THE CLASSICISM OF T. S. ELIOT (11)'
Toni Pascua1
In the firsl part of this paper 1emphasized Eliot's passion for order as underlying
his concem with the literary tradition, arguing that this constituteswhat we might term
a classicist attitude. 1roughly defincd h e classical sensibility as an urge on the part of
the writer or artist to be led by a principie of extemal aulhority which makes him/her
abandon theromantic illusion of originality to acknowleúgehis/her debt to deadauthors.
Here, in the second part, 1shall altempt to sketch the literary atmosphere that helped to
shape Eliot's classical ideas, and briefly discuss the authorswho had a direct impact on
him. Eliot's poetical development follows a very coherent line, nourishing himself as
he did from a few authors that went into the shaping of his most peculiar literary
personality,with a decisiveness that we seldom find in any other contemporary author.
Seen in its historical context, Eliot's idea of order and his appeal to extemal
authority spring from adesireto impose on theevanescentflux of the phenomenalworld,
which by the tum of the century had made al1 the nineteenth-century absolutescollapse
in the face of an incipient relativism. The vindication of fixed literary standards,and the
subsequent allegiance to them, can be viewed as a reaction against the relative
multiplicity of experience resulting from the crumbling of Victorian absolutes. In this
respect, part of the modemist movement was a post-Victorian return, very reactionary
in nature, to a set of outmoded principles that had long been discredited by romantic
individualism.
The beginnings of the modemist movement are thus markedly anti-romantic,
and it is as a stubbom reaction to romantic relativism that we can situate the demand for
classical principles such as "standards" or "order". The unrestrained assertion of
individual will as the only measure of judgment, spread by late romanticism, was felt
as a threat by m v y tum-of-he-centuryauthors. The outcome was a nostalgic craving
for tradi tional pre-capitalistvalues, which can be related to an aristocraticconception of
writing and artistic creation. Opposing the spread of mass culture and mass education,
many early twentielh-century intellectuals condemned democracy as the product of
egalitarian liberalism,and some even endorsed the rising fascist movements that would
crystallize in the following decades. They regretted the diversification of al1 forms of
knowledge and the resulting relativism created by the wide-ranging ideal of a culture
more accessibleto everybody.The reaction was a virulent and highly dogmatic rejection
1.- This article emerged from the research 1am canying out for my doctoral thesis, funded by
apostgraduate grant from the "Departarnent d'EnsenyamentWof the "Generalitat de Catalunya".
of romantic individualism and egalitarian principles. Michael H. Levenson, in his most
elucidating A Genealogy of Modernism, discusses the radicalism of h e early modem
movement:
By ternperarnent as well as by their cultural position, the English
modernists were inclincd to dcfinitive opinions expressed in vehement
tones. Literary attitudes were not offered as tentative hypothesis subject
to revision, but as final judgments?
Levenson further discusses what he calls "he modemist urge towards dualistic
opposition and radical polarities", as well as its Manichcan habits even if terrns like
"good" and "evil" are no longer har~dled.~
When judging Eliot's appeal to extemai
authority, we must keep in mind this radicalism o€the period and the desperate craving
for absolutes that characterizes it.
Levenson traces the classical obsession with order within the early modern
movement to Matthew Arnold, in whom the threat of relativism crystallized as a
vindication of classical excellency and the "high-seriousness" o€ Greek and Latin
authors. In Amold's appeal to self-constraint,Levenson sees the craving for a principle
of organization to restrain h e drift towards relativism and disorder, and the disgust at
an incipient sensuousness which any good Victorian was supposed to find execrable."
In his essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time", Levenson contends,
"Arnold carne Lo plead for a controlling criticai authority which might restrain the
excesses of private ind~lgence".~
Politically,in Culture and Anarchy Arnold invoked
a principle of institutional order to curve the tendency to anarchy created by what he
considered the egoistic individualismo€liberal phil~sophy.~
It is nota coincidence that
Eliot chose his own essay on Arnold to praise the critic who (as 1discussed in the fust
part of this paper) "every hundred years or so" was to review the literature of the past
"and set the poets and the poems in a new order"?
