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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
“Journey of the Magi,” anticipating the Four Quartets, constitutes a vision of historical process and a metaphor of religious mystery more complex than in Eliot's earlier work. Experimenting with dramatic monologue, remembering Browning's interest in the Higher Criticism, Eliot juxtaposes oral recitation against recorded account to provide an analogy for the Incarnation. As elsewhere, Eliot finds symbol and writing suspect: the Magus, in ironic ignorance, uses literally a figurative language Christianity had not yet created, but he intuits the Word better than readers steeped in biblical symbolism. Simultaneously Eliot interfiliates the Magus' speech with Matthew's gospel, Andrewes' 1622 Nativity sermon, and his own “impossible” re-presentation of the original utterance: the resulting historical sequence, collapsed by anachronisms, makes the poem's structure emblematize the Logos. Through the ostensible “loss” of the scribe's transcription, Eliot implicitly questions biblical canonicity and the traditions of Christian interpretation. The poem approximates his religious position in 1927.
1 Elisabeth Schneider, “Prufrock and After: The Theme of Change,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 1114; Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 122. Although both Schneider and Smith (p. 121) refer to the poem as a dramatic monologue, it has never been analyzed as such; see, e.g., John T. Hiers, “Birth or Death: Eliot's ‘Journey of the Magi’ and ? Song for Simeon,' ” South Carolina Review, 8 (1976), 42: “Although written with implied dramatic structure (the magus is talking to someone),” the poem “is very introspective. It becomes a dialogue with the self.”
2 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 11–15, 30–44.
3 All quotations from Eliot's poems are taken from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, 1952), with the exception of citations from the Four Quartets, for which I have used the lineated edition, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1971).
4 Arthur R. Broes, “T. S. Eliot's ‘Journey of the Magi’: An Explication,” Xavier University Studies, 5 (1966), 131.
5 See, e.g., Piero della Francesca's The Resurrection, Palazzo Communale, Borgo San Sepolcro, Italy. Christ's resurrected body is physically the mark of division between the two dispensations: on his right, a barren wilderness; on his left, a fertile landscape in the midst of which stands a city, symbol of the civilization his presence vouchsafes. There is no evidence that Eliot knew Piero's painting; but “Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service” (st. 3) shows his familiarity with its principles of construction, which indeed were conventional.
6 From Art. 31 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican communion, cited by R. D. Brown, “Revelation in T. S. Eliot's ‘Journey of the Magi,‘ ” Renascence, 24 (1972), 137; see also Rosemary Franklin, “The Satisfactory Journey of Eliot's Magus,” English Studies, 49 (1968), 560.
7 The preponderance of the criticism assumes either a Christianized magus or a proleptic landscape of Christian symbol to which the Magus' mode of vision is irrelevant. See Brown, p. 139; Mary Eleanor, “Eliot's Magus,” Renascence, 10 (1957), passim; Hiers, passim; Balachandra Rajan, The Overwhelming Question (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 47; Smith, pp.123–24; David Ward, T. S. Eliot between Two Worlds: A Reading of T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 165. Other commentators have noted the division between the Magus' vision and that of the reader but have not analyzed its significance. See Elizabeth Drew, ?. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribners, 1949), p.120; Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1959), pp. 248–49; Nancy K. Gish, “The Meaning of the Incarnation in Two ‘Ariel Poems,‘ ” Michigan Academician, 6 (1973), 62.
8 Lancelot Andrewes, “A Sermon: Of the Nativity,” 1620, in The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 11 vols., Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1865–74), I, 235. Andrewes achieves his reading by glossing Matt, ii.l with 2 Pet. i.19. I have used Andrewes' rendition of Peter. Subsequent citations of Andrewes' Nativity sermons are to this edition and are identified in the text by the year of the sermon and the volume and page of the Works.
