Lucy McDiarmid, "The Treason of the Clerks."
The modern "clerk" is determined to have the soul of a citizen and to make vigorous use of it; he is proud of that soul; his literature is filled with his contempt for the man who shuts himself up with art or science and takes no interest in the passions of the State ... Today the "clerk" has made himself Minister of War.
Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (Aldington translation)
Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives;
because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
Auden, "At the Grave of Henry James"
I.
The "soul of a citizen"- how ardently Benda's contempt comes through even in translation. Yeats had such a "soul" in the Seanad, speaking on the coinage, or the condition of schools, or fire prevention. Eliot had the same soul in the Criterion, opining on Owsald Mosley, Harold Laski, Parliament, education, public buildings, agriculture, and money. Nothing human was alien to them; no current issue was too remote or too dull. Wanting, in Eliot's phrase, to have "some direct social utility," wanting to turn a fragmented group into a community of neighbors, wanting to save civilization, all three poets "betrayed" the intellectuals. Yet even while making "vigorous use" of these citizens' souls, they did not feel the "contempt" Benda ascribed to them for the inhabitants of the ivory tower. Yeats's poetry is filled with admiration for the person "shut up" in art:
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel
Keep those children out.
There on the scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo. (618)
Betraying their clerical caste in the prose of the public arena, in their major lyric poems the poets are closer to Benda's view, and reject the idea that poets or intellectuals can save civilization. If the poets, within themselves, contain the whole range of characters in "Lapis Lazuli," from hysterical women to calm Chinamen, in the prose and minor poems the poets are closer to the hysterical women, impatiently calling for solutions, but in the great poems they are with the Chinamen at the little halfway house, apart from the "tragic scene" yet defined in relation to it. But the detached stance is hard won. The position of many lyrics in The Tower, The Winding Stair, Last Poems, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and Auden's poems of the early forties, is not simply nonactivist, but- like Benda's- anti-activist. Artist and clerks are defined as much in terms of their political failures as their aesthetic successes. The great poems form a response to the more engag speeches, and minor poems, and recant their "treason."
As they confront the limitations and fallibility of art, the poets define it more positively. The power of art increases proportionately as the burdens placed on it diminish. And, correspondingly, the scenes of war recede and becomes less devastating. In apocalyptic poems such as "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," The Waste Land, and "Memorial for the City," those burdens are greatest. In elegiac tones the poets express dismay that so much beauty and so many "ingenious lovely things" have been unable to create an analogous order and harmony in society. Other poems, of more modest expectations, deliberately eschew treating art as a mode of salvation. In the Coole Park poems, East Coker, and For the Time Being, where there is less anxious grasping after permanent achievement, and more humility about human civilizing powers, communities appear as a genuine possibility. Only in a small number of lyrics, which cluster around the beginning of the Second World War- "Long-Legged Fly," "Lapis Lazuli," Little Gidding, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," and "At the Grave of Henry James"- is the burden lifted entirely. In these poems, as the poet's role is defined explicitly in terms of a rejection of social action, the poet is granted freedom to "save" the world of a work of art, a space within history, yet geographically and ontologically distinct. As less is demanded of art, as it is burdened with less idealism, and therefore less likely to disappoint and disillusion, it has freer rein to do what it can do, which is to create a model of a saved world, in which, as Auden says, crowds are communities and sins forgiven.1
The work of art, so understood, represents the world that the poet can "save" completely; there, at least, he can create a perfect order that no war, no dictator, no historical change can ever ruin. It embodies a community in which every fragment finds a place; it is the aesthetic equivalent of the twigs bound by the fascia, the discrete, isolated citizens who make up a nation. A verbal League of Nations, it has the qualities that the actual saved civilization was to have had, according to the poets' more activist moments. Untainted by human imperfection, it is more perfect, and more permanent, than any small circle of friends can ever be.
This political perception of a work of art is implicit in the poets' prose comments on literature, in which they tend to define aesthetic order in metaphors derived from social relationships. But it is only gradually, over the generations, that the idea of a substitution of a perfect poem for a perfect society becomes explicit. Only Auden stresses the ontological separation of poetry's world from "history." The other two poets, older and less skeptical, retain some hope of a relation between aesthetic and social order. The connection Yeats sees is diffuse but causal. In his autobiography, Yeats presents the artist as (in Auden's phrase) a "midwife to society." The poet perceives, expresses, and makes public in literature a preexisting "Unity of Image," a kind of Jungian anima patriae buried in every citizen. Every mind, writes Yeats, is part of a "nation-wide multiform reverie," and passes through "a stream of suggestion."
A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, bound together by this interchange among streams or shadows; that Unity of Image, which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol?2
This "Unity of Image," articulated by the poet, would "define" and "evoke" Unity of Culture. Like Stephen Dedalus, the artist "forge[s] in [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race." With its conscience thus expressed, the "race" comes to selfconsciousness, and can achieve- this is Yeats's hope, not Stephen's- "Unity of Being." The work of art, through a series of removes, "saves" the civilization of a nation.
In Eliot the implications of a socially defined aesthetics are less explicit but almost as significant politically. Even the title of Eliot's most important aesthetic statement, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is a not quite buried metaphor. Literary tradition, as Eliot conceives of it, is a social relationship: "No poet, no artist of any art, has him complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone ..." Of course, here Eliot is describing people, so naturally the language sounds social. But even when he is describing the works of art themselves, the order they form sounds communal. As a collective entity- and they are definitely collective- they sound almost like Sarastro and his priests passing judgment on, and then welcoming, Tamino:
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete
before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.3
This is a living, organic order, a set of relationships that change, expand, and grow. Tradition "saves" the individual talent; it is a kind of League of Literature.
The essay "halts at the frontier of metaphysics," but its philosophical implications make unsurprising Eliot's statement, eight years later, that he was classicist, royalist, and Anglo-Catholic. The need for a hierarchy to confer value and meaning was obvious from the aesthetic ideas of "Tradition and the Individual Talent." But the essay does halt, and does not talk- as Yeats would have- about nationalism or political hierarchies. The analogies with Eliot's thought in other areas of life are clear in retrospect, but Eliot does not pursue them in the essay- or is not yet conscious of them.
