by T. S. Eliot
Quincy’s essay “The English Mail-Coach.” To admirers of De Quincey this is
his best work, an example of ornate prose of a sort that has much in com-
mon with the prose poem as it was developing contemporaneously in France
under the impress of Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire. See Collected Writ-
ings of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 13, Tales and Prose Phantasies, 270–330.
21. The conversation is recounted by De Quincey in a late essay entitled “Charles
Lamb,” first published in the North British Review in 1848 and reprinted
in Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 5, Biographies and Biographic Sketches, 215–258. De Quincey is explaining how much his tastes di¤ered
from Lamb’s. While Lamb had an inborn bent toward “the natural, the
simple, the genuine,” he was also responsive to irritating mannerisms of the
sort used by the essayist William Hazlitt. The reason for this defect in his
taste, De Quincey goes on, was his inability to appreciate the value of either
music or “pomp,” the latter a term which could indicate something spurious,
but also something genuine. “It is well to love the simple— we love it; nor
is there any opposition at all between that and the very glory of pomp. But, as we once put the case to Lamb, if, as a musician . . . ” (235). The point
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 16 3 – 16 5
2 2 5
of the anecdote is that simplicity alone would not be a suªcient criterion
for reaching a decision.
22. Three works by Edgar Allan Poe. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is
the founding story of detective fiction. “Shadow—A Parable” (1835) is a brief
account purportedly by an ancient Greek named Oinos (the word means
“wine”), who, in biblical tones, recounts how he and six companions have
sat beside the enshrouded corpse of one Zoilus, while outside a pestilence
has been raging. A mysterious shadow moves and speaks to them. “The
Assignation” (1834) tells the story of an unidentified stranger in Venice who
poisons his beloved and then, after reciting a few lines from the “Exequy
for His Wife” by the poet Henry King (see n. 13), commits suicide to join her
in the afterlife.
23. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) was perhaps the most influential French
poet of the nineteenth century after Baudelaire, noted for his grafting of
image on image, and allusion on suggestion—a style in which words take on
new meanings, sentences new shapes, while rhyme and sound contribute
still more suggestiveness.
24. Alexandrianism, a term derived from the ancient city of Alexandria in Egypt,
describes the lifeless formalism that was thought to typify writers and schol-
ars under the Ptolemies, or after the golden age of ancient Greece. Georgian-
ism is Eliot’s scathing term to describe poets who published their works
in the Georgian Poetry collections; on these, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 15, 206.
25. James Joyce’s Ulysses was not published until February 1922; Eliot assumes that his readers have read it as it was being published serially in the Little
Review in New York and the Egoist in London (though the latter had a total circulation of only two hundred). In England, the Egoist had gotten only
through the first part of the Wandering Rocks episode (episode 10 of the 18
in Ulysses) when the journal was discontinued. In the United States, the Little Review managed to reach the thirteenth episode in its issue of October 1920
but was legally barred from printing further issues after being convicted on
charges of obscenity in February 1921.
26. “The Monna Lisas of prose” refers to Walter Pater’s description of the paint-
ing; see n. 16. For the “drums and tramplings of three conquests,” n. 12.
“The eloquent just and mightie deaths” refers to a frequently anthologized
passage from Sir Walter Raleigh’s Historie of the World (book V, chapter VI, the penultimate paragraph): “O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom
none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast
done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the
world and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far stretched greatness,
all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these
two narrow words, Hic jacet.” Hic jacet is Latin for “Here lies.”
2 2 6
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 16 6 – 16 7
London Letter, May 1921
1. The essay was first published in the Dial 70, no. 6 (June 1921): 686–691.
On the Dial generally, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 1. Writing on 21
May to Scofield Thayer, the Dial’s editor, who was then in Berlin, Eliot noted:
“I am glad to hear that my letter was received in time.” Given how long it
would take for Eliot to send his essay to the Dial’s oªce in New York, for the oªce then to notify Thayer in Berlin, and for Thayer to acknowledge receipt
to Eliot, the essay must have been posted by early May. It can be inferred that
he wrote it sometime in late April.
2. For this performance of Volpone, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 28, 210.
3. “The only connection between The Phoenix and the Stage Society which I
could ever discover lay in the fact that we used the same oªces and had the
services of the same Secretary, Miss Alice Freedman. It is true that upon our
first nineteen programmes appeared the legend ‘Under the Auspices of the
Incorporated Stage Society,’ but so far as I am aware nobody attached the
slightest meaning to the phrase, and so far from existing under the auspices,
on Friday, 29th June, 1923, The Phoenix gave at the Regent Theatre a mati-
née of Volpone in aid of the funds of the tottering and impoverished Incorporated Stage Society” (Montague Summers, Appendix III: The Phoenix,
The Restoration Theatre [London: Kegan Paul, 1934], 324–325).
