Objective Correlative

The term "Objective Correlative" first used by the American painter Washington Allston in 1840. T.S. Eliot revived it and makes it famous in his essay on "Hamlet" . By the term Eliot meant a pattern of objects, actions or events or a situation that can serve effectively to awaken in the reader on emotional response without being a direct statement of that subjective emotion. It is a means of communicating feeling. Eliot calls the objective correlative the only way to expressing emotion in the form of art. He defines it as "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that wehn the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked". Eliot calls Shakespeare's tragedy, "an artistic failure", because it lacks on adequate objective correlative for Hamlet's state of mind. Hamlet is "dominated by a state of mind which is inexpressible because it is an excess of the facts as they appear".But Eliot praises"Macbeth". He states that in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking speech and in the speech of Macbeth made after he has heard the news of her death, the words are completely adequate to the state of mind.
In other words, a succesful artistic creation requires an exquisite balance between form and matter and a coalescence of them. If the matter (thought, feeling, action) is too much for (in excess of ) the form (the words) we have a discrepency, strain, a lack of unity (in sufficient correlation) and vice versa.