Religion and the Drama: John Galsworthy, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams

i have a great deal of grown to cover it would be a simple matter to devote the whole lecture to any one of the three writers whose work on guard to discuss if i am asked why i didn't do that the answer is that i want to bring out the contrast between the city and to show the beheading of the contrast on religion in relation to the drama some of you may feel that the choice of subjects is arbitrary and that there is no obvious relationship between goldsworthy elliott and tennessee williams i agree that the choice is arbitrary it intrigues me to imagine goldsworthy elliott and williams and huddled together still before the election is over i may be able to justify the singling out of these the playwright's for study i begin with goes wealthy and he is out of old at the present time he has been for a good many years before the second world war ii and florence wrote to a critic inquiring what below that of big

goals were they had said about one of his novels but if schools with these novels a nod now widely read it his plays are not being revived this does not mean that he should be a naughty he has left a lasting mark on the sea attack and thinking people on both sides of the atlantic all a great deal to him first let me say something about the character and personality of the man he was in the beer since of the wood a gentleman he was kind generous sensitive in feeling and imagination are being it may be a detail but he was the handsomest ago the literary lights of his generation he had a lively mind keen interest in ideas unmarked ability and facilitate in expressing them but mr price from the man to his work no one is likely to call him a prophet he was essentially a

critic we don't find in him either positive affirmation or the intensity borne of great creative conceptions and convictions people want to know how to make a meaningful response to life which is in its constant concern may not get much directly from god what that effect is and i should imagine this led later he sold no religious significance in man he regarded him primarily as a social animal and bees does judgments on humanistic this worldly values looking at his work as a whole novels and plays we see an author concentrating on the assertion of the rights of the individual against all institutions which tried to set themselves up as of greater value on greater importance than the human person underneath this was a more important beliefs

one which she rarely articulated because he took it for granted as self evident the doctrine of progress although the perfectibility through education and legislation old man in his novels particularly in the fall for site said of course where they set himself to portray the upper middle class in england from a team at to the years following the first world war he described well to the victorians edwardian some georgians in their heyday and then in their slow decline and decay in some ways decadence is as much a feature of course wealthy as of tennessee williams also their growth from the inside he was a member of the class he described he was thirty seven years of age before he had an errand income he had a nation for the old

fashioned virtues it is a count a satirical as in the case of storms foresight it is also sympathetic characters are almost as solid as the victorian furniture in which they sit but he himself did not truly accept the standards moral or religious all the victorians and in characters like floor and today he should help the younger members of the foresight family led lights which had no fixed standards and in the ultimate since know meaning no purpose i have said that no one is likely to call girls will be a prophet but in his pleas we see him in the role of reformer there's hardly a plea of his which was not intended to convey a message to teach a lesson the foreman and would have deemed it sheer stupidity to write plays as elliot writes them in a medium so subtle that that purport you you did the minds of the general public when it was the general

public whose conscience he wanted for hours in the sensitive appreciation of the finer shades of human character and the infinite variety of human experience his novels or works of art what we associate on the other hand with this place is not so much art as craft trust in the good sense of the wood an amazing skill in constructing a place so flawlessly as to make it from beginning to end and message and listen orf with his plays over dramatized someone's perhaps i should rather say feces because it's not so much an argument for that to go to show they consist of reportage he presents real life and everyday conversation on the stage christopher friday and t a salient with the blanco some poles apart from girls were they the device he resorted to

repeatedly was to present similar events similar events and then bring out their reactions on people all the different classes that's in the silver box a middle class youth and the child woman's husband a bulletin board in the fifth of a silver box the case is smooth over for the gentleman that shy woman's husband get someone's in prison with hard labor the message of the play is that the more orval nominally unbiased beers far more harshly on the poor than on the rich goes well we have the courage to say what many a clergyman could never came within sight of say incidentally the parts which the gods played in the works of the great big three billions upgrading goals were these dramas by abstract and impersonal forces the lord dominates more than one of his plays the mob dominates others the sense of property

