Another doubt has been expressed. Mr. Eliot repeats himself in two ways. The nightingale, Cleopatra’s barge, the rats, and the smoky candle-end, recur and recur. Is this a sign of a poverty of inspiration? A more plausible explanation is that this repetition is in part a consequence of the technique above described, and in part something which many writers who are not accused of poverty also show. Shelley, with his rivers, towers, and stars, Conrad, Hardy, Walt Whitman, and Dostoevski spring to mind. When a writer has found a theme or image which fixes a point of relative stability in the drift of experience, it is not to be expected that he will avoid it. Such themes are a means of orientation. And it is quite true that the central process in all Mr. Eliot’s best poems is the same; the conjunction of feelings which, though superficially opposed,—as squalor, for example, is opposed to grandeur,—yet tend as they develop to change places and even to unite. If they do not develop far enough the intention of the poet is missed. Mr. Eliot is neither sighing after vanished glories nor holding contemporary experience up to scorn.
Both bitterness and desolation are superficial aspects of his poetry. There are those who think that he merely takes his readers into the Waste Land and leaves them there, that in his last poem he confesses his impotence to release the healing waters. The reply is that some readers find in his poetry not only a clearer, fuller realisation of their plight, the plight of a whole generation, than they find elsewhere, but also through the very energies set free in that realisation a return of the saving passion.
NOTES.
[†] Hegel’s dictum, History of Philosophy, iii, 543.
[†] Critique of Judgment, transl. by Meredith, p. 15.
[*] Dr Bosanquet was one of the last adherents. See his Three Lectures on Æsthetics.
[†] E.g. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful.
[*] E.g. Any choice for which the chooser cannot give his reasons tends in the laboratory to be called an ‘æsthetic choice.’
[*] Cf. Chapters X and XXXII, and Impersonality, Index.
[†] Clive Bell, Art, p. 25.