One of Auden's earliest references to art as an alternative to society, and to ordering the world of a poem instead of saving civilization, occurs at the end of "The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats," where the prosecution condemns Yeats's social views and the defense transfers the frame of reference to art:
... there is one field in which the poet is a man of action, the field of language.... However false or undemocratic [Yeats's] ideas, his diction shows a continuous evolution towards what one might call the true democratic style. The social virtues of a real democracy are brotherhood and intelligence, and the parallel linguistic virtues are strength and clarity.4
That the analogy is somewhat strained indicates how determined Auden was to make Yeats into the creator of a perfect society, even (and especially) a perfect verbal society. Now in America, and no longer under the old political pressures of England and the thirties, Auden seemed to insist on a political metaphor for poetry. "A poet is a revolutionist who wants to convert the reader to his own verbal society," he told a college audience in January 1940.5 Years later, in "The Virgin and the Dynamo," Auden is even more insistently political in terminology and antipolitical in polemic. As he describes it, what the poet does in organizing a poem is precisely like political organizing:
The subject matter of a poem is comprised of a crowd of recollected occasions of feeling.... This crowd the poet attempts to transform into a community by embodying in it a verbal society. Such a society, like any society in nature, has its own laws.... As members of crowds, every occasion competes with every other, demanding inclusion and a dominant position to which they are not necessarily entitled, and every word demands that the system shall modify itself in its case, that a special exception shall be made for it and it only.6
Finally, once the crowd has become a community, aesthetic harmony makes the poem "very nearly a Utopia," but this is "an analogy, not an imitation; the harmony is possible and verbal only." Verbally, at least, it is possible to save: "Every beautiful poem presents an analogy to the forgiveness of sins." But as Auden stresses that the poem offers only a model of salvation, he stresses the corollary, that the world outside the poem is separate, distinct, and not saved. The essay ends with a caveat against confusing art and life:
The effect of beauty ... is good to the degree that, through its analogies ... the possibility of regaining paradise through repentance and forgiveness is recognized. Its effect is evil to the degree that beauty is taken, not as analogous to, but identical with goodness ... and the conclusion drawn that, since all is well in the work of art, all is well in history. But all is not well there.7
When Eliot presents art in terms of a social model, he feels no such anxiety to deny the political implications. To Auden the analogy is dangerous, and false.
II.
The great lyric poems explore the burdens put on art to create order and stability in history; to take "beauty," as Auden warns us not to, as "identical with goodness." In the major apocalyptic poems- "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," The Waste Land, "Memorial for the City"- huge empires are at stake, and the poems' panoramic sweep is temporal as well as spatial, from Phidias's ivories through the Black-and-Tan Terror, from "Homer's world" through the Second World War, covering all of western Europe, Jerusalem, Athens, London. Yet their subject is less the devastation of war than the failures of civilization. The poems implicitly deny all the most comforting myths of secular idealism: that citizens can be neighbors, and crowds communities; that art makes people better, that human beings love one another, and that there ever was a world in which beautiful objects signified social well-being. They deny, with particular emphasis, that poets can save civilization. With each generation, they show the poet less as someone specially set apart from the rest of the world, a privileged missionary born to spread a message of redemption, and more as someone implicated in civilization's corruptions, in need of salvation himself.
The wish for poetry to save the world dies hardest in Yeats. The expectations seem to have been that (as Auden would phrase it) "since all is well in the work of art, all is well in history." But "all is not well there." According to "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," the aesthetic charm of "ingenious lovely things," of "pretty toys," did not make a morally beautiful world, but concealed violence and anger that never went away.8 The "clerks" tried to save the public world with intellectual order: "We pieced our thoughts into philosophy / And tried to bring the world under a rule." The magnitude of such an attempt- bringing the „world„ under a rule- testifies to their idealism, and their naivetŽ. All the language describing their efforts indicates the aesthetic assumptions they brought to the task. They
dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind .(431)
The word "mend," like piecing one's thoughts into philosophy, suggests that qualities of imagination and intellect can replicate in reality the powers they have in literature and philosophy; terms like "mischief," and "rogues and rascals" in the first section, transform real evils into literary ones.
Instead of ruling, mending, or saving, the clerks become lost in a labyrinth of "art or politics." Wrapped up "in his own secret meditation," the clerk tries to order a world he is only remotely aware of. In his meditation, an intellectual devising schemes, how can he ever come into contact with "mischief"? Just to call his creation a labyrinth implies that it is impossibly complicated, a structure that shows off the builder's ingenuity but certainly does not improve the world. On the contrary, if he's lost in it, it separates him from the very world he's trying to save. His superior awareness of the futility of all this idealism only separates him further; instead of sympathizing with other disappointed saviors of civilization, the "great," the "wise," and the "good," he "would not lift a hand" to help them "bar that foul storm out," and retreats in mockery from even the tenuous community available to him.
The Waste Land's many prophets announce the city's need for salvation, but they do not place that burden on artists, intellectuals, Yeatsian civilizers, or any other caste. Everyone is equally culpable. The speaker has not sought to bring the world under a rule or to mend mischief, but only to express the unarticulated grief of the city:
By the water of Leman I sat down and wept
.......................................................
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. (67)
But in the very last paragraph of the poem, when the pile-up of reference to Arnaut Daniel, Gerard de Nerval, Hieronymo, and others implicitly identifies the speaker as a poet, his redemptive function becomes clear; the poet is himself the territory to be saved:
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon- O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine ˆ la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. (75)
The juxtaposition "Shall I at least set my lands in order? / London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down" sets in contrast the empire whose monuments cannot be saved and the speaker's own "lands," which can be. Arnaut Daniel, who cries and sings, is not saving civilization but his soul; the author of the Pervigilium Veneris longs merely to be expressive, and worries about his own silence four times in four lines in the passage from which The Waste Land's allusion is taken:
illa cantat, nos tacemus; quando vir venit meum?
quando fiat uti chelidon ut tacere desinam?
perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit?
sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium.9
The tour abolie of Gerard de Nerval is not one of the falling towers of Jerusalem or Athens, but his own imaginative energy. The fragments that the poet has shored are chunks of poetry, not bricks, and the ruins are in his own soul. The metaphorical association with the debris of civilization only makes more distinct the realm which the poet can save. The fragments of secular life he cannot arrange into an order; poetry he can. The example of Arnaut Daniel provides spiritual inspiration; the author of the Pervigilium Veneris is a fellow sufferer in silence; de Nerval's "Desdichado" is a perpetual reminder of the gloom and melancholy of imaginative impotence; Hieronymo signifies hope that he can rouse himself to write a "mad" macaronic poem. There is definitely a function for the poet, but it has to do with poetry, not with society. He suffers the same sterility, the same ruin, the same despair, as the civilization around him, but he does not set himself up in a causal relation to it. It is only "my lands" that he intends to set in order, "my ruins" that he prevents from complete collapse. The preceding poem belies his anxiety about silence and loss of imagination; its lines are certainly the fragments that have staved off despair. Apocalypse only sets in greater relief the poet's true function, to fill the desert with "inviolable voice."