others the predatory instincts of the middle classes others in the political strife the subject is a strike in a coal mine from the point of view of both the owners and the name the attempt is to provide a documentary picture of a particular aspect of society the message is directed at weaknesses in the modern industrial system and a fine caliber on both sides wasting themselves in a war of attrition which bull moves once again we have a topic of which the content is too often tended to not silent a topic which gorge where they were great aunt of the stage and through that medium placed on the conscience of an influential cross section of the british and american public or take the plea called escape it describes the adventures of an escaping prisoner among various groups of people a lady in a bedroom a country gentleman a couple of made

ladies' a passion and so on if you were never fortunate that fortunate enough to see escape you'll need no one to say anything to you about it passionate sense of message the evils of solitary confinement the wrongs done to prisoners in penal institutions the crying need to people reforms these were all matters on the mind of conscience got sweaty he put them on the mind and conscience is that the british public and to some bubbles the british home office thought the prison scene in the play justice and fair to winston churchill then in charge of that department of the government goes with a gold i strove to be scrupulously fair in my limited experience i simply sold main undergoing people's attitude when record board showed no previous offense solitary confinement is a dumb thing it cannot speak for itself it is a warm soul breaking missouri

who's worst moments unnecessarily and utterly hidden for more lies i have given it a time for once surely that is not i'm saying here again is going to have is that a form of lifting up his voice about the social issue which has never crossed some christians are a wink of sleep not taken the edge off that appetite you see then the picture that is emerging a man born in affluent circumstances working with ego rise of social life and institutions concerned about the rights of individuals sensitive very sensitive to inequality injustice that doctors say what then was his religion on no subject was he so tentative as a young man and in early life he was so absorbed by the phenomenon of social life he was so alive to social injustice that the religion and in a lot of churches occupied a subordinate place in his mind in the world of his novels and plays

lavishly people buy office hopes that are relatively few gretchen and on the whole they do not make a very brave show as he grew older his mind well frequently on the internet as against the social world and the scene drawn to our half mystical philosophy with the emphasis on the wonder and the beauty and the mystery of life in his latest work however one since it's not just of master cicerone but something great skepticism and ej puts into the modes of some of his characters and bitterness verging on cynicism from which is at least work is free thus he makes the broader minister explained sometimes i leave the church either it's too hot and no one else it's one click on the knicks did the protest i didn't say there was no god i only said his plan was to

remote can't you hear god saying by the way is that boring the us still rolling and an angel counseling oh yes out quite nicely let's see it must be fun ghost over by no or so there's some busy paris say oh yes so you mean ma'am quite i remember we call it that between or was writing to our schools with a what his religion was to a person he replied i like to live a neighborly terms with all men and i have been accustomed to believe that god is everywhere and to look for the life of christ in maine's daily conduct nor do i have a desire to think was somehow man because his greed differs from my own to a woman he told my philosophy is merely a belief that if we understood and tolerated each other a little more than we do the world would be a happier place to live in all human problems

set me all those ideas we'll turn out to be more so you go buy it increase of sympathy and understanding i guess for a kid pictures of certain phases of life in the hope that one he or the mac my meaning it out that i may be to say i'm going to another year old this two years before his death in nineteen thirty three my dear said your letter excites my respect and admiration i don't however when i can be of any service to you i'm not a judgment not even noticeable is probably speaking a christian that is to say not a believe are in your premise the reassurance of strength which only christianity at its best can compare confucianism buddhism stoicism or hamburgers and sincerely believed in an open fair reassurance of strength you probably know the

saying god is that helping all the manned by man that i think it's the only religion which is any chance now of making real headway and being essentially practical the only faith which will steady comfort and uplift is all a game when girls with a guard members of the author's society expressed the wish that his ashes should be buried in westminster abbey the dean of westminster felt unable to conquer in any case it was not what goals were they would've wished some years earlier he had written scatter my ashes let them be free to the air soaked in the sunlight and rain scatter with never a care whether you find them again let them be gray in the dorm bright if the noontime be bright and when night sky news drone star ian darke with the night

