Eliot at Edinburgh

The Elder Statesman by T. S. Eliot is about one Lord Claverton who, retiring with honor from public life, finds that “we cannot retire from ourselves”: whose past catches up with him and affects for ill his son who cannot be dissuaded from making the same mistakes as his father; how the father realizes that one cannot flee the past but must atone for it; and how by self-confession and contrition and “becoming as nothing” one may find freedom and peace and, for one’s best beloved daughter, the key to the eternity of perfectly shared love.

Mr. Eliot’s two previous plays, The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk—both of date later than the Four Quartets—have won a prestige in the theater which is difficult to sustain. Now made available at the Edinburgh Festival, the new piece draws on itself that half-rancorous, half-adulatory criticism which is so often the reward of a third attempt. Some find it his “most human” play. Others his deepest. Others again vote it chilly and sententious.

PH

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Philip Hope-Wallace

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The Elder Statesman by T. S. Eliot is about one Lord Claverton who, retiring with honor from public life, finds that “we cannot retire from ourselves”: whose past catches up with him and affects for ill his son who cannot be dissuaded from making the same mistakes as his father; how the father realizes that one cannot flee the past but must atone for it; and how by self-confession and contrition and “becoming as nothing” one may find freedom and peace and, for one’s best beloved daughter, the key to the eternity of perfectly shared love.

Mr. Eliot’s two previous plays, The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk—both of date later than the Four Quartets—have won a prestige in the theater which is difficult to sustain. Now made available at the Edinburgh Festival, the new piece draws on itself that half-rancorous, half-adulatory criticism which is so often the reward of a third attempt. Some find it his “most human” play. Others his deepest. Others again vote it chilly and sententious.