A man in whom these ideas had taken root at the beginning of the century was
irving Babbitt. Babbit was Eliot's teacher at Harvard, and his acquaintance was cruciai
towards developing Eliot's obsession wiíh order and extemal authority. As pointed out
by Lyndall Gordon, in the autumn of 1909 Eliot attended a course in French litcrary
criticism with Babbit, who was to capture Eliot's interest with his vindication of the
symbolist writers and the whole humanist tradition. Babbitt callcd for a retum to the
humanist tradition,and indeed in Gordon's words, "Babbitt used to make his class read
2.-Levenson, Michael H.: A Genealogy of Modernism. A Study of English Liferary Doctrine
1908-1922.Cambridge:C.U.P., 1984, p. viii.
3.-Ib., p. ix.
4 .-Ib.,pp. 23-28.
5.- Ib., p. 25.
6.- Ib., pp. 26-27.
7 . - ~ l i oT.s.:
t
The Use of Poetry and fhe Use of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber, 1933, p.
108.
widely in theclassics of h e past and he alerted them to the dangers of the modern secular
w~rld".~
In an early essay, "Imperfect Critics", Eliot praised Babbit along wilh another
American cntic, Paul More, for thcir universal outlook on literature. Despite being
Americans, Eliot argues, both are much nearer h e European current than other critics,
and the French influcnce can be traced in their dedication to ideas and the problems of
art and
Their humanistic approach, Eliot goes on to say, allows them u> consider
European culture in its unity, and more clearly than anybody, Babbit "appears ... to
perceive Europe as a whole; he has a cosmopolitan mind and a tendency to seek the
centre".lOBythis timeEliot was enthusiasticaboutBabbitt's ideas oforder,even though
some years later, in his essay of 1928 on Babbiu's humanism, he was to criticize him
for not having conceived of a new humanism outside the Christian tradition, on the
grounds that Christianity and humanism have always gone hand in hand throughout the
ages and cannot be dissociated." We must remember that Eliot's conversion in 1927
meant a turning-point in his literay career, and that from then on his critical output was
to become extremely biased in favour of the institutionalized faith.
Babbiu's "new humanism" had an air of retreat towards old values. Levenson
discusses how the principies of order and self-constraint held by Arnold, as well as his
recovev of classical authors, were taken over by Irving Babbitt. To Babbitt, the return
to humanism meant the adoption of "standards" to oppose to what he considered, in
Levenson's words, "he prevailing laxity of intellectual democracy and natural scien~e".'~
In tum, Ackroyd suggests that Babbitt influenced Eliot in his distaste for
emotion and "personality", and inspired him with ideas of "standards" and "discipline"
to oppose to the unrestrained individuality of late nineteenth-century liberalism.13To
Babbitt liberal democracy was a romantic offspring that had asserted individual
judgment and undermined the possibility of an appeal to absolutes. Homfying though
it may seem to our present-day mind, as 1poinlcd out above this rejection of dernocracy
in the early twenlicth century was adesperatereaction to acmmbling world of absolute
nolions that was giving way to modem relativism. In such a desperale intellectual
climate, many writcrs of h e early twentieth cenlury fe11 into the trap of supporting the
rising fascism that was to sweep Europe in the following two dccades. Antedating this
radical solution,Babbitt rejected impressionism as a romantic movement,and called for
extemal authority in vehement terms, and revealing a certain dogmatic inflexibility:
With h e spread of impressionism literature has lost standards and
discipline, and at the same time virility and seriousness;it has fallen into
the hands of aesthetes and dilettantes, the last effete representatives of
8.- Lyndall Gordon: Eliot's Early Years.Oxford: O.U.P., 1977, p. 22.
9.- T.S. Eliot.: The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1920, p. 39.
10.- Ib., p. 42.
11 .-T.S. Eliot.: Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 195 1, p. 480.
12.- Levenson, op. cit., p. 28.