but the birds find them in decline for the next and the beast nibbling the grizzled grass made many whistle today's feast scatter my ashes hereby i make it addressed it in no grave be confined bingo my desk with the dust give me in fee to the lead and scatter my ashes did he think that this would be the end of everything for him it is hard to say on the subject of immortality two he was tentative but i like to think the boy and scatter my ashes was this the last poem in his collection of us bring me knowledge how the pans as a maid and the cuckoo's song and the little arrows a day in the evening sleep on again the gold cups of field the flight of the swirl the eyes of the crew who has calmed the wind pressing from parish treat to actually for these so i never sees it

kicking to the nats at the dance in the sun and the flowers eight or the bees rifling their goal isn't it warren leight who did beauty fulfill my cou the heat of my desire now we turn from girls were the jewel it unlike course was the eliot was a devout christian he was a devoted and were catholic you is a highly controversial figure how did humans and antagonists and few would deny his claim to be an outstanding literary critic and a highly gifted poet and it was a convert to christianity it is in the poems written prior to and just after his concussion he dealt with the meaninglessness with a four seater mass of modern existence with its roots christmas and ian

listeners and to the attitude that was the brothel i have measured of my life with coffee spoons i go oh i grow old i sure where the bottoms of my chosen as row so i parked my hair behind do i dare to eat a peach i shall wear a white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach to visit the dark for more comfortable suburbs empire from the north from the waist them from the south prince those is traveled to me to that time to city where my word is unspoken in the land of roubini as in tennis finals the rabbit show borrow and the thorns revisit the nato shall flourish on the gravel courts and the wind show say here where a decent godless people that only monument the actual roads and a thousand last golf balls the titles of the major works of this beauty about immigrant in

their significance the waste land reform presenting mammals form his society or a knitted score and crumbling his pleasures corrupt his spirit did his diverse need a spiritual leader waldman a boy i'm picturing contemporary civilization as horrible stuff main like the dice which boys going on bonfire night a picture of desolation with nothing to suggest all this is the way the world ends this is the way the world changed this is the way the world aims not with a bang but a whimper all through this period elliott was put into himself the question how should i find the spiritual power necessary to face up to and deal with myself as a coral and with my world as without sense and meaning he fumbles the vision and the power in christianity as his poem

ash wednesday shows cephas not to mock ourselves with forceful teachers to care i'm not to care teachers to sit still for peace in his will was the played my dear in the cathedral elliott began to present its central christian convictions it is not as many think the picture of a man they get who stood up for his conscience against all odds i truly protestant and english mind it is the picture of a man who subjugated his individual will be to the winner of god who was a martyr in spirit as well as in body has been complicit in his christmas day some the true laughter is he who has become the instrument of god who has lost his will in the will of god and who no longer does as anything for himself not even the glory of being an actor characters in the play and represented on four medals first

about the woman of canterbury who form the chorus and i blindly passive and suffering and it suggests to them that many of us all the time and most of us some of the time i'm only partly living we had insensitive of thinking does not commit as do anything and we need therefore to be stared into a higher order of the snow like listen to the woman of canterbury the course we do not wish anything to happen seven years we have lived quietly succeeded in avoiding notice living and partly living that have been location and luxury that i've been poverty and license that has been minor and justice yet we have gone on living living and partly living sometimes the coroner's failed us sometimes the harvest is good one year is a year of rain another year of dryness when you're the apples and abundant another year the plums and letting it we have

gone on living living in particular thing we have to the feasts had the masses we'll do the insiders gathered wood against them and to talk to the corner of the fire talked at the court martial streets blocked was in whispers living compassionately living we've seen birth state sen managers we have had various scandals we have been afflicted with texas we haven't lost the gossip several parables of disappeared unaccountably and so i'm not able to we have had all our private cottage a particular shadows how secret fears but no a great theaters upon sophia not have won but of many i feel like there are some days when we cede their sundays alone and avoid apart we're afraid interfere which we cannot know which we cannot face which non understands and our hearts are torn from us our brains and skinned like the layers of an onion ice sails are lost lost in a final seal which

