Eliot and Fry
The Third Voice. By Denis Donoghue. (0.U.P., 30s.) THAI' the prestige of poetic drama in any age is no guarantee of permanent literary achievement is a lesson of history. We know enough about the con- ditions in which poetic drama flourishes to save us from expecting to plan them into existence. Theatres may be packed and actors may excel themselves, but the intellectual vitality of a period may not choose to make the theatre its home. Great drama, as distinct from 'good theatre,' im- plies concentration, a meeting between writers and audience at a level deeper than plot and tech- nique. In our own age the deeper meeting is likely to evoke some degree of fear, boredom and self- disgust, all undeniably real feelings, very widely experienced and powerful for good or evil. So the dramatist aiming at the deeper levels—and this is the main excuse for verse—assumes heavy responsibilities.
In these essays Mr. Donoghue discusses the plays of English and American poets with a clear sense of the ramifications of his subject. His task was the more difficult in that there were no masterpieces for him to interpret. But by keeping in view the question whether progress has been made towards the creation of a serviceable verse other than the iambic pentameter he gives himself scope for personal judgments about familiar materials, chief of which being Mr. Eliot's plays. The 'third voice' of the title is, in Eliot's words, 'the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say with- in the limits of one imaginary character address- ing another imaginary character.'
The verse of the later Eliot plays is shown to be' more successful from this point of view than that of Murder in the Cathedral. But the claims made for The Confidential Clerk and The Elder States- man are far from persuasive. Mr. Donoghue writes the word 'holiness' with a capital, and is inclined to gush about 'illumination' and 'spirituality.' He goes more than halfway to meet Mr. Eliot's own word-play. What Sir Claude Mulharnmer's phrase 'the real world' signifies is clear enough, but the plays do not take us far beyond mere cliché. In shedding some of his earlier starkness and becoming urbane Mr. Eliot has drifted closer to the ethos of the parish maga- zine. The verse may be more supple but the dominant impression is of monotony. We have only to think of such a 'minor classic' of 'spirituality' as Silas Marner to realise the tenu- ousness of these plays, in which both the com- monplace 'world' and the 'reality' which transcends it suffer diminution. In general there is too wide a gap between Mr. Donoghue's appre- ciation and the plays themselves. Though he writes 'Eliot's is very much a Paleface theatre,' he does not see that the criticism strikes deep enough to make discussion of Eliot's verse a side- issue. In his examination of Yeats, Auden. Fry, Pound, Eberhart and others, he draws attention to the characteristic vigour of Pound's version of the Trachinite of Sophocles. Directness and vigour are certainly uncommon virtues in moderill verse drama. `Mr. Fry's language has a soft, centre.' But a flourishing drama is a communal, achievement and, as- Mr. Donoghue insists, the conditions seem unpropitious.
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