13.-P. Ackroyd: T.S. Eliot. London: SphcreBooks, 1984, pp. 35-37.
romanticism, who have proved utterly unequal to the task of maintaining
its great tradilions against the scientific po~itivists.'~
As Levenson argues, for Babbitt both science and democracy "conspire to
undermineprinciplesofrestraint,measureand authority"." Outrnodedthough they may
seem to us nowadays, it is those principies of externd authonty that were to constitute
the touchstoneof Babbitt's "new humanist", and which were eventudly handed over to
Eliot.
Interesting in connection with Eliot's idea of order is his doctoral thesis on the
philosophy of F.H. Bradley, written bctween 1914 and 1916, in which Eliot had
researched the appeal in Bradlcy lo an "absolute order" that was to transcend individual
expericnce.I6
In his vindicationof the literary uadition asaprincipleof extemal authority, Eliot
was tofindacommitted supporter inEzraPound,whom hefirst met in Englandin 1913,
and who was LO become one of Eliot's lifelong friends." The weight of the literary
tradition, either as a constraint or a liberation,or both at the same time, had been a major
theme of the early modernist movement.Although the literatureof the more immediate
past was rejected as an offspring of late romanticism,there was aretum to earlier models
and areassessmentof the importance to have a literary tradition to account for one's own
poetical output. Pound was to become a pioneer of that attempt at recovery. In this
connection Levenson mentions Pound's essay of 1913,"The Senous Artist", in which
Pound vindicates art on grounds of social utility, contending in a typically humanistic
vein that the function of art is to provide some knowledge about the inner reality of
man.18
Also as early as 1913 Ezra Pound emphasized the importance of the literary
tradition in his crucial essay "The Tradition", which opens with the statement that "the
traditionisabeauty which we preserveand nota setof fetters tobind ~s".~~Pound'snotion
14.- Irving Babbit: The New Laokoon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910, p. xiii. Quoted in
Levenson, op. cit., p. 30.
15.- Levenson, op. cit., p. 30.
16.-T. S. Eliot. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. London: Faber
& Faber, 1964. See Stephen Spender's remark conceming Eliot's scepticism about the worth of
hisacademicresearchonBradley,inEliot'sownintroduction to the thesis whenitwaspublished,
forty-six years after it was written (SPENDER, Stephen: Eliot. London: Fontana, 1975, pp. 3031). Eliot's later assessment in his essay of 1927 "Francis Herbert Bradley" disregards most of
the philosopher's ideas on order, and is confmed to praising Bradley for attemptimg to bring
British philosophy closer to the Greek philosophical tradition (Selected Essays. pp. 444-455).
For a full assessment of Eliot's debt to Bradley's philosophical ideas, see LEVENSON, op. cit.,
pp. 176-185.
17.-Gordon. op. cit., p. 66. For Pound's relationship to Eliot, see LEVENSON, op. cit., pp. 146164.
18.- Levenson, op. cit., p. 74.
19.-T. S. Eliot (ed.): Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber, 1954, p. 91.
of the poetical tradition is extremely vast, not confining himself to English authors, but
ranging even beyond Chaucer to encompass ancient Greek and medieval French and
Provencal poets. This cosmopolitan vein of Pound's was praised by Eliot in his
Introduction to his own edition of Pound's Essays: "He has enlarged criticism by his
interpretationofneglecled authors and literatures,and by his rehabilitation of misesteemed
a~thors''.~~
This is cxactly what Eliot himself did throughout his own critical career,
securing his own apprchcnsion of a literary tradition as the origin of the poet's artistic
sensibilityand ideas. This search for lilerary origins hides the craving for a principle of
higher authority that charactcrizes the authors we are dealing with here:
Aretum to origins invigorates because it is a retum to nature and reason.