4. The Daily News was founded by Charles Dickens as a Liberal rival to the
Morning Chronicle in 1845, though Dickens retired after seventeen issues and handed over control to John Foster. In 1912 it amalgamated with the Morning
Leader. From 1912 to 1919 the editor was Alfred George Gardiner (1865–
1946), who brought its sales to more than 800,000 a day. He was forced to
resign for criticizing Lloyd George (on him see London Letter, March 1921,
n. 17, 206–207) and remaining faithful to the Asquith wing of the Liberal
Party. The newspaper now shifted its allegiance from the Asquith liberals to
Labour, the “Manchester School politics” noted by Eliot. The literary editor
of the newspaper was Robert Wilson Lynd (see n. 21, 233). The Star was an
evening paper launched by T. P. O’Connor in 1888 and edited from 1920
to 1930 by Wilson Pope. In 1912 both the Star and the Daily News were purchased by the Cadbury family, famous makers of chocolate in England,
who retained them until 1960, when both disappeared. On the Ebenezer
Temperance Association, see “Andrew Marvell,” n. 11, 218.
5. The Duchess of Malfi (1614), by John Webster (c. 1580–c. 1634), has often been deemed the greatest tragedy of the English Renaissance after Shakespeare’s. It dramatizes the story of the young and widowed duchess, who
secretly marries her major-domo, Antonio, a marriage that enrages her
brothers, precipitating her disappearance and his
murder. The performance
Eliot saw, sponsored by the Phoenix Society, was performed at the Lyric
Theatre, Hammersmith, on 23 and 24 November 1919. The producer was
Allan Wade. The cast: the Duchess of Malfi, Cathleen Nesbitt; Ferdinand,
Robert Farquharson; Bosola, William J. Rea; the Cardinal, Ion Swinley; Julia,
Edith Evans; Cariola, Florence Huckton; Antonio, Nicholas Hannan. William
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 16 7
2 2 7
Archer (1856–1924) was the most influential drama critic of the New Drama
movement in the 1890s and a translator of Ibsen. He considered the period
between the Puritans’ closing of the theaters in 1642 and the creation of the
New Drama to have been the dark ages of drama. His review of The Duchess
of Malfi appeared in the Star, 25 November 1919, 3, col. 5, under the headline: “phoenix society. / ‘The Duchess of Malfy’ [ sic] in an / Elizabethan
Setting”:
The Phoenix Society, an o¤shoot of the Stage Society, which pro-
poses to deal in Elizabethan and Restoration plays, opened its activities
yesterday at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with a performance of
Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfy” [ sic].
From the time of Charles Lamb onward, critics have vied with each
other in lauding this farrago of horrors as a masterpiece only inferior to
Shakespeare’s greatest work. That it contains some passages of beautiful
writing no one would deny; but that is not to say that it is either a great
work of imagination or a good piece of dramatic craftsmanship. It is
shambling and ill-composed; its horrors, besides being exaggerated be-
yond all measure, are mechanical and tricky; and its style, even in the
most admired passages, is marked by a sort of funereal a¤ectation
which places it immeasurably below that Shakespearean level to which
fanaticism seeks to raise it.
f i n e s t a g e s e t t i n g .
For one thing the Phoenix Society deserves great praise. It has commis-
sioned Mr. Norman Wilkinson to design a setting, which is by far the
best reproduction of an Elizabethan stage as yet seen in England, or
(so far as I know) anywhere else. Certain questions of proportion apart,
the middle curtain was the only serious departure from the Elizabethan
model; and, as no pretence was made to accuracy, it would be pedantic
to object to this concession to modern convenience.
The treatment of the text is a di¤erent matter. The producer (Mr.
Allan Wade) had the good sense to cut out several pages of the most ob-
viously dead matter, and might well have cut more, for the performance
lasted three solid hours, with only one brief intermission. But why did
he cut the most famous and beautiful lines in the play:—
Of what is’t fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
And why did two of the Duchess’s most natural and tragic lines
disappear:—
I am acquainted with sad misery
As the tann’d galley-slave is with his oar.
2 2 8
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 16 7
On the other hand, the coarse language of the text was sedulously
retained, all except one very gross indecency. Let us be thankful for that
small mercy.
a c t i n g t h e m a d m a n .
Of the acting it is diªcult to speak, for where almost everything is un-
natural, there is no sure criterion of merit. Miss Cathleen Nesbit made
a beautiful and touching Duchess, without rising to any great tragic
height. Mr. Robert Farquharson (rightly, no doubt) presented Ferdinand
as a madman from the first, and threw great conviction into his ravings.
It seemed to me painful and intolerable stu¤; but whether any setting
could have rendered it acceptable I am more than doubtful.
Mr. Farquharson enlivened the gloomy proceedings by dying “on his
head,” with his heels in air—a position which he retained for several
minutes, at imminent risk of apoplexy. “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est
pas l’art.”
