ABSTRACT
Whatever The first reactions to Mr. T.S. Eliot’s new play may be, one thing can be claimed for it: it is profoundly original. Not so much in idea, for as Goethe said, it is impossible for anyone to have a thought that has not struck somebody before; all that a man can hope for is to arrive at such by the motions of his own mind. The originality lies in what has been done with the form. Not that there is anything new in the way the piece has been built up; it conforms to the well-tried laws of Sardoodledom – the exposition, the scène à faire, and so on. The play is original because of the level of existence this kind of play is made to maintain, for the idea has been presented through an improbable medium: Eliot has made a serious thing out of a farce. Or, from another angle, the originality of the play consists in its being a drastic pushing forward of the old critical comedy which, by making us laugh at and criticize our neighbors, aimed at making us see ourselves as others see us. In this play Eliot calls upon a higher tribunal by demanding that we see ourselves as our conscience sees us. And what is further original, is his making us accept as the person who is justified the individual who in critical comedy would be the butt. In the old way of writing the young ‘hero’ of this play would be the person to be laughed at: he is not fitting into society, it would be said; he is being presumptuous, he is guilty of excess, he thinks about himself too much, he is, possibly, a bit of a prig. But here he is the one character who has solved the problem of how to live. It is as though the self-flagellant, or Alceste, or Sir Positive At-All, were to be the model, not the laughing-stock. The old form has been made to serve a new purpose, and if this is still moralistic, it is so with a difference. Eliot has not torn the trappings from society; he has not given us a fleeting vision of the terror or the glory of existence; those things are, rather, the province of tragedy. But he has made a rent in the curtain of complacent assumptions, and whether or not his conclusions seem valid, he has at least provided something which in its context is new, and which the imaginative reason can work upon.