The man who retums to origins does so because he wishes to behave in
the etemally sensible manner. That is to say, naturally, reasonably,
intuitively.2'
Elsewhere, in his well-known litemry manifestoof 1918, "ARetrospect", Pound
reveals a very widc nolion of tradition and an open-minded view of creative writing: "Be
influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to
acknowledgc h e dcbt outright, or to try to conceal it".22In the same essay he makes a
significant plca for lilerary tcchnique as self-consuaint, emphasizing the need for a
principle of extcmal authority that hc significantlycalls a "law":
Technique 1bclieve in technique as h e test of a man's sincerity;in law
when it is ascertainable;in the trampling down of every convention that
impedesorobscures thedctermination of h e law,or the preciserendering
of the imp~lse.2~
Eliot's poetical dcvelopment, then, finds a parallel in Pound's awareness of the
importanceof the litemry tradition. This is most apparent as we consider the latter's role
in the composition of The Wasle Land. With regard to both Eliot and Pound's reliance
on the literary tradilion, Edmund Wilson was to say, in what has become a critical
commonplace nowadays, that with The Waste Land they "founded a school of poetry
which dcpends on litcrary quotation and reference to an unprecedentcd degree"." Not
only did Pound bnng about his own iask of censorship by effecting substantial cuts in
the original manuscript ("11 miglior fabbro", Eliot was to cal1 him in the dedication),he
had previously set up an example by composing poetry from various quotations and
allusions, which might have given Eliot the idea of the literary medley.
20.- Ib., p. xi.
21 .-Ib., p. 92.
22.- Ib.,p. 5. Also reprinted in David Lodge:20thCentuy Literary Criticism.AReader. London:
Longman. 1972, p. 63.
23.-Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 9. Lodge, op. cit., p. 63.
24 .-Wilson, Edrnund: Axel Caslle. New York, 1931. Reprinted in Clarke, Graharn (ed.),: T.S.
Eliot. Critica1Assessments. Vol. 11. London: Christopher Helm, 1990, p. 142.
Another decisive influcnce on Eliot's classicism, even if Eliot never met him,
was T.E. Hulme. In his Speculalions, publishcd posthumously in 1924,Hulmegathered
a few arlicles that had appeared over the first two decades of the century and had tumed
theprevailingrornanticsensibility
him inloan aposlleagainstla~eromanticism.~~Against
Hulme propounded the need for a return to some form of "classicism". This made him
representative of a general attilude that many intellectualsof theearly twentieth century
understood as a liberation from romantic decadence.
The most apparent flawof Hulme's "classicism" is that hisdefinition of the new
sensibilily is not self-contained, but simply conceived of in dualistic opposition to
romantic models. Classic is what is notromantic,and viceversa. Indeed, as DavidLodge
adrnits in the introductory note lo his own editing of Hulme's article ,it should be bome
in mind that both "romantic" and "classic" are mcky notions that have never been
properly dclimited or fully deíined,and that both Hulme and Eliot made a biased use of
. ~ ~ trcatment of both romanticism and classicism is highly dualistic
both t e r m ~Hulme's
and meets many contradictions,apart from a loose handling of terms like "fancy" and
"imagination".
Hulme was by no means the only pioncer of the anti-romantic reaction. As
Levenson conknds,Hulme and Eliot's rejection of latenineteenth-century romanticism
led them to support aradicalmovement, Action Francaise, that was to support the rising
fascist movement from the beginning of the twentieth century up until World War TI.
They were particularly altracted to Pierre Lasserre's Le Romanticismefran~aisand the
ideas of Charles Maurras, both of whom advocated the resuaint found in classicism."
The radical attitude of thc Action Fran~aiseis present in the tone of Hulme's
(writtenin 1913or 1914,and published
influentialessay"Roman~icismandC1assicism"
in Speculalions), whose very opcning is straightforward and vehement: "1 want to
maintain that aftcr a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival
Hulme goes on to dcnounce that Rousseau's ideas had spread the notion that man was
essentially good, and that it was the principlesof social authonty that had perverted him.
This inherenl goodness of man fosters the notion of man's perfectibility that underlies
al1 theories of material and spirilual progress:
Here is the rootof al1romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite
reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the
desuuctionof oppressiveordcrthen these possibilities will haveachance
and you will have Progress.
One can dcfinc the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to
this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is
25.-T.S. Hulme,.:Speculafions. New York: Hawurt Brace, 1924.
26.- Lodge, op. cit., p. 92.
27.- Levenson, op. cit., pp. 82-88.
28.- Lodge, op. cit., p. 92.
absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything
decent can be got out of him."
