantic was not even used until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of the German influence nothing is felt until Madame de Stael's book De 1'Allemagne appears, and then only a few writers receive notice, principally Goethe.10

The remarkable point about France is that when Romanticism did win acceptance, it did so by modifying itself, into Classical features.

"French Romanticism ... is in many ways a classic phenomenon, a product of classic French rhetoric,"11 writes George Brandes; and

Victor Klemperer adds to this: . . . als sie [die Romantik] in voller deutscher und englischer Entfaltung auf Frankreich ubertragen wurde, erhielt sie dort ein charakteristisch romanisches Geschenk: Formbereicherung. Die 19

Franzosen sehen in der Romantik einerlei, ob sie ihr als einer germanischen Trubung romanischer klarheit feindlich oder als einem Wesenzuwachs freundlich gegenuberstehen —, von sich aus sehen sie zu Recht in ihr fast aussschliePlich einen Kampf des Subjectivismus um neue Formen den fest - ausgebildeten klassischen Formregeln gegenuber. Nun beantwortet sich auch die Frage, warum sie ihre romantische Schule trotz Chateaubriand und Lamartine erst von 1830 datieren. Sie lassen eben folgerichtig ihre eigentliche Romantik erst dort beginnen, wo programmatisch fur eine neue Dichtungsform eintritt und sich der reprasentativsten franzosischen Diehtungs- gattung, des Dramas, bemachtigt. Es ist mit der Cromwell - Vorrede wie mit der Defense Du Bellays. Die neue Form wird starker unterstrichen und wirkt starker als der neue Geist.-^

Despite the fact that Baudelaire was writing in the mid- nineteenth centuryj he lived in a literary milieu that had always been primarily tinged with Classicism. What was, then, the Neo• classical conception of Nature? It was of Nature as the norm, the ideal, of virtue, beauty, and perfection. It was a Platonized Nature of which there was more idealization than reality. The doctrine of

"la belle nature" allowed for only one absolute, one standard of beauty, and one common denominator. : When the Romantics took over this word and emblazoned it on their-bannerj they denied that there was one uniform standard for life or art but they did not change their opinion about the essential goodness and benevolence of Nature. In a different way, Nature was still retained as an ideal and made the focus of a cult of worship. Here was a contradiction for the Christian

Romantic that Baudelaire saw: on the one hand, Romanticism was based' on the tension between reality and the ideal; it was an art with wide-

"open eyes that dared to confront reality with all its imperfections and horrors but that postulated for.itself an infinite goal, an

Absolute toward which it would forever strive though never attain. 20

Hence, perfection and wholeness were not here, in Nature, but in the ever-beyond, in the Spirit. This accorded perfectly with the

Christian dogma which saw man and nature not as perfect but as fallen, and which held out the promise of perfection in a future spiritual state. (Schlegel himself said that Romantic art was a

Christian art.) But what the Neo-Classicists and the majority of

Romantics maintained was that Nature was the ideal, was the source of all goodness and perfectability. (Consequently, too, the problem of evil was one that they could not come to terms with.) J. W.

Beach has made some illuminating comments on the connection between the Romantics' idea of Nature and scientific positivism that may throw light on Baudelaire's position of revolt. "It is to be ob• served," he writes,

that this concept of a harmonious and purposive nature was most of ten-held by writers who were not orthodox Christians; that, however religious it might be in its essence, it carried more or less of a latent protest against the prevailing dogmatic religion. . .. Historically considered, the faith based on this concept of nature amounted, for the literary mind, to a kind of substitute for the - Christian religion. It was Christianity, freed from various superstitions, irrational and, so to speak, parochial elements, and yet retaining enough emotional force to satisfy man's craving for a moral and intelligible universe. That it actually did constitute such a substitute religion is shown by the fact that the poets, who harbored this con• ception were almost invariably not "fundamentalists", and by the fact, roughly true in a general survey, that their enthusiasm for nature was in almost inverse ratio^ to the hold,of Christian dogma upon them.13

Baudelaire's revolt against Nature was then against the

Neo-Classical and subsequently Romantic conceptions of that term. 21

Unlike them, he did not see in Nature the ideal of beauty or of goodness. For Baudelaire, the horror of reality was contained in

Nature, and the ideal belonged to the distant realm of spirit.

What can be so confusing about this revolt is that there are two types of Romanticism coming into conflict. From what I have said of the first and comprehensive Romantic aesthetic of F. Schlegel, it is plain that Baudelaire accords with that conception. The ideal is implicit in Romantic art, the perfection of form and content is its goal, but these belong to the "Geist" or spirit,

14 and can only be realized in the spirit, not in the letter.

Baudelaire seized on the spirit of Romanticism and, thus, on the spirit of Christianity, and found not goodness in Nature, but evil.

To the evil in Nature, most of the English Romantics, we will note, did not find an answer. Baudelaire was perhaps the first to see the contradiction in Romanticism so clearly; to him Nature could not be reconciled with goodness and ideality unless one were blind to the reality of evil. "Si toutefois nous consentons a en referer simplement au fait, visible a 1'experience de tous les ages et a la

Gazette des Tribunaux," he wrote,

nous verrons que la nature n'enseigne rien, ou presque rien, c'est-a-dire qu'elle contraint l'homme a dormir, a boire, a manger, et a se garantir, tant bien que mal, contre les hostilites de 1'atmosphere. C'est elle aussi qui pousse l'homme a tuer son semblable, a le manger, a le sequestrer, a le torturer; car, sitot que nous sorfons de l'ordre des necessi-tes et des besoins pour entrer dans celui du luxe et des plaisirs, nous voyons que la nature ne peut conseiller que le crime. . . . C'est la philosophie (je parle de la bonne), c'est la religion qui nous ordonnent de nourrir des parents pauvres et infirmes. La nature (qui n'est pas autre chose que la voix de notre interet) nous commande de les assommer. 22

. . . Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalite; le bien est toujours le produit d' un art.15

The anti-natural, the ideal of spirituality, became the hallmark

of Baudelaire's art, and the revolt against Nature a perfectly

logical Christian-Romantic answer to the problem of evil which the

Enlightenment and early Romantic cult of Nature-worship ignored.

* •

What were the artistic "implications and results of Baud•

elaire's revolt against Nature? This is a question we can answer by a look at his poetry and criticism; there we will find revealed

a new feature of Romantic art never, before explored: the exalta•

tion of artificiality. Theophile Gautier, the "poete impeccable"

of the Fleurs du Mal dedication page, speaks of "le gout particulier

du poete pour 1' artif iciel", and adds "Tout ce qui e'loignait l'homme

et surtout la femme de l'etat de nature lui paraissait une invention heureuse. "1d This is perhaps not too surprising when we remember

that Schlegel had designated the modern age as an "artificial" one

in contrast to the "natural" epochs of antiquity and had declared

that modern poetry must be "the most artificial of all works of art".17

Baudelaire's emphasis on conscious application and on the elimination

of chance in art has always been considered by critics a mark of his

"classicism" and, therefore, proof of an anti-Romantic tendency.

Camille Mauclair in Le Genie de Baudelaire compares our poet to Racine

and speaks of "la langue classique, stricte, tres picturale, des Fleurs

du Mal":

Les pieces le plus hardies, les plus specialement empreintes de perversite morbide au jugement des 23

detracteurs de l'immortalisme baudelairienne, demeurent superbement classiques par 1'expression, et ce classicisme,"loin d'etre disparate avec le sujet, lui confere une sorte de purete hautaine.18

Taking a similar position is F. L. Doudet in Charles Baudelaire et

L'esprit Classique:

Sa condamnation des systemes n'empeche pas qu'il affectionne les regies, et qu'il les juge necessaires, indispensables a l'a'rt. Ailleurs, il s'avou convaincu — et jusqu' a 1'evidence — que "rhetoriques et prosodies ne sont pas des tyrannies" mais que c'est "organisation meme de l'etre spirituel" qui en a, au cours des'.ages, reclame l'invention. "Jamais, affirme-t-il, elles n'ont empeche l'orig- inalite de se produire distinctement. Le contraire, a savoir qu'elles ont aide l'eclosion de 1'originalite, serait infiniment plus vrai.-9

Baffled by Baudelaire's inconsistency and vexing duality, a critic such as Henri Peyre has simply contented himself to list all the features wherein the poet is Romantic and those wherein he is Classic.

Another, Gustave Kahn, has taken the complete reverse position and declared Baudelaire to have been "perfectly indifferent" to the

Classics: "Baudelaire perfectionne la ligne du romantisme qu'il 21 augmente d'un vaste terroir. II n|est nullement classique." Many more examples of the critical controversy surrounding this matter could be cited, but I will content myself to conclude with Paul

Valery's examination of Baudelaire's classicism and what it entails.

"II y a une infinite des manieres de definir," he writes, ou de croire definir le classique. Nous adopterons aujourd'hui celle-ci: classique est l'ecrivain qui porte un critique en soi-meme, et qui l'associe intimement a ses travaux. Tout classicisme suppose un romantisme anterieur. Tous les avantages que l'on attribue, toutes les objections que l'on fait a un art "classique" sont relatifs a cet axiome. L'essence du classicisme est de venir apres. La purete est le resultat d'operations infinies sur 24

le langage, et le soin-de la forme n'est autre chose que la reorganisation meditee des moyens 1'expression. Le classique implique done des actes volontaires et reflechis qui modifient une production "naturelle", conformement a une conception claire et rationelle de l'homme et de l'art.22

I believe it is inaccurate to consider Baudelaire's scrupulous attention to form as a mark of classicism or Parnassian- ism — if that term is used to indicate features opposite to or irreconcilable with Romanticism. As we have seen, Schlegel's

Romantic aesthetic strictly formulated an art that would retain the perfection of form associated with classicism but that would have an infinite or spiritual content. It therefore seems to have been a long-standing misconception of critics to consider Romanticism as expressly excluding so-called "classical" elements. (This miscon• ception was, I think, not one of the least about Romanticism held by T. S. Eliot.) Victor Klemperer makes a good point in regard to this problem:

Denn das Reden von der "Formlosigkeit" der Romantiker mu£ genauso in die Irre fuhren, wie das Reden von der Ausschlie^li^hkeitib ihres Fiihlens. Sie fuhlen nicht nur, sondern sie denken auch; und was sie fuhlen und denken, formen sie auch ^- sonst kamen keine Kunstwerke zustande. Das ist eine Selb- stverstandlichkeit — aber eine von denen, auf die nachdrucklich hingewiesen werden mu|9, weil gegen sie gesundigt wird. Nicht formlos ist der ^3 Romantiker, sondern er hat seinen eigenen Ausdruck.

Paul Valery's definition of a classicist as "one who carries a critic within himself" can certainly be applied to the true Romantic; but we have become so accustomed to thinking of the latter as one totally unmindful of form and so wildly overflowing with passion — and those not the best — that we have made a very serious and false distinction between these two types. Doubtless, many Romantic artists have them• selves contributed to strengthening this misconception so that when a 25

poet who mastered the rigors of form did come along he was in• stantly hailed as the "first counter-Romantic" and taken into the bosom of the self-styled classicists. Hopefully, this error will soon be cleared up and criticism will cease to consider Romantic art as contrary to the Classical perfection of form. This brings up the interesting question whether any artist can ever be a classicist in the modern age, but I will postpone comment upon this until later.

Another manifestation of Baudelaire's artificiality

(meaning conscious or spiritual control of matter) arising from

the revolt against Nature is in the realm of life. Here we have

the "", the "citoyen spirituel de l'univers", the "homme qui

comprend le monde et les raisons mysterieuses et legitimes de tous 24 ses usages". Baudelaire's conception of the dandy arises out of a sense, an intuition, of the of the modern world, of the new social situation of humanity. If we think of the mid-nineteenth

century and its positivist, materialist trend, the rapid industrial• ization, the new faith in science and progress to herald in a Golden

Age, then we realize that the bucolicism of the first-wave Romantics was no longer possible for a Baudelaire, just as it became increas•

ingly impossible for his English counterparts. The new man was

truly breaking out of the parochialism and provincialism of a rural

society and would have to become a "universal citizen". Writes

Gustave Kahn: Baudelaire, en effet, se separe et se distingue du Romantisme par une recherche volontaire, absolue, intransigeante, du modernisme. Ce qu'il a resolu de peindre, c'est non seulement l'homme moderne, 26

mais l'homme des grandes villes eloigne de tout bucolisme, pris par de soucis de vie angoissants, l'homme des foules; mais cet homme des foules, c'est dans sa conscience et sa mentalite qu'il le veut etuder.25

This was the beginning of the era of the Massenmensch, and for this reason I do not agree fully with M. Peckham's analysis of the dandy as an affront to the aristocracy.

. . . The role of the highest status in European society is that of the aristocratic gentleman of leisure. By willfully playing this role better than those born and. trained to it, the Dandy reveals the pointlessness of the socially adapted. He makes a mode of life designed to symbolize social status into a work of art designed to symbolize nothing at all, or nothing that society values . . . .

This was the time of the break-down of social classes, of the loss of power of the aristocracy, and of the homogenization of humanity.

Rather than being an "anti-role" as M. Peckham sees it, I would say the dandy is a very positive role to assume in a society that is becoming increasingly faceless and colorless. It is just because the aristocracy is virtually non-existent, because the pageantry of the past has departed, that the dandy must take its place. The dandy is a protest against society's power to swallow up the individual and to render him voiceless, faceless, and powerless. It is the assertion of the uniqueness of the human spirit in an age of democratic tend- endy toward collectivization. Baudelaire's own remarks on the dandy. would support this interpretation:

Le dandysme apparait surtout aux epoques transitoxres ou la democratie n'est pas encore tout-puissante; ou 1'aristocratie n'est que partiellement chancelante et avalie. . . '. Le dandysme est le dernier eclat d'heroisme dans les decadences ... .27

That last line is a very telling one — "the last flash of heroism". 27

The dandy is the man who revolts against Nature, all that tends to reduce the individual to a norm, and who "represents all that is best in human pride, the need — too rare among those of today —

2 8 to combat and to detract from triviality."

Because the environment of the modern artist is the city and not the country, external nature itself is noticably absent from Baudelaire's poetry. The dandy is primarily the man of the large, impersonal, modern metropolis which could be London, New York, or Rome, as well as Paris.- Accordingly, we find external nature appearing only as a reflection of the poet's mood which is generally one of depression, despair, or spleen. Nature is associated with death, and the spirit with"' life; but, unfortunately, the realm of the spirit is usually far-off,, either in the ideal which is never realized save in imagination or in an exotic clime. Nature becomes associated with the dreary and corrupt life of the city or with the fatal laws of time and space that imprison man in his unhappy condition without hope of escape. Barbara Meyer in her extensive doctoral study of the feeling for nature in the French lyric of the early twentieth century says of Baudelaire that he "avoided everything connected with a sentimental nature - feeling" and "saw in Nature an enemy who of itself seeks no empathy with the human , ..29 soul.

Sonnenuntergang, Nachthimmel, und das Meer beeindrucken ihn vor allem durch die zauberhaften Licht-und Farb - wirktingen. Er hat demnach vom Malerischen her, also aus einem kiinstlerisch asthetischen Standpunkt heraus, Zugang zur Nature. Die Landschaften, die Baudelaire herauf- beschwort, sind entweder ode, vegetationslos 28

und lebensfeindlich oder von beriickender phantas• ms ch unwirklicher Schonheit, wie aus einem Opiumtraum entstiegen.30

The principal image pattern connected with external nature that I would like to emphasize because of its enormously

telling character is coldness or frozenness. External nature has

come under an infernal curse; it has been cruelly sterilized by

the icy hand of death. To give but a few examples from Les Fleurs

du Mai: "De Profundis Clamavi" opens with a cry of despair for pity

from an unspecified "Toi", presumably God or perhaps his mistress.

He has plunged in an abyss where there is no warmth, only icy cold• ness.

Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois, Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre; C'est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire; — Ni betes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois!

Or il n'est pas d'horreur au monde qui surpasse La froide cruante de ce soleil de glace

Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos;

The image of the icy sun returns again in "Chant d'Automne" and is

combined with the sense of approaching winter or death. The mood

of the poem reaches a terrifying climax as the approaching steps

of winter/death are heard by the poet coming ever-closer like

"funeral shocks". In the last stanza, he feels himself already-

nailed into a kind of coffin. Bientot nous plongerons dans les froides tenebres; Adieu, vive clarte de nos etes trop courts! J'entends deja tomber avec des chocs funebres Le bois retentissant sur le pave des cours.

Tout l'hiver va rentrer dans mon e'tre: colere, Haine, frissons, horreur, labeur dur et force, Et, comme le soleil dans son enfer polaire, Mon coeur ne sera plus qu'un bloc rouge et glace. 29

J'ecoute en fremissant chaque buche qui tombe; L'echafaud qu'on ba*tit n'a pas d'echo plus sourd. Mon esprit est pareil a la tour qui succombe Sous les coups du belier infatigable et lourd.

II me semble, berce par ce choc monotone, Qu'on cloue en grande hate un cercueil quelque part, Pour qui? — C'etait hier l'ete; voici l'automne! Ce bruit mysterieux Sonne comme un depart.

The sun also appears associated with blood — another image of violent death — in "Harmonie du Soir" ("Le soleil s'est noye dans son sang qui se fige"). In "Un Fantome", he speaks of the

"caves of fathomless sadness/Where destiny has already relegated me", and "Ou jamais n'entre un rayon rose et gai". "La Cloche Felee" gives us the image of "Au bord d'un lac de sang", and "La Fontaine de Sang" describes the blood of the poet's heart "flowing in waves/

Like a of rhythmic sobs" . . . "coloring nature red". When nature is not covered with ice or blood, it is raining. Two of the most outstanding poems describing the depression brought on by the rain are "Spleen LXXVII" which begins with the ironic line: "Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux", and "Spleen LXXVIII" which is one of his best poems and opens with: "Quand le ciel bas et lourd pese comme un couvercle". The other principal nature image of Les

Fleurs. du Mai is, of course, the sea. Here too, we detect always the sad, melancholy sense of suffering humanity that reminds me, per• sonally, of Mathew Arnold and of T. S. Eliot in "The Dry Salvages".

The last stanza of "Les Phares" sets the tone for the other.appearances of the image.

Car c'est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur temoinage Que nous puissions donner de notre dignite Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'age en age Et vient mourir au bord de yotre eternite! 30

In "L'Homme et la Mer", Baudelaire contemplates the sea as "man's mirror", reflecting the "eternal struggles", "le carnage et la mort", of the "siecles innombrabies". And "Moesta et Errabunda" contrasts the "noir ocean de l'immonde cite" with "un autre ocean ou la splendeur eclate". It is to this imaginary sea that the poet asks to be transported, to "this sea, the vast sea, [that] consoles our labours". From this brief survey of the appearance of external nature in Baudelaire's poems, we can see that the poetic representation was not only the outcome of his original revolt against the Nature principle but also of the urbanization and spir• itual suffering of modern man. External nature becomes the reflection of his inner despair and spleen.

One further and final consequence of Baudelaire's revolt against Nature was the denouncement of woman. This phenomenon is not too difficult to understand when we pause to consider that "la femme" has traditionally been associated with the nature-principle and man with the spirit. That this polarization leads to unfortun• ate consequences in periods of nature antipathy or worship is evident from history, and only proves of what fundamental importance a correct concept of Nature is. Woman has had to suffer both the extremes of idolization and misogyny, and Baudelaire's mistress was no exception.

That it is not woman herself that he really despises but rather what she represents — the Nature-principle — is made clear in several contexts. In Mon Coeur Mis' a Nu, Baudelaire writes:

La femme est le contraire du dandy. Done elle doit fair horreur. La femme a faim et elle veut manger; soif, et elle veut boire. 31

Elle est en rut et elle veute etre foutue. Le beau me'rite! La femme est naturelie, c'est-a-dire abominable. Aussi est-elle toujours vulgaire, c'est-a-dire le

contraire du dandy.31

His prose poems, Le Spleen du Paris, and provide

a repertoire of images which serve to emphasize the woman-nature

association. Always, these are the images of extreme cold — winter

ice, snow, of inflexible hardness — minerals and metals, of in•

difference or insensitivity, and of sterility — deserts or infernos

Some of woman's more striking epithets are: "o bete implacable et

cruelle", "Femme impure", "Machine aveugle et sourde", "vii animal",

"bizarre deite", "demon sans pitie", "la vampire", "ignorante", and

"_me toujours ravie". Venus is always represented as being hard and

cold to the poet-victim and, instead of a goddess of love, ". . . es 32

une des formes seduisantes du Diable". The prose-poem "Le Fou et

la Venus" gives us a better description of this emotional complex.

Amid a scene of universal rejoicing, the poet perceives an afflicted

being, a fool, at the feet of a collosal Venus. His eyes are lifted

pleadingly toward her, begging for pity and mercy for "the least and

most solitary of beings": "Ah! Deesse! ayez pitie" de ma tristesse

et de mon delire!" With one final sentence Baudelaire characterizes

what to him is the essence not only of Venus but of Nature and of

woman as well. Mais l'implacable Venus regarde au loin je ne sais quoi avec ses yeux de marbre.33

We may sometimes laugh at Baudelaire's extremist views,

especially when the above quotations are set in contrast to the fol•

lowing idealization that almost — but not quite — rings true. 32

Speaking of woman again, but using the pronoun "it" for the more personal "she", he writes:

... C'est plutot une divinite, un astre, qui preside a toutes les conceptions du cerveau male .... C'est une espece d'idole, stupide peut-etre, mais eblouissante, enchanteresse, qui tient les destinees et les volontes. suspendues a ses regards.34

Rene Valeynes in his little book Baudelaire et les Femmes documents these two contrary opinions of revulsion', and idolization and con• cludes that "Envoute' par sa premiere passion, Baudelaire a ete in• capable de satisfaire a celles qu'il a pu eprouver par la suite. La seule femme qu'il ait vraiment aimee a ete' sa mere."3"' True as that may be, I do not believe it explains his attitude to woman; rather, it seems to me to be the logical outcome of his revolt against Nature.

We have seen in this chapter how Baudelaire's revolt led — symbol• ically — to the death of Nature. Ironically, God was very much alive to him! External nature and woman are both included in the ideal or general concept of Nature and therefore must suffer the consequences of whatever attitude or orientation man has toward that principle.

Opposed to the Neo-Classical and early Romantic conception of Nature, which we have already looked at, Baudelaire was led to reject Nature altogether and to make it the depository of the princ• iple of Evil, that perennial bugbear that no one knows just what to do with or where to place. In the next chapter we shall see how

Baudelaire did not simply remain in a position of idle revolt but how he set about to transform Nature. Footnotes

Chapter II

1. F. Schlegel, "Blutenstaub," K.A. , p. 164.

2. See Paul C. J. Bouget, Essais de psychologie corttemporaine, (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, et al.-, 1908); and Rene Laforgue, L'echec de Baudelaire: essal psychanalytique sur la neVrose de Charles Baudelaire, (Geneve: Editions du Mont-Blanc, 1964).

3. See his letters to his brother and parents. Baudelaire, Letters from his Youth, trans, by Simona Morini and Frederic Tuten (New York: Doubleday &Co., Inc., 1970).

4. Joseph Melancon, Le Spiritualisme de Baudelaire (Montreal: Fides, 196 7)* p. 111.

5. Baudelaire, "Les Fleurs du Mal," Oeuvres, p. 86. All subsequent quations will be taken from this source.

6. F. W. Leakey, Baudelaire and Nature (Manchester: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1969), pp. 10-11.

7. Leakey, p. 103.

8. Charles du Bos, "Meditations on the Life of Baudelaire," Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Henri Peyre (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 48.

9. Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne," Oeuvres, p. 911.

10. See Rene Cheval, "Die deutsche Romantik in Frankreich," Romantik: Ein Zyklus Tubinger Vorlesungen, ed. by Theodor Steinbuchel (Tubingen':- Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1948), pp. 258- 260; and George Brandes, "The Romantic School in France," Main Currents in Nineteenth Century , vol. 5 (London: William Heinemann, 1904), p. 54.