The implication of "inviolable voice" ("A Game of Chess") is that the personal poetic voice remains as an arena of possible salvation. It remains uncorrupted, alone pure and redeemable in the waste land. In the original manuscript, Magnus Martyr's walls were of "inviolable," not "inexplicable," splendor: like the poet, the church remained a possible salvation within the desert.10 In Auden's "Memorial for the City," even the small territory of the self is denied the poets. Throughout the poem, poets are disqualified as redeemers because like "scribes and innkeepers," kings, popes, scientists, and statesmen, they are creators and members of civilization, and are implicated in is corruptions. The Renaissance poets "acclaimed the raging herod of the will." In such characters as Faustus, Tamburlaine, or Macbeth, their poetry exuberantly celebrated all the forces that destroy the civilized community: "The groundlings wept as on a secular stage / The grand and the bad went to ruin in thundering verse." The romantic poets, with their bad health ("wasted away with the spleen," "Sunk Off Cape Consumption") and fitful impersonal lusts, are not qualified to save civilization either. "Myself am civilization," Auden's typical poet might say. The romantics are the last exhausted products of a culture in its death throes; the poet's mind carries the taint of civilization within it. The romantics think of themselves as starting afresh, searching for some uncivilized place to begin a new world. In a "hectic quest for the prelapsarian man" they raise "the flag of the Word / Upon lawless spots denied or forgotten." But the Word is a product of the same mind that built the civilization they are trying to escape. They "died for the Conscious City," because merely to bring consciousness to a remote place- the Lake District, the South Seas, or even the Aran Islands- is to spread the same fallen civilization.
"Memorial for the City" traces the rise and decline of civilization in a series of sounds: "Pope Gregory whispered," "Luther denounced," "poets acclaimed," "thundering verse," "the packed galleries roared." Several of the romantic poets were "wrecked on the Gibbering Isles." In that noise, which peters out into meaninglessness, poets are simply more voices, their "Word," for better or worse, like anyone else's. In the final section of the poem the poetic voice is rejected definitively by the uncorrupted Flesh, which has viewed civilization with a certain skepticism for centuries: "I heard Orpheus sing; I was not quite as moved as they say."
The poets' attitudes toward saving civilization are also reflected in the types of romantic love in the apocalyptic poems. As exemplars of infatuation without love, the lovers typify all that is wrong with a civilization not aligned with community. The relation of lust to love is like that of the Renaissance to the Middle Ages in the poets' myths: it is energy separated from feeling. So Lady Kyteler is abruptly introduced into "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" in a relative clause, grandly and perversely surrendering to her demon-lover: "To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought / Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks." The mad impersonal gesture is made to a fiend who may be merely a fiction of her lust. The typist and clerk of The Waste Land interact in an impersonal fashion, but without so much drama; they are more encased in vanities, and do not even see each other. The clerk's vanity does not require that the real human being respond to his touch; when he leaves, the typist "turns and looks a moment in the glass" at the only being she has been concerned about, "hardly aware" of him. The isolation of lovers is greatest with Auden's romantics. Auden uses the phrase "changing their Beatrices often" to describe the romantic poets' frantic, erratic inclination to adore, a subjective whim of the anxious mind rather than a genuine feeling for another person. They have a model of ideal romantic love ready in Dante's fictional character, and the current holder of the Beatrice title changes as often as their whim. They can change the real identity of the person often because it is insignificant next to the ideal identity that exists in their imaginations.
The separateness of all the lovers from each other in the apocalyptic poems is indicative of human relations on a larger scale. If there is no love between two people, how can there ever be communities? In order for the group of neighbors passing bricks from hand to hand to exist, you cannot (to mix poets) have a people whose "vanity requires no response." In all three poems there are either isolated individuals or great mobs of people, but no communities. In "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," the people who are not in chaotic masses- the dancers, the riders, the daughters of Herodias- are alone, the mother murdered at her door, the incendiary and bigot, the poet "in his own secret meditation." In The Waste Land's foreground are the typist, Mr. Eugenides, each Thames daughter; in the background are crowds and hooded hordes swarming. Every individual member of the crowd is as isolated as the young man carbuncular: "Each man fixed his eyes before his feet." The city itself, in "Memorial for the City," begins in the solitude of Pope Gregory, "Alone in a room," grows to little combative groups (like the "disciplined logicians" who "fought"), swells to the groundlings who watch Renaissance plays and the packed galleries who listen to Mirabeau, degenerates to the alienated romantic poets who "died, unfinished, alone," and finally to "two friends" divided by barbed wired. The barbed wire is only revealed at the end, but it was there all along, in every divided, antagonistic, "civilized" relationship.
Just as the crowds break down into separate solitary people, so the heaps of beautiful objects, unassociated with communal feeling, become fragments of debris, the archaeological remains of a civilization. None dared admit, says Yeats, that anyone would "break in bits the famous ivories / Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees." The "levelling wind" destroys the monuments of the great. All the effete ornate trappings of civilization in The Waste Land are revealed as "stony rubbish" and "a heap of broken images" at the start. Ivory chessmen, golden Cupidons, candelabra, and laquearia alike fall down with London Bridge, leaving the poet with fragments. The stained-glass windows, Romanesque churches, and baroque sculpture of "Memorial for the City" lie in ruins at the end, ruins such as Auden saw at NŸremberg in 1945:11
Across the square,
Between the burnt-out Law Courts and Police Headquarters,
Past the Cathedral far too damaged to repair,
Around the Grand Hotel patched up to hold reporters,
Near huts of some Emergency Committee,
The barbed wire runs through the abolished City.12
The buildings are the exhausted institutions that failed to save civilization. Even the "innkeepers" of an earlier stanza find apocalyptic fulfillment in the patched-up Grand Hotel.
When the temporary condition called "civilization" gives way, it is succeeded by the more permanent condition that it has interrupted. If (for Yeats) "civilization is a struggle to keep self-control," then it is a counteraction to the inherently violent, centripetal tendency of matter. The Yeatsian cosmos is a world of winds and storms, and civilization may be like the tower at the beginning of "Prayer for My Daughter," a crude, vulnerable structure, or like the house at the end, a gracious, "ceremonious" center of sweetness and light, but it is surrounded by the sea-winds of arrogance and hatred. So in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," when civilization is de-constructed, there are lust and rage, "violence upon the roads, violence of horses." When all those monuments and labyrinths are gone, there is raw energy, wild and sexual, but also, worst of all, the perverted vestiges of the civilized urge, still making masterworks, but as offerings to a fiend.