To man's natural goodness, which gives rise to a wide-ranging philosophy of
action, Hulme will contend that rnan is inherently evil as he suffers from Onginal Sin,
and that a sourceof constraint is needed to curve his natural evil instincts. The classicist,
according to Hume, has no faith in progress, and believes in the need for discipline to
rearrange man's natural state of disorder. Levenson highlights Hulme as an heir of
The
Bergson's rejection of malerialism,dismissing the absolutesof scientificanaly~is.3~
realization that a comprehensive rational undcrstanding of the world was no longer
possible led Hulme, following Bergson, to an anti-indlectuaiism that entailed "a
scepticism towards h e claims of traditional metaphysics, and a rejection of the
rationalistbelief in histoncal and social pro gres^".^' Social progress prevented by man's
evil nature, man's natural instincts must be curved by the imposition of discipline and
order. The need for self-control can become obsessive in Hulme. Elsewhere in
Speculations he wntes: "Nothing is bad in itself except disorder; al1 that is put in order
in a hierarchy is gc~od."~~
Hulme's Manichean distinction between the romantic as
extreme revolution and the classic as the pnnciple of immobilism is categoncal:
Put shortly, thcse are the two vicws, thcn. One, that rnan is intrinsically
good,spoilt by circumstance;and the other that he is inbinsically limited,
but disciplined by ordcr and tradition to something fairly dccent. To the
one part man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view
which regards rnan as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, 1 cal1 the
romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature,
1 cal1 the classical."
Next: Hulme, again in very reductive terms, extends the duaiism and relates
romanticism toa tendency to repress a natural instinct in rnan which he calls "religion".
In contrast to the romantic tendency to make of rnan a god, Hulme defends the religious
impulse,which has as its basis thc attitudeof giving oneself over to an extemal pnnciple
of authority. According to Hulme, the"classical view" :"is absolutely identical with the
normal religious attitude", which the romantics have repressed for the sake of idolizing
the individual and sctting up a few pnnciples for h e improvement of the race. Hulme
denounces romanticism as having divinized rnan and enthroned a set of ideals, and
endorses the classical as holding that the belicf in the divine is part of h e fixed nature
of man. In romanticism: "You don't belicve in God, so you begin to bclieve that rnan
is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to bclieve in a heaven on earth. In
29.- Ib., p. 94. Levenson discusses this passage at length (Levenson, op. cit., m>. 84-85).
30.- Levenson, op. cit., p. 40.
31.- Ib.. p. 42.
32.- "A Tory Philosophy". p. 190. Quoted in Levenson, op. cit., p. 85.
33.- Lodge, op. cit., pp. 94-95.
other words, you getrornanti~ism.'~Next
hegivestheUbestdefinition" of romanticism,
which he regards as "spiltreligion", andcornplainsthat "theromantic,because he thinks
man infinite, must always be talking about the infini~"?~
The classic,on the other hand,
has his/her feet firmly on the ground: "In theclassic it is always the light of ordinary day,
never the light that never was on land or sea It is always perfectly human and never
exaggerated: man isalways man and neveragod."36Hulmeregardsgoodclassicalpoetry
as "dry and hard", and ends up by prophesyingthat "a period of dry,hard,classicalverse
is comir~g."~~
Hulme was also the father of h e "image", which later Pound was to define in "A
Retrospect" as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of
Hulme composed numerous poems as "images" and was a member of the
"Imagist" gro~p.3~
The "image" meant the introductionof a self-consciousrestraint that
curved impressionistic sensuousness and romantic verbosity. According to Levenson,
"the image is to be visual and concrete, replacing large-scale philosophic vision,
emotional effusion, the declarnatory imp~lse".~
Eliot never subscribed to the imagist
movement, but a few of his early poems bear the traces of their influence?'
This brief consideration of Hulme's ideas is very useful to determine to what
extent Eliot's notions of order and discipline are essential to his reappropriation of the
litemy tradition. The traces left by Hulme on Eliot's poetry and criticism are obvious.
