This incident is comically symbolic of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
It is hardly necessary to go into Dr. Levy’s defence of Nietzsche against the charge that he was the “man who caused the war.” Dr. Levy points out quite justly that Nietzsche was as severe a critic of Prussians and Prussianism as any English leader-writer in war-time. This, however, does not meet the point of the anti-Nietzscheans. What they contend is that Prussianism is essentially the vulgar application of the principles that underlie the Nietzschean philosophy. It is obviously ridiculous to contend that Nietzsche caused the war. It is arguable, however, that he was the supreme poet of the supreme falsehood that is at the bottom of all unjust wars.
In any case, like Carlyle, he will probably survive as an artist rather than as a teacher. And even men who detest his gospel will delight in the lightning of his phrase as it shoots out of the thunder-clouds of his imagination.
XIII
MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC
Mr. Eliot, in his critical essays, is an undertaker rather than a critic. He comes to bury Hamlet not to praise him. He has an essay on “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he assures us that, “so far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” Now, there are several things about Hamlet that call for explanation. But there is one thing that needs no explanation, and that is its “artistic failure.” One might as well set out to explain why the mid-Atlantic is shallow, why Mont Blanc is lower than Parliament Hill, why Cleopatra was unattractive, why roses have an offensive smell. It might be possible for a writer of paradoxes to amuse himself and us on any of these themes. But Mr. Eliot is no dealer in paradoxes. He is a serious censor of literature, who lives in the gloom of a basement, and cannot believe in the golden pomp of the sun outside. It might be unfair to say that what he is suffering from is literary atheism. He has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he worships them in the dark spirit of the sectarian, and his interest in them is theological rather than religious in kind. He is like the traditional Plymouth Brother whose belief in God is hardly so strong as his belief that there are “only a few of us”—perhaps “only one of us”—saved. We see the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference to “the few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal and Flaubert and James.” This expresses an attitude which is intolerable in a critic of literature, and should be left to the précieuses ridicules.
Mr. Eliot, however, does not merely say that Hamlet is an artistic failure and leave it at that. He goes on to explain what he means. He believes that:
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.
In so far as this is an attempt to explain the specifically new Shakespearian emphasis in Hamlet, in contrast to those elements which he borrowed from an earlier play, the first part of the assertion is worth considering. But, as regards the completed play that we possess, novelties, borrowings, and all, the entire sentence gives us merely a false simplification. Shakespeare’s finished Hamlet is a play dealing with many things besides the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son. It is a play dealing with the effect of a whole circle of ruinous events closing in on a man of princely nature, who was a foreigner amid the baseness that surrounded him. Shakespeare showed in Hamlet that it was possible, contrary to all the rules, to write a play which combined the largeness of a biography with essential dramatic unity. Mr. Eliot, however, clings to the idea that Shakespeare failed in Hamlet because he was divided in interest between the theme of the guilty mother and other intractable stuff “that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.” Now, every great work of art is like the visible part of an iceberg; it reveals less than it leaves hidden. The greatest poem in the world is no more than a page from that inspired volume that exists in the secret places of the poet’s soul. There is no need to explain the mysteries that crowd about us as we read Hamlet by a theory of Shakespeare’s failure. To summon these mysteries into the narrow compass of a play is the surest evidence of a poet’s triumph. Let us see, however, how Mr. Eliot, holding to his guilty-mother theme, attempts to explain the quality of Shakespeare’s failure. He writes:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.
“Hamlet (the man),” he adds, “is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” Mr. Eliot has a curious view of the things that justify violent emotion. I should have thought that the murder of a father by his usurping brother, the infidelity of a mother and a mistress, the use of former companions to spy on him, the failure of all that had once seemed honest and fair, plots to murder him, the suicide of his beloved, might have caused considerable perturbation even in the soul of a fish. If ever there was a play in which the emotion is not in excess of the facts as they appear, that play is Hamlet. The emotion is “in excess” only in the sense that it expresses for us not merely the personal emotion of one man, but the emotions of generation after generation of fine and sensitive spirits caught in the gross toils of disaster. Hamlet is a universal type as well as an individual. In this he resembles such a figure as Prometheus to a degree which cannot be claimed for Lear or Macbeth or Othello. That, perhaps, is the real mystery that has bewildered Mr. Eliot.