The distinction between civilization and its absence in Eliot's and Auden's poems occurs along more Augustinian than Paterian lines. In spite of its beautiful objects and intellectual efforts, the city is only the civitas terrena, sinful and impermanent. What is left when civilization has burned itself out ("Burning burning burning," "the burnt-out Law Courts") is what has always been, the civitas Dei, the "City of God without beginning" in the words of Auden's epigraph from Juliana of Norwich. At the end of "Memorial for the City," the flesh, which will be resurrected to inhabit the abiding city, rejects a long list of civilizers, conspicuously poets and intellectuals (Orpheus, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Ahab) and looks forward to the damnation of the earthly city: "I shall rise again to hear her judged." The Waste Land's fifth section puts more starkly the antagonism between civilization and community, because its revelation of love occurs in the jungle, the place outside of civilization; before and after London Bridge, Ganga existed. The time implied by the references to the Upanishads is mythic time, when gods talked to men and demons. The setting is non-Western, prior, in recorded history, to "Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London." This is the jungle primeval, with its river, leaves, black clouds, and silence of expectation. Here God revealed in the voice of the thunder utters three imperatives: give, sympathize, control. That is how communities begin. The Christian version might have been "Love thy neighbor as thyself," but anything Christian would have been too closely associated with the decadent Europe of the poem. This isn't civilization "stripped," as in Yeats, but civilization rejected and begun anew. The association of give, sympathize, and control with the jungle implicitly allies civilization with the vanity, selfishness, and indulgence embodied in the denizens of the city. The poem's civilized speaker cannot himself necessarily give and sympathize. He understands the thunder's meaning, but "thinking of the key ... confirms a prison." Only in the place where nothing has ever been built can the revelation occur.
III.
If two people cannot love each other- the typist and the clerk, Lady Kyteler and Robert Artisson- there is no way for communities to exist. But if two people can, communities will grow into being. In the commands give, sympathize, and control lie the beginnings of a saved civilization, but it must begin with two people. Against a background of failed civilizations and secular debris, the thunder utters the words that can turn the crowd flowing over London Bridge into a group of loving neighbors, blood shaking their hearts, not eyes fixed upon feet. What is "controlled" is the ego, a non-neighborly sense of oneself as superior to others. To "control" is to recognize other people as like oneself, equal beings in relationship, not inferiors or competitors. In the lines following "Damyata" there is a potential relating, a touch and responsiveness between boat and hand, and, potentially, between heart and heart. All the instances of good community in The Waste Land and other places in Eliot's poetry involve the same "control" of egotism, and a responsive awareness of other people. The children singing under the dome, the fishmen eating and talking on Lower Thames Street, and the dance in Little Gidding, all embody the sense of communal equality: no one is special, all are related. Eliot's compound ghost describes the difference between arrogance and humility, proceeding in exasperation or moving in measure:
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer. (195)
That "measure" is "control," the acceptance of pattern, the way to love.
Such a relating among human beings is possible when expectations are humbler than they are in apocalyptic poems, and art is not asked to save the world. At Coole Park Lady Gregory brought Unity of Culture to her "small circle." Her "pride established in humility" gave her confidence, but not arrogance. In "Coole Park, 1929" the greatest "work constructed there in nature's spite" was the society formed out of naturally isolated, antisocial people: the "timid" Yeats, the "meditative" Synge, the "impetuous men" Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane. Through Lady Gregory the shy Yeats was able to socialize his literary impulses, and the extroverted Hyde, a guest "before he had beaten into prose / That noble blade the Muses buckled on," was inspired to write. With the centripetal force of her "powerful character," she created a community where there was not one naturally, harmonizing into a group difficult people whose innate tendency was towards fragmentation. She "knitted into a single thought" the separate beings and created, temporarily, Unity of Being.
The volume The Winding Stair juxtaposes the humility of Lady Gregory with the arrogance of other "clerks" who are lost in their labyrinths rather than lovingly social. Its poems are arranged out of chronological order to create a contrast. Until the Coole Park poems, civilizers in The Winding Stair are "bloody" and "arrogant": There are Swift's savage indignation, Goldsmith's intellectual narcissism ("deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of the mind"), "haughtier-headed Burke," and "God-appointed Berkeley." The symbols of civilization are guilty ones: the crime-ridden sword, the torn dress, the half-dead tower. Its energy derives from hatred: "Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne / All hated Whiggery." But once Lady Gregory enters the volume, civilization changes from the arrogant, solitary defiance of men, to the courteous, sociable "pride established in humility" of a woman. Her "civilization" is not a collection of artifacts, swords, dresses, towers, and gazebos, but a social ritual, a "scene well set and excellent company," a "dancelike glory," "intellectual sweetness." The eminent men of letters at Coole Park chose for theme not their own eminence but
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever's written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme. (491-2)
With Lady Gregory's humility, civilization becomes something less selfish, less a trumpeting of its own power, and more a worship of the sources of is power.
Such a community of harmonized opposites appears at the Nativity in Auden's For the Time Being (1942-44). Auden insists on the precise complementarity of the shepherds and wisemen, just as Yeats emphasized the eccentricity of the men Lady Gregory kept "in formation" so that they "seemed to whirl upon a compass-point." In "At the Manger" and the sections leading up to it, Auden dramatizes operatically the fragmentedness, and finally the union, of the figures who meet at the Nativity. First the individual wise-men sing separately, in "The Summons," and then together; then the three shepherds sing separately, and together; then they alternate as trios, and finally sing as "tutti."
Tutti
We bless
Wisemen
Our lives' impatience
Shepherds
Our lives' laziness,
Tutti
And bless each other's sin, exchanging here
Wisemen
Exceptional conceit
Shepherds
with average fear.
Tutti
Released by love from isolating wrong,
Let us for love unite our various song,
Each with his gift, according to his kind
Bringing this child his body and his mind.13
In spite of the opposing lines and personalities, the wisemen and shepherds form, temporarily, a complete community. This little group "at the manger" is not an entire saved world, but represents what such a world could look like. The section begins with Mary's song to her child "(O shut your bright eyes") and ends with both groups' invocation of the child, so the entire scene is- like Coole Park- under the benevolent auspices of maternal influence, and grows out of family love and stability. The musical form of Auden's community, like the "voix d'enfants chantant" or the fishmen listening to the mandoline and chattering, embodies the idea of "control"- each individual, and each group, has sacrificed his previous egocentric demands and peculiarities to become part of a community, although, as the music also suggests, there is a blending and harmonizing, and not a canceling out, of difference. Even the children, who seem to form such a community naturally, must have been directed by a choirmaster to perform the sacred music.