nairn understand joe thomas archbishop old thomas o'rourke leave us and leave us be in our humble untarnished frame of existence to leave us do not ask us to stand to the dorm on the house the dorm on the archbishop the dorm on the world and then that otherworldly dentist who can too sensual pleasure temperament political power and in the third place that and the priests to honor and ticket site but for merely human and conventional reasons and finally there's beckett himself on a spiritual clinical from which he thinks is heaven it is that just man who like a lion bone should be without fear i've come here no traitor to the king i am a priest a christian saved by the blood of christ ready to suffer with

my blood this is the sign of the church always the sign of blood blood for blood his blood given to buy my life my blood given to pay for these days my days for his death i for so much that in the cathedral in a cast a theater where christmas pantomime had been running for two months it was impressive to see a theater thronged with people for a play was central theme was the subsidy issue of the individual we look to the will of god no elliott found it very difficult to translate his christian convictions through the medium of the theater into terms of contemporary life i have coral i went to see a revival of the play a family reunion in london next to me was a man of middle age at the until he said to me why compose poetry and write plays as if they were a crossword puzzles we were still arguing about that when the curtain went up on the second half

of the play towards the end of the second how the central character says about his decision to go somewhere on the other side of despair i wouldn't brain but you would none of you believe it if you believe that still you would not understand that elliott hesitate to speak out from the field being misunderstood did you suppose that understanding that communication are actually impossible to two different people the same words never have sufficiently similar meanings for satisfactory communication to take place if you're impatient with what seems to you the obscurity of elliot when you take into account that his life was one long struggle to be understood without wafting down without voter rising the convictions he had to express in one of his poems he offers this piece of autobiography so here i am in the middle way having had twenty years twenty years largely wasted

trying to learn to use words and every attempt is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure because one has only learned to get the beds of words for the things one no longer has to say or the way in which one is no longer disposed to state and so each adventure is a new beginning a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment or was deteriorating in the genital myself in precision of feeling i'm disciplined scorns of emotion there is expressing his problem as a playwright now that they say something that endures play the family or you know how he is obsessed with the idea that he pushed his wife off the deck of a minor c his consciousness of guilt has followed him in the shape of the few days he flies from them or overwhelmed

but cannot interviewed them and at last returns to his home hoping that you'll find refuge there and asked the furious catch up with him even at home among his uncles and dances and for principle of a woman's college who as a ghetto was in love with how his father she tells haddad that just before he was born his father had planned to murder his mother here is the origin of the family curse which has haunted korea connection of the greek tragedy and how he sees that it is useless to flee from the furious the very place in which he had hoped to get away from them is more than any other of the place where they have always beat he sees more than this it is meatless as well as useless to try to escape the furious have to be made and faced and lo and behold when he meets and faces than the no longer tenable the bright angels he is ready now to

leave home again to go wherever they may lead him even though following them may mean i sure can sell secretaries who worship in the desert assessed and the privations a stormy century and the primitive alter the heat of the sun and the icy night her care over the lame so humble people the lesson of ignorance of incurable diseases many interpretations of been offered to the family reunion one of them being that it obliges us to think again of what the or theologians manned by all original sin what i ask you to notice as the bottle with murder in the cathedral this education of the individual to ohio the family reunion was followed by the cocktail party when it was produced in new york and drew from most intelligent or jitters apostle admiration what was eliot seeking to convey he he'd brings together a

motley collection of characters one who seems to be a psychologist who talks like a priest and seeks to readjust the lives of a husband and wife and their lovers' one each another use a superficial type who goes off to make movies another the central characters senior cobblestone who is made to discover his first that everybody is a warm and second that she is a sinner the second discovery leads her to choose the way of harley in the family of the union and of becket in modern in the cathedral the un worthiness in herself and in the world and girls or to go on an act of renunciation and bill sent to a submission of her individual will to ohio will he goes to mass african natives dying of the pestilence and during an insurrection is captured and crucified near an anthill the insect swarming over

