CHAPTER I V TRANSITION : THE HOLLOW MEN, ARIEL POEMS AND ASH-WEDNESDAY The course of Eliot's poetic development after The Maste Land can best be described by reversing the title of Jessie Weston's book. As suggested at the end of the last chapter, the figure of the knight is being replaced by that of the saint. The term 'saint' of course encompasses the Christian context but goes beyond it to suggest an attempt at chastening the sensibility through the ascetic discipline of religion. As Lyndall Gordon has argued, the figure of the saint coexisted with that of a secular quester from the beginning, but under Pound's influence, the religious strain was held in abeyance. ^ •'•' But with the closing of frontiers, as indicated by The fVaste Land, the quester had no other option but to effect a self-transformation through a change of roles, through a turning back to the poetry of religious candidature. That the magnum opus of 1922 marked a terminal point is clear from what Eliot wrote to Richard Aldington barely a month after its publication. 162 As for The l^aste Land that is thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style.^ ^' As Ronald Bush has pointed out, some idea of Eliot's search for new form and style can be had from an introduc­ tion Eliot wrote to a slim volume of Paul Valery's verse and from the Clark Lectures of 1926 ^ "^ ^ In 1924 Eliot wrote an introduction to Mark Wardle's translation of Valery's "Le Serpent". Earlier in The Sacred h/ood, Eliot had compared Valery to Dante in an unfavourable light and had castigated Valery for "exorcising" philosophy from modern poetry. But in the 1924 Introduction, Eliot displayed a change of attitude. Valery is now seen as a poet, who "extended" and "completed" his personal feelings in impersonal verse; who reintegrated "the symbolist movement into the great tradi­ tion" of French classicism. Thus Valery represents the "completion" and "explanation" of the "experimental work of the last generation". Eliot further wrote that Valery raised "the music, the fluidity" of Jules Laforgue to new heights through a poetic organization of a much higher intellectual order than Laforgue's" 163 One can imagine what it must have meant for an ardent admirer and imitator of Laforgue like Eliot to suggest that Valery was the "completion" and "explanation" of Laforgue. The earlier Laforguian strategy of representing the inner life through dramatization is now being discarded in favour of Valery's technique of discovering a pattern of one's emotions. Howsoever hard and painful the process of change, the attempt at imposing a pattern on his emotions is clearly seen not only in the poems that follow but also in his statement in the 1924 Introduction that Valery understood "the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we make of our feelings is the centre of value". If Valery is being privileged over an earlier favou­ rite Laforgue, in the Clark Lectures of 1926 a similar exercise of reassessment is undertaken with respect to another earlier model, Donne. These eight "Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century" dealt with Eliot's old preoccupations with poetic excellence and tradi­ tion by applying new criteria. Whereas in the earlier essay "The Metaphysical Poets" - a review article on Grierson's anthology of Metaphysical poetry in 1922 - Donne was held up as a poet par excellence of unifield sensibility, now in the 164 Clark Lectures, Eliot argued that Donne's sensibility represented a dissolution of the fusion of thought and feeling, which is to be found in the mediaeval poets like Dante and Cavaleanti. Whereas the sensibility of the Ital­ ians is "classical" and "ontological", rooted in man's orientation toward absolute value, the seventeenth century roetaphysicals were "romantic" and "psychological". Donne, instead of contemplating metaphysical ideas for their in­ trinsic value merely plays with them. As opposed to Donne's "romantic" subordination of thought to feeling, Eliot recommended the wisdom of writers like Aquinas, Dante and Cavaleanti, who were interested only in the impersonal value of thought and feeling. These writers Eliot asserted, extended the frontiers of the everyday world by "the devel­ opment and subsumption of emotion and feeling through intel­ lect into the vision of God". The ontological enquiry into the nature of existence was evident even in their amatory work, where a statement of the effect of the beloved upon the lover served"solely ... to suggest the beauty and digni­ ty of the object contemplated". The suggestiveness of these comments in relation to The Hollow Men and after becomes clearer by Eliot's acknowl­ edgement in the introduction to his lectures that the pivot 165 on which "the whole of my case turns" was his