And yet the small harmonious group at the manger, so like Lady Gregory's in its temporariness and its separation from the public world, is crucially different in one respect: It is not like her "constructed," "knitted" group, dedicated to the imagination or the intellect. Although Lady Gregory was not trying to save civilization, she did create "intellectual sweetness." Culture, "civilization," art, are not only absent from "At the Manger," they are emphatically rejected by the wisemen before they join the shepherds; that rejection is a precondition for the later scene's harmony. It is not enough for them not to value civilization absolutely; they must not value it at all. One by one they reject science, philosophy, and liberalism, all the secular systems with which they had hoped to save civilization:
The Third Wise Man
Observing how myopic
Is the Venus of the Soma,
The concept Ought would make, I thought,
Our passions philanthropic
And rectify in the sensual eye
Both lens-flare and lens-coma:
But arriving at the Greatest Good by introspection
And counting the Greatest Number, left no time for affection,
Laughter, kisses, squeezing, smiles:
And learned why the learned are as despised as they are.14
The denial of the intellectual disciplines, which do not redeem civilization, is more dramatically apparent than the affirmation of the religious love, which does.
Like The Winding Stair, For the Time Being has an absolute civilizer, someone with pride but not humility, able to create civilization but not to give, sympathize, or control. Herod's Judaea, a world clerkishly conceived to be perfectly civilized, is the kind of waste land that the wise men have rejected for living love. A "little civilized patch," an oasis of order, beauty, and manners, it seems a Roman counterpart to Coole Park. Herod, like Lady Gregory, has civilized the wilderness, but only a small part. In Coole, the swan drifts upon a darkening flood, and its sycamores and lime trees are "lost in night / Although that western cloud is luminous." Herod's civilization, too, is light surrounded by darkness, though in the twenty years of his rule
the darkness has been pushed back a few inches. And what, after all, is the whole Empire, with its few thousand square miles on which it is possible to lead the Rational life, but a tiny path of light compared with those immense areas of barbaric night that surround it on all sides...?15
Beyond those patches lies the darkness of irrationality, the domain of Robert Artisson. Whether it is a "darkening flood" or "that incoherent wilderness of rage and terror," its existence insists on the limitation and vulnerability of civilization, a peaceful world of books and gardens and "great works constructed ... in nature's spite."
Certainly Yeats would approve Herod's measure of value: "It's a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans." The Irish swan is "so arrogantly pure, a child might think / It can be murdered with a spot of ink." With its "Beloved books that famous hands have bound, / Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere," Coole Park epitomizes what Judaea might be in another twenty years; at the present moment, "there isn't a single town where a good bookshop will pay." Of course, to Lady Gregory, Herod would seem arriviste; he is just beginning to cultivate the land now ("Barges are unloading soil fertilizer at the river wharves") whereas her land boasts "ancestral trees" and "gardens rich in memory." In spite of swans and other visible signs of culture, the two civilizations have little in common. Coole Park's hospitality is not trivialized in Herod's Park ("Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had at the inns at reasonable prices"), it is entirely absent. The signal virtue of Coole Park is that it is a community. That is why, in "Coole Park, 1929," the house does not matter so much as Lady Gregory's spirit. "When all those rooms and passages are gone," literary tourists should pay homage to "that laurelled head." At Coole, aesthetic qualities are indistinguishable from social ones. Coole did not just have books but "Beloved books that famous hands have bound," "Great rooms where traveled men and children found / Content or joy." Even the choice of poetic subject encouraged at Coole is socially oriented, "The Book of the People."
Herod's civilization, in contrast, is more involved with the "cash nexus"- the soft drinks sell "for reasonable prices," the good bookshop "wouldn't pay." Herod is less than Lady Gregory manqu navigable, "civilized," but devoid of human interaction. There is a "civilization" in Judaea, but it is sundered from any notion of community. In fact, any community referred to is treated with scorn. The uncivilized "wilderness" outside the Empire may have some silly ideas- "Mongolian idiots are regarded as sacred and mothers who give birth to twins are instantly put to death ... warriors of superb courage obey the commands of hysterical female impersonators ... the best cuts of meat are reserved for the dead"- but it is at least a folk community, with a common core of values and beliefs. The "households" under Herod's protection are equally irrational. Their "wild prayer of longing" may sound trivial- "Become our uncle, look after Baby, amuse Grandfather, escort Madam to the Opera, help Willy with his homework, introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer"- but it assumes as ultimate value the family: Baby, Grandfather, and Willy are not that far from the "men and children" of the Gregorys at Coole Park. The "New Aristocracy" that Herod predicts will ruin his world is composed of unglamorous but humanitarian citizens: the "rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals." And of course, since "Civilization must be saved even if this means sending for the military," Herod is going to murder all the boy babies; better them than the swans.
Between Yeats's muted worship of Lady Gregory, and Auden's ironic rejection of Herod, lies Eliot's wise sympathy for his civilizers in East Coker, those eminent men of letters and generous patrons of art who, like the Gregorys and like Herod, are surrounded by darkness:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
...........................................
And dark the Sun and Moon ... (180)
The darkness suggests not only the impermanence of their achievement, but the uncertain world in which those achievements exist. It is the same menacing irrational darkness symbolized by the "Night" surrounding the lime trees, the darkening flood, or the "immense areas of barbaric night":
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. (179)
Although East Coker has no such locus of civilization as Coole Park of Judaea, in the persons of the old men it considers two types of civilizers. One type, like Herod, or like the Anglo-Irishmen of "Blood and the Moon," arrogantly believes in its own intellect alone:
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. (179)
This is not wisdom, but fear, as Herod's rising hysteria makes evident; fear "of belonging to another, or to others, or to God"- fear, that is, of community, of helping Grandfather, Madam, or Baby. The other type, like Lady Gregory, or the wise men at the manger, has "the only wisdom we can hope to acquire," the "wisdom of humility." When Eliot's civilizers ("the generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rules") all go into the dark, they must surrender and "Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought." Like Auden's wise men, they relinquish intellectual power for the possibility of connection with something larger than themselves.
Eliot's own attitude toward creating, in the fifth section of East Coker, combines Lady Gregory's modest confidence and the wise men's rejection of intellect. Like Lady Gregory, he perseveres in the hope of some limited success, but like the wise men, he makes a conscious sacrifice of absolute achievement. The slightly defeated tone derives from the relinquishment of greater expectations:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
............................................