and the voting a body before she dies she gains herself and i have to say by losing she gains herself by giving yourself away beyond the meaningless she finds meaning at last i was there with them to talk about the later elliot plays the confidential talk the elder statesman but i must note into tennessee williams there are some will consider that alongside of goldsworthy and elliot williams is in all the clothing company i don't think that it's fair to a brilliant american playwright williams was arthur miller is one of the pros masters of the contemporary american theatre and he and we see that our time of troubles is capable of stimulating work of great dramatic power plays like a roasted to the glass menagerie a streetcar named desire tin roof or works of

dramatic force people complained that the censor certain decadence and williams says that he represents a return to the primitive that he is preoccupied with society in the role that he lingers too long and tomorrow would be over sixteen six profession that tee hee hee make similar frequent use of objectionable four letter words george meredith once said that he's staying play in painting molded emotion and exceptional positions but his conscience wouldn't let him still waste as tying his love was for a typical subject off the cobwebs it uprooted corner though he knew the fascination of unraveling that the complaint against williams is that he appears to have no such conscience as for precisely the opposite principal and is doing more to help destroy an old world and help build a new

one for my own part i think i know her williams would reply such complaints were charges i believe he would say that the playwright of today must dig at the roots of the sickness of today as he sees the sickness of today as he feels it the decay of an old couch the failure of a new one to put meaning and significance into the lives of multitudes of people with strong primitive hand religious instincts to be sure his characters are often decadent but civilization itself is decadent tenorio great to confuse because because few of them had any idea what williams was a bond they didn't know what to make of a play that had been a double a barroom escaping to die for an ideal in greece ahead and crumpled casanova a communal reduced to buy don quixote escaping into the happy world of his own illusions and american prize fighter with a bad heart kluge dissect offices of weeks of august

apple beating up the common creatures of the street scavengers cutting off dead bodies to a garbage dump all the action of the play takes place in a city on one side of the square is a proprietor full of hockey contempt for will come into his view on the other is a fall post a pawn shop in a house of prostitution outside the city are interminable deserts and unsurpassable mountains really it's not too difficult to see what williams is about he's holding up a minute to life it may be life in the role but from unions life is roll it's a trap that's what they've come to think it is it is a tap in which they have been caught tenorio is the night manager a man was choked with aversion upon the world in which he with the rest of us must live and there is this to think about underneath tennessee williams' characters sophie know and

roasted to the mother daughter son and gentleman caller in the glass menagerie mentioned stanley invested car named desire underneath the characters it's human nature with its fights and its its tourism sorrows it's big news and meanness william offers are mining of human experience and spiritual exploration think blanche in streetcar what makes a beautiful is that she could never been the light of reality no other not time to almost to choose with just that for the major problem that they can air the light of reality she's nearly a study and psychopathology or the sensitivity she represents has been crushed are moving out of the shelter uphold and family into a nun carrying anti human world of sight we can see her we who are comfortably host and brendan

fit without the ticking of the guilt for her destruction i have had the characters of williams' dismissed as merely animals you know i've applied to that what animals ever compassionate did they care for justice says williams cares and virtually all the beautiful creatures the people the plays of tennessee williams once dams an indictment of the world that has had such a large pot making them he has an affection for the little man the little men was the big man potentially and was seeking for what thomas be in court is proper other sheep of life which are not of this whole the words of jesus it seems to be attended have pointed putnam's former tv when the brazen williams which is rich in religious suggestiveness and challenge so i come to an end of the season it's is on religion and the drum philosophers

think on the issues of life and say do you follow dramatist think on the issues of life and say do you see going to the theater cannot become strained as an act of piety but it isn't act which part to help to bring into existence man has created many means of unveiling the truth about the win over india and the world within the physical sciences the psychological sciences the disciplines of economic and historical research and spirit one means of unveiling the truth is very ancient away back to east coast sophocles and fifties and it is at the same time very modern drama can raise the truth consciousness of men and women to such a level of intensity has to transform those who observe it religion helped to bring it into existence and all the great dramatists religion has no reason to be other than

that