reading and interpretation of the Vita Nuova. Some of the most reveal­ ing observations are made when Eliot uses examples from Dante's handling of erotic material to criticise the degen­ erate "modern" sensibility represented by Donne. For exam­ ple, he charges Donne of conflating the human and divine aspects of love and goes on to say, - "Donne, the modern man, is imprisoned in the embrace of his own feelings. There is little suggestion of [Dante's] adoration, of worship. And an attitude like that of Donne leads naturally to one of two things: to the Tennysonian happy marriage - not very different from Donne's own - which is one sort of bankruptcy; or to the collapse of the hero of Huysman's En Route : Men dieu, que c'es done bete. It leads in fact to most of modern literature; for whether you seek the Absolute in marriage, adultery or debauchery, it is all one - you are seeking in the wrong place". Perhaps, that is the lesson the quester has learnt by the end of The Waste Land. But that is not all, for the 166 poet Eliot goes on to say in the fourth lecture, as he speaks of Donne's 'The Blossome', "There is a great deal of the modern "recherche de I'absolu", the disappointed romanticism the vexation of resignation at finding the world other than one wanted it to be. The literature of disillusionment is the disillusion­ ment of immaturity. It is in this way that I have ventured to affirm that Dante is more a man of the world than is Donne" . The phrase "disillusionment of immaturity" shows that Eliot had clearly someone else besides Donne in mind, as he criticizes his earlier favourite for writing the kind of poetry he himself had written till recently, if The Waste Land is anything to go by. Any lurking doubt in this respect is completely eradicated when he targets Laforgue next in his assault. Like Donne's Laforgue's writings, too, had metaphysical origins : Laforgue "had an innate craving for order : that is, that every feeling should have its intellectual equivalent, its philosophical justification and that every idea should have its emotional equivalent, its 16? sentimental justification"/ Again like Donne, he too needed a Vita Nuova to justify and integrate his sentiments into a system of the universe. But instead, what Laforgue wrote was "a poetry of adolescence" unintegrated with an adult view of the world : he thus remains, for us, imprisoned within his adolescence, with a philosophy which should have been mature ... For Laforgue to have passed into a larger life would have necessitated a violent struggle, too violent for so delicate a constitution". For Eliot, who too like Laforgue, had "so delicate a constitution", Donne and Laforgue, who had acted as his Virgils through the Inferno of his early life and poetry, now needed sturdier and more blessed persons like Dante to take him through the rest of his journey. It was Dante who had "passed into a larger life", who by an "adult view of life" had transcended his adolescent sensibility. Vita Nuova uses the same material as Laforgue's verse : "the material of adolescence; but it is handled by a mature man with a philosophy which assigned a place to such experinece". For Eliot, Vita Nuova came to symbolize a "record of the method of utilizing, transforming instead of 168 discarding, the emotions of adolescence; the record of a discovery analogues to those concerning the use of waste products of coal-tar in industry. The result of this dis­ covery was a real extension of the area of emotion and an attitude both more "spiritual" and more "worldly" than that of Donne, or that of Tennyson or that of Laforgue." In the third Clark Lecture, Eliot said, " The Vita Nuova is to my thinking a record of actual experience reshaped into a particular form." If the phrases, "actual experience" and "reshaped into a particular form" are given equal emphasis, one begins to see the relevance of these comments to Eliot's introduction to Valery. Both Dante and Valery demonstrate the importance of weaving an emotional pattern. For Eliot, the poems in Vita Nuova present stages in the growth of a young man's feelings "from Beatrice living to Beatrice dead." In other words, the work shows a development from the earlier poems expressing the selfish love-struck emo­ tions of an adolescent to the final sonnet which shows a "pilgrim spirit" directed heavenward and blessed with "a new perception born of grieving Love". The importance of Vita Nuova for Eliot at this stage becomes clear if we set it in the context of his own line of development. Right 169 from the start, as we have seen, Eliot's poetry, displays an emotional inclination towards romantic quests and, because of the disappointing nature of the world, an equally strong inclination towards chastisement through religious disci­ pline.