11. Brandes, p. 23.

12. Victor Klemperer, "Romantik und franzosische Romantik," Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik, ed. by Helmut Prang (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), p. 69.

13. Joseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth Century English Poetry, 2nd. ed"! (1956; rpt., New York: Russel & Russel, 1966), pp. 4-5. 14. F. Schlegel, "Gesprach...," K.A. , p. 353.'

15. Baudelaire,'"Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne," Oeuvres, pp. 911-12.

16. Theophile Gautier, preface to Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Colmann- Levy, n.d.), p. 26.

17. Schlegel, "Gesprach," K.A. , p. '312.

• • i / 18. Camille Mauclair, Le Genie de Baudelaire (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue critique, 1933), p. 88.

19. . F. L. Doudet, Charles Baudelaire et L'esprit Classique (Paris: de 1'imprimerie Tancrede, 1946), p.. 23.

20. See Henri.Peyre, "Baudelaire: Romanticarid Classical," Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Peyre, pp. 20-29.

21. Gustave Kahn, Charles Baudelaire: Son Oeuvre (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1925), p. 9.

22. Paul Vale'ry, introd. to 2nd ed. of Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Ayot, 1926), p. xvii.

23. Victor Klemperer, "Romantik und franzosische Romantk," Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik, p. 67.

24. Baudelaire, "La Peintre de la Vie Moderne," Oeuvres, p. 887.

25. Gustave Kahn, preface to Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, n.d.), p. xxii.

26. Morse Peckham, "The Dilemma of a Century: the Four Stages of Romanticism," The Triumph of Romanticism, p. 44.

27. Baudelaire, "La Peintre...," Oeuvres, p. 908.

28. Baudelaire, Oeuvres, p. 908.

29. Barbara Meyer, Das NaturgefuhT in aer franzosischen Lyric des beginnednen XX Jahrhunderts, PhD diss., Ludwig-Maximilians- Universit&t zu Munch en (Miinchen, Notovny & Sollner, 1965), p. 15.

30. Meyer, p. 15.

31. Baudelaire, "Mon Coeur Mis a Nu," Oeuvres, p. 1207.

32. Baudelaire, "Mon Coeur" Oeuvres, p. 1221.

33. Baudelaire, "," Oeuvres, p. 289.

34. Baudelaire, "La Peintre...," Oeuvres, p. 910. 35. . Rene Valeynes, Baudelaire et les Femmes (Paris: Editions Nilsson, 1932), p. 118. Translation

Chapter II

#12. ..as [Romanticism] in its full German and English devel• opment became transmitted to France it received there a characteristic Roman gift: form enrichment. The French see only one thing in Romanticism, whether they stand hostile toward it as Germanic beclouding of Roman clarity or friendly as an essential increase of substance; from their point of view they regard it rightfully as almost exclusively a battle of subjectivism for new forms in opposition to the highly developed classic form-rules. Now there is also answered the question why they date the Romantic school, despite Chateaubriand and Lamartine, only from 1830. True to nature, they only allow their true Romanticism to begin where Victor Hugo programmat- ically intercedes for a new poetic form and masters the most representative French poetic genre, the drama. It is with the Cromwell preface as with the Defense of Du Bellay. The new form is more strongly emphasized and works more powerfully than the new spirit.

#23. For the discussion regarding the "formlessness" of the Romantics must equally lead into error as the discussion about the exclusiveness of their feeling. They not only feel but they also think; and what they feel and think they also form —otherwise no.works of art would arise. That is an obvious statement — but one that must be emphatically stressed because it is continually sinned against. Not formless is. the Romantic, rather he has his own expression.

#30. Sun-set, night sky, and the sea impress him above all through the magical light and color effects. He has access to Nature through the picturesque and from an artful aesthetic standpoint. The landscapes that Baudelaire evokes are either bleak, vegetationless and life-hostile, or touched with unreal fantastic beauty as if arising out of an opium-dream. CHAPTER III

BAUDELAIRE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF NATURE

Had Baudelaire remained in a position of opposition to

Nature without being able to put something in place of what he had rejected, he would have remained as so many Victorians did, spiritually bankrupt knowing not where to turn for comfort — science or religion. Both of these proved to be less spiritual homes than desperate refuges for the tormented minds of that period. We must be careful to distinguish between the despair of Baudelaire and that of the Victorians. Both responded to the

"mal de siecle" but in different ways. The despair of the

Victorians was based on. the loss of three faiths, if I may so call them: the faith in orthodox, revealed religion, the faith in Nature, and the faith in science. Of course, most of the people clung in various, measure to one or more of these faiths still; the nineteenth' century was an age of belief in the in- finite progress of"man, mostly of progress along material lines.

However, to the sensitive minds of that time, even the last faith became increasingly shaken as they saw the price of progress.

There is no need or opportunity here to enter into the Victorian dilemma, but suffice it to say that their despair issued from the loss of three faiths. Baudelaire's despair, on the other, hand, arose out of completely different causes, not that nine• teenth century France was so socially different from England; the 34

same belief in the perfectability and betterment of humanity ex• isted there in equal measure. But Baudelaire never lost the first faith — the faith in God — and the other two faiths — in Nature and science — he never had to begin with. So whence arose his despair?

To answer this question we must first look at Baudelaire's attempt to transform Nature. Rejecting an.unpleasant reality does not make it go away; Baudelaire was too sober to deny that. Neither would he willfully blind himself to.it by what he called "false" means, as we shall later see. No; Nature was the ever-present reality, the vessel of evil, that could not be ignored but that could be transformed. Here lay the secret of man's liberation and freedom — in the transformation of. Nature. This was, moreover, the spiritual task of the poet and of every man. Therein lay

"progress", not in the acquisition of new inventions and gadgets, but in what he called "la diminuition des traces du peche originel".

Baudelaire's notion of progress, needless to say, stood and still stands in complete opposition to the democratic tendency of col• lective improvement. "II ne peut y avoir de progres (vrai, c'est- a-dire moral) que dans l'individu et par l'individu lui-meme. Mais le monde est fait des gens qui ne peuvent penser qu'en commun, en 2 bandes . . . ." Each man had the means to bring about that trans• formation of Nature within himself, and that agent was the Imagin• ation, "la Reine des facultes".

Si le poet est, en premier lieu, un homme naturel parce qu'il est prisonnier de son corps — et il on souffre trop, a certains moments, pour l'ignorer — il est, en second lieu, "un homme imaginatif" parce qu'il comprend "la morale des choses" . . . 35

Elle [1'imagination] est un oeil interieur qui ne s'arrete pas a la surface de la nature exterieure, comme l'oeil naturel, mais qui penetre jusqu'a 1'ideal et percoit directement "la morale des choses".

It is impossible to underrate the immense importance and the central place of the imagination in Baudelaire's aesthetic.

The inner eye that penetrates to "the moral of things", to their spiritual significance, could transform "mud into gold". In order to touch upon the basic points of that aesthetic we must review some of Baudelaire's own writings on the subject which will then indicate to us how deeply suffused with spirituality or idealism was his art.

In the Salon de 1859>he sums up his formula of the true aesthetic:

. . . la formule principale, ou est, pour ainsi dire, contenu tout le formulaire de la veritable esthetique, et qui peut etre exprime ainsi: Tout l'univers visible n'est qu'un magasin d1images et de signes auxquels 1'imagination donnera une place et une valeur relative; c'est une espece de ^

pature que 1'imagination doit digerer et transformer.

Thus, the doctrine of "Copiez la nature" is the "ennemie de l'art"^ because it requires very little or no imagination to do, and art presupposes the ordering and shaping of matter into a new and pleas• ing form. "Ceux qui n'ont pas d'imagination copient le dictionnaire. / N / 6

II en resulte un tres-grand vice, le vice de la banalite . . .."

Accordingly, the poet must become the seer, the "decipherer", of the deeply hidden symbolic meanings contained in nature. In his on Victor Hugo, Baudelaire writes: Or, qu'est-ce qu'un poete (je prends le mot dans son acception la plus large), si ce n'est un traductuer, un dechiffreur? Chez les excellents poetes, il n'y a pas de metaphore, de comparison, ou d'epithete qui ne soit d'une adaption math- ematiquement exacte dans la circonstance actuelle, 36

parce que ces comparisons, ces metaphores etces epithetes sont puisees dans 1'inepuisable fonds de 1'universelle analogie, et qu'elles ne peuvent etre puisees ailleurs._7

In the same article, he mentions the names of Fourier, Swedenborg, and Lavater, Goethe, Byron, and Shakespeare (and Poe seems most certainly to be implied in the phrase "an exact mathematical adap• tion") , indicating his sources of influence.

The Platonic and Neo-Platonic origins of this view of nature as a storehouse of symbols intimating a deeper reality or ideal are evident. It is especially marked in Baudelaire's famous , "Correspondances", which presents the view of nature transformed by the imagination.

•La nature est-un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L'homme y passe a travers des forests de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent Dans une tene'breuse et profonde unite, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, — Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant 1'expansion des choses infinies, Comme l'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens, Qui chantent les transports de 1'esprit et des sens.

Here Baudelaire has captured the mood of infinite expansion and depth; it seems that time and space themselves have ceased to exist. There is only the pregnant silence of mystery and of a revelation at hand but not yet fully beheld. Man walks through a nature transformed by his imagination and listens to the "unheard music" of the spheres.

How beautifully Baudelaire expresses the solitariness of the human 37

spirit as it makes its way through this idealized nature, waiting

for a "word" to be spoken to him by the "choses muettes" — the silent things, as he had called nature's phenomena in "Elevation"!

But note that the "words" of nature are hard to receive and hard

to understand by man; nature lets them escape, as it were, and

they are obscure. It is extremely fascinating to note that F.

Schlegel had already spoken of such a "hieroglyphic" interpreta•

tion of nature and had advocated a "symbolic" or "ideal" view of it in Gesprach Uber die Poesie and in Athenaum Fragmente. To quote but two very brief examples:

Und was ist jede schone Mythologie anders als ein hieroglyphischer Ausdruck der umgebenden Natur in dieser Verklarung von Fantasie und Liebe?8

Ehedem wurde unter uns die Natur, jetzt wird das Ideal ausschliep end gepredigt. Man vergi0t zu oft, da/3 diese Dinge innig vereinbar sind, da^ in der schonen Darstellung die Natur idealisch und das Ideal naturlich sein soli.9

In Baudelaire's art we have the combination of the ideal and of

reality. Here we have just witnessed the transformation of reality

or of nature, but that the latter exists in its own right is never

denied but given affirmation throughout Les Fleurs du Mal. Un•

fortunately, it is a negative affirmation; that is, reality is presented in its full horror and terror; nature untransformed by

spirit accosts the poet's eye everywhere he looks. What we find

in Baudelaire is, I repeat, the co-rpresence of the ideal and

reality, of spirit and nature, but not their "harmony". This latter

goal was one that F. Schlegel foresaw for the future of Romantic art. 38

Der Idealismus in jeder Form mu/& auf ein oder die andre Art aus sich herausgehn, urn in sich zuruckkehren zu konnen, und zu bleiben was er ist. Deswegen mu0 und wird sich aus seinem Scho/3 ein neuer ebenso grenzenloser Realismus erheben; und der Idealismus also nicht blop in seiner Entstehungsart ein Beispiel fur die neue Mythologie, sondern selbst auf indirekte Art Quelle derselben werden. . . . Auch ich trage schon lange das Ideal eines solchen Realismus in mir, und wenn es bisher nicht zur Mitteilung gekommen ist, so war es nur, weil ich das Organ dazu noch suche. Doch wei^ ich, da^ ichs nur in der Poesie finden kann, denn in Gestalt der Philosophie oder gar eines Systems wird der Realismus nie wieder auftreten kSnnen. Und selbst nach einer allgemeinen Tradition ist es zu erwarten da/5 dieser neue Realismus, weil er doch idealischen Ursprungs sein, und gleichsam auf idealischem Grund und Boden schweben mu(J, als Poesie erscheinen wird, die ja auf der Harmonie des Ideellen und Reellen beruhen so 11.10

The possibility of the transformation of nature was a ' new challenge for art, and only "modern" or "Romantic" art could be equal to the task according to Baudelaire. To him, as to Schlegel,

to speak of modern art was to speak of Romantic art, and we find his

•theories regarding it expressed in three principal writings: "La

Peintre de la Vie Moderne", "L'Art Philosophique", and Salon de 1846.

Baudelaire expressly states that its principal feature is the com• bination of two elements, "le transitoire, le fugitiv, le contingent",

and "l'eternel et 1'immutable".11 Their union produces a curious

and strange new effect, a "sorcellerie evocataire".

Qu'est-ce que l'art pour suivant la conception moderne? C'est creer une magie suggestive contenant a la fois 1'object et le sujet, le monde exterieur a 1'artiste et 1'artiste lui-m_me.l2

Romanticism, he states elsewhere, "is not precisely in the choice of

13 subjects neither in the exact truth, but in a manner of feeling".

Only it can present "a conception analogous to the moral of the 39

century" and, therefore, "whoever says Romanticism, says modern art — that is —intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration toward the infinite, expressed through all the means available to the arts"."'"5 The artistic design, originally borrowed from architec• ture, that expressed for Baudelaire (and for Schlegel10) the union of diverse elements was the arabesque. Baudelaire calls it "le plus ideal de tous".17 Now the.final result of the transformation of nature should be beauty. Here we come to the ultimate goal of all of Baudelaire's artistic and private endeavors, the summit.to which his theory of art has been leading.

If we will recall, in chapter one I maintained that

Baudelaire's revolt against Nature was largely occasioned by his inner quarrel with the Enlightenment theory; now, in his concept of beauty, this point once again comes up. What Baudelaire em• phatically maintained was that there exists no single standard of beauty, such as the Classics were always considered, but many standards. Beauty is relative to the age, and each historical epoch must find its own ideal of beauty. Not only did this view have far-reaching implications for art, but also for life. The modern age has been considered that of the "anti-hero", and we need not enter into the tortuous convolutions of that figure in the modern novel and play at present. If we would even today only listen to what Baudelaire has said we, too, might find our own 18 ideal, our own "heroism" , and cease to grovel in the self-pity and nihilism of our present condition. Truly, what we have so far lacked is the genius to portray the hero of the present — not an anti-hero, but a positive figure who comes to terms with his 40

world and who shapes it. Baudelaire's theory of beauty, so essentially and deeply Romantic, is so vital to an understanding of the transformation of Nature that it merits an unusually lengthy question. In "La Peintre de la Vie Moderne", he writes:

C'est ici une belle occasion, en verite', pour etablier une theorie rationelle et historique du beau, en opposition avec la theorie du beau unique et absolu; pour montrer que le beau est toujours, inevitablement, d'une composition double, bien que l'impression qu'il produit soit une; car la difficulte de discerner les elements variables du beau dans 1'unite de l'impression n'infirme en rien la necessite de la variete dans sa composition. Le beau est fait d'un element eternal, invariable, dont la quantite" est excessivement difficile a determiner, et d'un element relatif, circonstanciel, qui sera, si l'on veut, tour a tour on tout ensemble, l'epoque, la mode, la morale, la passion. Sans ce second element, qui est comme l'enveloppe amusante, titillante, aperative, du divin gateau, le premier element serait indigestible, inappreceable, non adapte et non approprie a la nature humaine.19

The "ideal", he amusingly says elsewhere, "is not this vague thing, this limpid and impalpable dream that floats on the ceiling of the academies; an ideal is individual, fashioned by the individual, re• constructed and rendered by the paint-brush and chisel to the shining 20 truth of its native harmony." His own ideal of beauty was stated 2 in "Fusees" and contained the elements of "melancholy" and "mystery".

From Baudelaire's concept of beauty and the ideal we can see how closely it resembles the original Romantic aesthetic of F. Schlegel 22 who also revolted against the "false trend" of Neo-Classicism. Marc

Eigeldinger in Le Platonisme de Baudelaire presents a very strong case for the ideaLe surnaturalisml absolutism e ofd e thBaudelaire poet. e transpose les objects materiels dans un ordre superieur, de telle sorte qu'ils representent symboliquement 41

la realite spirituelle dorit ils procedent. Cette transposition, operee par 1'imagination, n'est possible qu'avec le concours du souvenir qui contient le sens inne' de la Beaute". 23

True as that statement is, it nevertheless does not tell the whole truth about Baudelaire, for we have seen that despite his tendency imaginatively to see the "correspondances" of natural objects with their ideal or spiritual reality, he also stressed the relativity of beauty and of the ideal. We have the paradox that he himself so often pointed out, the duality of things — their eternal element and their relative element. He called this

2 4 duality "the contradiction of unity".

The imaginative complex that began with the rejection of

Nature and that culminated in the creation of a spiritual beauty allowed for no false methods of apotheosis. Baudelaire may have sought an escape from the horror of nature and reality, but he denounced all synthetic avenues of release. To him, the imagina• tion remained the only legitimate means of transformation; those who sought to take the easier but ultimately destructive route of drugs, he pitied and scorned with bitter in "Les Paradis

Artificiels". There, Baudelaire charts the deluded course of those who seek this false means of escape from the conflicts and suffer• ings of existence. Mistaking his reasons for intoxication to be spiritual, the drug-taker ends up reversing the hierarchy of 25 creation and thinking, "Je suis devenu Dieu!" In the final section of "Le Poeme du Haschisch", aptly entitled "Morale", Baud• elaire presents the striking vision of a spiritual mountain atop of which sits a Brahmin, a poet, or a Christian philosopher, surrounded by the Muses; at the base of the mountain, in the thorns 42

and mire, sits a troupe of humans, a band of idiots, who are simu• lating grimaces of enjoyment in their drug stupor. Saddened by this spectacle, the poet says to himself:

Ces infortunes qui n'ont ni'jeune', ni prie, et qui ont refuse la redemption par le travail, demandent a la noire magie les moyens de s'elever, d'un seul coup, a l'existence surnaturalle. La magie les dupe et elle allume pour eux un faux bonheur et une fausse lumiere; tandis que nous, poetes et philosphes, nous avons regenere notre ame par le travail successif et la contemplation; par 1'exercise assidu de la volonte et la noblesse permanante de l'intention, nous avons cree a notre usage un jardin de vraie beaute. Confidants dans la parole qui dit que la foi transporte les montagnes, nous avons accompli le seul miracle dont Dieu nous ait octroye la license!26

Each person has within him "the taste for the infinite", but to seek to transform nature by these culpable methods results only in the creation of an "artificial ideal". For the poet the only legitimate means to bring about that transformation is through the agency of the imagination.

We may return now to our original question: What is the source of Baudelaire's despair? Haying reviewed the Baudelairean process of remoulding nature, what stands in the way of the poet's happiness? Many things, of course, not the least of them personal sufferings and vexations; but the main source of despair for

Baudelaire must always be the inability to harmonize the ideal and reality. The imaginative transformation of nature does not always totally succeed; indeed, only in sublime and certain- moments does he feel that he has achieved this apotheosis. A glance at Les Fleurs du Mai will show us that the greater number of poems concern the poet's spleen or despair at .being unable to succeed in the imaginative 43

endeavor. Nature, usually in the form of time, returns abruptly and cruelly to catapult the poet back to reality. In "L'Ennemi",

Baudelaire expresses his hope that these "new flowers" (poems) will restore him, and in the last stanza we learn the cause of his sadness:

— 0 douleur! £ douleur! Le Temps mange la vie, Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge la coeur Du sang que nous perdons croit et se fortifie!

Again in "Le Gout du Neant", he complains that

Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur! Et le temps m'engloutit minute par minute, Comme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur;

Memory is sometimes viewed by Baudelaire as a redeeming feature, as in "Le Portrait", where time is the "injurious grey• beard" that "strikes every day with his rude whip":

Noir assassin de la Vie et de l'Art, Tu ne tueras jamais dans ma memoire Celle qui fut mon plaisir et ma gloire! but, generally, it too is the emissary of time, as in "Spleen LXXVI" where he utters that famous line, "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans", and where the past appears like an "immense pyramid containing more dead than the common grave". Perhaps the

feeling of being time's, and hence nature's, prisoner is best ex• pressed in the poem "L'Horloge". There, the clock is addressed as

"dieu sinistre, effrayant, impassible"; its ticking tells the poet:

"Souviens-toi!" and, finally, "Meurs, vieux lache! il est trop

tard!" The prose poem, "La Chambre Double" is the most perfect- mood-piece on the subject of time and polarized the two states of bliss and despair. At first the room is bright; the colors pink and 44

blue suggest his spiritual elevation. Time has disappeared and the imagination and the dream reign blissfully. Then, suddenly, a terrible blow falls, and time — "the spectre" -- returns. Now the room changes colour; everything becomes dark and gloomy as time brings back with it "memories, regrets, spasms, fears, anguish . . . " .•,

The transformation of nature which was the poet's constant aim and goal was a difficult task. Only in special moments could

Baudelaire enjoy the bliss of success; the rest of the time, he was only too aware of the reality of nature that tenaciously resisted his spiritualizing. Everything could be transformed except time; that alone prevented the complete victory of his endeavor. Thus we see that the cause of despair was deeply rooted in the intransigency of nature, but in the following'chapter we shall discover something that helped Baudelaire even to survive despair. Footnotes

Chapter III

1. Baudelaire, "Mon Coeur Mis A Nu," Oeuvres, p. 1224.

2. Baudelaire, "Mon Coeur . . .", Oeuvres, pp. 1210-11.

3. Joseph Melancon, Le Spiritualisme de Baudelaire (Montreal: Fides, 1967)* pp. 81-82.

4. Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859", Oeuvres, p. 779.

5. Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859", Oeuvres, p. 772.

6. Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859V, Oeuvres, p. 777.

7. Baudelaire, "Victor Hugo", Oeuvres, p. 1086.

8. F. Schlegel, "Gesprach . . .," K^A. , p. 318.

9. F. Schlegel, "Athenaum Fragmente," K.A., p. 196.

10. F. Schlegel, "Gesprach . . .," K.A. , p. 314.

11. Baudelaire, "La Peintre . . .," Oeuvres, p. 892.

12. Baudelaire, "L'Art Philosophique," Oeuvres, p. 926.

13. Baudelaire, "Salon 1846," Oeuvres, p. 610.

14. Baudelaire; p. 610.

15. Baudelaire, p. 610.

16. See F. Schlegel, "Brief Uber den Roman", K.A., pp. 330-33.

17. Baudelaire, "Fusees," Oeuvres, p. 1192.

18. Baudelaire, "Salon de 1846," Oeuvres, pp. 667-679.

19. Baudelaire, "La Peintre . . .,". Oeuvres, p. 883.

20. Baudelaire, "Salon de 1845," Oeuvres, p. 644.

21. See Baudelaire,."Fusees," Oeuvres, p. 1195.

22. See F. Schlegel, "Gesprach . . .," K.A., p. 302, and "Athenaum Fragmente," p. 209. 23. Marc Eigeldinger, Le Platonisme de Baudelaire, (Paris: Neuchatel, 19.51) , p. 37.

24. Baudelaire, "Salon de 1846," Oeuvres, p. 643.

25. Baudelaire, "Le Paradis Artificiels," Oeuvres, p. 473.

26. Baudelaire, p. 477. Translation

Chapter III

And what is every beautiful mythology other than a hiero• glyphic expression of surrounding Nature in this clarification of imagination and love?

Before this time, Nature was preached, among us, and now it is exclusively the Ideal. One forgets too often that these things can be intimately united; that in the beautiful rep• resentation Nature should be ideal and the Ideal natural.

