SPRING BOOKS
What Became of Sweeney?
Br FRANK 1(12MODE Wint The Elder Statesman* Mr. Eliot has brought us to a place we could not have expected to reach when we started. We, may see how the road runs from the fragmentary marvels of Sweeney Agonistes to the finished, fluent agones and subtly complete recognitions of the latest plays; but it does not follow that this is the neces- sary, the only possible, or even the right road. Why was this one built, and not another?
Mr. Eliot's earliest thinking about the drama for the most part makes sense only in terms of 'little' theatres ('we should hire a barn or studio'). What you did in your barn would hardly be fitted to combat the 'listless apathy' of the 'morally corrupt' middle-class or West End audiences. For the most part, too, one can say of Mr. Eliot's early dramatic theory that it was anti-naturalist, or, more positively, Symbolist. One remembers how many interests he had in common with the first-generation Symbolist, Arthur Symons; to Donne and recent French poetry one may add the Jacobean drama, ballet, liturgy and music- hall. Eliot's emphasis is, of course, his own. Thus he finds the Jacobean drama defective by com- parison with a truly classical theatre; but in the last analysis he admires it because it is more like ballet and more like liturgy than anything in the modern theatre, because its , versification was adequate to its hiOest intentions yet not too remote from a colloquial norm, and because its audience would 'stand' a lot of poetry and so allow the dramatist to satisfy them while pleasing a minority of finer sensibility. Here, indeed, are Mr. Eliot's two principal, and conflicting problems: hoW to achieve a balletic-liturgical theatre; how to cope with a mass audience.
At one time he might have given priority to the first of these problems. 'Is not the High Mass— as performed, for instance, at the Madeleine in Paris—one of the highest forms of dancing?' he asked in 1925; and in the 'Dialogue of Dramatic Poetry' (1928) he lets `E' say that the ballet can give us everything we want in drama 'except the Poetry. . . . If there is a future for drama, and Particularly for poetic drama, will it not be in the direction indicated by the ballet?' Drama cannot afford to lose touch with the liturgy from which it sprang; perhaps in a period of chaotic religious and ethical belief it should be all the more litur- gical. Now this choreographic-liturgical bent was inherited from the Symbolists and their English followers, who not only took Schopenhauer a step farther and saw the world as ballet but did pioneer research into medieval dance- liturgies. Even Mr. Eliot's passion for 'popular' theatre—Ernie Lotinga, Marie Lloyd—is in- herited from the Nineties; the great "popular' Performers like Lloyd and Guilbert were the darlings of the elite in both Paris and London. Yet even here Mr. Eliot has his own emphasis, his 'cultural' qualification, and in a remarkable * THE ELDER STATESMAN. (Faber, 12s; 6d.) essay he represents Marie Lloyd as exclusively `working-class.' The working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act; he was engaged in that collabOration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art.' Not for him the decadent cult of the music-hall, a rebours, as it grew up originally in Paris : Eliot sees it in a sociological context, and its death as a diminution of our culture. A cult-audience must fall short of what the new drama would need.
Now it could be argued that the audience of initiates is the 'best self' of the community, and then the choreographic-liturgical manner becomes possible. And post-Wagnerian approaches to a theatre of this kind accepted Wagner's belief that ordinary speech was no longer a possible way of reaching the soul, since it appealed only to the understanding, so that speech became an aspect only of a ritualistic whole, the anti-naturalistic unity of action, scene and voice proposed by Gordon Craig. Character, verisimilitude, were banished; the actors went masked and moved like dancers. Some thought of marionettes; and then the discovery of the No plays seemed to offer the richest solution. They confirmed all that Yeats had thought and imagined about a theatre in this tradition, and consequently his incom- parably distinguished verse-plays bear, from then on, the marks of this hieratic influence. But he wrote for 'an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society'—'not a theatre but the theatre's anti-self.' After Sweeney and the unre- peatable compromise of Murder in the Cathedral, Mr. Eliot chose the theatre. Yeats remained con- stant to his rejection of naturalism and the mass audience. And later, pondering, no doubt, the paradoxical achievement, in Yeats's late plays, of that spareness and purity of diction at which he himself aims, Mr. Eliot saw that Yeats had used the theatre none the less 'as an organ for the expression of the consciousness of a people.'
Having renounced the anti-theatre, Mr. Eliot was committed to an audience largely made up of middle-class groundlings, incapable of full participation in his whole design. This meant operating, in the Jacobean manner, 'on two levels at once,' and the levels are the 'dramatic' and the 'musical.' At first Mr. Eliot supplied two kinds of verse, as in The Family Reunion; now the verse is strictly monotonous and the 'musical' pattern is a matter of reverberations within ex- ceedingly careful plots, in which the author has learned from the Greeks, but also and perhaps mostly from Ibsen. The task is to 'musicalise' naturalism, to make poetic an existing, conven- tional drama. And such an attempt was adum- brated as early as The Sacred Wood; perhaps, thought Mr. Eliot, we should not think of the `small public which wants "poetry,"' but 'take a form of entertainment and subject it to a process which would leave it a form of art.' The author's
'cultural' preoccupation overcame desires far more natural in a poet of his time.
Space is wanting to discuss the efforts Mr. Eliot has made recently to achieve the 'mirage,' a perfect conflation of the 'dramatic' and the `musical.' The audience, presumably, is engaged in the doomed experiment of forming 'a civilised but non-Christian mentality'; like Celia in The Cocktail Party it has had a conventional upbring- ing and has 'always been taught to disbelieve in sin.' (Sweeney was about, not for, this audience.) The naturalistic, 'dramatic' level is theirs. And in the musical order of the plays we must look for that 'orthodoxy of sensibility' and pressure of 'tradition' which characterise, in Mr. Eliot's view, all possible art. In The Elder Statesman the dramatic has absorbed the musical more fully than ever before—lbsen would have admired it. Yet it fails to satisfy; if we want to know why, and where we have got to, we can take our bear= ings both from Ibsen and Chekhov and from Yeats. For plot can carry 'music' in a prose play too; and the poetic drama is another thing again. In a sense it is the audience he has considered so carefully that has sabotaged Mr. Eliot's theatre. It does not give expression to 'the consciousness of a people.' Yeats seems to have been right in thinking that you do that by considering only an elite, ignoring the `shopkeeping logicians' of Shaftesbury Avenue and refusing to supply
what the blind and ignorant town Imagines best to make it thrive.
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