FEATURE
Profoundly Christian Joseph Shaw on two performances of Modernist Christian art: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio
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n December I was privileged to see performed two great works of Christian culture, both earning standing ovations. One was the recital, by the veteran actor Ralph Fiennes (familiar to some as ‘M’ in the most recent James Bond films), of T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, the poem series, Four Quartets. The other was the UK premier of a new composition, Christmas Oratorio, by the Catholic composer Sir James MacMillan. Four Quartets is the greatest achievement of the greatest modern poet of the English language. Eliot was a modernist poet, in the sense that most of his poetry does not rhyme and scan like that of Shakespeare or Coleridge. He was of course perfectly able to do old-fashioned poetry, and in one of the great ironies of literature, eventually made his widow a rich woman with his whimsical children’s poems about cats, set to music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber. But as he explains in Four Quartets, he felt he could not express himself adequately within the limitations of the old conventions. After a bombastic passage, he tells us: That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. One way of understanding the problem, the impetus for art always to break out of old conventions and to develop new forms, is the need to maintain the effect on the audience of doing something a little unexpected. Thus, Shakespeare made his own the quite new convention of the iambic pentameter. In the late plays he broke the rules to convey (for example) in an extraordinarily vivid way, the growing madness of the jealous King Leontes in A Winter’s Tale. To have the same
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Four Quartets is, indeed, a profoundly Christian poem. Eliot perceived the problem of modernity—as expressed in The Wasteland—and came to accept not just Christianity, but the traditionalism of High Anglicanism. Some of his modernist artist friends were appalled to read these lines, which refer to Jesus Christ:
T.S. Eliot in a photograph taken by his friend Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Christian message of Eliot’s Four Quartets is profound
effect, later writers would have to break the rule even more, but do this too much and the expectations created by the rules disappear: it would no longer sound mad. In this sense the old forms are ‘worn out’. Eliot comments: …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. Modernism in art can mean the antitraditionalism of avant-garde artists who want to shock us simply to get attention, or wish to subvert, ridicule, and destroy artistic forms which have been used in the past to express values they reject. What Eliot does is, rather, to develop the poetic tradition, and his work is characterised both by economy of effort and the establishment of new forms and conventions. Modern poetry, not all of it bad, is deeply indebted to what Eliot was doing a hundred years ago. Eliot’s new paradigm has stood the test of time.
The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart. It was pretty amazing to hear them spoken by one of our leading actors, the Catholic (I believe) Ralph Fiennes, in a small but fashionable London theatre. Fiennes was brilliant and accompanied by all the subtle effects of lighting and stagecraft. The poems are about time and memory and set (and written) in part during the London Blitz. Eliot makes an extraordinary analogy between the bombs which brought destruction to the city, and the Holy Ghost: The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed from fire by fire. For all the brilliance of Fiennes’ performance, however, I detected a certain embarrassment about the Christian nature of the work. The programme did not deny it, but placed the focus elsewhere: for instance, on Eliot’s interest in Eastern mysticism, which he studied at university. Again, there was something a little strange about the way Fiennes recited the two most explicitly Christian passages, of which I have quoted parts above. The first he spoke sitting, in front of an old-
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