Idealism must in one form or other emerge out of itself in order to be able to return back to itself and to remain what it is. For this reason, there must and will also arise out of its lap a new equally boundless realism; and Idealism in its form of origin will not only be an example for the new mythology, but be itself in an indirect way the source of the same. I too have long carried the ideal of such a realism in myself, and if up to now it has not been communicated, it was only because I am still searching for the organ (means of transmission). But I know that I can only find it in poetry, for in the form of philosophy or even in a system, realism will never again be able to appear. And even according to a common tradition it is to be expected that this new realism — because it is of an idealistic source and at the same time must float on an idealistic foundation — will appear as poetry that is to rest upon the harmony of the ideal and the real. CHAPTER IV c BAUDELAIRE'S DUALISM AND CHRISTIANITY

We have seen that Romanticism is based.on a recognition of the "dissociation of sensibility", of the duality of man and art. That duality may perhaps best be expressed as one between

Spirit and Nature. It was the original aim of Romanticism to seek a reunion or "harmony" between these two disparate forces in man. Such a harmony has not yet been attained and remains the goal of a future achievement, but Baudelaire brought both elements together in his art and attempted a magical transformation through the mediating power of imagination. In a tragic way, the sacred symbolic marriage of Spirit and Nature was never consummated; both parties glared at each other across the chasm of misunderstanding and remained forever at quarrelsome odds. The problem lay in making Nature contain the principle of evil, I believe. Just as the Enlightenment and the early Romantics had made Nature the source of all good and virtue, so Baudelaire went to the other extreme of making it the repository of all evil and vice. (Some• where in between these two lies the truth, no doubt.) Then, when

Baudelaire's attempt at transforming Nature — both external and internal — did not meet with complete success, despair was bound

to ensue. Nature, rather like the mulatto mistress Jeanne Duval,

could not be lived with nor without.

Corollary to the Spirit-Nature dualism was Baudelaire's 46

constant sense of man's sublimity and baseness. He even went so far as to make this distinction the cause of the "comic" in

De L'Essence du Rire. "The laugh", he says, "is one of the clearest signs that man is one of the numerous pits contained in the symbolic

, ..1 apple. . II est, qu'on me comprenne bien, la resultante necessaire de sa double, nature contradictoire, qui est infiniment.grande relativement a l'homme, infiniment vile et base relativement au Vrai et au Juste absolus.2

That Friedich Schlegel-, too, was aware early in life of this con• tradiction is pointed out by H. Eichner:

As early as 1792, he had written to his brother that "whoever is not, in the consciousness of his infinite power, pervaded with the feeling of his insignificance, must be a. little short-sighted." Five years later, he had come to understand that it was through irony that one learned to keep sight of his awareness without being crushed by it, and that, consequently, irony was obligatory. 3

Eichner adds that it was "his achievement, however, to have introduced the term irony into modern and to have started the 4 long and intensive discussion of its nature and significance".

Baudelaire's poems are suffused with the irony of man's existence, with the consciousness of "une grandeur infinie et d'une misere in-

finie"; it was "du choc perpetuel de ces deux infinis que se degage

le rire"."' Jacques Barzun maintains that the Romantics conceived of their "mission" in "the light of [this] great contradiction co'ii- - ' 6

eerning man . . ." , and that Pascal was the most famous Romantic

forerunner in that sense. The technique of irony that Baudelaire wasemploye, howeverd in ,orde nort enougto coph e iwitn itselfh the. tensioA sensn betweee of ironn Spiriy alonet an, dw eNatur muset 47

realize, does not help man to face life and to find a purpose for

this at once tragic and grotesque existence; no one can remain in

an ironic pose for very long without either lapsing into cynicism

and eventually nihilism, or faith. . The truth of this statement is

confirmed by the countless examples of Romantic artists.

Baudelaire himself only rarely lapsed into the first

attitude, cynicism, and then always in regard to woman. She was

the one creature who could strain his more usual arid genteel irony

into bitter cynicism, as the-poems "XXV", "XXVII", "XXXII", "XXXIX",

and "Remords Posthume", and "Le Vampire" of Les Fleurs du Mai point

out. It seems itself ironic that for most of these poems he did

not even substitute titles for numbers. But Baudelaire's answer

to the dilemma of man's duality was not cynicism; it was faith. In

Christianity, Baudelaire found the "objective correlative", as it were, to his own inner condition. Christianity expresses the truth

of man's torn condition — his potential or ideal perfection, the

prototype of which is Christ, and his actual or natural culpability,

the archetype of which is Adam. According to St. Paul, "The Spirit wars against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit", and Christ

came to redeem and do away with the "natural" man.7 Even in

Christianity, if we follow its development carefully, we see this

dualism reigning in dogma and practise. Although it has condemned

as heresy the Gnostic and Jansenist views that nature is essentially

evil, that strain has always been a.latent and unconscious one in

the minds of Christians. It is therefore not surprising that Baudelaire

should have felt himself completely in accord with Christianity when 48

he beheld evil in Nature and sought its transformation into a spiritual state. His chief loathing for the Enlightenment was 8 that it denied original sin , and hence arose the false conception of Nature and beauty.

By projecting his dualism into the Christian framework,

Baudelaire found a "myth" ,; that could contain his contraries, just as the ancients had projected their diversities into the

Homeric pantheon. And here we see the importance and significance

of a myth, and by that I do not mean, something that is unreal; indeed, myth may be the'. only reality if it is seen as the poetic bodying forth of all that man is. For myth to be unreal, man would first have to be unreal. Myth is the first collective poem of mankind; every now and then, humanity writes a new poem —

unconsciously, of course — and then either worships or denounces

its own creation. Schlegel was right when he emphasized the necessity of a "mythology", a symbolic interpretation of man and

the universe;. but a myth cannot be conjured up ipso facto; it is

an organic collective growth, the manifestation of the unconscious

life of a people. When that myth, that "god" if you will, dies, humanity has lost its connection with the larger Life of Man. The

individual life then becomes "smaller and drier", to borrow a

phrase of Eliot's. The problem is that once a myth has been lost,

once men have lost connection with the myth, they cannot willfully

be rejoined with it: "all the king's horses and all the king's

men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again". There remains

nothing but patiently to await the re-writing of a new poem, or 49

a new stanza to the old poem. In the meantime, while the collective unconscious poetic faculty struggles to create the new epic, human• ity vainly casts about for substitute "religions" to fill the void.

Baudelaire was extremely fortunate in that he was still

organically connected to therChristian myth. This great poem was not yet exhausted for him as it was already beginning to be for so many moderns. He may not have coincided with the Church on every 9 point of dogma, as many critics have pointed out , but at least he was in the spiritual sheep-fold. The myth is useful in two ways: firstly, it provides a framework for the individual, per• sonal work of art with which everyone can identify because everyone has had a part in its composition. The individual work thus set in a larger and grander "Bilderumkreis" becomes itself larger than it could otherwise be. Such was the case with Dante's Divine

Comedy which, without the Christian myth as framework, would prob• ably have remained a puny poem in contrast to the grandeur it attained. In any case, it is unimaginable without its Christian context. Baudelaire's art, too, received a touch of greatness and a sublimity despite its un-sublime content because it was set in a Christian framework. In its own way, it also encompasses the farthest spaces of the metaphysical cosmos — Heaven and Hell — and sends the small, tiny voice of the frail human being reverberating throughout creation. No longer is it the petty and nasty despair of so many modern anti-heroes, but instead the collossal despair of

Man himself when he has sunk to the depths of "Hell". This, then, is one advantage of the myth: for art it provides an indispensible 50

frame of reference that is powerful because it is implanted in the unconscious of mankind. No individual work of art can be great or a so-called "classic" without being deeply and organically rooted in some poem larger than itself.

The second advantage of a myth is a personal one. Let us try to imagine what would become.of a man such as Baudelaire, deeply and continually aware of the duality of his own being and of the contradictions of life, if he had no spiritual anchor such as Christianity? He would, .1 submit, have become not a genius but a neurotic or a schizophrenic torn in half by the opposites waging a battle in his own mind. I am not asserting that every modern neurotic has a latent genius that can be released by be• coming a Christian; what I do maintain, however, is that without a myth, without a greater poem to contain man's contradictions, the individual has to suffer those battles and.scars within his own mind and, consequently, that mind becomes fatally divided against itself. "Each man in his own prison / Confirming a prison at nightfall". The deepened sense of isolation that man suffers because he feels himself alone in his predicament is diminished when he can project that conflict — so essentially common to all men — into a larger framework. Then he can see, as Baudelaire saw, his own struggles taking on cosmic and spiritual significance; he has once again become a hero. "Dieu est l'eternel confident dans cette tragedie dont chacun est le heros."1^ Today, instead, we have no true heroes in art because no man's struggle seems to be significant; each man suffers in the isolation of his own mental 51

prison. Can we even dare to imagine a Baudelaire on the psychiatrist's couch? Many reasons suggest why he might have belonged there, but the question is impertinent. His suffer• ings became meaningful to himself, and to us, because he saw significance in them; that significance was conferred by the

Christian myth. His mind, despite the awareness of duality, remained whole because it had a poem in which even duality was accounted for. Thus we see that man's psychic fragmenta•

tion, which the Romantics so lucidly revealed, can be contained in the larger unity of a myth. Writes Jacques Barzum:

The judgement of Madame de Stael, aided by Schlegel's, that the romantic view of life is basically Christian seems fully justified, for it combines the infinite worth of the individual, soul in its power and weakness, the search for union with the infinite, and the gospel of work for one's fellow man.H

In the final work of Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, we see the epic struggle of a modern hero. Despair and faith battle one another in succession. Despair, in ,the usual form of time, whispers in his tired ear: ,. "Trop tard peut-etre!"; Then, again, hope awakens and exclaims: "Tout est.reparable. II est encore 12

temps. Qui sait meme si des plaisirs nouveaux . . . ? His

only faith is in God: "Mes humiliations ont ete des graces de

Dieu", and in work. Work, which has always been so important an element in Baudelaire's life if only because he frequently suffered

from debilitating ennui, now assumes even greater significance. He makes daily plans to work for certain hours in order to pay his

debts before death and to help his mother and Jeanne, but how 52

successful these plans were we can only guess. We cannot help being reminded of the old Christian maxim: "Laborare est orare" when we read his last lines.

Le travail engendre forcement Les bonnes moeurs, sobriete et chastete, consequemment la sante, la richesse, le genie successif et progressif, et la charite. Age quod agis. ^

But time, the arch-villain of Nature, always returns to remind him that he failed to transform life completely.

A chaque minute nous sommes ecrases par l'idee et la sensation du temps. Et il n'y a que deux moyens pour echapper a ce cauchemar, pour l'oublier: le plaiser et le travail. Le plaisir ^ nous use. Le travail nous fortifie. Choissions.

Despair does not win in the end, however, no matter how formidable a power in his life it is. Though destined to struggle to the very last day, Baudelaire retained the?vision of the larger poem and the hope of salvation.. It is often suggested that Baudelaire's

Christianity amounted to no more than an esthete's love of flowers, incense, Gothic churches, and pageantry; nothing could be farther from the truth. He certainly loved those elements of the Church which distinguished life from ugliness and drabness, but he had a deeper sense of spiritual, mysteries than an esthete such as Pater.

The unconscious life of the Church was his life; his struggles were projected into the epic panorama of the Christian myth. The Fall of Man was a motif he enacted each day of his life; we cannot doubt that the sequel remained to be disclosed until the very end.

A Footnotes

Chapter IV

1. Baudelaire, "De L'Essence de Poire," Oeuvres, p. 714.

2. Baudelaire, p. 716.

3. Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel, p. 74.

4. Eichner, p. 74.

5. Baudelaire, "L'Essence . . .," Oeuvres, p. 716.

6. Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, p. 16.

7. Bible, Romans 8: 1-17.

8. See, Baudelaire, "La Peintre de la Vie Moderne," Oeuvres, p. 911.

9. Regarding the controversy about Baudelaire's "Christianity" see the following: the Mauriac, du Bos, and Auerbach essays in Baudelaire: A Collection of.Critical Essays, ed. by Henri Peyre; Marcel Ruff, Baudelaire (Paris: Hatier,); and Joseph Melancon, Le Spiritualisme de Baudelaire.

10. Baudelaire, "Mon Coeur Mis a Nu", Oeuvres, p. 1230.

11. Jacques Barzun, p. 95.

12. Baudelaire, "Mon Coeur . . .," Oeuvres, pp. 1235-6.

13. Baudelaire, p. 1236.

14. Baudelaire, p. 1234. • CHAPTER V

T.S. ELIOT AND THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SPIRIT AND NATURE

Inheritor of the artistic and human dilemma first sounded by the Romantics, T. S. Eliot took up the position of reaction against the insight of duality and fragmentation they bequeathed.

From the present standpoint, he is a highly interesting figure to study not because he presented an alternative or a revolt against

Romanticism but because he wrote within that tradition despite his protests to the contrary. Such is, at least, the case that I shall here present, fully realizing that I debate against the poet's own stand.

Eliot's principal error concerning Romanticism, it seems to me, is that he associated with that movement a deplorable chaos and fragmentation, whereas what Romanticism set out to show was that chaos and fragmentation are man's perennial condition, a condition that can be remedied not by imposing an artificial rule of order and unity, such as had been attempted by the Neo-Classicists, but by fully recognizing that dissociated state and by seeking a reconciliation of opposites. Wehave already seen in the foregoing chapters how Romanticism began with this sense of modern disunity and disorder and with the longing for a Classical past where whole• ness still existed. But the important step that the most advanced of the Romantics made was in abandoning the search for unity in the past and in striving to achieve it in a totally new way suited to the present. "Malheur a celui," wrote Baudelaire, "qui.etudie dans l'antique autre chose que l'art pur, la logique, la methode gene'rale! Pour s'y trop plonger, il perd la memoire du present; il abdique la valeur et les privileges fournis par la circon- stance; car presque toute notre originalite vient de l'estampille que le temps imprime a nos sensations."1 Romanticism is not in itself chaotic or fragmented, it is simply an art that reflects

modern life. This was its big break-through, to mirror not:an imposed order and wholeness but a realistic image of .

Moreover, it retained the vision of the ideal unity, which was to be an organic one, and sought to unite realism with idealism.

Thus, when Eliot coined the phrase "dissociation of sensibility", he was unconsciously.speaking from within the Romantic tradition.

The same nostalgia for perfection that.haunted him haunted the

Romantics, and the same dualism of Spirit and Nature that strove in their divided souls warred within his.

Adrift on the sea of despair, the early Eliot, like his nineteenth-century predecessors, cast about for a spiritual anchor and found the rescue in Classicism. In time, that youthful secular faith was to be exchanged for a deepened, religious one; but for many years Classicism was his 'religion' and Romanticism his 'heresy'. This tendency expressed itself most clearly in such writings as "Tradition and the Individual Talent", For Lancelot

Andrewes: Essays, on Style and Order, and After Strange Gods. In

2 this period, which Eliot designates as his "first" , he cites his influences as having been Irving Babbitt, Ezra Pound, Charles

Maurras, and T. E. Hulme. Seizing on the Classical feature of 55

elimination of personality from art — all individual types being reducable to the one norm — Eliot expounded the principle of "escape from emotion". Good poetry 11. . .is not the expression of person- 3 ality, but an escape from personality." Accordingly, Donne was an inferior to Lancelot Andrewes who was "more medieval . . . 4 more pure, and because his bond was with the Church, with tradition."

Underrating the emotions here, he was in a later essay, "The Social

Function of Poetry",.to say: ". . . poetry has primarily to do with the expression of feeling and emotion . . .."5 Throughout his career there was to be a great deal of vacillation between so-called

Romantic and Classical elements; consciously, Eliot maintained the unruffled front of the Classicist, but, within, the romantic dualism reigned. The way he coped with the problem of personality in his own art was by cultivating the form of the dramatic monologue; here, he could express his emotions indirectly through the mouth of another.

Writes Herbert Howard in Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot:

"In the eyes of the neoclassicists, the nineteenth century had placed an inordinate value on the uninhibited representation of the passions.

Thibaudet differentiated three ways in which the passions may be directed into art: they may be mastered by the will; they maybe broken, annulled, and burried by."la juste necessite" and the serene laws of order; they may. be sublimated in the intelligence and become 6 radiance, pardon and peace." =» Eliot, as we shall see, chose the latter way, but at a great sacrifice, in terms of life and art.

The Classicism of Eliot was nothing more than the attempt already made by countless Romantics, to find a resolution for the 56

tormenting duality of .life. That duality for him, as for them, took the form of a conflict between Spirit and Nature. Spirit or reason became associated with the ancient virtues of order and discipline, and Nature with the modern vices of excess, passion, chaos, and Romanticism. "Pour Eliot," writes E. Greene, "la difference entre le classique et le romantique, c'est la difference entre le fragmentaire, entre l'adulte et le pueril, entre l'ordre et le chaos."7 However, as we have already seen, it was impossible for the modern writer to assert order and perfection without going back into a hypothasized past, and even that endeavor was colored more by fiction than by fact. What'resulted from Eliot's addiction to the past and to its supposed virtues was a serious negation of the present and, ultimately, of Nature. He received confirmation for his pursuit of the exclusively spiritual and ideal (associated by him with classicism) from the Symbolists. Baudelaire, as the forerunner of that movement, helped to "lay the foundation for the 8

Symbolist view of Nature" , but the Symbolists went far beyond

Baudelaire. Whereas the latter never lost touch with reality, no matter.how unpleasant it may have seemed to him, and never escaped from Nature but only sought to transform it, the Symbolists cut themselves off from Nature completely. Theirs may be called a

Romanticism of the extreme right, for it stressed only one half of the Romantic formula —Spirit. In a true Romantic art, these two principles co-habit and seek a union, but in Symbolist art;only one principle was stressed. Thus, the Symbolists did not really

come to terms with the modern dilemma at all; they found their own 57

unique solution, escape from life and Nature into the Ideal. Art

became the prime means of this escape into the Void or the Absolute,

and consequently art suffered because it lost all touch with the

earth and humanity.

In his aesthetic, Schlegel foresaw the problem of a one•

sided art, an art that was too exclusively based on Idealism. "What

is most frightening to man," he wrote in 1806, "is absolute loneli• ness . But Idealism is the very system in which the mind is com• pletely isolated, bereft of everything that relates him to the q

ordinary world, so that it stands alone and completely deprived."

Eliot himself seems to have been aware of the danger inherent in

Symbolism as his late essay "From Poe to valery" points out" And as for the future: it is a tenable hypothesis that this advance of self-consciousness, the extreme awareness of and concern for language which we find in Valery, is something which must ultimately break down, owing to an increased strain against which the human mind and nerves will rebel . . ..10

He might well have said "against which Nature will rebel" for he did as much as any of the Symbolists to negate Nature. His own development shows the important influence of the Symbolists almost more than that of Baudelaire, a fact that he himself confirms despite his often expressed regard for the latter.11 Although

Eliot was to grow out of the Laforguean ironic pose (out of necessity, as I have earlier maintained), he returned to pay his spiritual and artistic debts to Symbolism in Four Quartets.

Ludwig Marcuse in his highly relevant article, "Reak-

tionare und progressive Romantik", points out that Romanticism

took two turns, the progressive and the reactionary.

Die Massen-Kultur, die aus der industriellen Revolution geboren wurde, hat zwei Gegen-Bewegungen 58

ausgelost: die reaktionare und die progressive Romantik. Die erste wolte zuriick: in eine Ver- gangenheit, die weder Maschine noch das isolierte Massen-Atom Mensch gekannt hatte. Die zweite drangte worwarts zur Uberwindung des "Zeitalters der vollendenten Sundhaftigkeit," wie der Rom- antiker Fichte seine zeit in der Schrift "Grundzuge des gegenwartigen Zeitalters" taufte.12

Those who took the reactionary stance may be described in a telling paradox: "Sie alle kann man auf einen paradoxen Generalnenner 13 bringen; sie waren aitiromantische Romantiker." He adds, "Es ist kein zwei fel dafi eine der Folgen der Romantik die politische

Reaktion war. Aber nur so, wie auch eine der Folgen des Pionier -

Daseins das Zugrundegehen ist. Falsch ist, zu schlie(Jen, daf> die

Reaktion die logische Folge der Romantik gewesen ist und sein mu/3."14 Eliot I would term such an example of an "anti-Romantic

Romantic". In the following exploration of his early, pre-Waste

Land, poetry there will emerge a picture of an artist who struggled with the duality of Spirit and Nature, but who persisted in the

Symbolist role of rejection of Nature and yearning for Spirit.

The first two collections of Eliot's verse, Prufrock and

Other Observations (1917) and Poems (1920), lay bare the natural world and constrain us to see it through the poet's eyes. Through• out the work, there is an unspoken Ideal behind the descriptions of people and life, an Ideal which is never openly expressed but only suggested by certain juxtapositions of phrases or motifs in

the verse. The technique of combining naturalistic and realistic

description with an idealistic viewpoint is already in evidence here and finds its culmination in The Waste Land. Here, however,

the emphasis is primarily on the natural world as viewed from a 59

withdrawn spiritual consciousness. The result is a subtle tension between the spiritual and the natural states, giving the poetry an intensity that would otherwise be lacking. Mere realism or natur• alism in art, no matter how well handled, has the tendency to become uninteresting, for it does not challenge us with a higher point of view. Eliot's poetry implicitly contains this spiritual sensibility which is detached from the natural world and passes judgement on it, but which is also a suffering part of it. The difference between the purely realistic-naturalistic technique and Eliot's is that the former describes the street in all its sordidness and decay, but the latter has "such a vision of the street/As the street hardly understands."

The epigraph for these early poems might be the last stanza of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us and we drown.

Modern man, unlike the heroes of old, has succumbed to the song of the Sirens, to the enticements of Nature, and is now their helpless, weak prisoner. The spirit of man is in a hostile element— water; it is, to be more precise, submerged under water, that is, in the unconscious. Man's spirit, imprisoned in the unconscious which is an expression of Nature, cannot perform its moral duties or destined tasks. The example of the Classical heroes teaches us that man's spirit must travel above and across the water, and fight against the powers of Nature that would entice it away from its course and waylay it in a prison of false pleasures. All the men and women who pass through these poems are imprisoned in Nature and are either un• aware of the dangers to which their spirit is exposed or, if they are 60

conscious of their plight, do not know how to set themselves free.

Those of the former category are in the majority and largely com• pose the modern population. In the poems, they are represented by

Sweeney, Burbank and Bleistein, and a medley of discordant females who weave their voices through scores of situations.

If there can be said to be grades in Eliot's natural world, as there are in Dante's triple universe, then Sweeney surely occupies the lowest rung. He is the natural man most like the beasts; from the descriptions Eliot applies to him, he is closer to the animal kingdom than to the human. Of the divine, needless to say, he knows nothing. Yet here we can see most clearly Eliot's technique of throwing the natural world into relief by juxtaposing

to it the sublimer possibilities to which man can attain. In

"Sweeney Erect", Eliot places the picture of a disgustingly and brutally physical modern beside that of the Homeric hero whose modesty and respectfulness in the presence of Nausicaa and her maidens dictated concealment. Needless to say, the figure of Doris does not gain in stature from the comparison. Sweeney, with his

"gesture of orang-outang", ironically "knows the female tempera• ment", but we cannot forget that this is only such knowledge as that of the lowest animals. Any higher conception of human rela•

tionships is not possible to this type of natural man. "Sweeney

Among the Nightingales" repeats this characterization in a tone of undiluted disgust:

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate giraffe. 61

The tropical and exotic imagery of "the person in the Spanish cape", the "oranges/Bananas figs and hothouse grapes" suggest the ripeness of decay, and the fruit may even spur the reader to remember the symbolic Garden where the first sinful bite was taken. Again, the higher spiritual sensibility of the poet passes judgement on the scene with the evocation of the murder of

Agamemnon and the elegiac song of the bird:

The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart

The birds' "liquid siftings" suggest the lament of the spirit over the treachery and bestiality of the natural man. As if to indicate the way that must be taken — expiation, penance, and self-denial — the ignored nightingale sings "near the Convent of the Sacred Heart", its very name a reminder of the difference between ideal or divine love and the coarse, profane intrigue which passes for it.

There is in these early poems an unfortunate application of Semitic imagery to the deplored and censured natural man, that is, the individual without spiritual sensibility. Rather than in• creasing the success of his descriptions, it tends to weaken them, for we either politely ignore the indiscretion or take offence and feel the poem is spoiled. We can only venture a guess as to why

Eliot thought the application appropriate; perhaps the Jews seemed to him a natural race of men because they had not accepted the spiritualizing message of Christianity. In that respect, they may have epitomized for him the anti-spiritual or anti-Christian tend• ency of modern man. They were men still in the old state of Nature, to use Pauline terms. Whatever the reason, and the above seems 62

more likely than that he was simply a hateful, biased man, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" remains one of his least

appealing creations.