For us, there is only the trying ... (182)
To begin a passage on his function as a poet with such an offhand phrase is a kind of humility; no fanfare, no purgatorial absolution, no dramatic despair or joy. The "middle way," an allusion to Dante's and Eliot's own age, also implies a sense of moderation. The locution l'entre deux guerres suggests the distinctly unapocalyptic nature of the period he describes; if there are "deux," then neither one is apocalyptic. A "guerre" is something repeatable, and a second war inspires less feeling of pressure and urgency. It is a part of a pattern, not a unique event. And his m not the production of a literary monument. Even the idea of "using words," as opposed to "writing poems," grants more power to the words, and less to the poet. The poet does not feel pride in any final achievement, but humility in the face of many "ventures." The passage reveals how difficult it is to renew a commitment to an activity one feels one has never completely succeeded at: "every attempt / Is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure."
The deepest implication of the phrase "l'entre deux guerres" is that there is no single momentous climactic guerre, but a continual struggle; that civilizations are not saved or lost in one great war, but precariously sustained by people who do not define their roles as saviors: "For us, there is only the trying." This passage has the sadness won of honesty; Eliot does not let himself impose a false teleology on his career, like the old men who impose patterns and falsify. By living in an openness to the pattern of life, which is, every moment, "new and shocking," he demonstrates a greater heroism, and a greater confidence, than in the anxious, apocalyptic last paragraph of The Waste Land. To sing in despair is difficult, but to accept instability as a permanent rather than a temporary condition requires even more faith. In East Coker, as in the Coole Park poems and For the Time Being, the best civilizers are those who do not treat "civilization" as an ultimate value.
IV.
Although Auden found Yeats's "parish of rich women" an embarrassment, part of the dead poet's "silliness," he was soon to meet his own equivalent of Lady Gregory in Elizabeth Mayer, the Beatrice to whom New Year Letter was dedicated. She is mother and muse and also- just as important for a thirty-three-year-old immigrant in a new city- hostess. If Yeats had described her she would certainly have been Castiglione's Duchess. Like Lady Gregory ("mother, friend, sister, brother") she is a benevolent maternal presence who rescued the poet at a time when he felt isolated and rootless. And, like Lady Gregory's, her house- on a considerably smaller scale than Coole mansion, a mere "cottage" on Long Island- provided social and aesthetic order, a little society within a society. The music of Buxtehude, played on Christmas Day,
made
Our minds a civitas of sound
Where nothing but assent was found,
For art had set in order sense
And feeling and intelligence,
And from its ideal order grew
Our local understanding too.16
The civitas of kindred spirits, like the "intellectual sweetness" of the harmony Lady Gregory created at Coole, is sharply distinct from the public community where there are "visible hostilities" like a war in Poland. The "same sun," says Auden, with his usual habit of observing the globe from a heavenly body's point of view, lights up the Polish war and the Long Island civitas. In the private life, at least, there is "assent," and a community "set in order" by Buxtehude, under the warmth of Elizabeth Mayer. She is a sun to her own smaller world, casting on the lives about her a "calm solificatio." That locution, at the end of the poem, delineates the realm in which the sun can look down on order and love.
Like Eliot's voix d'enfants, like the fishmen in the bar, like "tutti" at the manger, this is a civitas of sound, a musical harmony offered as a model for social harmony. But it is not, as the Augustinian word so emphatically reminds us, the whole civitas terrena. Acutely aware that the Buxtehudes and Elizabeth Mayers of the world do not save civilization, Auden emphasizes that aesthetic order does not "cause" social order: "Art is not life and cannot be / A midwife to society." What Auden states in New Year Letter in 1940 is typical of the claims and apologies all three poets were making in poems written around the beginning of the Second World War: art provides a world that can be perfectly ordered, or "saved," but this aesthetic order is dependent on the artist's rejection of an activist, engag poems inspired by present or imminent war, the artist is shown as successful in creating order and beauty, but the necessary precondition for that success, in the realm of art, is the rejection of all demands that art act in the public world.
There is a slight shift in this idea from Yeats to Eliot to Auden that reflects the increasing ontological independence of poetry from society in the poets' literary criticism. The "saved" world of the work of art becomes more separate from the unsaved civilization around it with each generation of poets. In "Long-Legged Fly" and "Lapis Lazuli," Yeats implies a remote causal connection between art and the world of political action. In Little Gidding Eliot presents art and history as parallel, non-intersecting planes, neither one absolute. In "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" and "At the Grave of Henry James" Auden insists on the dangers of confusing the two realms, to such an extent that his denial of relation between them is as strong as his positive statements about art.
In "Long-Legged Fly" Yeats backs into a definition of the artist's relation to saving civilization; the poem's this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built structure moves backward, in what Whitaker calls "causal regression," from history as effect to art as cause.17 The structure embodies a rejection of political engagement, as the poem retreats from the urgent crisis of the first stanza, a crisis that demands political action ("That civilization may not sink"), to the second stanza's more muted apocalypse ("That the topless towers be burnt"), to the final stanza's act of creation ("There on the scaffolding reclines / Michael Angelo"), in the remote, sacred space where the civilization saved at the poem's opening is made in the first place. The a-historical sequence- Caesar, Helen, Michael Angelo- emphasizes the insignificance of chronology, and the simultaneous but differentiated existence of these representative figures and their activities. Creation and wars are always happening; the great battle always being fought, the topless towers always about to be burnt, works of art always being brought to life. By the third stanza the "great battle" of the first has lost its feeling of urgency; certainly to skip from Julius Caesar to Troy to Michael Angelo baffles any sense of the historical moment. The dominant expression at the end is of the artist's imperviousness to everything outside his work.
Although "Long-Legged Fly" epitomizes the way all three poets see the coexistence, and the separation, of historical crisis and artistic creation, it does not show the artist's sense of being pressured by external events. Yeats implies a kind of pressure of Michael Angelo by uttering the rhetorical imperative, "Shut the door of the Pope's chapel." The poem sets up the ideal isolation for the artist, but does not say what it would feel like to be interested in the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the world on the other side of the door as well. The overflowing life pressing in on the artist in the form of children outside the chapel is reminiscent of the fish, flesh, and fowl surrounding the speaker of "Sailing to Byzantium" or the school-children around the sixty-year-old smiling public man. They are a potential disturbance, but not a temptation to make art do something it cannot.
That pressure does occur in "Lapis Lazuli," where it is not Caesar who must act "That civilization may not sink," but poets. The poem is generated out of the hysterical women's demand that artists act in the realm of history. They are the children on the other side of the chapel door, disturbers of artistic serenity. And it is the poets whom they burden with the "great battle" to save civilization: "... if nothing drastic is done / Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out ..." Like "Long-Legged Fly," the poem moves from the urgencies of history to a remote aesthetic height. Once the chapel door is shut, or the hysterical women ignored, the end of the world seems somewhat less important, and less likely. No battles rage or cities burn at the end of "Long-Legged Fly," and the imminent bombardment of "the town" in "Lapis Lazuli" turns into an aesthetically viewed "tragic scene." In both poems the artist is a "first cause" of history: he builds the civilization that needs saving. His role is defined by its differentiation from the political roles of Caesar and those who take "drastic" action. His supply of beautiful objects and war's destruction are infinite and continuous: "All things fall and are built again." Michael Angelo keeps on creating so that beautiful girls will feel the sexual impulse, more men risk cities for their beauty, and more Caesars defend cities. The pattern is "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," calmed down; no illusions are lost, no one expects to save civilization, or "mend / Whatever mischief seemed / To afflict mankind" with art, and civilization does not grind to a halt because of war. Both poems show the limits of what the artist's actions can do, but also the long-range effects of those actions.