First of all, there is the anti-rornantic fceling, which was in the air and which Eliot had
also found in Babbitt. What we can now clearly allude to as Eliot's "classicai" attitude
starts with a reaction to romantic literature in his youth. Eliot's passion for proportion
and order, and his submitting to an extemal principie of authority,should be understood
as a reactionary stance well in keeping with the anti-romantic attitude of the modem
movement in general.
Eliot's origins, it has to be granted, were clearly romantic. To be noticed are the
Tennysonian and Swinburnian echoes of Eliot's "Poems written in early youth",
appended at the close of the complete edition of Eliot's poetry and plays." But the antiromantic reaction carne soon from the symbolist influences. The beginnings of Eliot's
poetry bear the imprint left by his readings of the French symbolist poets in his early
youth. His fnst contact with these was through Arthur Symons' influential The Sym-
34.- Ib., p. 95.
35.- Ib.
36.- Ib., p. 99.
37.- Ib., pp. 98-99 and 101.
38.- Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 4. LODGE, op. cit., p. 59.
39.- See Jones, Peter (ed.):Imagist Poetry. Harmondsworili: Penguin, 1972.
40.- Levenson, op. cit., p. 46.
41.-See, for example, the fist verses of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Prufrockund
Other Observations (1917) (T.S. Eliot,: Collected Poem 1909-1962.London: Faber & Faber,
1963, p. 13).
42.-T.S. Eliot,:The CompleteFoemundP1aysofT.S.Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1959, pp.
587-606.
bolist Movement in Literature, which Eliot read whileat Hatvard. Most conspicuously,
theinfluence ofJulesLaforgue,ThéophileGautierandTristran Corbikreisfelt inEliot's
fust two volumes of verse,Prufrock and Other Observations(19 17)and Poem (1920)."
Eliot's atuaction to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets and Elizabethan
drarnatists may also be regarded as part of his attempt to reach back beyond the
romantics."
More interesting even than Eliot's general anti-romanticattitude is the imprint
lefton his poeQ and essays by Hulme's notion of Original Sin.Hulme's appeal to man's
evil nature as the touchstone of the classical attitude does not end in "Romanticism and
Classicism". In aseriesofessayspublishedb 1915and 1916inTheNewAge,Hulme
related the craving for order and discipline to an awareness of man's fallen state: "Man
is by nature bad or limited and can consequently only accomplish anything of value by
disciplines, ethical, heroic or political. In other words, the new sensibility believes in
Original Sin."45In this connection, Gordon discusses Eliot's concem for mystical
expcrience, and registcrs in the Eliot of the 1910sa "sense of man's flawed nature and
the necessity for drastic measures of purifi~ation".~
Gordon also quotes a significant
statementof Eliot's in hisoxford lectureof 1916,"TheReactionagainst Romanticism",
showing the impact of Hulme's ideas: "The classicist point of view has been defined as
essentially a belief in Original Sin -the necessity for austere di~cipline."~~
Hulme's notion of original sin is apparent behind Eliot's disgust for the modem
city, which Eliot shared with Laforgue and Baudelaire. Eliot himself acknowledged his
debt to those authors in his essay on Danle of 1950: from both Laforgueand Baudelaire
Eliot learncd the poetical possibilities of the sordid aspects of modem cities, which he
This rejection of urban life emanates from
applied to the Boston of his adole~cence.~~
a loss of faith in human progress, much in keeping with T.E. Hulme's definition of the
classic as an "exact opposite" LO the romantic optimism that views man as an "infinite
reservoir of possibilities". Baudelaire's view of h e modem city allegedly inspired the
"Unreal city" of The Waste L ~ n d . 4 ~
Thus Baudelaire's modern metropolis becomes the site of man's compted
nature, and an unavoidable condition in which individuals have to share their miseries
with each other even if they try to ignore them: "Hypocrite lecteur! --mon semblable,
--monfr&re!".50This is the city of men; in Stcphen Spender's words, "he temporal city
43.-See Ackroyd, op. cit.. pp. 34-35; Gordon, op. cit., pp. 29-32; Wilson. op. cit.. pp. 93-101.
44.- Edmund Wilson, in an observation which opens his classic essay on Eliot, was one of the
fust to notice "the sirnilarity between the English seventeenth-century poets and the French
nineteenth-century Symbolists" (Wilson. op. cit., p. 93).
