Abstract
Eliot, who is known for some infamously dogmatic remarks, actually had a nuanced view of culture and art grounded in a robust conception of tradition. Relying primarily on The Sacred Wood and After Strange Gods, as well as selected critical essays, I offer a careful analysis that shows how Eliot’s often unwisely provocative rhetoric is undermined by ironic and counter-intuitive illustrations and cautious verbal “thrusts and retreats.” I suggest that Eliot’s “catholic” sensibility provides a view of tradition that powerfully challenges modern ideological habits of thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Eliot, T.S. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., Inc., 1929, pp. vii–viii. (FLA) Russell Kirk, in a speech to The Heritage Foundation, mentions the second qualification, and goes onto say, “The Conservative Party of England was not nearly conservative enough for T.S. Eliot.” Kirk, “The Politics of T.S. Eliot,” Lecture Number One Hundred Eighty Two, February Ninth, 1989, and http:/www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/kirk/kirk182.html
- 2.
Kearns, Cleo McNelly, “Religion, Literature, and Society in the Work of T.S. Eliot,” in The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 77–93. (CCTSE) p. 80.
- 3.
Eliot’s warning against the “temptation to legislate,” surely applies to himself; he is saved only by his skepticism and catholicity of taste. See, Eliot, The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays, Mineola, New York: Dover Pub., Inc., 1998, p. 7. (SW) Cf., Eliot, T.S., After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy: The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1933, p. 27, fn. 1. (ASG) In the text, Eliot rejects the confinement of taste to the simple categories Romantic and Classical: “For instance: two of my own favorite authors are Sir Thomas Mallory and Racine.”
- 4.
Kearns, CCTSE, p. 83.
- 5.
Scott, Peter Dale, “The Social Critic and His Discontents,” in CCTSE, pp. 60–76. p. 73.
- 6.
Scott, CCTSE, p. 62, passim, 68.
- 7.
Eliot regretted the errant rhetoric of the Preface of For Lancelot Andrewes . In After Strange Gods , he calls his former statement “injudicious. It may suggest that the three subjects are of equal importance to me, which is not so; it may suggest that I accept all three beliefs on the same grounds, which is not so; and it may suggest that I believe they all hang or fall together, which would be the most serious misunderstanding of all.” ASG, pp. 27–8. The irony of Eliot’s having just said something far more injudicious than “classicist, royalist, anglo-catholic” is not to be missed. Because of the inevitable scandal attached to ASG, I feel compelled to say something about the single most notorious phrase in Eliot’s prose: “free-thinking Jews.” I can scarcely enter into this controversy here. Too briefly, I would only point out that the context makes clear that free-thinking is Eliot’s real concern. Of course, he might have said simply “free-thinkers” or he might have displayed another form of bigotry—free-thinking women, peasants, Poles, who knows—but did not. He expressed the form he had, and his recklessness is much to be regretted. I leave aside the poems.
- 8.
Harrison, John, The Reactionaries: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia, New York: Shocken Books, 1967.
- 9.
Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics, Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991. Preface to the First Edition, 1962.
- 10.
ASG, pp. 25–26.
- 11.
SW, p. iv.
- 12.
SW, “Andrew Marvell,” p. 111.
- 13.
See, “Literature of Politics,” TCC, where Eliot worries about the too radical separation of speculative and literary thought from politics, and “Notes Toward the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture, New York: Harcourt Brace, and Co., 1976, (CC) where Eliot argues against Mannheim’s idea of elites on grounds of their lack of social connection.
- 14.
SW, “Andrew Marvel,” p. 110. (My edition is “SW and Major Early Essays.”)
- 15.
SW, p. 29.
- 16.
SW, p. 28.
- 17.
SW, p. 28.
- 18.
Shusterman , Richard, “Eliot as Philosopher,” CCTSE, pp. 40–41. This is not to say Eliot would not sympathize with Gadamer’s concern for the living connection to tradition that modern conditions have severed. Gadamer is too accepting of “critical history,” and tries to tame it by binding it to our practical present. Eliot, I think, strives to see the whole of human experience under the category of eternity. For an excellent study of Eliot’s relation to Bradley , which differs from Shusterman’s view, see Mallinson, Jane, T.S. Eliot’s Interpretation of F.H. Bradley, Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 2001.
- 19.
SW, p. 28, p. 33.
- 20.
SW, p. 28. Many critics seem to take the word “ideal” to have a normative force, but I think Bradley means something closer to “ideational.” Hence, it is not that we face a past invested with an automatic prescriptive claim; rather, we face a past that is structured in terms of our understanding, thus “notional.” One reason for denying Shusterman’s view is that Eliot did not devote his energies to theorizing the complexities of this relationship. He exhibited his understanding in his poetry and criticism, where a perfectly consistent theory is less important than standing ‘in the hard, Sophoclean light/ and tak[ing] your wounds from it gladly.’
