COMMUNICATION
The "Cocktail Party"
Stit,—In his appreciation of Mr. T. S> Elies new play (Spectator, April 21st) Professor Dobrde said of the language: "Now, we feel secure, Mr. Eliot has achieved his mastery : he has worked out a form of speech suitable for an actor to say, and actor-proof, cadenced enough to enable the stresses to tell, flexible enough to be either portentous or light ; and while it is a universal medium, it yet carries his own individual rhythms," which—high praise that it is—might with equal fairness have been said of a fine piece of prose. This answers the question: " Is this good drama ? " with a loud " Yes " ; but it leaves the much more vital question: " Is this good poetic drama ? " unacknowledged. It seemed to Mr. Dobrde sufficient that the play was dramatic, and the verse important for its statements, or its meaning, or the "attitude it induced." Yet between a play that is written in verse and one which follows the normal pattern of ordinary conversation there has always been, and there always will be, a natural and essential difference, each giving a different kind of pleasure, and having to be judged on different principles. In the case of The Cocktail Party the difference to the rhythm, the vocabulary, the syntax, the subject, the form and the grand design which may be directly attributed to the verse is so slender that one might believe the division into lines was caused by a whim, as it certainly was not caused by any ascer- tainable system of metre. Only perhaps for the higher metaphysics and the ritual libation was verse clearly necessary ; but even here, stripped of the constant regulating power and cumulative harmony of metre, only a thin, halting spectacle, instead of a strong and perfect masterpiece, is shown. The play appears throughout to be an attempt, so far as possible, to abolish the essential difference between the language of verse and the normal, spontaneous remarks of intelligent conversation ; and thereafter to combine the milder pleasure of everyday, common expressions with the exciting and restraining qualities which verse imposes on language and thought. With these two incompatible forces jarring on each other, the one striving to reveal, by realism, buried secrets of the mind, the other demonstrating the meanness of normal conversation and normal ideas by framing them in verse, the attempt has been made to express an incommunicable metaphysics in a language that will not offend a modern audience. It is a bold attempt.
Even in the face of the prevailing public apathy towards verse, the doubtful popularity of a play which no one, even with a delicate, sensitive ear, would recognise as verse, could not have been the serious object of a poet. Yet there is no work—not even Mr. Fry's— which disguises its nature as completely and as violently as this play disguises its verse ; not just in moments of pleasant conversation, but in the climaxes of passion, everywhere except in a few phrases or lines there is a determined restraint of language, limiting it to the humdrum flatness of small-talk, occasionally elevating it to the level of a university Socratic Club. It calls to mind that there is no written verse which carries so logically to its conclusion the critical theory of Wordsworth that " there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition "—a theory fortunately abandoned by him in his poetry and rejected by Coleridge in the Biographia.
Why, in order to please actors and audience, in order to make the play " actor-proof," to avoid any gulf which might have existed be- tween the audience and the players had Mr. Eliot put on his singing- robes ; was it necessary to strip his verse as bare as ascetic prose ? Surely only by following methods entirely proper to its nature can the 'verse-play be restored to an intelligent popularity, rather than by making it approximate as close as could be to the usual language of the stage. Is the reputation of poetry worthily advanced by accommodating itself to an exclusive taste for prose ? As language, printed in the form of verse, and therefore to be judged as verse, this is for the greater part as flat, prosaic and bloodless as any language yet contrived in verse ; and at its worst—again by stan- dards of verse—it is either offensive or ridiculous. The metre has been made measureless, and therefore abolished had the words been slightly altered in one or two parts, and the whole printed as prose, there would have been an improvement, for it could not then have been judged by standards of poetic excellence. The imagery, the statements, the mental probings, might all have been spoken quite naturally by ordinary educated people ; but in a verse-play, where the language becomes of utmost importance by reason of being verse, and should raise and excite the sense with poetic pleasure, should arouse and control the poetic imagination—in this context the kitchen-gabble of the lightest scenes is bitterly trivial and un- bearable. In a straight and unpretentious comedy this language would be good and honest of its kind, but verse is the most pre- tentious form of composition one could choose. Yet here there is a colloquial actualism—not just realism—of style, compared with which some of Wordsworth's plainest lines seemed inspired.
This fine delicate precision, comparable to mystical prose, is the redeeming quality of the play. It seems at first, looking into the depths of the subject, that this naturally warranted treatment in a style superior to prose. But here again the language fails to rise to the regular, anticipated level of verse. Though Mr. Eliot's play happens to be frequently poetical in the sense in which The Pilgrim's Progress may be described—loosely—as poetical, even at its best the language yields more of the fruits of mysticism than of verse. The heart-searchings to dis- cover " reality," to define " escape," to believe in one's own personality, to " get back to normality," to find the " way of illu- mination," or how the human is " trans-humanised," or to have an " awareness of solitude " ; finally, to be able to call a cocktail party an " appointed burden "—these mental convolutions and probings are certainly sincere: they may be absolute truth ; but, being state- ments that derive from metaphysical or mystical regions, their geography clashes with that of anything so material as verse, and the preponderance of abstract over concrete expressions that results, dulls all but the metaphysical portions of the mind. Our imagination, feeling out for something to touch, is repulsed with " you are being yourself," " he was only a projection," and the Biblical allusion sadly shorn of Adam, " we die to each other daily." Yet there are some very fine phrases in this style, such as the " residue of ecstasy " or
" the final desolation Of solitude in the phantasmal world Of imagination, shuffling memories and desires."
But the final result is one of disappointment at the substitution of a metaphysical for a poetic pleasure and occasional annoyance at the creation of original platitudes. The same quality in an even stronger degree is found in the novels of the late Mr. Charles Williams, whose heroine in Descent into Hell is haunted by the same lines of Shelley as are quoted in The Cocktail Party, and all of whose characters pick on their spiritual problems, and worry them as tensely as a dog worries a bone, and give them a religious importance which supercharges their entire nature.
There is no lack of feeling, of depth, of thought in this play ; but there is a darkness, a shrouding of the poetic imagination as this has been understood from the beginning, and as it was displayed in The Waste Land. The reason, I believe, lies not only in the attempt to make verse indistinguishable from prose—a kind of fruitless flattery to modern lack of taste—but in the very nature and object of the work, which is undoubtedly more concerned drama- tically with probing into the recesses of truth about the characters and their situation than with the poetic presentation of these truths in the drama. My contention is that the object of poetry—and this includes poetic drama—is poetic pleasure primarily and truth inci- dentally : if this order is reversed the work may merit the attention of philosophers, co-religionists or other schools of drama or letters, but it does not deserve serious consideration as poetry. It was a grave disappointment to find that The Cocktail Party had neglected this order, that the author of The Waste Land had—either deliberately or mistakenly—abandoned poetry in the pursuit of spiritual " ways," and a common and popular language to express them.—Yours, etc., 26 Warwick Square, London, S.W.I. RICHARD MURPHY.
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