9 Gish has noted similar discrepancies (p. 61).
10 T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 48. Eliot's consciousness of such an arbitrariness in the cultural operation of language modifies but does not annul his philosophic apprehension of the metaphysical and epistemological interdependence between a word and the reality toward which it points:
The reality without the symbol would never be known, and we cannot say that it would even exist (or subsist); but on the other hand the symbol furnishes proof of the reality, inasmuch as without the reality it would not be that symbol: i.e. there would be an identity left which would for our purposes be irrelevant, (p. 104)
See Richard Wollheim, “Eliot and F. H. Bradley: An Account,” in Graham Martin, ed., Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium (London: Macmillan, 1970), p.183: “What is of supreme importance for Eliot is the way in which any word merges with, and therefore necessitates the existence of, its reference.”
11 “See, e.g., Broes, pp. 129–30; Brown, pp. 138–39. My own classroom experience with this poem, among graduate as well as undergraduate students, has repeatedly shown the same habit of reading.
12 Hiers's commentary typifies many that not only disregard Eliot's disguising of his symbols but assume that the Magus ought to have understood symbols that had not yet come into being (p. 42).
13 “Gerontion,” 1. 16. Eliot's source for “Signs are taken for wonders,” as is frequently observed, is in Andrewes (1618, I, 204).
14 See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963), Ch. ii, passim; see esp. pp. 106–08. As “Journey of the Magi” indicates, Langbaum's paradigm does not account for some modernist developments of the genre.
15 “What Is a Classic?” in T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt; Farrar, 1975), p. 130. See also T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, in T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 49: “We have been accustomed to regard ‘progress’ as always integral; and have yet to learn that it is only by an effort and a discipline … that material knowledge and power is gained without loss of spiritual knowledge and power.” See also T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1932), p. 6: “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.‘ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
16 No study of Ash-Wednesday has yet treated Eliot's use of the Mass as a dramatic backdrop—a parallel, if not superimposed, text—to the central meditation, despite the poem's manifold echoes of the liturgy. For a brief comment, see Schneider, p. 1111 ; for a general account of Eliot's use of the Anglican liturgy, see Karen T. Romer, “T. S. Eliot and the Language of Liturgy,” Renascence, 24 (1972), 119–35, esp. pp. 125–27.
17 “Virgil and the Christian World,” in T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, 1957), p. 137.
18 Cf. Brown, p. 137: the Magus “realizes with a shock that this baby is not like any other: it is the fulfillment of God's plan for all mankind.”
19 The Idea of a Christian Society, p. 49. For Eliot's preoccupation with the early Fathers, see Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 58–63, 121–22.
20 “Baudelaire,” in Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 337–38.
21 Eliot's exclusionary emphasis on the Incarnation, of course, ultimately leads the reader to the Crucifixion. Gish has stressed the motifs in the second verse paragraph that allude to it (pp. 62–63).
22 The emphasis on “finding” Christ in Andrewes' 1618 Nativity sermon is marked, and Eliot doubtless remembered Andrewes' language.
23 Cf. Hiers, p. 42; Gish, p. 64; Eleanor, p. 30 (who reads the poem as a mystical allegory based on John of the Cross); and Smith, p. 123.
24 For Eliot's contact with Josiah Royce at Harvard, see Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (Boston: Houghton, 1964), pp. 209–13. Howarth, however, does not note the issue in hermeneutics—manifest throughout Volume n of The Problem of Christianity—with which Royce was engaged while Eliot studied with him. The introduction that Eliot wrote for Charlotte Eliot's Savonarola (London: Cobden-Sanderson, [1926]), pp. vii-ix, shows that he was indeed attuned to Royce's concern with the function of signs in interpretation, for he explicitly refers to an essay he had written for Royce on the theory of interpretation; it is instructive that in the year or so before he composed “Journey of the Magi” he was plainly rethinking his earlier education with Royce. For additional commentary on Eliot and Royce, see Adrian Cunningham, “Continuity and Coherence in Eliot's Religious Thought,” in Graham Martin, ed., Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 214; and Wollheim, in Martin, ed., pp.171–72. In Knowledge and Experience (p. 103), Eliot alludes to Charles Sanders Peirce's essay “The Icon, Index, and Symbol.”