The pressures of history do not disappear so easily in poems by Eliot and Auden. In the place of Yeats's systematic distancing, there are insistent reminders. War is present throughout Little Gidding, as the "world's end," the Blitz, the English Civil War, or the descending dove. The fires left by the German bombers are viewed as purgatorial flames, but they do not cease being actual fires in the streets of London. Violent death is present in muted form at the end, as "a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat / Or to an illegible stone." Perhaps in the last line, "And the fire and the rose are one," the contemporary war has been as symbolized away as the "tragic scene" at the end of "Lapis Lazuli," but the fire retains its sense of secular destruction. It is pervasive in a way Yeats's wars, in "Lapis Lazuli" and "Long-Legged Fly," are not. War may be seen from different perspectives, religious or historical, but it remains a fact to be reckoned with, even at the very end.
In Auden's elegy for Yeats the fact of war is not even muted. Auden saves for the poem's final section a vivid reference to a singularly unsaved civilization. The violence of history is not transformed to an aesthetic "scene" or "pattern." It persists in unpalliated form as nightmare:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark
And the living nations wait
Each sequestered in its hate. (243)
In "At the Grave of Henry James" written in 1941, the same war is a less dramatic but more pervasive pressure:
Now more than ever, when torches and snare-drum
Excite the squat women of the saurian brain
Till a milling mob of fears
Breaks in insultingly on anywhere
....................................
Are the good ghosts needed with the white magic
Of their subtle loves.18
These squat women sound like a more subjective- and fatter- version of the hysterical women of "Lapis Lazuli," but the hysterical women are mentioned once and never return. As a "resentful muttering Mass," a "vague incitement," a "wind that whispers of uncovered skulls / and fresh ruins," the anxieties these women represent persist to disturb the poet. It is against this background that Auden prays to so calm and remote a figure as James.
The undeniable fact of war in Little Gidding and in Auden's poems does not make art a less potent force than in Yeats's poems, but it does separate the political and aesthetic realms more definitively. The Chinamen listen to music while still gazing down on the tragic scene, and Michael Angelo is the first cause of Caesar. In Little Gidding Eliot does not put poetry into relation with history; he is more concerned to show that neither realm is absolute, that the significance of poetic events, as of historical ones, must be understood sub specie aeternitatis. Whether in the refining fire's dance or through the "purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching," both literature and history, equally creations of the human will, derive value from another source. They are analogous realms, but not causally linked. Auden's denial of connection is explicit: "poetry makes nothing happen." This is not a statement of frustration or futility, but merely of limitation. Like Yeats's insistence that tragedy cannot be affected-
Though all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce. (566)
- like the denials of Eliot's ghost in the second part of Little Gidding, Auden's denial is a necessary precondition for making claims for art's powers. All these statements of ontological differentiation precede the liberation of art from circumstance. Freed from direct dependence on history, art is freed from responsibility for saving civilization. So liberated, it is enabled to express its own powers to the fullest. Yeats can say that all things are "built again," Eliot can refer to "every phrase and sentence that is right," and Auden can call on the poet in resounding, enthusiastic imperatives:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice. (243)
The poets are aided in acceptance of art's limitations, and in the affirmation of its powers, by identifying with figures of ascetic denial, "dead master" in religious or contemplative retreat from the world. Whey they conceive of small, temporary communities, the poets imagine women in charge: Lady Gregory, the Virgin Mary in "At the Manger," Elizabeth Mayer- all motherly, nurturing, domestic. But the dominant figures in the world of art, the only realm they can imagine saved without qualification, are male, stern, and priestly; men disengaged enough to please Benda. Henry James, as he appears in Auden's poem, is a paradigm for these figures. He is prayed to as the patron saint of disengaged writers, a holy celibate whose dedication to art was a religious vocation:
... your heart, fastidious as
A delicate nun, remained true to the rare noblesse
Of your lucid gift, and, for its own sake, ignored the
Resentful muttering Mass.19
The world James retreats from- or "ignores"- is a popular audience, whose "hatred of all which cannot / Be simplified or stolen is still at large." No Michael Ransom, reluctant hero of the thirties, James with his fastidious sensibility seems to have found easy the artist's sacrifice of the world. The eremitic devotion is harder for Auden, who needs James's authority and personal example to control his own tendency to be distracted from his vocation by more immediate but corrupt satisfactions:
Preserve me, Master, from its vague incitement;
Yours be the disciplinary image that holds
Me back from agreeable wrong..."20
"Agreeable wrong" is the wish to be Marie Lloyd, to hear your poetry sung and marched to, to entertain the mob. The chief sin for which Auden needs forgiveness is what Benda calls "the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end"- the sin, in short, of wanting to save civilization.21 Although Auden cannot acquire James's innocence, he can at least acknowledge his fault and, like Eliot's compound ghost, pray for purgation:
Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead,
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling.22
When, in the final stanza, Auden refers to God in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, as the "author and giver of all good things," he attributes ultimate creative power to a source beyond "all writers living or dead."23
With each generation, the anti-activist stance is won through greater struggle. The Chinamen of "Lapis Lazuli" look on the tragic scene with apparent composure, and their eyes "are gay." They do not have to become gay, or meditate for half an hour, or recite mantras. They are obvious models of detachment because the attitude comes naturally to them; the East, as Yeats wrote, "has its solutions always and therefore knows nothing of tragedy."24 With a Western figure some distraction clouds the picture: Michael Angelo is separated from the profane world on a scaffolding in a sacred spot, the Pope's chapel. The "vague incitement" of the world is just outside the door, in the children pressing in on his privacy, so the poet must command, "Keep those children out." The creative solitude common to the Chinamen and Michael Angelo is shared by Milton, as Eliot makes a glancing reference to him in the third part of Little Gidding. The adjectives Eliot uses- as Milton is "one who died blind and quiet"- imply a calm retreat from the world, but the context suggests resignation and loss. To invoke Milton after a reference to Charles I and "three men, and more, on the scaffold" is to call to mind the politics in which Milton was engag and devoting himself to ordering language.