When Eliot describes woman, he is not far from Baudelaire's opinion that she is "natural and therefore hateful". Although this was an attitude that was to change later, as we shall see, in these first two volumes of verse Eliot essentially views her as "the eternal enemy of the absolute". Whether she is a society lady, an ordinary woman, or a harlot, she is regarded with distrust and dis•

like. The more intelligent ones are neurotic, like the anxious,

love-denied, and dominating subject of "Portrait of a Lady", and the stupid ones are, at least, unprepossessing if difficult to communicate with. The spiritual hero sees himself as victimized between these two types. In the "Portrait", the gulf between the two people is so terrifyingly absolute that the woman's illusion of understanding and

communication no longer seems funny. Toward the end, even she is forced to wonder what is wrong:

'For everybody said so, all our friends, They all were sure our feelings would relate So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

Her inappropriate sincerity causes the silent and meek hero to feel remorse and guilt; but, most of all, what he really feels and conceals is furious hatred. It is his total loathing of the neurotic lady that

occasions his guilt and death-wish:

And I must borrow every changing shape To find expression..., dance Like a dancing bear, Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape. Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance— Well! and what if she should die some Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose; 63

There is a change in tone in this passage as soon as he begins to

imagine her death. The first part is filled with hard, staccato

sounds that convey resentment and anger, and final two lines con•

tain soft, soothing, and pleasant syllables. It is also interesting

to notice that he is beginning to compare himself to an animal, something this spiritual young man cannot tolerate; one can hardly

resist coming to the undignified conclusion that she is 'making a monkey out of him' — that is, causing him to lose his intellectual and spiritual possession. When his rational control breaks, he

feels himself becoming like an animal, a natural beast. It is

therefore not strange to see him angry, although posing as the woman's victim. The final line of the poem, concluding his revery on her death, indicates better than all his feeling of guilt and self-pity the real emotion he feels toward the woman: "And should

I have the right to smile?"

The second type of woman, unlike the older and apparently intelligent society lady, is the one whom Prufrock meets in the unspecified "room". Certainly, these women who "come and go/Talking of Michelangelo" do not possess any real culture or intelligence;

they merely simulate it for effect. Or, if they do not speak, they sit placidly and langourously at tea-tables, waiting for the gentle• man to make a proposition. One would think the hero to have less

difficulty here; but no, this time he is victimized by their indif•

ference and his spiritual expectations. Prufrock wants the sympathy

of this woman, to lay bare his troubled heart to her; but he realizes

that she is stupid, somewhat vicious, and would not understand. 64

And I have known the eyes already, known them all- The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall. Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And should I presume?

The crux of the problem for this man, unlike Sweeney, is that he has

a spiritual sensibility but that it cannot relate successfully to

Nature. On the one hand, his spirituality leads him to regard Nature

as inferior and to feel slightly superior to it; on the other, he

feels himself victimized by it. The truth, which the final stanza

evokes, is that modern man — whether he knows it or not — has not

come to terms with Nature so that a balance exists between it and

his spirit, but that he has permitted Nature to swallow him up in

its deadly tide. It is the destructive side of Nature to which he

has fallen victim and which results in his paralysis of will, his

resentment and hatred of the natural, and his vicious animality. It

is not difficult to understand that the perverted natural man like

Sweeney does not consciously despise Nature but that by his every

act he desecrates it; and that the would-be spiritual man like

Prufrock and the poet's persona fears and hates Nature because he

is its unwilling prisoner. Their attitude to woman is thus a con•

sequence of their inner corruption or conflict, both of which issue

directly from the division of Spirit and Nature in the psyche. For

further examples of Eliot's position at this time we need only look

at the negative feminine portraits in "Hysteria", "Conversation

Galante", "Whispers of Immortality", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night",

all of which reveal a failure of adjustment of these two fundamental

principles. 65

There is, as I have said, an Ideal behind these poems, a vision of the world and people as they could be. While it is never stated, for fear of sounding ridiculous perhaps, it sometimes manages to steal past the tough pose of the narrator.

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.

Eliot seems not to be certain of or secure with his vision of the

Ideal at this point in his career. In a jaded world of hardened men and women, such as he is describing, to have an Ideal — let alone a spiritual one — is dangerous if not outright ridiculous.

It is much easier to conceal it under a facade of disillusionment, irony, or the prophetic utterances of an assumed persona. In

"Preludes", Eliot handled the disguise rather clumsily:

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

These closing lines say everything except what he is trying to say; the brittle comic mask breaks and tears come gushing out. Rather than being a statement of indifference about the corruption, suffering, and ugliness of the natural world, it is one of deep concern. As an ironic pose it is just that — an intellectual disguise and not a true feeling. Similarly, the Ideal lurks behind the other poems: in

"Prufrock" it is the vision of a hero who has not been rendered emotion• ally impotent by succumbing to the seductive strains of Nature, in the "Sweeney" poems it is the memory of the nobler virtues of love and decency, in "Whispers of Immortality" it is the realization of man's longing for a supernatural love and satisfaction such as a "friendly 66

bust giving promise of pneumatic bliss" can never afford, in "The

Boston Evening Transcript" it is the hope that there is more to life and existence on this earth than the excitements afforded by the headlines, and so forth. The poetry is groping toward a spir• itual realization which cannot be denied or parodied, an Ideal which can be lived and expressed without fear of ridicule or shame.

But as yet, Eliot had not arrived at this stage. He was still in the process of identifying and emphasizing the sins or crimes of man in the unredeemed state of Nature.

One poem of this series that stands out as a weather-vane indicating the next phase of Eliot's development is "Gerontion".

In many ways, this poem anticipates the greater interpenetration of Spirit and Nature in The Waste Land and hints in what way the duality will be resolved. In its images of dessication and drought, the persona of the old man, the budding historical sense, and the appearance of the Christian motif, "Gerontion" foreshadows the next stage. The persona of Gerontion functions as an object- ification of the self and enables the poet to view the natural world from the removed standpoint of "an old man in a dry month".

Writing from the point of view of extreme age was not only a means of distancing himself from the scene to be surveyed, but also an opportunity to express the intensity with which he had already lived and thought. Like Baudelaire, he could say: "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans". Through the mouth of

Gerontion the youthful Eliot could express with more seriousness and weight his accusations against a "depraved" world. One does not expect to find a historical sense in youth and, coming from the 67

lips of a younger character, the fatigue and disgust with life

expressed by Gerontion would seem premature or perhaps abnormal.

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?

For the first time, the natural world is beginning to be thrown

into a Christian relief:

Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled in darkness. In the juvenescence of the year Came Christ the tiger

This passage seems to symbolize Eliot's own state at this time; the

'new' word that he will speak, and that is embodied in his later

poetry, is already immanent but "swaddled in darkness" — perhaps buried in the unconscious and preparing for its birth. Intimately

connected with this is the new historical sense that the world has

always been corrupt and has never been ready to receive the annuncia•

tions of history. They have come either too soon or too late for man to benefit from them at the right moment. The spiritual history

of mankind, dated from the "wrath-bearing tree", has been one of

equal failure. The new insight tortures the poet as he poses the

question:

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed ink or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us....

After having taken preliminary stock of the world and man, and seeing

it fall short of the spiritual ideal which was always with him, Eliot 68 tried to find that which would save man — or, at least, himself. The new challenge was presented by Christ and way which He pro• posed: "The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours." Christ is here pictured as a destructive force which may at first seem incompatible with our usual notions of Him, but Christ brings death to the old self and proclaims a new way for man to follow. What that way would be, however, was a task taken up in The Waste Land; at this stage, Eliot reminded us, "We have not yet reached conclusion". Footnotes

Chapter V

1. Baudelaire, "La Peintre de la Vie Moderne," Oeuvres, p. 894.

2. T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic: And other Writings (London, Faber & Faber, 1965), p. 17.

3. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays, 1st. ed. 1932, rev. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1964), p. 10.

4. Eliot, "Lancelot Andrewes," For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), p. 31.

5. Eliot, "The Social Function of Poetry," On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), p. 19.

6. Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot (Boston: Hengnton Mifflin Co., 1964), p. 178.

7. Edward J. H. Greene, T. S. Eliot et la France (Paris: Boivin, 1951), p. 180.

8. Barbara Meyer, Das Naturgefuhl in der franzosischen Lyric des beginnended XX Jahrhunderts, p. 19.

9. F. Schlegel, K.A. Vol. 12, p. 151.

10. Eliot, "From Poe to Valery," To Criticize the Critic, p. 42.

11. Eliot, "From Poe to Valery," To Criticize the Critic, p. 18.

12. Ludwig Marcuse, "Reaktionare und Progressive Romantik," Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik, p. 384.

13. Marcuse, p. 384.

14. Marcuse, p. 380. Translation

Chapter V

#12. The culture of the masses that was born out of the Industrial Revolution released two counter-movements: reactionary and progressive Romanticism. The first wanted to turn back: into a past that knew neither the machine nor the isolated mass- atomic man. The second pushed forward to conquer the "age of complete sinfulness" as the Romantic Fichte baptized his time in the work "Fundamental trends of the present age".

#13. They can all be termed under a paradoxical generalnommer: they were anti-Romantic Romantics.

#14. There is no doubt that one of the results of Romanticism was political reaction. But only in the sense that one of the results of pioneer existence is destruction. It is wrong to conclude that reaction was and must be the logical result of Romanticism. CHAPTER VI

THE WASTE LAND: "CHAOS AND EROS"

The Waste Land occupies a unique place in Eliot's poetic development, for it marks the middle-ground between his first and last stages. The first stage, which we have just seen, was occupied with the depiction of the natural world and man. That natural state was a deficient one, lacking in spirituality, grace, beauty, and virtue. It was a state in which the disguised consciousness of the narrator felt itself trapped and victimized but as yet ignorant of how to escape. Not until "Gerontion" do we see a new possibility opening up for the poet; this is the development of a historical consciousness which enables him to see his own time in relation to the past and, thus, to realize that the problems which the modern faces are not new but that they have only assumed new shapes.

Parallel to the emergence of the historical sense is the re-discovery of the teachings of Christianity. Eliot had an innate spiritual sensibility as his early work shows, but it was unchannelled and undisciplined. His idealism was evident from the start, but he seemed to feel embarrassed by It. Very likely, his greatest fear as a young poet was of sounding sentimental and trite; and, as a pre• caution against this danger, he found the ironic, sarcastic, and disillusioned tone of Laforgue and Corbiere a sure check. As Eliot became more sure and confident of his direction, the ironic technique became less frequent. The last phase of his work is one of intensive 70

spiritualization of all that belongs to the natural state. It

is really a transformation of fallen Nature and an undertaking of

the Christian way of salvation. But that way was not outlined or

understood until he had written The Waste Land.

From the point of view of this study, this lengthy poem

which has already received so much critical attention reveals more

clearly than anything else Eliot might have said or written that

he is truly a Romantic in spite of himself. Decrying the state of

modern civilization as fragmented, chaotic, and corrupted, Eliot

uses that very technique or form to convey his criticism. The

principle of eros, first child of Nature, is made to bear the blame

for humanity's depraved condition; in its stead, Eliot wishes to

place agape or spiritual love. The sexual motif, so central to

The Waste Land, symbolizes the falling away from the agape ideal

and the triumph of eros — albeit a very debased form of it. Inter•

estingly enough, F. Schlegel had declared: "The best explanation

of the romantic is perhaps chaos and eros".1 In his Literary Notebooks

(1797-1801), he repeatedly referred to these two aspects of Romantic

art, but rather than deploring them Schlegel saw positive value in

"chaos and eros". First of all, what did he mean by "chaos"? From

the Notebooks it appears that Schlegel had in mind not artless form- 2 lessness, but "ein gebildetes kunstliches chaos" of which Shakespeare 3 provided an example. The "chaotic form" was a natural and spiritual » 4 design, an "arabesque" of which the "Marchen" was a type. 'The

principle of Romantic prose as well as poetry is symmetry and chaos"; what the artist had to achieve was a "synthesis" of the two.^ Lastly, 71

on the subject of chaos in art, Schlegel writes: "Die eigentliche

Grundform des mythologischen Gedichts ist absolutes chaos. Is not The Waste Land itself a "mythological poem" whose "basic form" is chaos? I believe so; it is "mythological" in the sense that its substructure is the Grail legend and numerous other primitive myths, and that it is chaotic no one has yet denied. But there is also

"symmetry" in Eliot's "chaos"; a spiritual, artful plan lies behind its execution. Truly, I believe, The Waste Land may be called an

"arabesque" poem.

Regarding Schlegel's second principle active in Romantic art, eros, a little more must be said. Hans Eichner in his com• mentary on the Notebooks writes: "Greatly influenced in this respect by Hemsterhuys, Schlegel saw in the erotic a cosmic force which far transcends the domain of the sexual. His explanation of romantic poetry as erotic therefore required only a slight modification to become an essential part of his later, catholic poetics."7 Schlegel viewed eros in the Platonic sense, that is, in the sense which it is expressed in The Symposium, as a binding power which unites the divine and the mortal. Eros, in the larger sense, the great unifying power of love. Romantic poetry should be suffused with this spirit of eros; in Schlegel's own words:

Die moderne Poesie ist erotisch. Vielleicht ist das Prinzip der romantischen Poesie zweifach; sie ist erotisch und dann kunstahnlich d.h. pittoresk, musikalisch pp. Hier untercheidet sie sich doch wohl nur durch Vollstandigkeit von der Griechischen.8

Eliot, unfortunately, understood eros only in its debased sense, and it is not unlikely that this debasement is a consequence of the negative 72

view of Nature. The Waste Land reflects the preoccupation with

chaos and eros but also reveals Eliot's inability to understand

the value of both. As a result, these elements suffuse the poem but only in a negative way. In the main symbol of the poem, the waste land, we see the terrible and sterile state to which Nature has been reduced by the departure of eros. Eliot connected eros or Romantic love with sexuality, but sexuality is only one aspect of eros. What we have in The Waste Land, as in the modern world, 9 is sexuality without eros. Eliot is not entirely inconsistent with Western tradition in his mistrust of eros, but this only arises out of a false conception of Nature for, essentially, eros is not incompatible with agape. St. Augustine himself realized this in saying that eros leads man to God. We have in The Waste

Land the curious situation of a conflict of loves — eros and agape — a conflict that would never have arisen in the first place had Eliot understood the value of Nature. As it was, his form and subject matter betray the unconscious immersion in the Romantic tradition and the conscious revolt against it. By turning to the poem itself we will witness this unnatural conflict and the way in which Eliot finally resolved it.

A very interesting question, which unfortunately cannot be pursued here, is why spiritual love has been traditionally viewed as incompatible with Romantic love. The latter has been recognized as a mighty power in men's lives, but one either to be overcome or to be overcome by. There is no alternative; and to be overcome by eros

results in sinning against the Spirit (hence, the moral code) and in 73

death. Romantic love must thus be an anti-civilizing force,

leading to wholesale destruction and decadence, if the erection

and maintenance of a moral code is considered as the activity

of the spirit. Romantic love poses a danger to man and to

civilization: the danger of being swallowed up by Nature. Hence, eros must be balanced by another type of love — the love for

order and restraint that is required to ensure the continuation of

civilization. For man to be capable of such a love, which is prim•

arily concerned with the ideal relationship between men, and men and God, he must first be capable of sacrifice. Spiritual love is based on the self-denial of Nature's strongest power — eros. In

The Waste Land, we see Eliot struggling with these two forces —

Eros and Agape — and finally making what, to him, was the necessary sacrifice.

The opening section of the poem, "The Burial of the Dead",

draws out attention to the fact that the fascination of Romantic love is always accompanied by death — either physical or spiritual, and sometimes both. Evoking the tale of Tristan and Isolde, Eliot

chooses two very significant excerpts from Wagner's operatic score.

The first is taken from the beginning of the tragedy, when Isolde is still innocent and untouched by the power of Eros, sailing on the ship that is to take her to Mark. The word "Kind", child, is touch- ingly appropriate to her present state.

Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind Wo weilest du?

The second excerpt, however, is one of innocence destroyed and already 74

indicates the result of the illicit passion that has united the

lovers in ecstasy and, now, in death.

Oed' und leer das Meer

Tristan utters these words of absolute despair as he waits looking for the ship that is to unite him and Isolde. Isolde arrives just in time to see her lover die in her arms. The sterility and empti• ness of the ocean here symbolizes the ultimate barrenness of their love; Eros is seen as an essentially destructive force which devours the individuals and does not permit them to create anything but their own death and the upset of society. Nevertheless, Eliot reveals a nostalgia for this kind of love and condemns it almost sadly. The scene in the hyacinth garden is one of extreme emotion, but whose end must be death and despair.

—Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer.

In the subsequent sections of "A Game of Chess" and "The

Fire Sermon", Eliot is more explicit about the viciousness and barbar• ism into which Romantic love degenerates. The recurring motif is rape, or violation of love. The Cleopatra analogy in the "Game of Chess" again reminds the reader of the result of submission to eros. The love of Antony and Cleopatra, as depicted by Shakespeare, was an anti- civilizing force that created its own morality and threw two kingdoms into war. The burning ships are an apt symbol for its all-consuming intensity and destructive conclusion. By the use of the Cleopatra and, later, the change of Philomel analogies, Eliot implies that Romantic 75

love always leads to violence and barbarism in the forms of war, killing, or rape. The modern men and women who are his subjects of study are by no means more moral or spiritual than their pagan predecessors, and this largely accounts for the success of his analogical method. The same powers still animate and rule the human heart, be it the heart of a Queen or of a pauper. The con• clusion of the "Game of Chess" emphasizes the theme of violation in the conversation between the two lower-class women. This is an illustration of Romantic love in its least exalted form, bring• ing with it sickness and disease. The poem indicates that it does not really matter whether it is exalted eros — such as illustrated in the lives of Tristan and Isolde, and Antony and Cleopatra, or denigrated eros — as depicted by the poor women, the "nymphs",

Sweeney and Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, and the typist and the carbuncular young man — that rules our lives; the end is the same. Romantic love leads to death and corruption, and must be renounced if man is to restore himself and the world to grace.

The conclusion of "The Fire Sermon" gives the hint of the way that must be taken with the words of St. Augustine: "To Carthage then

I came". The way is to renounce all "unholy loves" and to embrace the new, spiritual love.

"What the Thunder Said" may be the symbolic voice of God speaking to man from heaven and giving him the spiritual precepts by which to live: "Give, Sympathize, Control". These words express the essence of agape or spiritual love. It is a holy love based on man's recognition of his moral duty towards his neighbour. By ex• pressing these virtues in his life, man is essentially asking the 76

"questions" that will redeem the strickened Grail King from his suffering and the world from its sterility. From the movement of

The Waste Land, we can see that Eliot considered eros as a power dangerous to the maintenance of civilization, the cause of best• iality, brutality, hostility among men, and a host of other vices.

It could only lead man to death and destruction, whereas the saving power that could restore the world was agape. Eliot could succes• sfully draw on his tradition for the statement and solution of this problem, thereby indicating that he was profoundly stirred by these conflicting claims of life. That he decided in favour, or rather, for the necessity of spiritual love is not surprising, and reveals the bias of Western tradition as much as the inclination of an individual. Once again, we are led to speculate if the incompat• ibility of Romantic love and Spiritual love in the Western con• sciousness is not symptomatic of an inability to reconcile the claims of Spirit and Nature. The Waste Land very convincingly shows that our tradition is one which believes in the necessity of the suppression of Nature (eros) in order for civilization to be maintained. Civilization demands order, sacrifice, and relative harmony among men, but it cannot thrive in a state of unrestrained

Nature where passion and self-interest rule.1^ Because eros drives men and civilizations to war and ruin, it must be controlled and sublimated at all costs. But the cost is sometimes extremely high in terms of man's fulfillment. Looking at the following lines from

The Waste Land, we cannot resist believing that the sacrifice was one not easily made: 77

My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In empty rooms

There is an ambiguity surrounding "The awful daring of a moment's surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract". Is it the surrender to Romantic love or to Spiritual love to which he is re•

ferring? The "age of prudence" suggests it is the former, but the

context in which it is placed in the structure of the poem favours

the latter. The ambiguity exists, I submit, because Eliot himself was divided between the spiritual and the natural claims of life and, although he consciously chose the spiritual solution, he remained

constantly aware of what had been sacrificed. Footnotes

Chapter VI

1. F. Schlegel, Literary Notebooks: 179 7-1801, ed. by Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), p. 176, # 1760.

2. Schlegel, L.N. # 1356, p. 141.

3. Schlegel, L.N. # 1530, p. 155.

4. Schlegel, L.N. # 1804, p. 180.

5. Schlegel, L.N. # 1961, p. 194.

6. Schlegel, L^N. # 1897, p. 187.

7. Hans Eichner, "Commentary", L.N., p. 224.

8. Schlegel, L.N. # 2097, p. 207.

9. Rollo May also makes this point in Love and Will, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1969), Ch. 3.

10. See S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans, by Joan Riviere, 1st. ed. (1930, rpt., London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957) for an expression of this viewpoint. Translation

Chapter VI

#2. A structured artful chaos

#6. The essential basic form of the mythological poem is absolute chaos.

#8. Modern poetry is erotic. Perhaps the principle of Romantic poetry is two-fold: It is erotic and then artful, i.e. — picturesque, musical, etc. Here it certainly distinguishes itself through wholeness from the Greek [art]. CHAPTER VII

T.S. ELIOT AND THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION

When in 1927 Eliot announced his conversion to the

Anglican Catholic Church he took a step that so many Romantics had taken before him, not the least of whom was F. Schlegel. As

I have earlier said, the ironic pose which was an outcome of the

awareness of the gulf between the ideal and reality could not be

indefinitely maintained without lapsing either into nihilism or

faith. In Eliot's later poetry we note the curious absence of irony, a technique that was such an indispensable ingredient of his early verse. In its place, we now have faith, or the groping

for faith. The poetry from "The Hollow Men" to "Four Quartets" is as much a testimony of the difficulty of faith for modern man

as it is of its necessity. The youthful secular faith of Classicism has deepened into the religious sphere. In this very crowning act

of his lifetime, Eliot entrenched himself firmly in the Romantic

tradition. Writes Jacques Barzun:

As a romanticist, his {man's] task is to reconcile the contraries within him by finding some entity outside himself vast enough to hold all his facts. He has become once again a religious thinker.1

In The Mind of the European Romantics, H. G. Schenk cites

three variations of the Romantics' search for foundations:

(1) the exhortation to an age of spiritual insecurity and dwindling faith to look with reverence to the example of the Christian Middle Ages. 79

(2) Nations could be made to look back to times when they had reached their political or cultural apogee.

(3) the passing of an age of feudalism and chivalry could be deplored by those who, like or Joseph von Eichendorff or , belonged to the elites of the past, or even by others who had no axe to grind.

T. S. Eliot with his Dante-Middle Ages-Christian cult most certainly belongs in the first of those categories. Romanticism and Christianity became very early associated with one another possibly for three reasons: firstly, Romanticism in contrast to Classicism was a "modern" art, and Christianity in terms of history may be said to be the great religion of "modern" man; secondly, Romanticism was founded on the consciousness of man's dualism, his natural and spiritual sides, his potential greatness and actual lowliness, and Christianity was also based on this recognition; thirdly, the moving principle within

Romantic art was to be eros or the all-unifying power of love, and this, too, was at the heart of Christianity. Schenk calls the trend toward Catholicism "yet another unmistakable feature of the Romantic 3 revival" and notes that is was often based on the fear of "the break• down of civilized life on earth."4

This fear is expressly behind Eliot's 1939 book, The Idea of A Christian Society. Set in front of a background of war and devastation, this book urges a return to the Christian state. The alternative that Eliot sees facing humanity is paganism: ". . .1 believe that the choice before us is between the formation of a new

Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one."5 Like so many

Romantic prophets of doom, Eliot did not envision a bright future for 80

Western civilization if it persisted in its present materialistic ways.