45.- Quoted in Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 76.
46.- Gordon, op. cit., p. 71.
47.- Ib.
48.-To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber & Faber, 1965, p. 126.
49.- See Collected Poems, pp. 65.81.
50.- Collected Poems, pp. 65, 81.
of total ~onditioning.'~',
where no private life of personal relationships is possible:
"Everything private is exposed as symptomsof the neurosis which is that of civilization
itself'?2 This will be realized in opposition to the ideal City of God of St. Augustine
(again in Spender's terms, the6'cityoutside time"'') which Eliot will find in Christianity,
and which is present in his poetry from The Hollow Men (1925) onwards.
Eliot's reasons for his interest in Baudelaire are stated in an essay of 1930, in
which Eliot callsattention to Baudelaire's notion of "original sin". The French poetdoes
not practise Christianity, Eliot argues, but asserts the necessity of it, and this done
constitutes a state of "partial belief'.54His suffering in the face of man's evil nature
implies the possibility of a positive state of beatitude.", which will bring about the
ultimate salvation through a recognition of one's damnation: damnation is a form of
salvation because it overcomes the ennui of h e modem world, and gives some meaning
to
As humans we must do either good or evil, and todo evil is better than nothing,
becauseat least weexist. Thisnotion of damnation isconveyed by means ofa new stock
of imagery drawn from contemporary urban life,which is elevated to its fust intensity
in an effort at spiritual ~ublimation?~
Baudelaire is not blamed for his lack of faith, but
vindicad for his rcalization of ihe impossibility of belief and, in spite of that, his
constant striving towards it. Towards the end of the essay Eliot quotes from Baudelaire:
"La vraie civilisation ... est dans la diminution des traces du péché originel", and
concludes quoting a highly significant passage by Hulme of which Eliot presumes
Baudelaire would had approved:
In the light of these absolute values, man himself is judged to be
essentially limited and impcrfect. He is endowed with Original Sin.
While he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection,
he can never himself be perfect. Certain secondary results in regard to
ordinary human action in society follow from this. A man is essentially
bad, he can only accomplish anyihing of value by discipline-ethical and
political. Order is thus not merely negative, but creative and liberating.
Institutions are nc~essary.5~
Thcre is, of course, the issue of Eliot's rcligiosity, and his allegiance to one of
the most prominent of hose "neccssary indtutions" that Hulme vindicates. Eliot's
religious fervour matchcs Hulme's vindication of religion as a principie of extemal
authority, and it is not too far-feched to spcculate that Hulme's linking of the notions of
51.- Spender, Stephen: Eliot. Fontana, 1975, ch. 6.
52.- Ib., p. 91.
53.- Ib., ch. 7.
54.- Selected Essays, p. 422.
55.- Ib., p. 423.
56.- Ib.. p. 428.
57.- Ib., p. 426.
58.- Ib., p. 430.
orderand disciplinetoreligion might haveconditioned Eliot's conversion to the AngloCatholic Church in 1927. Indeed, it would not be very difíicult to discuss somehow
cohercntly (but this is, of course, beyond the scope of the present paper) that Eliot's
religious obsession is rather h e self-conscious satisfaying of his craving for extemal
authority.
From Eliot's conversion onwards, his writings adopted a reactionary tone,
misreading authors from prejudice on the grounds of their religious faith, or lack of it,
and propounding a defence of institutionalized religion. In the Preface to a volume of
essaysof 1928significantly entitled For Lanceloi Andrewes.Essays on Style and Order,
he claims about the collection that "the general point of view may be described as
classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religi~n".~~
Edmund
Wilson was the first prominent critic to suspect (already in The Waste Land) Eliot's
religiosity as a half-hidden craving for order, and to attribute the whole shrinking from
emotional experience to Eliot's puritanical family background, which had imposed on
him an awareness of man's imperfect nature and had extremated the disgust for the
physicality of the body that is inhercnt to the Christian tradition:
We rccognize throughout The Waste Land the peculiar conflicts of the
Puriian turned artist: h e horror of vulgarity and the shy sympathy with
the common life, the ascetic shrinking from sexual experience and the
distress at the drying up of the springs of sexual emotion, with the
strainingafter a religious emotion which may be made to take its pla~e.6~
Wilson negatively judged Eliot's radicalizing of his anti-romantic attitude
during the twenties, which thecritic regarded as "leading finally into pedanuy and into
a futile aestheticism".6' Further, he noticed in Eliot's writings of the late twenties "a kind
of reactionary point of view which had already been becoming fashionable among
certain sorts of literary people"62,and suggests that the pretended religiosity of many
contemporary writers is but a wish to give thcmselves away to a pnnciple of extemal
authority: "We feel in contemporary writcrs like Eliot a desire to bclieve in religious
revelation,a belief that it would be a good thing to believe, rather than a genuine belief.