- 21.
ASG, p. 18. A striking image, and possibly—this is a guess—a nod to Thomas Jefferson, founder of The University of Virginia, where the lectures were delivered, and who espoused the need for periodic revolution to renew the tree of liberty.
- 22.
ASG, p. 18.
- 23.
ASG, p. 18.
- 24.
SW, p. 29. My italics.
- 25.
SW, p. 35.
- 26.
SW, p. 36.
- 27.
SW, p. 36. Eliot’s italics.
- 28.
Shusterman , I believe, is misled by Eliot’s use of the word “object,” and his sly praises of science, and so over-emphasizes Eliot’s debt to Russell. When Eliot speaks of this “new thing” or about the “object” that poetry creates and contemplates, he is speaking about emotional experiences, some the poet’s (as ‘the man’) and some observed in human experience. Poetry is “a presentation of thought, or a presentation of feeling by a statement of events in human action or objects in the external world,” SW, 36. The “object” is connected with some human, emotional experience. Eliot retains a distinctly idealist stance when he writes that “in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes,” SW, p. 127, and passim. It is true that Eliot uses the quasi-scientific language of detachment to describe the “objects” of poetry, but it remains the case that the object is seen in its clarity in order to be “transmuted” and brought into coherence with a body of systematically related experiences. “The true generalization is not something superposed upon an accumulation of perceptions; the perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure; and criticism is the statement of this structure; it is the development of sensibility,” SW, pp. 8–9.
- 29.
SW, p. vi.
- 30.
SW, p. 4. My italics.
- 31.
SW, p. 33. Eliot’s italics.
- 32.
SW, “The Metaphysical Poets,” p. 127.
- 33.
Like Tocqueville, Eliot uses “individualism” for a specific—though different from Tocqueville’s—cultural and psycho-social malady, but certainly refuses to take up any “anti-individualist” stance that would submerge the individual in collective experience, or deny liberty. Eliot’s individualism comes through in lines like “only those who know what it means to have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things,” SW, p. 33.
- 34.
SW, “Andrew Marvell,” pp. 108–109.
- 35.
ASG, p. 19.
- 36.
SW, “The Metaphysical Poets,” p. 128.
- 37.
SW, pp. 102–108, passim.
- 38.
SW, p. 111.
- 39.
ASG, p. 56.
- 40.
ASG, pp. 11–12.
- 41.
SW, p. 31.
- 42.
ASG, p. 62. Perpetual criticism is not what the word “orthodoxy” usually calls to mind.
- 43.
SW, p. 47.
- 44.
ASG, p. 38. What I mean by suggesting a liberality at work even in the midst of severe and unsparing judgments of Lawrence and others, is that Eliot was surely clever enough to see the ironies of placing Joyce, whose Ulysses was banned and censored, as the most orthodox writer of the time. That work, like Lawrence’s, was seen as obscene.
- 45.
ASG, p. 37.
- 46.
ASG, p. 37.
- 47.
ASG, p. 32. We could think of Eliot’s “tradition/orthodoxy ” as “spirit,” if we took the term simultaneously in the senses of the New Testament, Montesquieu, and a non-progressivist Hegel. The relation between the individual—writer, theologian, or plain man—and the civilization is quite close. For example, in “Andrew Marvell,” (SW, p. 101), Eliot progresses from defining the “perennial task of criticism” as “bringing the poet back to life,” to a different metaphor, of “squeezing some precious liquor” from a few poems, to finding that this “essence” is “a quality of civilization, of a traditional habit of life.” N.B. the progression: The poet, the works, the civilization—the corpse, the corpus, the spirit?
- 48.
ASG, p. 33.
- 49.
SW, p. 33.
- 50.
ASG, p. 33.
- 51.
Scott, CCTSE, pp. 62–69, passim.
- 52.
ASG, p. 40.
- 53.
It is in this context that we can make sense of his criticism of Babbitt’s humanism. It misses out on the “ancestral” and “cultivated” aspects of religion. These are at least as important as the doctrinal, and may be more so: “Is [Babbitt’s humanism], in the end, a view of life that will work by itself, or is it a derivative of religion which will work only for a short time in history, and only for a few highly cultivated persons like Mr. Babbitt—whose ancestral traditions, furthermore, are Christian, and who is, like any people, at the distance of a generation or so from definite Christian belief?” Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960, p. 472.
- 54.
ASG, p. 34. An analogy and not merely a swipe: Money is a means—so too, “experience” is the currency of meaning, but only if one pays the price.
- 55.
SE, p. 344.
- 56.
ASG, p. 61.
- 57.
FLA, pp. 104–5.
- 58.
SE, pp. 342–342.
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Abel, C. (2020). “Pagans, Christians, Poets”. In: Callahan, G., McIntyre, K.B. (eds) Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_6
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