The more highly industrialized the country, the more easily a materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that philosophy will be. Britain has been highly industrialised longer than any other country. And the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.6

His idea of the Christian society is one wherein the best minds form a kind of spiritual elite, guiding the rest of the flock.

We need therefore what I have called 'the Community of Christians,' by which I mean, not local groups, and not the Church in any one of its senses, unless we call it 'the Church within the Church.' These will be the consciously and thoughtfully practising Christians, especially those of intellectual and spiritual superiority.7

And again:

The Community of Christians is not an organisation, but a body of indefinite outline; composed both of clergy and laity, of the more conscious, more spiritually and intellectually developed of both. It will be their identity of belief and aspiration, their background of a common system of education and a common culture, which will enable them to influence and be influenced by each other, and collectively to form the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation.8

Although he later hastens to add, "And, incidentally, I should not

like the 'Community of Christians' of which I have spoken, to be

thought of as merely the nicest, most intelligent and public-spirited g

of the upper class . . ." , he has done absolutely nothing to diminish

that impression in the foregoing chapters. From what has been quoted it is impossible not to interpret Eliot's 'community of Christians' as 81

a spiritual aristocracy based on a Medieval hierarchy where every member has his place, to be sure, but where those places vastly differ. The guiding community within the Community is the spir• itual elite that shapes the "conscience of the nation". What we have here is merely the reverse position of the one he is attack• ing; just as "pagan" Germany had its secular military elite that formed the national consciousness, so Eliot's intellectual and spiritually superior Christians will perform the same service.

Whenever any body — secular or religious — undertakes to "form the conscious mind" of a people a type of totalitarianism must result. Here is where Eliot's reactionary Romanticism most fully emerges. But simply because Eliot's Christianity is unemotional and exclusively "intellectual", "a matter primarily of thought and not of feeling","'"^ does not make it less objectionable. But that his development in this direction is firmly rooted in Romantic tradition is undeniable. F. Schlegel in his later years began to look to the Middle Ages for guidance in politics as well as in religion and formulated the theory of the Christian "organic state".''""''

Ludwig Marcuse says of him: "Sein Ideal war eine mittelalterlisch - feudale Monarchie auf katholischem Fundament. So endete einer der sturmischten Stifter der romantischen Revolution — aber dieses Ende 12 war eben nicht Fruhromantik, sondern die auperste Anti-These."

Another famous example of such a Christian-state theory is ' 13

Die Christenheit Oder Europa wherein he, too, looks nostalgically back to the Medieval past and cherishes the hope of a revived Christian

Europe in the near future. 82

What we see in Eliot's "intellectual" Christianity is

a tragic absence of eros or all-embracing love. As I have shown

in regard to The Waste Land, he reduced eros to sexuality and

associated it with the natural man. By glorifying agape, however,

he did not come any closer to the heart of Christianity which

must always be love in its total sense. As a result, his later

poetry strikes one as spiritually and naturally dry. There is

the arduous attempt at self-purification — yet another step away

from Nature — and the desperate plea for grace, but the effect

fails to stir the reader. It is ironic that in The Idea of

Christian Society Eliot says "the natural life and the spiritual

life have a conformity to each other" and, further on, quotes

Thomas Aquinas (without acknowledgement): ". . .a wrong attitude

towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God. . .

Here he referred to the devastation of external nature as a result

of industrialism, but it is very improbable that Eliot ever had a

true understanding of or attitude toward Nature as a whole. Joseph

Warren Beach at the close of his study on The Concept of Nature in

Nineteenth Century English Poetry says of Eliot:

Neither the word nor the concept of nature survives in him. The word is naturally ruled out by his poetic creed, which abjures abstractions and phil• osophical statements. That the concept of nature is not present even implicitly is perhaps partly owing to his (apparent) insensibility to the beauty of the world, and this may very well be an accident of personal organization. . . . The ways of the universe are for him simply and solely the ways of man; and the ways of man are mainly symbolized by the obscenities, the meannesses and treacheries of our sex-life, by the futilities and half-heartedness of our sentiment and culture.15 83

Mr. Beach sees this tendency in Eliot as the outgrowth and "extreme

logic of the new humanism."

Eliot can take no pleasure in our oneness with the universe process. He has learned from Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More that we owe to nature nothing but what is beastly in us — animal instinct, the cravings of selfhood. . . . But Eliot has bettered the instructions of his masters. He cannot be content with this bifurcation of our human nature. He cannot remain thus in intolerable isolation. He must find somewhere the origin and sanction of what is human in us; and nature being forbidden, he has no recourse but to the supernatural.16

That Mr. Beach is correct in his analysis is borne out by the last phase of Eliot's poetry. Here we shall see the attempt made by the poet to transcend Nature; let us briefly note that

Baudelaire had sought the less extreme route of trying to transform it into beauty via the agency of the imagination. That Eliot bears

the stamp of the Symbolist in this undertaking has already been mentioned, but there are also present the religious strains of

Hinduism, Buddhism, and mysticism. In short, whatever philosophy of world and nature negation existed, Eliot was quick to seize upon

and to incorporate into his thought and art. What I take to be the

true and essential spirit of Christianity — love — is sadly lacking.

In the following analysis of his last major poems, we will be able

to see more clearly that the road taken by Eliot led into the past,

into antiquity, but not into the present-world and life. The Christian

solution was a typically Romantic reactionary one but lacked the one

ingredient to make it positive — the One Love in which eros and

agape are united. This unitary vision was achieved by Dante, and

although in "Little Gidding" Eliot tried to convince himself and his 84

readers that he, too, had reached that goal, the cumulative evidence of a lifetime's work weighs against his conclusion. * Footnotes

Chapter VII

Jacques Barzun, Classic. Romantic, and Modern. 2nd. ed. rev. (1943; rpt. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc.) 1961, p. 567.

H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics, 1st. ed. 1966, rpt., (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1969), p. 34.

3. Schenk, p. 93.

4. Schenk. p. 88.

5. Eliot The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939) p. 13.

6. Eliot P- 21.

7. Eliot P. 35.

8. Eliot P- 42.

9. Eliot P« 61.

10. Eliot P- 8.

11. Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel, p. 131.

12. Ludwig Marcuse, "Reaktionare und progressive Romantik," Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik, p. 379.

13. Novalis, "Die Christenheit Oder Europa," German Essays IV: Romanticism, ed. by Max Dufner & Valentine C. Hubbs (New York: Macmillan Co., 1964), pp. 29-57.

14. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, p. 62. (St. Thomas makes the remark in Summa On the Pagans.)

15. Joseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth Century English Poetry, pp. 554-55.

16, Beach, p. 555. Translation

Chapter VII

His ideal was a Medieval-feudal monarchy of catholic foundation. Thus concluded one of the stormiest founders of the Romantic revolution — but this end was precisely not early Romantic, but the most extreme antithesis. CHAPTER VIII

THE POEMS : "THE HOLLOW MEN" TO "FOUR QUARTETS"

The final phase of Eliot's development contains some of his finest poetry and reveals an intense concentration on the

spiritual aspect of life. The tendency to reject the world and nature is now channelled into a religious direction. What might

otherwise have developed into nihilism turns into quasi-mysticism.

The despair aroused in him by the insufficiency and depravity of

the world is not wholly conquered but transmuted into humility.

While he patiently learns to "endure" and "not to care", he searches

for the way of release. This liberation from the world, nature,

time, and history is not achieved until Four Quartets. Those last poems express the summation of his achievement and the victory of

the spirit over nature. Although nature appears to be accepted,

it will be seen that this is only true in a limited fashion. It

is more accurate to say that nature is fitted into its place in

the ideal pattern. The details of that pattern must now be supplied by the poems themselves.

In The Hollow Men, Eliot restates and elaborates themes

and motifs that appeared in Gerontion and in The Waste Land. The

images of drought, wind, rats, and death, which had been evoked to

describe modern man's impoverished spiritual consciousness, are here

intensified around the generalized central image: "the hollow men".

Up to this point, Eliot had drawn individualized portraits of modern 86

men and women that scrupulously etched the moral flaws of the original models, flaws whose source lay in nature undisciplined and untransformed by spirit. Here, however, he obliterates every vestige of individuality from his subjects in order to emphasize a doomed collectivity whose perennial state is one of death in life. He creates an atmosphere of unreality, partaking more of the dream state than of waking life, and evokes a mood of haunted despair. It is not even a mood of active despair that involves the person in a struggle against its causes, but one such as is experienced by the lost souls in Dante's Hell. There, as in the world of the poem, action is not only in vain but also impossible because that which makes it possible — moral decision issuing from spiritual awareness — is lacking. The external world or reality of the "hollow men" — a wasteland — is a reflection of their inner condition; for them, as for Gerontion, it can be said to be "a wilderness of mirrors". The sense of spatial distortion in the poem, moving as it does between two planes of reality — the phenomenal world and the world after death, relies on the inter• mingling of images from both worlds. The dream state and the waking state relax their boundaries and are themselves only reflections or mirrors of the consciousness of the narrators. For this reason, the present world and "death's other Kingdom" bear close resemblance; one is, in fact, the extension of the other. By implication of the wording, if the state beyond the grave is "death's other Kingdom",

then this visible world is_ death's kingdom and there is no escape

from death anywhere. Like Milton's Satan, the hollow men create the external correspondence to their inner condition wherever they go. 87

The only hope that the poem holds out to them is the call to a

change of consciousness.

A large part of the poem's meaning is transmitted through associated images that have been the building blocks of Eliot's pre• vious poetic structures. These are principally drought, wind, and rats, and all three appear in the first part of The Hollow Men.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats1 feet over broken glass In our dry cellar

In order to understand their total significance here we must recall their previous applications. The image of a dry, waterless, region symbolizing the modern world was anticipated in Gerontion (where the speaker described himself as "an old man in a dry month,/Being read

to by a boy, waiting for rain.") and made the central focus of The

Waste Land. Projected into the religious sphere, the drought symbolizes the absence of Living Water or the spiritual renewal given by Christ.

Indeed, the allusions to Christ's words, "If a man drinks of the water

I will give him, he will never thirst" (John 4: 13-14) and the many

Biblical associations of Christ and water are always present in the

context of the drought imagery.

The wind imagery is of no less spiritual import and was most

fully utilized in Gerontion where it appeared in four key passages:

"A dull head among windy spaces", "Vacant shuttles/Weave the wind",

"An old man in a draughty house/Under a windy knob", and "Gull against 88

the wind, in the windy straits/Of Belle Isle, or running on the

Horn". In The Waste Land, the narrator spoke of the "cold blast" at his back that reminded him of death and decay, and the lady of "A Game of Chess" incessantly demanded to know, "What is that noise?", receiving for her fears an answer hardly capable of assauging them: "The wind under the door." Remembering that the word "wind" is closely associated with the Greek concept of pneuma

(breath or spirit) and that the latter's Latin equivalent is spiritus, we can clearly see the connection between the two. In

Biblical literature the presence of God is usually symbolized by a "rush of wind" as, for example, on the day Pentecost, the day of Christ's baptism, or the account of the healing at the Pool of

Bethseda. The appearance of the wind image in Eliot's poetry is, however, not indicative of the presence of God but of His absence.

The Spirit that moves over the earth is not God's, but the godless spirit of secularism and evil. The wind thus takes on a frightening aspect and suggests the terror of lost souls from whom the pneuma, or breath of God, has departed.

Finally, the third image to reappear with its old associa• tions is that of the rat. Symbolizing the worst aspects of man — greediness, mass aggregation, filthiness, and destructiveness — the rat has always been a surrogate for his evil and vicious tendencies.

Added to this list of unattractive associations, Freudians consider the rat as primarily a sexual symbol of the repressed unconscious.

From a careful study of The Waste Land it is obvious that Eliot drew on all these associations of the image. It coincided particularly 89

well with the denunciation of Eros as there the rat image reinforced the negative depiction of romantic love. The fields where the "nymphs" and their lovers have played were soon described as infested with rats ("A rat crept softly through the vegetation/Dragging its slimy belly on the bank"), and the man-woman relationship in "A Game of Chess" evoked a similar comparison: "I think we are in rats' alley/Where the dead men lost their bones". Nor could one prevent being reminded of a pack of rats overrunning, destroying, and infecting the world in

Eliot's reference to the barbarian forces seizing control of civiliza• tion: "Who are those hooded hordes swarming/Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth".

Re-appearing in The Hollow Men, these three images bring with them the emotional and intellectual values of previously accumulated associations. Their present context is thus enriched and the opening stanza of the poem is able to suggest a great deal about these subjects with a minimum of elaboration and description. By the end of the tenth line we already have a fairly complete picture of the hollow men: absence of spiritual consciousness or animating life force (pneuma), individuality merged in collectivity or abrogation of moral responsibility, and decay or spiritual death. While these images evoke their previous associations, they take on a new life in this poem as Eliot explores the consciousness of modern man.

The peculiar effect of the poem — closely resembling that of a surrealist painting — is achieved by the blurring of the waking and dream states. The insubstantiality and barrenness of "death's other

Kingdom" depends on the traditional Christian associations with 90

immortality for its striking effectiveness. While men have long accepted the description of the present life in negative terms,

their imaginations still compensate for it in their fantasies of

the future life or the state beyond death. It is with chilly discomfort that we therefore survey Eliot's vision in which the present life and the future life are not dissimilar but, rather, extensions of one another. In reading the poem, one is reminded of Yeats' A Vision in which he describes the "soul in judgement" and declares that the spirit "is compelled to live over and over again the events that had most moved it Similarly, the narrator in The Hollow Men is afraid to cross the threshold leading into the dream state or the post-mortem condition because he fears the meeting with other souls whom he has perhaps wronged or failed

to achieve understanding with in life.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer In death's dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer—

Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom 91

He realizes that he will not awaken from death to find himself in a celestial paradise, ringed 'round by choirs of singing angels.

No; what the narrator's consciousness faces is an extension of his earthly condition. Only this time it will be the confrontation of spirits rather than of bodies. He has dreaded the confrontation with the "eyes" of his fellow men in life, and so he has yet greater reason to dread the meeting in "death's other Kingdom". He wishes to adopt "deliberate disguises" and to be invisible to their eyes, just as earlier another of Eliot's symbolic "hollow men" assumed

"every changing shape" in an unbearable earthly condition. The purpose of the disguises is to cloak his essence, for the essence of man is too vulnerable to expose and too fearful to behold. In life the spirit seeks its masks and prepares its faces, but after death the spirit no longer has a body to hide in; it therefore seeks con• cealment in images: "rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves". Although the hollow men lean, whisper, and grope together, they are careful to avoid true contact, for meeting the "eyes" of each other they would be forced to realize their sinfulness and cursed condition. For this reason, the narrator prays, "Let me be no nearer/In death's dream kingdom".

Although the narrator has not physically crossed the threshold of death, he has premonitions of that state in dreams and has imagined those who "have crossed/With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom" as remembering the living "— if at all — not as lost/Violent souls, but only/As the hollow men/The stuffed men". The living receive, then, the indictment of the dead for the failure to use that life and to 92

respond to it. They are actually more closely allied with the dead

than with the living. The reference to the 11 lost/Violent souls"

is an evocation of the Romantic men who (like Baudelaire) may have been or, at least, considered themselves damned, but who were

supremely capable of living. In their striving they burned up every

atom of energy and experienced the spectrum of human life. The hollow men, unlike their Romantic predecessors, are not even animated by strife and thus there is no progression but only an eternally

static paralysis. Consequently, their external world mirrors their psychic condition.

This is the dead land This is the cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Here there is no spiritual animation in life, although lip- service is given to religion. The pneuma, or life-force, has departed

from their souls and from their liturgies. The God to whom these people pray is a dead God, an idol, an image of stone — in short, another reflection of their consciousness. Dead worshippers are worshipping a dead God and "form prayers to broken stone". Again, the narrator is compelled to ask:

Is it like this In death's other Kingdom The only vision accessible to him is one of thwarted love.

At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone. 93

The love described here is specifically human, that is, erotic; but it is unrealized, and the suggestion is that because human love remains unrealized so does divine or spiritual love. The lips that cannot kiss also cannot love God; their only act is one of deadness, possibly motivated by fear or despair. This is a very interesting point for it reveals the connection between human values and divine ones. Typical of Eliot's poetry, these lines again express the failure of human love, but what emerges more clearly now is that the natural and the spiritual are linked and are shown to be a reflection of the one consciousness.

The human eyes that the hollow men avoid meeting, here and in dreams and in death, become symbolic of spiritual vision in part four.

The eyes are not here There are no eyes here

Barbara Seward, in her captivating study of the rose symbol in

Western literature, remarks that "The eyes, recalling Beatrice's, suggest not only love's betrayal but the spiritual grace that could, 2 if accepted, lead from the 'dead land' to God's rose." Not only can the hollow men not meet the eyes because of personal guilt and sinfulness, but they dread being confronted by what they are not.

The eyes, symbolizing spiritual light and wisdom, would compel the dead men to change and, thus, to suffer. As they are now, they are not ready for purgation, but purgation is what is needed.

Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men. 94

In order for the eyes to reappear, however, the hollow men must first confront them; that is, they must have the courage to face the eyes of the reproachful spirits whom they have so long avoided.

And meeting these eyes, they will be made aware of their guilt and eventually be led to a change of heart. This, says the narrator/ poet is "The hope only/Of empty men"; but it is also their only hope.

The connection of the eyes with the "perpetual star" and the "multifoliate rose" emphasizes further the spiritual nature of the salvation. The star, particularly, is a very beautiful symbol in this poem. Previously, it had been connected with the adjective

"fading" in two contexts, one suggesting the remoteness of the spirits of the dead and their disembodied state, and the other al• luding to the present world — "this valley of dying stars". From time immemorial men have gazed up at the heavens in order to read their destinies among the stars. Thus, the "fading star" tragically suggests the waning and eventual disappearance of mankind's greater destiny. The star symbol brings an elegiac tone to the poem, a mourning of the passing of greatness. Eliot's first major character,

Prufrock, uttered a line strangely premonitory: "I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.../And in short, I was afraid." The star — insofar as a symbol can be analyzed — symbolizes for man his spiritual and eternal destiny. It is hardly to be wondered, then, that man is made to tremble and fear when that star fades or is ex• tinguished. But, Eliot hints, the star is never completely put out; it only seems to be when men no longer have the spiritual vision to see it. The blindness of the hollow men has caused the star to grow 95

dim; but if their spiritual vision — their "eyes" — return, it will burn brightly once more, for the star is "perpetual". And,

significantly, if the star is seen again, so will be the rose. In

Miss Seward's words: "Providing a clear allusion to Dante's, 3

Eliot's multifoliate rose suggests Divine Love's enduring bloom."

The fact that the rose belongs to "death's twilight kingdom" stresses

a point I have mentioned earlier, namely, that it is the conscious• ness of man that creates the external equivalent of its state.

Whereas "death's twilight kingdom" is a spiritual state that re•

flects the earthly fears and barrenness of the hollow men, once

they undergo a change of consciousness they become capable of per•

ceiving the star and the rose. With their sins unpurged, they can

see only the reflection of their cursed condition.

The final section of The Hollow Men seizes on a child's

game for the opening and closing refrain, creating thereby a Blakean moral design of the contrast between Innocence and Experience. To be sure, the words of the child's song have been ironically altered

to correspond to the circumstances of experience. Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning.

The original refrain is "Here we go round the mulberry bush", but this

is not as important as the nature of the game itself and the meaning

that its pattern expresses. A very crude form of dance though it may

be, it, like "Ring Around the Roses", is essentially forming a mandala

or circular design of wholeness out of the movement of little feet.

In the Blakean sense, the child is already the unconscious possessor 96

and expressor of eternal truth. Eliot achieves a very effective contrast by the use of the childrens' song, sung in total innocence, and leaves no doubt as to his intended meaning. Very appropriately, the flower celebrated in the refrain of experience is a desert flower — the prickly pear — and not a rose or even a mulberry bush. The three middle stanzas pinpoint explicitly the gulf between the ideal and reality. The spectre that separates the two states is termed "the Shadow". From the development of the poem, we realize that it is not the fact of physical death that paralyzes man but spiritual death, and it is the latter that renders the former so fearsome. We might see in these stanzas the best description of the

"dissociation of sensibility".

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

The right-hand refrain from the Lord's Prayer still further emphasizes the disparity between "this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms" and the

Kingdom of Heaven. In the latter, there is no gulf nor dissociation; the ideal and the reality are one: reality is the ideal, and the ideal 97

is reality.

Eliot concludes the poem, however, not with an accomplished

vision of the rose but with a return to the altered child's refrain,

that is, a return to the world of experience. Ennui prevents the hollow men from making the effort to change. "Life is very long",

and they are hardly capable of rousing themselves for the arduous

task of redemption. Their broken prayer

For Thine is Life is

For Thine is the is the direct outcome of the dissociation of sensibility as described in the three previous stanzas. Speech is the result of the union of

"conception and creation", and when these are separated speech fails.

Ultimately, it leads to the break-down of meaning. The end of such a division, as Eliot rightly realized, is the end of the world. That statement sounds dramatic, but we must not visualize a violent or sudden cataclysm. No; the end of the world will come upon us slowly but inevitably as man becomes further divided in himself and as he loses the vision of his spiritual destiny. "Not with a bang but a whimper". There is in that line a tragic irony reflecting the devit• alization of language that corresponds to the senility of the world. *

The poem that climaxes the development foreshadowed in the previous poems is Ash Wednesday. Here, Eliot is no longer concerned with depicting the spiritual ills of society and modern man but with taking the necessary steps toward salvation. Accordingly, the poetry

from now on becomes more personal and individual in tone. The masks 98

which the poet/narrator used for concealment of his own personality

are now dropped and the voice of the narrator becomes identified with the voice of the poet, although the experience expressed by

the poet retains its universal character. In a paradoxical way,

the poetry becomes more personal yet more detached. When Hugh

Kenner says that "The Eliot poem implies a Voice, but it is not the

voice of the poet speaking, nor does it agitate a desert silence; 4

it is audible only to the reader's mind" , his argument, to me,

seems specious. Ultimately, it is, of course, the voice of the poet speaking through the voice in the poem; that is, Eliot in his early poetry is using a mask in order to project his awareness and

sensibility. In the later poetry, however, the masks are no longer needed; the poet has gained assurance and can allow himself to use

a bare "I", stripped of personality trappings. As for the voice being audible only to the reader's mind, what poetic voice is not when we are reading it? It would be an unearthly and strange poetry

indeed which was spoken out of a vacuum by a ghostly Voice. Logically

and necessarily, the voice, no matter how it appears in a poem, must be connected with somebody. The poet may be "invisible", standing behind his creation paring his fingernails, but he is not non-existent;

and in Eliot's poetry the voice always issues from the poet's con•

sciousness. It is a consciousness that has loved to dramatize itself

in various forms and that has thereby sought to escape from personality.

We might even say that the early Eliot used personality (that of the

dramatic monologues) to escape from his own. Ash Wednesday seems to

herald the casting off of personalities, of masks, and the assumption 99

of simplicity. Strangely enough, the poetry becomes more intimate

as a result of it. As Eliot becomes truly personal, he becomes more universal. In speaking of experience that could only issue from a deep involvement with the antitheses of life, the poet succeeds in expressing what is eternally true for each individual who chooses the path of perfection. The "I" is both a personal and an impersonal voice, but it is never a voice unconnected with the poet's experience. Different experiences or facets of the poet have demanded various dramatizations, that is all.