25 Eliot's phrase “set down / This” derives, as Gish has also noted (p. 64), from Andrewes' Nativity sermon of 1622 (i, 260); Gish rightly observes Eliot's ironic disparity from Andrewes. What is more significant here is that Eliot has transformed Andrewes' instruction for private meditation into a direction for external transcription; that is, he has taken Andrewes' phrase literally. Eliot's other source for the phrase is Othello v.ii.351 (see Rajan, p. 48). Othello's “Set you down this” refers to the reports to be written about him (v.ii.340); his direction is immediately followed by his suicide, self-punishment for having violated Desdemona's innocence. The same collocation is evident, less explicitly, in the Magus. A fair copy of “Journey of the Magi” that Eliot made for the Signet on 24 July 1961 (now in the possession of the Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas, Austin) omits line 34, “This set down.” Valerie Eliot observes, however, that Eliot made a copy of the poem for her, at roughly the same time, that conforms with the printed versions (personal correspondence).
26 For a provocative study of the influence of the Higher Criticism on English literature (including a chapter on Browning's “A Death in the Desert”), see E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp. 207–08.
27 John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?” in J. B. Schneewind, ed., Mill's Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Collier, 1965), p. 105.
28 For the role of monodrama and prosopopoeia in creating such a predisposition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see A. Dwight Culler, “Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 366–85. Browning's “A Death in the Desert”—with its complicated interpénétrations of historical truth and historical fiction, its elaborate “frame” of uncertain textual transmissions—forces a severe questioning of the grounds of historical fiction and thus represents a significant exception to the general acceptance of the genre's conventions, an exception from which Eliot plainly learned.
29 It should be noted that the separation in “Journey of the Magi” between the poet and his historical mask or persona conflicts with Eliot's analysis of the function of mask in “The Three Voices of Poetry” (On Poetry and Poets, p. 103), in which Eliot posits little or no discrepancy between the writer and the disguise.
30 The phrase is Hugh Kenner's (The Invisible Poet, p. 149); see also J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 174–76.
31 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” Dial, 75 (1923), 483.
32 T. S. Eliot, “Literature, Science, and Dogma,” Dial, 82 (1927), 243. See also Eliot's more sustained attack on Richards' position—and on Arnold's—in “The Modern Mind,” in T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), pp. 121–42.
33 Knowledge and Experience, p. 144. On point of view, see Wollheim, pp. 183–84; Cunningham, pp. 214—15.
34 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 2 vols. (1913; rpt. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968), ii, 211.
35 “Lancelot Andrewes,” in Eliot, Selected Essays, p.291.
36 White, Introd., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), esp. pp. 30–31.
37 Henry James, “The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book,‘ ”in Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes (1912; rpt. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1969), p. 388.
38 The fictive stemma also raises the possibility that Andrewes somehow knew of the Magus' account and borrowed from it, in his 1622 Nativity sermon, as he revised Matthew's narrative. The complications resulting from such a possibility are too great to be treated at length here. Suffice it to say that Andrewes' sermon thus represents a partial “return” to the original “source,” a return that Eliot, as Andrewes' successor, completes; that Andrewes' “return” to the Magus' account—and, consequently, Andrewes' implicit criticism of a “false,” chiefly Catholic, textual tradition—coincides with the peak of Anglican supremacy is a collocation Eliot is not likely to have missed.
39 The Idea of a Christian Society, in Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 40.
40 “In Memoriam,” in T. S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), p. 187.
41 Quoted in John D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual Development: 1922–1939 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 134. Margolis cites Eliot's letter to More approving More's position (pp. 134–35).
42 Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in his Essays and Reviews [ed. Henry Bristow Wilson] (London: John Henry Parker, 1860), pp. 350–51.
43 “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” in Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 391.