“ a l o a t h s o m e e p i s o d e . ”
Mr. William J. Rea—a Bosola with a brogue—gave a very clever and
e¤ective performance of that curiously ill-drawn villain. Good work was
done by Mr. Ian Swinley as the Cardinal, by Miss Florence Huckton as
Cariola, and by Miss Edith Evans as Julia. Surely the loathsome episode
of the madmen might have been spared us. It was humiliating to see an
audience of educated men and women solemnly a¤ecting to find artistic
enjoyment in such barbarous tomfoolery. The company was loudly
applauded at the end, as their hard work deserved, but the attempts at
applause during the course of the action were very half-hearted.
Another review of The Duchess of Malfi, this one by “K. A. N.,” appeared
in the Daily News, 25 November 1919, 7, col. 7, under the headline: “an
elizabethan / melodrama. / Wholesale Butchery in / ‘Duchess of Malfi.’ /
funnier than farce”:
Did Elizabethan playgoers look on the madness in “The Duchess
of Malfi” as comic-relief or were they made cold with fear, as Ferdinand
hoped his sister would be? Wholesale butchery on the stage (all the
principal characters but one meet with violent deaths) was, we know,
considered impressive. To moderns it is funnier than many intentional
scenes of fun in musical comedy and farce. As a matter of fact, Webster
quite spoiled his play by seeking to be in the fashion.
His characters are of some interest. The Duchess herself, with her
courage and independence; her choleric brother, the Duke; her lover,
Antonio, an upright, ordinary man; the shameless hussy, Julia; and,
above all, Daniel de Bosola, the soldier of fortune who plays the villain
in private solely for professional ends and against the grain, a telling
satire of the soldier’s and politician’s trade—all have points of interest
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 16 7
2 2 9
and occasional vitality. They become puppets merely to suit the drama-
tist’s conduct of his plot. The drama is not made by the characters: they
are stretched on the Procrustean bed of theatrical necessity. The con-
duct of the scenes is arbitrary, and in spite of some fine lines here and
there, generally inspired by Shakespeare, Webster showed himself
yesterday afternoon at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, to have been
a poor tragic poet, but with considerable talent as a writer of comedy.
t e s t o f p e r f o r m a n c e
The Phoenix Society is to be thanked for having produced “The Duchess
of Malfi,” for its performance will bring home to playgoers the hollow-
ness of the old, uncritical praise of the great Elizabethan dramatists.
Charles Lamb’s gentle enthusiasm and Swinburne’s boisterous pane-
gyrics have made a legend of Elizabethan drama not founded on fact, as
most critical students have known for a long time. It is time this drama
were put to the test of performance.
Although not perfect, the representati
on of “The Duchess of Malfi”
was good enough in a general way. Miss Cathleen Nesbitt was, perhaps,
a little lacking in tragic grip, but she made a very sympathetic and hand-
some figure of the Duchess, and displayed a power for which her work
in the past, good as it has been, had not prepared us. Mr. Nicholas Han-
nan as the upright Antonio was excellent, but Mr. Robert Farquharson’s
Duke hovered too often on the verge of the ludicrous.
t h e d u k e
“A most perverse and turbulent nature,” the Duke hoped to have gained
an infinite mass of treasure by his sister’s death had she continued a
widow. Ferdinand was not a modern decadent gloating over crime and
bloodshed, as Mr. Farquharson attempted to make him. Nor was Bosola
the croaking bu¤oon that Mr. William J. Rea presented. He would not
have deceived anyone for a moment. Bosola is a cynic and a hater of the
deeds he performs professionally. He is also the author’s chorus, and in
person was a soldier with the temperament of Shakespeare’s Jacques.
Mr. Norman Wilkinson’s setting was e¤ective as a background, only
I thought the brilliant red railings of a balcony made a frieze that upset
the e¤ect of Mr. Tom Heslewood’s dresses. Mr. Allan Wade produced
the play with skill, but the incident of the Duchess grasping a dead
hand, thinking it her husband’s, was badly managed, and her murder
was not very impressive.
Eliot himself also wrote a review of the performance, and he especially
liked “the incident of the Duchess grasping a dead hand, thinking it her
husband’s.” It was “extraordinarily fine,” he wrote, because “here the actors
were held in check by violent situations which nothing in their previous
repertory could teach them to distort. Here,” he summarized, “the play
2 3 0
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 16 7
itself got through, magnificently, unique” (“‘The Duchess of Malfi’ at the
Lyric; and Poetic Drama,” Art and Letters 3.1 [Winter (1919)/1920]: 36–39,
here 37).
6. Sir Leo Money Chiozza Money (1870–1944) was a statistician and politician.
Born in Genoa, he moved to London when young and in 1903 adopted his
additional surname. From 1898 to 1903 he was the editor of Commercial In-
telligence. In 1906 he was elected Member of Parliament for North Padding-