"Because I do not hope to turn again" is a strikingly apt opening line for a poem that marks the dedication to a path, of spiritual perfection.^ Taking its title from the Catholic holy day indicating the beginning of Lent — the season of repentance pre- ceeding Easter — Ash Wednesday announces the poet's concern with ultimate things, death and resurrection. The occasion provides the external correlation to his inner state of penance and contrition and stresses to him the dark fact, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shallt return". Divided into six parts, the poem has a circular unity and design that creates an impression of intense exploration around one problem. The problem — if it may be so called — is salvation: how is it to be achieved by those who exist spiritually dead in sin; how is it to be accepted by those who inwardly still rebel against the yoke imposed by God? The tension of Ash Wednesday resides in the narrator's conflict between nature and spirit, and

can be described as the difficulty of subduing rebellious nature or of making it "surrender" to the claims of the spirit. In one respect, 100

nature has already been sublimated; romantic love has been left behind and the woman has been transformed into the spiritual

"Lady". The object of passion has become the object of worship, and rather than holding man's fate of mortal happiness in her hands, the woman now holds his spiritual fate in much the same way. Ironically, it is from nature transformed that man seeks help to overcome nature.

Discussing Eliot's reliance on Dante for his specific symbols and method, Barbara Seward points out that Eliot's Lady

"is allied with Dante's Beatrice and Virgin figures in being accompanied by imagery of whiteness and light, and identified with symbols of Garden and Rose. Perhaps less definable than

Dante's but meant to convey analogous meaning, Eliot's symbols are likewise expressions of spiritual progress and its goal. Guided by grace of the Lady up the purgatorial stairs, the soul will at last attain the Garden of the heavenly Rose wherein 'the unspoken word, the Word unheard' is understood. But Eliot, unlike Dante, is only at the beginning of the way and writes not of a vision remembered but of one desired. Suspended between sense and spirit, doubt and faith, death and rebirth, he seeks through purgation the transfiguration of temporal desert into eternal Garden."0 Her last point is one well taken up, for, contrary to Dante, Eliot does not seem ready for the final vision. He is, in many ways, attempt• ing to achieve by determination and will what Dante achieved naturally and effortlessly. That is to say, in reading Dante's experience, we feel that an unconscious, natural development led him to his way; 101

whereas, in reading Eliot's, it seems to be more of a conscious,

intellectual decision to pursue that way. As Eliot himself writes

in part one, he prays to "forget/These matters that with myself I

too much discuss/Too much explain". I do not believe it is too bizarre to say that nature led Dante to his destined spiritual path;

and, for that reason, he achieved an organic unity of being that

Eliot never did. Nature did not lead Eliot to his spiritual goal;

rather, his will did. From the poetry of these men it can clearly be seen that the way of the spirit is paved by the wisdom of nature;

and, if it is not, then that way must forever be a forced and

arduous one, founded on domination instead of co-operation.

Part one of Ash Wednesday deals with the renunciation of

earthly and human things. Worldly hope is exchanged for spiritual hope. The narrator has not only resigned himself to his present

condition — one of age and emptiness — but has surrendered the

many cravings of the ego. In addition to covetous worldly wishes,

such as "Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope", there are wrong spiritual desires which he has come to abandon: "I renounce

the blessed face/And renounce the Voice". The image God as created by the fearful ego must also be sacrificed if man is to ascend to

Reality.7 He prays to the as yet unspecified Lady to "Teach us to

care and not to care/Teach us to sit still." The lesson she must

teach man is to renounce desire for the wrong things (which comes

down to everything connected with nature), and to care only for what

is good for his soul. There is a latent Eastern asceticism present

here as well, as the first 'commandment' of Hindu and Buddhist per•

fection is "Kill out desire". 102

The sense of what is being sacrificed is hinted at in

the following lines in which the narrator expresses his sense of being barred from earthly or human joys:

Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

The last words, "for there is nothing again", repeat the familiar pattern of Eliot's earthly experience. The descriptions begin with promise, with a sense of nature's blessing, but inevitably end in frustration and despair. For him, even the "positive hour" has only an "infirm glory", and he is always aware of the imper• fection and want in human affairs. Still, there is a lamenting over an unrealized portion of life, it seems to me, and the self- constructed rejoicing of the narrator raises considerable doubts.

As has been mentioned above, the approach is excessively mental and results in the feeling of dryness and agedness. The entire age imagery in Eliot's verse, which goes back to the beginning of his career, is symbolic of never having lived. From the very first, his preoccupation was with "growing old", and the several masks adopted to convey that feeling were indicative of a separation from the mainstream of natural life. As if he could not resist one final dramatization, Eliot writes in parenthesis: "(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)" In the closing stanza of part one, he sustains the metaphor and evokes the seasoned imagery of dessication.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and drier than the will 103

The drought imagery, already explored earlier, is appropriate in yet another sense which this poem brings out. Imprisoned in the will or mind, and motivated by its dictates, the individual is cut

off from the "springs" of life so that what results is literally

a dryness of the psyche. Eliot connects the dryness with a loss of spiritual water, but what appears more likely from the testimony of the poetry is that the springs of nature and spirit are one.

In part two, Eliot develops the image of the Lady which had only been foreshadowed in part one by the closing lines of the

"Hail Mary". While she is not the Virgin Mary, she is symbolic of her as well as of Beatrice and perhaps the Church. Clearly, the kind of help he is asking of her is the kind which Dante received

from Beatrice: intercession with God, and guidance to salvation.

Very interestingly, the "I" of the narrator has been reduced to bare bones, indicating not only an extreme degree of abjectness and humility before his intercessor, but the dust to which all

flesh is reducable as well. The "three white leopards" who have

"fed to satiety" on his corpse symbolize both the lust that devours 9 man and sin in general. The leopards, like Dante's three beasts,

occupy the role of devourers of man's soul. Traditionally, the

leopard has been regarded as a symbol of destruction; but, according

to some mythologies, it is a beast from whom the hero emerges regen•

erated.10 Certainly, the narrator's bones hope to be resurrected,

as Ash Wednesday anticipates Easter Day. Eliot makes it clear that

"there is no life in them", and that the seed of sin is death. 104

And I who am here dissembled Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

Fertility is again blighted and the image of the desert made pre-

dominan t.

In the midst of this hopeless scene, the bones make their

litanical appeal to the Lady. Invoked by a series of paradoxes, she

is the spiritual vision of the poet.

Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose

The goal to which he would be led is the "Garden/Where all loves end".

Neither "love unsatisfied" or "love satisfied" holds out any peace to

the narrator, and what he appears to be looking for is as much of an

oblivion as a paradise. The garden of earthly bliss is a dangerous

Eden where love ends in despair and bitterness; this is one "torment".

Another "torment" is finding that human fulfillment falls short of

one's expectations, and this is deemed even worse than the former.

The spiritual Garden is Eliot's ideal of love, an ideal whose perfect

expression he has found in Dante; but Eliot's ideal of love has shunned

the garden of nature and, instead of passing through it, has sought a

detour. Significantly, he conceives the ideal Garden as a place "where

all love ends", rather than as a place where it reigns or truly begins.

His Lady, as the patroness of the Garden, is also a rather sterile

creature; certainly, she shows none of the compassionate and loving 105

concern of a Beatrice. Although she is invoked by the symbol of

"Rose", and accorded a string of fine epithets: "Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden", she remains a cold shadow of the Love embodied by Dante's imagination.

We receive a fuller picture of the Lady in part four, after the narrator has passed through the stage of purgation. The stairs indicate spiritual ascent and the leaving behind of illusion.

"At the first turning of the second stair", he has reached the point of realizing that hope and despair are themselves illusions; and

"At the second turning of the second stair", images of life are extinguished, and complete darkness reigns. The closer he approaches eternal reality, the farther away he moves from the delusive and illusory images wound around temporal existence. Not without a touch of pride in his humility, the speaker announces with some satisfaction: "I left them twisting, turning below". The final crisis of ascent comes "at the first turning of the third stair" where the narrator is compelled to view for the last time the image of the earthly garden. It is seen through "a slotted window bellied like the fig's fruit", indicating the erotic or romantic nature of the scene. What he sees is perhaps a condensation of past memories associated with human love. The images of this idyllic, pastoral tableau evoke an almost pagan atmosphere.

And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute. Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair;

The effect of the memory is one of "distraction"; momentarily, the 106

narrator feels trapped in the scene, but finally he moves beyond it too.

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair Climbing the third stair.

In contrast to the temporal garden of erotic love, part four describes the timeless garden of spiritual grace wherein the

Lady walks. She is depicted here as a restorer, and what she re• stores to man is the lost vision. The vision has been lost through sinfulness but, like the "perpetual star", it remains present and forever accessible in the timeless realm of eternity. Through time, man has lost the vision of his greater destiny and of the ultimate reality. Thus, time has become the arch-enemy. Its ceaseless passage reminds man of the shortness of his days and of the impos• sibility of making up lost or wasted time. The sins committed in time can never be atoned for in time. For this reason, the speaker prays:

...Redeem The time. Redeem

The unreal vision in the higher dream

This is the yearning and poignant pleading of the soul, resembling the child in its dependence on a power greater than itself for the realization of the wish. Only in the timeless realm of imagination can the aged, sinful man be forgiven and restored to the youthful innocence of a child.

...restoring Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring With a new verse the ancient rhyme.... The garden of grace, moreover, is the reality behind the appearance; and the narrator must penetrate beyond the temporal to arrive at the 10 7

timeless.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue Between the yews, behind the garden god, Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed

but spoke no word

Not insignificantly, the Lady stands "between the yews, behind the

garden god". Symbolizing faith, death, and resurrection, the yew

trees suggest the pillars of death through which the individual must pass before he can approach the Lady.11 Possessed of faith,

the narrator must die to the old self in order to be spiritually

reborn. In another sense, they anticipate "the last blue rocks"

of part five. Suggesting the Scylla and Charybdis of faith and

doubt between which the narrator must navigate, there is an inter• esting light thrown on the relation of the rocks to the yews by

the fact that the Greeks planted yew trees in pairs to symbolize 12

the heavenly Twins, themselves images of good and evil. Pan,

as the spirit of the woodland or earthly garden, must also be passed beyond. Behind the god of fertility stands the Virgin.

Although she is coolly silent, the poet wishes us to believe that

the springing up of the fountain is "the token of the word unheard".

The closing line of part four suggests that his "exile" in the

earthly, temporal, and sinful garden is soon to be ended. The final words of the unfinished sentence are: "Show unto us the blessed

fruit of Thy womb, Jesus".

The problem of the narrator, as appears in the final two

parts of the poem, is the difficulty of "surrender". Tormented by

doubt and the will to believe, he walks in the "last desert" which

is connected with the earthly garden and, archetypally, with Eden. 108

The desert in the garden the garden in the desert Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple- seed.

He prays to the Lady to help him make the leap into faith.

...Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray:

Pray for those who chose and oppose

Here we see exposed Eliot's central religious dilemma — the dilemma

of the rational man: scepticism. This problem was intensified in

the seventeenth century when the claims of so-called "reason" and

science came into conflict with the claims of faith and religion.

The "dissociation of sensibility" between reason and faith could

only have come about because man's consciousness was no longer un• ified and could not see that reason and faith are not hostile at•

titudes, but expressions of a single intelligence. Consequently,

reason came to have a very one-sided meaning for Western man. Only

that which is verifiable by the senses, by the scientific method, by the rules of logic, has been deemed reasonable, and whatever is

unprovable by these means is either non-existent, doubtful, or

"mythical". As a result, modern man has suffered the kind of conflict

that we see in Eliot. He, too, has a predominantly intellectual and

"rational" approach to religion. His religion must be as ordered, 13

logical, and foolproof as the scientist's calculations. Of course,

Eliot realizes that into the spiritual sphere man can only enter by

faith. But witness the tremendous turmoil engendered by this real•

ization, and, what is more, the knowledge that he does not spontan•

eously possess this necessary ticket to Nirvana. Basically, Eliot's

poetry is not religious; at most, It can only try to be. That is, 109

religious symbols and images can be thrown in at will, but they lack the natural life that makes them an organic part of the poetry.

Ironically, the images that do have a life of their own, and that will always grip the reader with a terrible intensity, are those of doubt and despair. When Eliot writes of the imprisonment of the modern consciousness in the fetters of the ego, of the "fading star of our lost kingdoms", or of the "desert", then his poetry conveys a moving experience with which all those who have suffered a similar consciousness can empathize. But when, like a desperate cook, he steals another's spiritual recipe, and throws roses, virgins, unicorns into the poetic pot in the vain hope of achieving a similar chef d'oeuvre, the result must often be strained. As a description of the anxiety and inquietude aroused in modern man by the dissociation of faith and reason, Ash Wednesday succeeds in stressing this problem.

It reveals as much the lifelessness of a spiritual path undertaken by the dictates of the will as the lifelessness of the desert state.

The narrator declares that, having chosen the Christian way of salva• tion, he cannot "hope to turn again". He must persevere in his self- willed journey toward the Absolute. But the vision that leads him on is not so much his own as it is a borrowed one. What makes Dante's poem so alive is that it is the vision of his own imagination; therefore, the symbols of rose and Lady are deeply rooted in his consciousness and are watered by the springs of nature. Eliot's symbols, on the contrary, fail to convey life because they are not the original products of his own imagination; what they do relate is the kind of dilemma that Dante never knew — scepticism resulting from the divided self. * 110

Part II

Jacques Maritain in his Preface to Metaphysics dis•

tinguishes two aspects of every form of knowledge, "the mystery

and the problem". The mystery aspect, he says, "predominates where knowledge is most ontological, where it seeks to discover,

either intuitively or by analogy, being in itself and the secrets

of being..."; whereas the problem aspect pertains to the solving

of a solution, that is, "where knowledge is least ontological... 14

as in empirical knowledge, and in the sciences of phenomena...."

This analysis proves, I think, very illuminating when looking at

Eliot's last poems gathered under the title of Pour Quartets. Here,

to a greater and more successful extent than ever before, the poet

is concerned with metaphysical questions and concentrates on the

"mystery" aspect of knowledge. Not only the substance of the poems, but their form especially reveals the preoccupation with being. In

Maritain's words, "...where the mystery aspect prevails the intellect has to penetrate more and more deeply the same object. The mind is

stationary turning around a fixed point. Or rather it pierces further

and further into the same depth. This is progress in the same place,

progress by deepening."15 The complexity of Four Quartets lies, there•

fore, not so much in the formal presentation (although this is in no 16 way simple as the analogy with its musical counterpart shows ) as in

the object of apprehension and contemplation. The object toward which

Eliot's intellectual and emotional force is directed is being or

Reality; but because the very nature this object is one intimately

and essentially bound up with the subject, it creates linguistic Ill

problems for the poet. On the one hand, the Reality which he is trying to apprehend is "wholly other"; it is not this world's reality, which Eliot regards as shallow and sordid; it is some• thing that transcends man and man's ordinary experience. As such, being is the object which is posited by the finite intellect and with which it strives to unite itself. On the other hand, this

Reality is not so far beyond man as he might think; paradoxically, it is a part of the phenomenal and mundane world. Being, as such, is not only an object, but the subject as well; that is, the "other" which man strives to realize objectively is the very basis and ground of his own subjectivity. Being ultimately transcends and unites subject and object, and the host of other dualities by which everyday existence is torn. For the poet, whose tools are words, any endeavor to convey insights and experiences reaching beyond the borders of relative existence must be fraught with perils and frustrations. Language reflects the categories of the mind, and it follows that the conceptual divisions within that mind will be expressed by the language. But when the mind once again turns aside from dispersal and seeks a state of unity, language strangely seems to be inadequate to perform its task.

In facing this problem, Eliot was not alone, as he realized.

His Symbolist forerunners, particularly Mallarme, had progressively and deliberately sought to indent the boundaries of the Absolute, and had failed. Or, rather, it would be more just to say that lang• uage had failed. Like the mystical writers of every age, the

Symbolists also came to that point where speech could or would not 112

go farther and where silence was the only goal. Numbering him•

self among that party ("Since our concern was speech, and speech

impelled us/To purify the dialect of the tribe"), Eliot has en•

countered the same linguistic difficulty and attendant frustration.

Like the Symbolists and the metaphysical poets who were forced to

use language in new and bizarre ways in order to approach a unity beyond dialectics, Eliot has relied chiefly upon symbols to suggest

the state of being or of absolute reality.

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us—a symbol: A symbol perfected in death.

Yet he has been careful not to succumb to an overly-private symbol-

ogy such as leaves the reader excluded from the meaning. While

some of Eliot's symbols are taken from intense moments of personal

experience, they are woven into a larger symbolic pattern which

rests on the foundation of Western poetic tradition. Thus, the

"mystery" which he constantly contemplates and attempts to reveal

is not an idiosyncratic vision but one, as it were, received or

transmitted. It remains the same "mystery" beheld only by different

eyes; but in order to be beheld in any fresh way at all a sense of

tradition is essential. This is, in fact, the crucial point about

this particular type of knowledge stressed by Maritain: "Obviously,

under the conditions of human life, progress of this kind requires

an intellectual tradition, the firm continuity of a system based on

principles which do not change.17

The tradition within which Eliot is writing and which he

has faithfully espoused is nothing less Imposing than the Western — 113

and, one should add, as he understands it. Everyone by now is

familiar with his famous judgement that "...the historical sense

compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of

Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a

18

simultaneous order". Certainly, such a consciousness of one's

literary legacy is commendable, but it is not so much a requisite

for the artist as it is for the critic. For the critic, it is

indispensable; he must at all times bring his historical conscious• ness into play in judging an individual work; but for the artist

it is less important and may even constitute a barrier for his private imagination. I cannot frequently help feeling that had

Eliot written less consciously with the blood of his ancestors in his veins, his work might have taken a different turn and have

appeared more spontaneous. In his case, one is tempted to believe

that the critic was the poet's greatest enemy. His judgements

and aesthetic propensities as a critic were conservative and highly spiritual or ideal; this led him, undoubtedly, to make that rather

late regretted manifesto about being "a Classicist in literature, an

Anglo-Catholic in religion and a Royalist in politics". The poet within Eliot, however, often seems less than converted. By a diabol•

ical psychological law, there lives a Romantic, a pagan, and an

anarchist in every pious dogmatic heart — although in a severly

enslaved condition. A careful reading of Eliot's poetry and prose

reveals many otherwise inexplicable contradictions which 114

has already taken the pains to enumerate. While one may agree

or disagree with Mr. Winter's conclusion that these contradictions

make Eliot a "decadent" poet and an extremely befuddled critic,

I would regard them as evidence of the tension between the critic

and the poet, both of which functions were highly developed in him.

As Arthur Lovejoy elsewhere has pointed out, "It is only the

narrowest or the dullest minds that are — if any are — completely

in harmony with themselves; and the most important and most charac•

teristic thing about many a great author is the diversity, the often

latently discordant diversity, of the ideas to which his mind is

responsive, and which manifest themselves at one and another point

20

in what he writes." The sense of tradition, which is nothing

other than an attentiveness to the growth and evolution of the human consciousness throughout the ages and the ability to discern

its collective patterns, must always be consciously present in the

critic, but in the artist it should be an unconscious and spontan•

eous apparition, not an enforced observance.

That no genuine artist at the moment of creation may choos what tradition he shall write in is stated by Eliot himself. No sensible author, in the midst of something that he is trying to write, can stop to consider whether it is going to be romantic or the opposite. At the moment when one writes, one is what one is, and damage of a lifetime, and of having been born into an unsettled society, cannot be repaired at the moment of composition.21

Insofar as Eliot tried to steer his art in a certain direction in

keeping with his intellectual and critical allegiances, he achieved

great control over his poetry, but frequently it betrays its natural 115

bent or its would-be inclination, and this results in the tone of

22 regret for what was never realized. It is a mistake to think that the Western tradition is a single path either to be trod or heretically forsaken. That aspect of it with which Eliot identified and on which he based his critical principles and art was the ideal• ist strain; and, certainly, if he thought that it was the predominant or orthodox one he was not wrong. A careful study of the Western tradition would very likely reveal that Idealism has been the most dominant and all-pervasive influence in shaping our culture and history. What we must content ourselves with at this point, however, is to indicate that Eliot's identification with the idealist strain of the Western tradition gave weight and scope to his thought and tension to his art.

Although Four Quartets attest to a greater peace of mind and to a more complete reconciliation of opposites, they still con• tain the characteristic tension so evident in all of Eliot's poetry.

Whether we call that tension one between spirit and nature, Classic and Romantic, or time and eternity does not really matter; any number of such distinctions would apply. The significant factor emerging from Four Quartets is the poet's acceptance of the necessity of strife. Prefacing his poems with fragments from Heraclitus, he in• vites comparison with that thinker who, in antiquity, was referred

to as "the dark" because of the spiritual and mystical nature of his

23 writings. The fundamental thought running throughout the Fragments is that the life-process is one of "strife" or of the conflict of opposing forces, and that balance, harmony, or "measure" is necessary 116

for the maintenance of life. Out of the apparent discord of

duality comes, in fact, harmony and oneness. "Opposition unites.

From what draws apart results the most beautiful harmony. All

2 A

things take place by strife." The emphasis on rhythm in the

ritual and symbolic function of the dance in Four Quartets bears

out Eliot's concern with devising a pattern in which the

opposites will be balanced. Like the later Yeats, Eliot saw in

the symbol of the dance the perfect integration of all the cosmic

and human forces which battle within the soul of man. I have

already discussed the mandala aspect of the dance in regard to

The Hollow Men; but whereas in that poem it was used as a travesty

of wholeness and as a comment upon the disintegration modern man's

psyche, here it may be said to assume its proper function.

Another symbol of integration — the center — has already

received extensive treatment by critics. The author of one of the most complete studies tells us that in Four Quartets "...the 'still point' becomes the source of all energy, pattern, and movement, the

spiritual center where all opposites are reconciled, the complete

vision perceived, complete reality experienced, and complete being

25

attained." Describing the "still point" concept, Mrs. Cornwell

elaborates four features: "the concept of certain absolutes...",

"the concept of an abstract, spiritual center outside oneself...",

"emphasis upon the timeless moment...", and "emphasis upon a 26

conscious way of life...." That the center, and the path leading

to it, have always had a mystical significance for man is well docu•

mented by Mircea Eliade. 117

The center, then, is pre-eminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality. Similarly, all the other symbols of absolute reality (trees of life and immortality, Fountains of Youth, etc.) are also situated at a center. The road leading to the center is a "difficult road" (durohana), and this is verified at every level of reality: difficult convolutions of a temple (as a Borobudur); pilgrimage to sacred places (Mecca, Hardwar, Jerusalem); danger-ridden voyages of the heroic expeditions in search of the Golden Fleece, the Golden Apples, the Herb of Life; wandering in labyrinths; diffi• culties of the seeker for the road to the self, to the "center" of his being, and so on. The road is arduous, fraught with perils, be• cause it is, in fact, a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divinity. Attaining the center is equivalent to a con• secration, an initiation; yesterday's profane and illusory existence gives place to a new, to a life that is real, enduring, and effective.

From this rather long passage we can clearly see that the direction into which Eliot is moving is one wherein "the human is trans-humanized". The moment of realization or enlightenment, how• ever, is transitory. Man does not remain in a perpetual state of beatitude; the laws of nature draw him back into the flux of phenomenal reality. The eternal and enduring vision is an snatched out of the fleeting moments of time. In this moment of moments, time is transcended, and man receives a glimpse of Reality. For the rest,

"the sad waste time", he must content himself to know that he has had

the vision and go on enduring the war within his members. It is the moment of epiphany that redeems the time. I would like to reserve

fuller comment upon Eliot's conception of time and his so-called historical sense until the poems have themselves been looked at, but 118

suffice it to say for now that the evidence presented in them weighs essentially against an acceptance of time and history

and, hence, the world and nature.

Essential to an understanding of Four Quartets is the real•

ization that Eliot's thought is operating on Idealist principles.

Throughout the poems we encounter Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas.