The most complex as well as the most authoritative of these dead masters is Yeats himself, an ambiguous, arrogant figure, one who understands "the day's vanity, the night's remorse" and is well qualified to forgive and bless the pride of younger poets. In Little Gidding and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" he shows Eliot and Auden how to be a poet- or rather, they use him to define their roles- by insisting that poetry is not absolute. As a ghost he is "compound" with Dante, among others, another authoritative master who sacrificed saving civilization for making art. Like James, he warns against "agreeable wrong," the ephemeral satisfactions of popularity ("Last season's fruit is eaten / And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail") and fame ("fools' approval stings, and honour stains"), and the pain of public engagement without power, and moral idealism mixed with moral culpability:
... the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue. (194-5)
The language is the language of Yeats, but the tone is the tone of Cotton Mather. For this hellfire-and-brimstone Yeats, a sterner "disciplinary image" than Henry James, the only salvation for the exasperated spirit of poets is the refining fire, the humility of "moving in measure." The sacrifice of originative power for religious purification is reminiscent of the end of the James poem, where God is addressed as "author."
The Yeats evoked in Auden's clergy also needs forgiveness. His sin is reactionary politics, and he is pardoned by Time not for any act of self-abnegation but "for writing well." This Yeats is not such a preacher as Eliot's or so remote and detached as his own Chinamen or Michael Angelo. He blunders through to a position of literary authority:
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying ... (242)
He is not only sinful and arrogant, he is unself-conscious. His poetry survives his political interests not through humility or sensibility, but through sheer talent. Poetry itself has a survival instinct, and great poetry creates its own world even when poets try to force it into other worlds: "it survives, a way of happening, a mouth."
Guilty of activism, of abusing art, the poets in these war lyrics confront all the urgency of a war they cannot affect, and define their own function by denial. Having acknowledged the reality of war, the perpetual battle to save civilization; having confronted the ineffectiveness of art in the world where those battles take place; having said "mea culpa" for the vanity of their calling, and submitted to the stern disciplinary image of a dead artist who also restrained his inclination to save civilization, the poets rejoice in the world that they can order perfectly, the work of art. It is a physical space that seems to expand as the poets devote themselves to it. It exists in its own private spot, fertile, pure, far from the poisoned wells of the public realm. It is a landscape in the imagination ("I / delight to imagine them seated there"), purified by snow or water ("a water-course or an avalanche:) and fecund:
... doubtless plum or cherry branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards... (567)
It exists in the Sistine Chapel, near the ceiling. It is free from aeroplane, Zeppelin, and Caesar as only the world created by art can be. It is the ideal harmonious civitas, the good community Eliot describes in Little Gidding:
(where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
As easy commerce of the old and the new,
........................................
The complete consort dancing together) (197)
The words of a phrase and of a sentence can, under the poet's direction, combine and support each other as no group of human beings ever could, for all the poet's wish. They behave here like Auden's refugees, handing the bricks, supporting the others. This group is the crowd of words transformed into a community, as the crowd flowing over London Bridge could never be. With each man fixing his eyes before his feet, no one was "at home" or had any interest in the others at all. Dancing together, the words are like the children singing under the dome or the fishmen in the bar, or "tutti" at the manger, or Lady Gregory's group at Coole Park; except, of course, that they are not human, and can neither give nor sympathize, though under the poet's control they can dance.
In an early draft of this passage Eliot had written,
So every phrase
When it is the right, one when every / word has power
To sustain the others, to do its part
In subservience to the phrase - 25
Even more than the final version, these lines insist on the social relations of the words; "sustain" sounds more social, and less aesthetic, than "support," and "to do its part / In subservience to the phrase" seems to impute a power of volition to the word. Like the "individual talent," it surrenders to a larger collective entity. Like Auden's description of a poet creating a poem ("every occasion competes with every other, demanding inclusion and a dominant position to which they are not necessarily entitled") Eliot's language implicitly defines the poet as the creator of a verbal society, a perfect world where each does "its part."
Auden's "saved" poetic world is delimited by the encompassing world of history; he insists on their autonomy and their coexistence. History may be a cold, dark, bleak, frozen landscape, with hatred, disgrace, and isolation, but art- as the poet brings it into being- can be fertile and healthy:
Follow, poet, follow night
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
The imperatives directed at the poet require him not to make the dark cold surroundings disappear, or to transform them magically, but to face them and act in spite of them. "Still" means "nevertheless" as well as "always." The poet persuades with full awareness of his context. In the act of persuading and singing in spite of circumstances, the poet creates his own world. Like the river's valley in the second part, the poetic landscape here comes into being gradually as the poet invents it. But the surrounding world cannot be wished away, or even distanced. Balancing creative energy against binding circumstances, Auden insists on the abiding reality of "unsuccess" and "distress." The reality of the good, saved world is assured, but it must endure in the midst of the desert and frozen seas which the poet can never change.
Notes
1. W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand (new York, 1962), 62, 71.
2. Yeats, Autobiography, 263.
3. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays, 15.
4. Auden, "The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats," 51.
5. As quoted in Charles H. Miller, Auden: An American Friendship (New York, 1983), I.
6. Auden, The Dyer's Hand, 67-9.
7. Ibid., 71.
8. I am indebted to Michael Ragussis for discussions of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." See his book The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore, 1978).
9. "She sings, we are mute: when is my spring coming? when shall I be as the swallow, that I may cease to be voiceless? I have lost the muse in silence, nor does Apollo regard me; so Amyclae, being mute, perished by silence." Translated by J.W. MacKail, Catullus, Tibullus Perviqilium Veneris (London, 1913, 1939), 362.
10. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, ed. Valerie Eliot (London, 1971), 37.
11. See the photograph of Auden at the wheel of a jeep, with the ruin of N in W.H. Auden: A Tribute, ed. Stephen Spender (London, 1974), 82-3.
12. Auden, "Memorial for the City," Nones, 42.
13. Auden, Collected Poems, 295.
14. Ibid., 286.
15. Ibid., 302.
16. Auden, Collected Poetry, 266.
17. Thomas R. Whitaker, Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History (Chapel Hill, 1964), 127.
18. Auden, Selected Poems, new edition, 121.
19. Ibid., 122.
20. Ibid., 122.
21. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New York, 1928), 46.
22. Auden, Selected Poems, new edition, 123.
23. My understanding of this stanza was much illuminated by Richard Johnson's talk, "Original Sin and the Sin of Originality," delivered at the Auden Symposium at Swarthmore College on 13 October 1979.
24. Yeats, Letters, 837.
25. See Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (Oxford, 1978), 219.