Even the choice of the musical metaphor Is entirely in accord with

Platonic thought, in which the harmonies of music played a special part. The belief in an absolute realm of reality or pure forms which this world, at best, only imperfectly reflects is found in

these verses and results in the subsequent world and experience

disparagement. His religious position therefore derives its impulse from the Christian Platonist strain, of which St. Augustine was the adherent and promulgator. R. W. Harris, in his fascinating study of the disintegration of the humanist tradition in the eighteenth century, points out that humanism was based on Christian

Platonism and Neo-Platonism but that under the impact of the new science and empirical philosophy arising in the seventeenth and 2 g eighteenth centuries, it collapsed. Considering Eliot's early preoccupation with and later renunciation of modern humanism, the interesting question is raised whether Eliot does not, in fact, hark back to its original form — a form which did not survive into

the modern era; but this cannot be explored here. I merely raise

the question to throw Eliot's religio-philosophical position into

a clearer focus. The combination in Four Quartets of Platonic and

Neo-Platonic idealism, Christianity, and emphasis on classical order 119

and form reveals an affinity both in taste and temperament with the old humanism. The new humanism, with its disengagement from religion, lacked for Eliot any permanent foundation and goal and, as such, drove him to seek alone the Christianity it rejected.

Eliot's Christianity is, however, not world-affirming and in many respects lacks its true spirit. From these poems we can see that

the spirit of Christianity is alloyed with that of Buddhism and

Hinduism, among other substances. Possibly the one tradition that

Eliot would have felt most at home in is the older humanism; as it was, he lived in a time wherein all traditions were imperiled and resented, and thus his art is a curious combination of many strains.

Purity is no doubt too much to demand in an age of conglomeration

and confusion. To simply take Four Quartets as an expression of

Christian sensibility and to be blind to the other philosophic strains interwoven with it — not to say determining it — results not only in one-sidedness of interpretation but also inability to

understand otherwise puzzling sections.

*

"Burnt Norton" opens the Quartets with a meditation that

recalls the plea expressed in Ash Wednesday: "Redeem the time"; but whereas in that poem Eliot had found no answer to his problem, here he has advanced to the stage of insight into its mystery. All

depends on one's viewpoint, the first ten lines proclaim. From an

absolute standpoint, such as the poet now adopts, time is only a

category of the phenomenal world, an illusion, a veil woven by maya, 29 or a symbolic form of the mind. Seen from the perspective of 120

eternity, there is only now, the forever present. The question then arises, how is time redeemed if there is really no past and no future? How does one redeem an illusion, if you will.

The only answer is, of course, to break through the illusion.

Having penetrated to the Reality behind the veil of appearance, man is "saved"; henceforth, he knows that reality is eternity and that ordinary time has no value except to prepare man for his final break-through. "What might have been" is only a pro• jected possibility; whether it is actualized or not is of little consequence from the absolutist standpoint since the goal of all experience is the same: its own transcendence.

The excursion "into our first world" is such a projected possibility. The episode is only an abstract construction of the poet's mind meant to simulate "the passage which we did not take" and "the door we never opened/Into the rose garden." Reminiscent of Frost's "The Road Not Taken", it attempts to recreate the by• passed opportunity,

But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.

Led by the "deception of the thrush", possibly the illusion-creating imagination, the narrator finds himself in a garden of innocence and romance. This "first world", very much like that of our archetypal first parents', is peopled by the ghosts of those who inhabited his childhood. But this is the world of insubstantial shadows, of images created by the mind of the narrator and, therefore, they are largely 30 lifeless and mechanical. 121

There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool.

Because the momentary vision of the filling of the empty pond with water and the rising of the lotus is also only an imaginary one, it soon evaporates. Perhaps the passing of the cloud marks the return of actuality dispersing the fantasy. Such an experience never happened in time, much to the dreamer's regret, and reality shows the pool to be "empty".

Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind Cannot bear very much reality.

The gulf between man's most-cherished dreams and most-disappointing actuality can swallow up and destroy him through despair. Mingled with the "unheard music" and the laughter of children is a tone of melancholy and regret, and we are reluctantly reminded that this fantasy represents one of life's missed possibilities. The "rose garden" of time was never entered into, and to this the "dust on a bowl of rose leaves" sadly attests. Fortunately, the narrator is saved from despair by his philosophic attitude based, as we have already seen, on absolutist principles.

What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

The transcendence of time and of all experience connected with it is described through a series of paradox in part two. Relying 122

on the kind of diction generally used by mystics when attempting to convey the ineffable and inexpressable, Eliot proceeds by the juxtaposition of opposites to indicate the unity that contains and transcends them.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline.

Only the symbol of the dance can adequately suggest the integration of diversity that characterizes the "still point". Louis Martz has indicated that the image of the wheel and the point "lies at the heart of Eliot's poetry":

This eternally decreed pattern of suffering, which is also action, and of action, which is also suffering, Eliot symbolizes by the wheel which ^ always turns, yet at the axis, always remains still.

The only comment I would like to add to this is that the wheel is one of the chief symbols of Buddhism and Hinduism as it represents the karmic cycle of cause and effect to which the individual is chained until he wins enlightenment. This significance is overtly present in Eliot's conception of salvation.

The inner freedom from the practical desire, The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion...

The universal consciousness which is attained at the moment of enligh enment is contrasted to the "little consciousness" of everyday life.

The laws of nature, in fact, protect man "from heaven and damnation" 123

that is, from absolutes. Although man is too weak to endure absolute reality (and a touch of scorn does not seem to be absent here), Eliot maintains that it must be sought in this basically unreal world.

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time is time conquered.

Here we encounter most plainly the Platonic and Neo-Platonic idealism of Four Quartets. Although the world or nature is not ul• timately real (Reality being a transcendental absolute), it neverthe• less provides intimations of Reality and correspondences to it. The opening passage of part two elaborates this theme more fully.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars. The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars Ascend to summer in the tree We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before But reconciled among the stars.

We see here the expression of a strain of Idealism on which the Romantics heavily drew; but whereas they could still affirm the world, Eliot belongs to that later group which largely denied it. Not only does

Baudelaire come to mind in this context, but, more strikingly, in the following. Speaking of the "old" world which the vision of Reality makes intelligible, Eliot singles out its two salient characteristics,

"its partial ecstasy" and "its partial horror". In his last Journal,

Baudelaire wrote: "Tout enfant, j'ai senti dans mon coeur deux sentiments 124

contradictoires; l'horreur de la vie et l'extase de la vie."

We obtain a much fuller sense of Eliot's world disparage• ment in part three. It is doubtful whether he could have been more aware of the evil in life than Baudelaire, yet he rejects life on almost less grounds. Baudelaire's outpourings of spleen are the evidence of love, and there is always a sense of acceptance of life and the world. In Eliot's verse we do not even detect hate but, what is more frightening and damaging, scorn and indifference.

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 That blows before and after time, Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs Time before and time after. Eructation of unhealthy souls Into the faded air, the torpid Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London. Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney, Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

The world has neither the virtue of "light" nor "darkness" and is regarded chiefly as an unfortunate place whose only value lies in affording man the opportunity to escape it. The only world that has any true worth is "that which is not world" or absolute reality.

Man reaches this state by a process of turning inward, such as is followed by Eastern and Western mystics.

Descend lower, descend only Into the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, 125

Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; This is the one way, and the other Is the same, not in movement But abstention from movement;...

Part four poses the question of resurrection after this

period of darkness in terms of metaphor.

Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carried the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling? Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.

As in The Waste Land, the flower imagery conveys the sense of Spring's

awakening after the cold darkness of death; here the death has been

to things of the world, and the awakening is to more than Spring.

It is to "light" or rebirth.

Transposed into the realm of art, the absolutist or idealist

philosophy produces aesthetic principles such as formulated by the

Symbolists, and in part five Eliot reveals his affinity with their

aims. The importance placed on form or pattern, music, mystery, and

conscious discipline is symptomatic of an art whose aspiration is to

approximate the experience of the Absolute with words. As in the 33

case of the Symbolists, for whom the word assumed a sacred meaning ,

Eliot's discussion of the literary word leads into an analogy with

the Word of St. John's gospel. Just as the Word incarnate was "attacked by voices of temptation" in the desert so, too, are the words employed

by the poet's art. 126

...Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them....

Again, we nqte the correspondence between two layers of reality:

one is the absolute and the other is the relative; but both are

connected analogically. Thus, the dissociation between spirit and

nature does not only take place in the category of experience but

also in that of art. What we evidence is a thoroughgoing split

that pervades the entire consciousness of the poet and that is never bridged, although within the limits of this dualistic frame• work he now works the conflict of opposites into a total design.

"The detail of the pattern is movement", a manifestation of "desire", but the essence of the pattern is immobility. Love is like the

"unmoved Mover", "itself unmoving,/Only the cause and end of movement".

The conclusion of "Burnt Norton" summarizes the poet's

sentiments about the strife and suffering man must endure in phen•

omenal reality, this place of exile from which he strives to be

liberated. Only the moment of release wherein he achieves the

vision of true Reality and wherein time is redeemed because trans•

cended does Eliot praise.

Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

With the reappearance of the children's laughter we somehow feel that

not only is Eliot associating childhood innocence and purity with the

spiritual state ("To enter the Kingdom of Heaven you must become as

little children"), but that he is unconsciously expressing a desire

to be rid of the responsibility of time imposed by the world. In the 12 7

world of childhood, time is non-existent. Maturation demands that man assume the burden of time and of history, that he take the world upon his shoulders, as it were; or, to use a Christian meta• phor, to carry the cross. From this first part of Four Quartets we can already see that Eliot's impulse is not to shoulder the world — for that implies recognition of its realness and worth — but to escape and to disown it. Certainly, he is going to endure it humbly but that, too, is a virtue of passivity. The Idealist philosophy and Eastern religious tradition reveal themselves as influences upon Eliot's Christianity and constitute the intellectual basis of the poetry.

*

"East Coker" explores the historical aspect of time and the value of human experience. "In my beginning is my end" brings to mind Alpha and Omega and that ancient symbol suggestive of the law of cycle and necessity circumfrencing matter, the serpent with 34 the tail in its mouth. J. J. Sweeney, in his article on this poem , informs us that "in my end is my beginning" was the motto of Mary,

Queen of Scots, and that its essential import is to stress "the cyclical nature of history". Certainly no one could dispute the last point as the entire poem develops and confirms it. What is interesting to note is the disparaging and negative tone of the verse as it describes this cycle of generation and destruction.

Indeed, the cyclical conception of time and history reinforces the viewpoint that ordinary reality is really valueless. 128

...In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Here, as throughout "East Coker", Eliot echoes the Preacher of the

Book of Ecclesiastes both in style and opinion. The theme of that book, developed by variation and repetition, is the emptiness of things human: "All is vanity I" (Ecc. 1:3) Knowledge, wealth, love, life itself, all these things are illusory. Life is no more than a succession of unrelated and meaningless events, ending in senility,

35 and death befalling wise and foolish, rich and poor alike.

The sense of pattern superimposed on the cycle of human events is elaborated in the Gouvernor section. Recalling his

Renaissance ancestor, Thomas Elyot, the poet harkens back to a humanist past which, as I have earlier mentioned, did not survive into the modern age. Once again, we encounter the symbol of the dance and, significantly, it belongs to the unseen world. Behind the ugly earthly scene of a dark afternoon, where "the dahlias sleep in the empty silence", lies the real world of mystery and enchantment.

Performing the sacred ritual, their dance symbolizes the conjunction of opposites and the universal rhythm that sustains the world in motion. One cannot help feeling part of an archaic world-view here, as if the modern reason or sensibility had been suspended. Anthro• pologists have amassed sufficient research to convince us that the dance has mythical origins and attempts to imitate archetypal gestures

that raise man out profane time. Understandably enough, if the 129

modern sensibility is a fragmented one, then the poet's attempt to find wholeness quite naturally leads him to a time before that fragmentation occurred. The archaic or pre-modern world-view is the one to which Eliot consistently returns in these poems.

The prospect of "the last things" or cosmic upheaval is entertained by the poet in part two. The natural horrors and aberrations believed by the ancients to accompany the conclusion of a world cycle are here adumbrated.

What is the late November doing With the disturbance of the spring And creatures of the summer heat, And snowdrops writhing under feet And hollyhocks that aim too high Red into grey and tumble down Late roses filled with early snow? Thunder rolled by the rolling stars Simulates triumphal cars Deployed in constellated wars Scorpion fights against the Sun Until the Sun and Moon go down Comets weep and Leonids fly Hunt the heavens and the plains Whirled in a votex that shall bring The world to that destructive fire Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

There follows a self-criticism that leads the poet into a meditation on the purpose of his art and of all experience. Having arrived at the age of retrospection, he questions whether the virtues popularly believed to attend old age are actual or merely negligible. He decides in favour of the latter, and insists that the "wisdom" of the elders is largely over-rated because it is not rooted in a true philosophy or religion. Their "darkness" is ignorance because it is not the darkness of purgation; in the latter, human wisdom is exchanged for divine. The wisdom of age is largely based on experience, and it is 130

ultimately all experience that Eliot negates. We have already seen

in regard to "Burnt Norton" how the absolutist standpoint aims at

the transcendence of experience; here, we witness its final result.

...There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been....

True it is that "knowledge derived from experience" can petrify man

in too conservative a mold unless used wisely, but Eliot's implica•

tion goes much deeper than this. His negation of experience is based on negation of the world and time. If this world Is only an

imperfect shadow of Reality, largely an illusion, and if time is

only the cyclical repetition of pre-ordained events over which man has no control ("birth and death"), then experience is also subject

to distortion and insignificance. The data provided by our senses

is untrustworthy because conditioned by the world. Throughout this

earthly existence man is threatened by the illusions of life, and his downfall is to construe them for reality.

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble, On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, Risking enchantment.... The Yeatsian fury of old age here simulated by Eliot ends on the note

of endurance.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

If the world and time are to be patiently endured until the spiritual

release is accomplished, and if one must be on guard against the 131

deception of human experience, then truly humility is the only safe excercise of will left to man. The way out of time and history is charted in part three. Playing on the associations of the word "dark", Eliot indicates two implications: one is the darkness of spiritual blindness that would lead to the death of the soul (such as was Samson's before his return to God), and the other is the darkness of St. John of the Cross, the dark night of sense and spirit that leads to eternal light. Going into the first darkness of death and damnation are The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters. The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairman of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors,... In the sense that all men must die corporally, "we all go with them", but Eliot plainly indicates that he does not intend to follow them into the everlasting darkness. Choosing the mystic way of St. John, he will suffer the deprivation of this life in order to win the abundance of the next. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Thus "the agony/Of death and birth" is undergone spiritually and forever transcended. The spiritual disease associated with the profane darkness of the world is healed by Christ. He, "the wounded surgeon", removes 132

man's iniquity by painful means, but his motive is compassion.

Again, the image of the world is an unpleasant one: "The whole earth is our hospital". Original sin or "Adam's curse" was re• moved by Christ's sacrifice, but salvation demands man's co-operation.

The process of purgation is both difficult and hope-giving, for it leads to the new life.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The roses and the briars symbolize the sweetness and the pain of this process.

"East Coker" proclaims that "Old men ought to be explorers", but the development of the poem makes clear in what sense this is to be taken. Obviously, Eliot is not advocating an exploration of this life ("Here and there does not matter"); what he is urging toward is the exploration of the mystery or of being. The world of absolute reality and the path to it are what engage his interest and effort. Even "the poetry does not matter". In part five Eliot stresses the labour involved in art, but he indicates that the poet cannot predict the result. His concern must be to perform the action without consideration for its fruits.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our

business.

There is a note of irony interspersed with the grandeur of the con•

cluding lines. As the poet grows older he moves "Into another intensity/For a further union, a deeper communion", but he is also

aware of the pathos of age. 133

There is a time for the evening under starlight, A time for the evening under lamplight (The evening with the photograph ).

And, again, as he moves "Through the dark cold and the empty des• olation" of time, a melancholy and minor note is struck by the verse. Such is the "reality" of which humankind cannot bear overmuch and which it seeks to exchange for one seemingly more glorious and meaningful. The next poem in the series struggles to find a purpose and a meaning in time and experience, and it is to this that one must turn in order to obtain the added dimension of Eliot's thought.

Into the sea all the rivers go, and yet the sea is never filled, and still to their goal the rivers go. (Eccl. 1:7-8)

In terms of unity of metaphor and mood "The Dry Salvages" is the most consistent and complete of all four poems. The marine metaphor for man's dual existence — one temporal and limited, and the other eternal and infinite — is beautifully realized by the river and the sea. Claiming the river to be the "flow of man's life

36 from birth to death" , Louis Martz seizes on one of the basic characteristics of this metaphor. More specifically, it suggests the entire diversity of phenomenal existence "with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops", and the limitedness of "the usual reign" — be it of an individual life or of the life of the world.

It also symbolizes the finite ego in contrast to the absolute con• sciousness, and that ego's willfulness, pride, and independence:

"sullen, untamed and intractable". The rhythm of the river is that of the unique individual life and "was present in the nursery bedroom,/ 134

In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,/In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,/And the evening circle In the winter gaslight."

The cycle of the seasons and of the ages of man are traversed in its flow.

The river is within us, the sea all about us;

In contrast to the individual, finite life, there is the eternal and boundless, symbolized by the sea. Man's ego is like a drop of water in this vast, limitless expanse. Here it was where life first began. All individual life is but a consequence of being or the Absolute. The sea "voices" measure "time not our time", but an eternity "that is and was from the beginning". There is also in the sea metaphor an echo of Arnoldian melancholy and anxiety. To a large extent, Eliot is the inheritor of the nineteenth century despair and search for meaning. The shattering of the old religious and cultural foundations which they experienced and lamented was the twentieth century poets' unhappy legacy. Eliot's sea also brings

"the eternal note of sadness in", with this addition, however: there is the hope of the Annunciation. The image of the fishermen forever "sailing/Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers" is a vision of the perilous and vulnerable life of man and of the endless cycle of repetitive activity. "Where is there an end of it...?", asks Eliot; and the answer he gives is that "There is no end, but addition...." Here we have a vision of history that is not unlike

Arnold's in "Dover Beach". The same pattern of "human misery" has existed from time immemorial; with time's passing there is only more debris added to the sea. Interestingly enough, Arnold's view 135

of the world stresses its illusory quality and its basic inhospit-

ability. (...This world, which seems/To lie before us like a

land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor

help for pain;) Eliot, in his search for the meaning of man's history, cannot bear to think that it has no purpose.

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless Or of an ocean not littered with wastage Or of a future that is not liable Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing, Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage; Not as making a trip that will be unpayable For a haul that will not bear examination.

The meaning is only hinted at by the reference to the Annunciation which promises the birth of One who will "redeem the time".

Similarly, the value of human experience lies in the

"meaning". The experience itself Eliot regards as almost unreal or

impalpable; only insofar as it is "revived in the meaning" does it

come alive and have any importance. The personal "agony" becomes buried in the plethora of other experiences and so is diminished

or unrealized. For that reason, says Eliot, we can understand

the meaning of the agony in other peoples' lives better than in

our own, because we are onlookers of their suffering. The subject•

ivity of our own condition prevents us from seeing it in the proper

perspective. Immersed in the flux of life, we scarcely pause to

realize that this is all part of an absolute and ideal pattern.

Though the fishermen perform the same activities throughout all time 136

and are themselves caught in the net of phenomenal reality from which no one escapes save by death or rebirth, their ultimate destination is the Absolute. Man cherishes the illusion of movement so long as he exists, but once he has achieved his liberation he knows that man's life is but a brief sojourn, a change between acts, or a passage between two ports. Drawing on the Bhagavad-Gita, he quotes Krishna's salutation: "Not farewell,/But fare forward, voyagers". Some of Eliot's most beautiful poetry is contained in this section of Four Quartets which combines the sense of man's imprisonment in the agony of history and his potential freedom from it.

That all men seek answers to the riddles of existence and experience is evidenced by the many occult arts to which they have recourse. Having no coherent and sound philosophy on which to interpret the accidents of history — either personal or collective, they turn to various false oracles.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behaviour of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, Observe disease in signatures, evoke Biography from the wrinkles of the palm And tragedy from fingers; release omens By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams Or barbituric acids, or dissect The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors— To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual Passtimes and drugs, and features of the press: And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.

The enigma of history is, however, only solved by an understanding of Christ's Incarnation. This mystery which cuts across the life of 137

the world is "half understood" by the poet to signify the re•

demption of all time.

Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

The Incarnation, the intervention of God in time, is also the

timeless moment or "the still-point" of history. This unique

divine act confers meaning on history and on experience. For

Eliot, that meaning is summed up in the revocation of Original

Sin. "The Dry Salvages" moves beyond the stages of nineteenth

century despair and confirms a new-found faith, but it does not

really come to terms with the actuality of history. It deals with it only in the sense of transcending it. The "meaning"

of history and experience are not in the things themselves but

in something that is beyond them. It is the ideal or absolute world that confers meaning and intelligibility on this one. *

The fourth and concluding poem of the Quartets marks

the culmination and climax of the series. The tone becomes more

sublime and the symbols more Dantesque as Eliot attempts to convey

the final vision toward which his meditation has been leading.

The second half of part two, written in conscious imitation of

Dante, prepares the way for the concluding evocation of rose and

fire. Throughout the poem, in fact, the imagery is predominantly

connected with fire in the sacred sense. Earlier the poet had

quaked in purgatorial fires, but now that he has been purified he

receives the fire from heaven in the form of a personal Pentecost. 138

The opening section of Little Gidding describes the state of the waiting soul as it is suspended "between melting and freezing" — life and death — in the timeless moment. It is a spiritual condition described in terms of seasonal metaphor but of which time really has no part.

...There is no earth smell Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom Of snow, a bloom more sudden Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading, Not in the scheme of generation.

Rebirth occurs in the winter of the world, just as the Nativity takes on a special symbolic meaning by being celebrated in

December. Again, we have the contrast between the life of the world or nature and the life of the spirit. The former is symbolized by winter, coldness, and darkness, and the latter by summer, warmth, and light.

Eliot indicates that the journey toward this "Zero summer" may be undertaken from any number of starting places and for any number of reasons. In other words, at whatever spiritual and temporal stage man is, he can turn his steps toward the Absolute.

The "timeless moment" is always waiting for man behind the tapestry of time. For the poet, therefore, "the intersection of the timeless moment/Is England and nowhere". Man's purpose for choosing the path to enlightenment does not really matter since it is altered on the way.

...And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled 139

If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment.

Only one thing is common to all those who embark on the spiritual

journey — abandonment of self.

If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid....

The turning away from the exterior world to the inner or ideal

Reality is expressed by a telling metaphor.

...when you leave the rough road And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade

And the tombstone.

Before that Reality can be apprehended, man must first die to his

old self and bury it. This is the tombstone's message that confronts him after he has made the first important act of will.

The four elements composing the phenomenal world — earth,

air, fire, and water — are themselves destroyed in the opening stanzas

of part two. Eliot here stresses the temporality of matter with which man's life is so intricately bound up; his very "hope and

despair", "toil", and "sacrifice" are conditioned by nature. The

passage, coming as it does after the epiphany of part one, further

suggests that for the man who has achieved liberation, matter or

nature no longer retains its power over him. It is, in effect,

destroyed since he has overcome nature within himself.

At this point, Eliot commences in a fine imitation of the

Italian master, selecting the passage of Dante's meeting with Virgil 140

as his theme. His own "master", Eliot indicates, has not been one person, but a combination of several great poets: "Both one and many". From the verse itself, the two most outstanding influences appear to be Dante and Mallarme'. The first is obvious, and the second is quoted in the following lines:

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight

The Symbolist influence, which I have earlier pointed out, is once again confirmed. In part five, we see the practical results of this influence, claiming for art no less a goal than perfection.

...And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together) Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph....

Dante and Mallarme are not an incongruous pair as the first glance might suggest. Although historical conditions separate them vastly and pose different aesthetic problems, both poets worked from an ideal conception of the universe and with the medium of symbols.

Mallarme's art, as is Eliot's, is evidence of the modern attempt to approach and express the ideal world which is the end of all their striving. We can appreciate the difference between the Medieval and the modern consciousness when we survey the poetry; that coherent and unified religious world-view which is so essential and nourishing to the symbolic imagination was present in Dante's time but already destroyed by the nineteenth century. 141

What the "master" tells Eliot is basically something he had already discovered for himself in "East Coker", namely, the

rewardlessness of old age.

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.

The "exasperated spirit" can find no peace in the world; its only hope is to enter into the "refining fire" of God. This fire is associated in part four with "Love". The double meaning of the word is played upon here as Eliot tenders two alternatives to man.

The only hope or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed by fire from fire.

Two absolutes await man — damnation or salvation. The fire of

desire, as the subject of Buddha's sermon, consumes the world and is its death. When man turns aside from desire, the holy fire of

God's Love awaits him. The secular situation at the time of "Little

Gidding"'s composition no doubt reinforced the significance of Eliot's symbol. The devastation wrought by "The dove descending...With flame of incadescent terror" showed the result of men's desire.

The contrast to the above destruction, the concluding lines

of the poem evoke the eternal well-being of those who have chosen

the way of renunciation and contemplation and who have achieved the 142

heavenly vision.

And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

The symbol of the spiritual rose recalls the rose-garden of "Burnt

Norton" which is perfected and transformed in the ideal world.

Children's laughter leads the poet back again "through the unknown, remembered gate" to a state of complete innocence and joy. It is as if the gates of Paradise, which had been closed to our first parents after their sin, were now again opened after man's purifica• tion. Having become like a child, Christ's promised Kingdom is ready to receive him. Paradise has been regained in the form of the new Kingdom through Christ's Incarnation. This is the goal

"And the end of all our exploring", says Eliot. We are now in a better position to understand the lines from "East Coker": "In my beginning is my end", and "In my end is my beginning". Man's spiritual "end" or destination is rebirth; by becoming like a child, he returns to his "beginning". In a theological sense,

Christ's "end" or earthly death marked the "beginning" of His eternal reign and of mankind's salvation. From Eliot's historical point of view, time moves in cycles and an age's "beginning" already starts the process of deterioration that culminates in its "end"; and, vice versa, the "end" of a cycle heralds the "beginning" of another one. "Little Gidding" itself completes the thematic cycle of Four Quartets and illustrates the motto by returning to the imagery of the opening poem. As the conclusion and climax of the series, it not only unites all the foregoing strains of thought in 143

an intricate pattern, but also affirms what James Benziger calls 37

"the hope-bearing vision" . This vision, the product of a

"metaphysically-oriented imagination", was the goal of the

Romantics' and Victorians' search, he says, but was "hard to

achieve" in the modern period. As we have already seen from "The

Dry Salvages", Eliot, too, was concerned to find meaning in man's

existence, "...one senses from the beginning", notes Benziger,

"a strong moral concern mingling with the aesthete's fastidious

distaste or evasion: life should perhaps be more beautiful, but 38

it should certainly be infused with some loftier purpose." This

purpose he could not find in the world itself. As the poems have

shown, Eliot postulated an ideal or absolute Reality that gave

this world its meaning and raison d'etre. By turning away from

the world and from experience, he sought that loftier Reality within of which philosphers and mystics have written. He was,

to be sure, not going to depart physically from the world in

order to achieve liberation, only spiritually. The negation of

nature to which this path led is amply documented by the verse.

It is its historical implication to which I would now like to

turn.

The idealist nature of Eliot's conception of time may

better be realized by considering the following description of

Plotinus' philosophy on that point. His guiding idea is that one must search for eternal life not beyond time but in time itself, following a path that is at once dialectical and mystical: dialectical in the sense that the chief task is to find via thought the unity, the 144

immobility, the eternity that is in things; mystical because the soul must make this journey by passing through all the stages of spiritual life to arrive at being one with God. Perhaps Plotinus' most profound idea is that this is not a dual but a single effort; that is to say, by striving to transform the soul's successive states into moments of thought we will truly win salvation.39

The notion that "There are two beings in each of us. One beyond

40 time, one in time." , is corroborated by Eliot's description of the "timeless moment" in time. The tendency to disparage the being in time is substantial, however. As man's life in time becomes more intolerable — or, at least, not any better, as the disappoint• ments of youth are not remedied by the inauspicious comforts of age, as "the world moves/In appetency, on its metalled ways/Of time past and future", he turns his gaze toward an ideal state where time is transcended. The ruthless reality upon which man cannot bear to look too long is this world's. The bird in "Burnt Norton" that urged the poet to "Go" and seek a better one is the imagination of man which feels exiled "here, where men sit and hear each other groan".

We can appreciate to what extent the Platonic or Idealist world-view helps Eliot to surmount the agonies of time. By denying ultimate reality to the temporal, he can bear its sufferings and enigmas with a stoical heart trained in the virtue of humility.

The so-called sense of history for which Four Quartets always seem to be lauded is, to me, rather negligible. As analysis of the poems has shown, Eliot is not concerned with affirming history or with shaping it; his concern is to transcend it or, more unkindly, if truly, to abolish it. The combination of Western Idealism and Eastern 145

religious philosophy produces a pronounced world (history) negation. When Eliot writes, "history is a pattern/Of timeless moments", he is stressing the transcendental nature of duration.

The "timeless moment" is an a-temporal experience; and if history is really reducable to its transcendental common denominator then it ceases to be important as history.

Light is thrown on Eliot's position by Mircea Eliade's book on archaic man's conception of time and history, The Myth of the Eternal Return. Men of the old civilizations, he shows, held a cyclical view of history and believed in the possibility of regenerating time through participation in archetypal rituals.

"This eternal return reveals an ontology uncontaminated by time and becoming. Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future.

No event is final and irreversible and no transformation is final."

Eliade interprets this world-view as "an attempt to return to innocence, 'paradise'", and as being hostile to history. By annulling time through participation in a sacred reality and in cosmic rhythms, man protects himself from "the terror of history" which he can neither comprehend nor control. The Christian view, history as theophany, first made its appearance with the Hebrews and stands opposed to the traditional vision of the cycle, "the conception that ensures all things will be repeated forever". Now time is regarded as linear and has a distinct value. History is tolerated "because it has an eschatological function". For the

Christian, "History is thus abolished, not through consciousness of living an eternal present (coincidence with the atemporal instant 146

of the revelation of the archetypes), nor by means of a period• ically repeated ritual (for example, the rites of the beginning 42

of the year) — it is abolished in the future." Eliade maintains

that even modern man is not "converted to historicism", and that

"we are even witnessing a conflict between the two views: the archaic conception, which we should designate as archetypal and anti-historical; and the modern, post-Heglian conception, which 43 seeks to be historical." Christianity, however, "...is the

'religion' of modern man and historical man, of the man who simultaneously discovered personal freedom and continuous time 44

(in place of cyclical time)."

From the above commentary, we can see where Eliot stands on the historical issue. He is, as I have earlier said, not commit• ted to history and rather seeks to escape it. Furthermore, his

Christianity is much influenced by philosophical Idealism and

Eastern religion. We must ask ourselves, what is the distinctive position of Christianity as opposed to Buddhism and Hinduism?

Whereas the latter teach endurance of this world and its sufferings by focusing the mind on absolute reality, the essence of Christianity is world-affirmation. Certainly, there has always existed an idealist strain in Christian thought which has contributed to an other-worldly emphasis, but its most fundamental mysteries, such as the Incarnation and the Passion, attest to the worthiness of the world and of effort.

The very intervention of God in history suggests its value and im• portance; and the example of Christ teaches man to take up the yoke

of time and to shoulder the weight of the world. By so doing, man 147

changes history. Christianity presents this challenge to men who have come of age, to men who accept the agony of maturity

and who do not wish to renounce it for a child-like irresponsib•

ility. If Eliade's judgement that the majority of the world's population wishes to evade the "terror of history" by clinging

to an archaic consciousness is correct, then the cycle becomes

a frightening trap, and the belief that "the past is but a prefiguration of the future" a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By thus analyzing Eliot's position and its implications

from this critical standpoint, I do not wish to undermine (if

that were even possible) the poetry of Four Quartets; on the

contrary, however beautiful or correct the art, its substance must be investigated to yield its full meaning. Having traced his poetic development from beginning to end, we can recognize

in Four Quartets the culmination of his spiritual quest that began with

Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question...

For Eliot, that "question" was a metaphysical one and was answered

in the mystery of "the fire and the rose". Footnotes

Chapter VIII

1. W. B. Yeats, A Vision, rev. ed. 1956 (1961 rpt; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961), p. 226.

2. Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 161.

3. Seward, pp. 160-1.

4. Hugh Kenner, ed. "Introduction", T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), p. 3.

5. Leonard Unger traces the line to Cavalcanti in "Ash Wednesday," T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique (New York: Russel & Russel, 1966), pp. 350-1.

6. Seward, pp. 161-2.

7. This is a point well documented in F. C. Happold's book Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology (England: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 60.

"By turning inward, away from the flux of phenomena, towards the centre of the soul, by putting aside all concepts and images, spiritual as well as bodily, in a state of stillness and passiv• ity, it is possible to penetrate through these separating screens, and to see deeper into that which more completely is; perhaps, in the end, to ascend to the contemplation of God Himself."

8. L. Unger, "Ash Wednesday," pp. 357-9 traces the "bone" imagery to Ezekiel, chapter 37.

9. See L. Unger, "Ash Wednesday," p. 360 for a different interpretation of the leopards.

10. Gertrude Jobes, The Handbook of Mythology and Folklore, vol. 2 (New York: The Scarecrow Press, 1962), p. 985.

11. L. Unger, "Ash Wednesday," p. 372 believes the yews to be "representative of past and future time".

12. Jobes, p. 1700.

13. In his Idea of a Christian Society, (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1939), p. 8. Eliot stresses that Christianity is "primarily a matter of thought and not of feeling". 14. , A Preface to Metaphysics (London: Sheed & Ward, 1948), p. 6.

15. Maritain, p. 7.

16. Lloyd Frankenberg, The Pleasure Dome (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. , 1949), p. 99.

17. Maritain, p. 7.

18. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Points of View (London: Faber & Faber, 1941), p. 25.

19. Yvor Winters, "T. S. Eliot, or the Illusion of Reaction," In Defense of Reason (Denver: University of Denver Press, 1943), pp. 460-501.

20. Arthur Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, 1st ed. (1948; rpt. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1960), p. xiv.

21. Eliot, Points of View, p. 40.

22. A similar observation is made by Lloyd Frankenberg (The Pleasure Dome, p. 116) and linked with the poet's sense of guilt or "taboo" about earthly experiences.

23. Milton C. Nahm, ed., Selections from Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: F. S. Croft & Co., 1947), pp. 84-5.

24. Heraclitus, Fragment 46, Selections from Early Greek Philosophy, p. 91.

25. Ethel F. Cornwell, The "Still Point" (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1962), p. 4.

26. Cornwell, p. 67.

27. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans, from 1st ed. by Willard R. Trask (1949; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), pp. 17-18.

28. R. W. Harris, Reason and Nature in 18th Century Thought (London: Blandford Press, 1968), pp. 21-47.

29. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), pp. 42-55. See also The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1-3, trans, from 1st ed. by Ralph Manheim (1953; rpt. London: Yale University Press, 1968). 30. Leonard Unger, "T. S. Eliot's Rose Garden," T. S. Eliot; A Selected Critique (New York: Russel & Russel, 1966), p. 384. Mr. Unger here makes a similar comment.

31. Louis L. Martz, "The Wheel and the Point: Aspects of Imagery and Theme in Eliot's Later Poetry," T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique, p. 445.

32. Charles Baudelaire, "Journaux Intimes," Oeuvres Completes de Baudelaire (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1954), p. 1228.

33. The sacralization of the word and its shrouding in obscurity and mystery by a code of symbols is evidently based on a division of reality into the sacred and the profane. This helps us to understand the logic behind the mystery cult associated with language in Symbolist art.

34. J. J. Sweeney, "East Coker: A Reading," T. S. Eliot, A Selected Critique, pp. 399-400.

35. Compact Bible: Jerusalem Bible Version (Belgium: Henri Proost & Co., 1969), pp. 653-660.

Interestingly enough, scholarship has shown that this Book reveals the first contact with hellenism (date, c. 3 B.C.) and consequently mirrors the despair of a period of Jewish transi• tion. The old conventional convictions have been shaken and as yet nothing has taken their place; thus Hebrew thought expresses the influence of Stoic, Epicurean, and Cynic phil• osophies. It is not unlikely that Eliot's period was also one of "transition", and therefore raised similar problems for the poet.

36. Louis L. Martz, "The Wheel and the Point...," pp. 458-9.

37. James Benziger, Images of Eternity: Studies in the Poetry from Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1962), p. 6.

38. Benziger, p. 244.

39. Jean Guitton, Man in Time, trans, from 1st ed. by Adrienne Foulke (1961; rpt. London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), pp. 56-7.

40. Guitton, p. 58.

41. Mircea Eliade, pp. 88-89.

42. Eliade, pp. 111-112.

43. Eliade, p. 141.

44. Eliade, p. 161. CHAPTER IX

CONCLUSION

In the foregoing study we have seen how the "dissociation of sensibility" is the central awareness from which Romantic art proceeds. Beholding modern life in contrast to an idealized Class• ical antiquity or Christian Middle Ages the Romantics saw only disunity and fragmentation as opposed to order and wholeness.

Friedrich Schlegel, the first propounder and theorist of Romantic art, was in many ways an archetypal Romantic; the stages of his career parallel those of many subsequent Romantics: the initial repudiation of modern fragmentation and the turning to the Classics, then the revolutionary break-through to an affirmation of modernism based on the acceptance of man's perennial duality, and finally the somewhat reactionary turning toward the past once more in the hope of creating a Christian "organic state". If Schlegel has been a shadow figure throughout this study it is only because his aesthetic expressed the Romantic soul and mind so completely and gave Romantic• ism its basic plan. In the "dissociation of sensibility", then, is contained the germ of the Romantic aesthetic. Baudelaire and Eliot are its most important expounders for our time; I say "our time" because we have today not yet come to terms with the problem they

Inherited, and until we do no new period may be ushered in.

In their art we see reflected the fatal dualism between

Spirit and Nature and the attempt to resolve that conflict. This 149

conflict is not only an internal or private one, but one that is mirrored in art; there it becomes the maladaption of "feeling" and

"language", or content and form. A unified or whole art depends on a unified creator. Art only accurately reflects our own wealth or poverty, our very deepest problems and concerns. The basic dilemma of the modern age, which the Romantics were the first to point out but not always to solve, is how to reconcile these opposites, how to unite and harmonize them so that the individual and art may once again attain to that ideal wholeness of the ancient past. The revolutionary insight of a Schlegel and later, of a Baudelaire, was that the modern artist had to find his own ideal, an ideal relative to his historic circumstances. The Classical past provided only an archetype of wholeness, and the moderns had to set about achieving their own unity suited to the present. The achievement of this unity was, however, confounded in the cases of both Baudelaire and

Eliot. As I have tried to indicate, a perfect unity could not be achieved because both men held essentially wrong views about one half of the human equation: Nature.

Baudelaire, I suggested, came to hold his negative view of Nature as the principle of evil because of two factors: the personal one of a spiritual sensibility that pre-disposed him toward the ideal or absolute, and the reaction against Enlightenment - based views about the essential goodness of Nature. Against the last stand, his Christian sensibility and common sense revolted. What do we see when we look at Nature? he, in effect, asked. Contrary to the Neo-

Classicists who would have answered, "the perfect model of all beauty, 150

the source of all virtue and morality", Baudelaire saw the reality of evil. All of Nature seemed to be penetrated with corruption, and the cause of this he attributed to original sin. Thus, he conceived of man's, and especially the artist's, duty to "diminish the traces of original sin" by attempting to transform Nature, to spiritualize it. The agent par excellence for this heroic endeavor was the imagination. We have already seen the despair into which

Baudelaire was plunged be cause of the enormous difficulty of this task; Nature always broke through the poet's dreams and shattered his hopes. The result which we see in Les Fleurs du Mal is an extremely significant attempt to come to terms with reality, especially with evil, and the combination of the reality and the ideal. The two principles, however, were never harmonized and

Baudelaire remained torn between them.

In Eliot, on the other hand, poetry has taken a further step away from Nature. Far from seeking a union or harmony of the two principles, Spirit and Nature, Eliot exalted the first at the expense of the second. He extended the Symbolist line of search for perfection, the ideal, and the absolute. Although repudiating the Romantic tradition consciously, he was, as I have hopefully shown, deeply entrenched in it and even came to a similar conclusion — refuge in Christianity and . As such, he failed to come to terms with the task inherently set by Romanticism: the confronta• tion with history. Eliot, as is evident from Four Quartets, sought a means to escape from the horrible reality of history and time; religion provided those means. He is an extremely important figure 151

for modern poetry because his influence has not yet been surpassed.

Poetry has failed to offer anything significant in place of Eliot; but Eliot is only the cul-de-sac of one line of Romanticism. Judging from Mr. Beach's summary of the post-Eliot generation, it appears that no new direction has yet been found. All are still wandering in the desert — let us hope not for another forty years!

Roughly speaking, nearly all of the most promising poets of the moment may be regarded as stemming from Eliot, Pound, or Hopkins, or as having some tincture of the "metaphysical" tendencies of these poets. . . . The present-day poets have given up nature, having found it bankrupt.1

Mr. Beach concludes his book with the assertion that "we may hardly look for a revival of the concept of nature till there shall appear a discoverer as great as Newton or Darwin, a thinker as provocative as Kant or Plato, to offer a new synthesis, and give nature a new 2 lease on life."

With the need for a "new synthesis" I am in complete agreement. But even with this thought one touches on the pulse of the modern ailment. Such a synthesis or "harmony" of man's dual be• ing— and with it the duality of art — is the ideal goal of Roman• ticism, but it cannot be achieved until Romanticism itself is revived from its death-bed. Romanticism took a false direction when it sought to resolve the Spirit-Nature duality by eliminating one half of the equation. The problem was not thus solved, only postponed for someone else to solve in the future. The very soul of Romantic art is this tension between the real and the ideal; if once the 152

scales are too greatly upset in one or the other direction, it is no longer true to its being. But it is understandable that man

cannot abide long in a state of unresolved tension; soon the scales

dip in one of the two directions and then we have either pure

realism and naturalism, or symbolism and idealism. The real task

of Romantic art, however, is to strive for a balance between the

two forces that constitute all life and are the basis of art itself: Spirit and Nature.

Now this has not been possible in the past, as we have seen, because of the false view of Nature held by men. Nature, it seems, has either been worshipped as the source and type of the Good or as the source and embodiment of Evil. Both are incorrect attitudes; so the first step in a revival of Romantic art must be the correction of false ideas about Nature. When that has been done, only then we can begin to think about a new synthesis.

At present, we truly inhabit a "waste land"; Eliot at least gave us the correct symbol for our time. Lifeless, waterless — but yearning for life and water — we grope for the lost clue to our salvation. But the answer will not come from the "thunder", from the Spirit in the ideal or rational sense; it will — because it must — come from the very earth we scorn and maltreat. I see in the symbol of the "waste land" a promise as well as a curse. We only understand the curse now, but the promise is waiting to be revealed to all who will hear. Our time has truly spent its forty years wandering in the desert, but the experience itself is a 153

purgative one and will lead into the "promised land", that is, back to the earth that is ours from the beginning. The earth, the world, has become a wasteland for the modern because he has failed to comprehend Nature. Without Nature and the power of eros that unites all things to one another and makes them increase, the psyche of man becomes dry and sterile. Our world but reflects the drama of our innermost being, and when we have stamped Nature out of our hearts we must pay for it dearly. This wasteland that is the modern psyche can only be restored by the saving touch of

Nature that will make all things grow again.

But, what is Nature? Is it the external phenomena of life in all their variety — the flowers, trees, animals, etc.?

Yes, it is that, but more. Therefore, all attempts to "return to

Nature" by superficial methods or by puerile Nature-worship miss the mark. If every factory worker or city dweller were to settle on a farm nothing would be changed except the social situation.

As far as man's estrangement from Nature is concerned, one can be in the heart of a thousand beautiful countries or on a thousand farms and Nature is not any more understood for it. This should be a great encouragement to modern, industrial man, for he can be industrialized and still be in touch with Nature. Nature, then, is a life-principle, a power that works in every man until he destroys it. And it is not until he begins to destroy it within himself that he begins to do the same to external nature. Nature, like a Sleeping Beauty, has been lying dormant and ignored within the psyche of man, rendered lifeless by a curse, and is only waiting 154

for the individual who will rescue her from her centuries' long

slumber so that the land may once again awaken to life. When

she awakens, the poetic, creative faculty in man will also be

revived and will receive a new impetus and inspiration.

But the poem of tomorrow that awaits to be written will

have to take evil into account. Baudelaire surely, has taught

us this much. Whoever seeks out Nature will soon find evil in

his path — much in the same way as Dante was initially confronted

by the three beasts. Unlike his predecessors, the new poet will

not attribute evil to Nature, however; rather, he will see that

all of Nature is itself unwillingly interpenetrated with it from

the smallest thing to the greatest. He will see, in St. Paul's words, that "... from the beginning till now the entire creation

has been groaning in travail", hoping "one day to be set free from

its slavery to decay" (Romans 8:21) and he will be moved by com•

passion for it. Where, then, will he find the source of evil, to where shall he trace it?

The poet of tomorrow will have as his guiding motto:

"The heart of man is the heart of the world". Accordingly, it is

there that he will find the root of evil; at the heart of the rose

feeds the worm. He will not project his evil o_r his goodness into

the heavens or into Nature; he will realize that the heart of man

contains all possibilities that exist — from the sublimest to the

meanest. Working from his own heart, the new poet will free Nature

partially from the curse man's mind has laid upon it; partially,

because the final liberation of Nature must remain a mystery. Here, 155

then, is material enough for a future epic, the epic of modern man which has yet to be written. But when it is, man will have received a new lease on life, will have had his unique story told, and will once again have become a hero. Let me hasten to add that he will also be partially villain, for the duality of man is thoroughgoing.

However, Nature will have been freed from the burden of bearing the evil; evil is at the heart of man, but goodness is there also.

Wonderful possibilities await man and art once Nature is again released from bondage. The potential of Romantic art is here most evident. It only needs to be given a new direction, a fresh inspiration. The harmony that it seeks, to transform the human chaos into order, will be achieved only when Nature with the power of eros quickens men's hearts to a new birth. Still, by its very nature,

Romantic art can never be exhausted, can never reach full perfection; there will always remain the vision of that ideal to entice men's soul to strive for it. But the striving itself confers beatitude; the fruits of the labors cannot be counted until the very end. What we must reconcile ourselves with — and this is a difficult thing for man — is the idea of imperfection, but of beauty no less present in that imperfection. The goal of the new Romantic art must be to harmonize the principles of Spirit and Nature, but not to become reactionary as did the old Romanticism. Romantic art must not escape life, but boldly intersect it and alter it for the better. The new poet of tomorrow would do well to heed the words of V. Klemperer before beginning his work, namely, "that Romantic creation will be necessarily fragmented creation." 156

Hiermlt meine ich nicht, da^ das romantische Kunstwerk immer Bruchstiick sein mu£, sondern da(J es sein Thema nicht nach Art des Klassischen in einem geschlossenen Kreise erschopft; der Kreis bleibt offen, und wenn alles gesagt ist, ware noch vieles zu sagen, und es herrscht die stimmung der Danteschen Seele:

Oh me lassa! Ch'io non son possente Di dir quel ch'odo della donna mia!

Wo aber geschlossene Gedankensysteme geschaffen worden sind, da kann man nur annMherungsweise von romantischer Philosophie reden: wer zur Ruhe in einer letzten synthese gelangt ist, der hat das Romantische uberwunden.3 Footnotes

Chapter IX

1. J. W. Beach, The Concept of Nature . . ., p. 558.

2. Beach, p. 559.

3. V. Klemperer, "Romantik und franzosische Romantik," Begriffsbestimmung der Romantik, pp. 62-3. Translation

Chapter IX

By this I mean not that the Romantic work of art must always be a fragment, but that it does not exhaust its theme in the Classical style of a closed circle; the circle remains open, and when all has been said, there would still be left more to say, and there rules the mood of the Dantesque soul:

Where, however, closed thought systems are manufactured, there one can speak only approximately of Romantic phil• osophy: whoever has come to rest in a final synthesis has surpassed the Romantic. 15 7

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