The faith of the modem convert seems to bum only with a low blue flame."' Wilson
values Eliot's moral convictions rather than his "religious mysticism", and considers
Eliot's relation to the Anglo-Catholic Church "artificial". Eliot's pretended religious
belief "seems to us less an Anglo-Catholic conversion than a reawakening of the New
Englander's conscience, of the never quite exorcised conviction of the ineradicable
sinfulness of m a ~ ~ " . ~ ~
59.- T. S. Elioi,: For Lancelot Anárewes. Essays on Style and Order. iondon: Faber & Faber,
1928, p. 7 .
60.- Clarkc, op. cit., p. 140.
61.- Ib., p. 148.
62.- Ib., p. 150.
63.- Ib. P. 150.
64.- Ib.
Whether sincere religious conviction or concealed desire for order and discipline, for Eliot, Dante is the supreme poet owing to his ailegiance bolh to the literary
tradition and to a strict formal rigour. The fixedstructureof Dante's hell, purgatory and
paradise, founded upon Ptolemy's astrological conceptions,must have attracted Eliot
for its order and regularily. Even if the iníluence of the symbolists and metaphysical
poets waned with the years, Dante acquired greater prominence in Eliot's later poetry,
until Eliot carne to consider him the master of al1 poets. His interest in Dante reveals a
concern with permanenceand timelessnessthat was to pervade Eliot's later poetry from
The Hollow Men. Whereas the infiuence of Laforgue and the syrnbolists is felt in Eliot's
first volumes of verse, Baudelaire's vision of the modem city is especially relevant to
The WasteLand, and Dante's progress of the Christian soul towards salvation pervades
the whole of Eliot'spoetq from The Hollow Men onwards. Dante's inferno can thus be
considered a dcrivation from Baudelaire's vision of the he11 of modem cities, and the
natural condilion of man's evil nature.
Dante's submission to the literary tradition and to principies of order must have
been crucial to attractEliot's altention to the Italian poet. For one thing, Eliot did not hide
his admiration for Canto XXVI of the Purgatorio,in which Dante meets his predecessors, Guido Guinicelli and Arnaut Daniel.6sMost conspicuously, Eliot's classicism is
laid bare as he quotes a significantpassage from Canto XVI of the Purgatorio about the
soul and the freedom of the will, in which the notions of orderand discipline areáirected
towards religious feeling and submission to tradition. 1want to finish this paper by
quotingthose lines,leaving thereader in silencebeforethe supremequality of thepoetry:
Escc di mano a lui, che la vagheggia
prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla
che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia,
I'anima semplicetta, che sa nulla,
salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,
volentier toma a cib che la trastulla.
Di picciol bene in pna sente sapore;
quivi s'inganna, e retro ad esso corre,
se guida o fren non torce suo arnore.
Onde convenne legge per fren porre;
convenne rege aver, che discemesse
della vera cilfade almen la torre.
From the hands of Him who loves he before she is, there issues like a little child
that plays, with weeping and laughter, the simple soul, that knows nothing except that,
come from the hands of a glad creator,she turns willingly to everything that delightsher.
Fust she tastes the flavour of a trifling good; then is beguiled, and pursues it, if neither
65.-Selected Essays, p. 255.
106
guide nor check withhold her.Therefore laws were neeúed as a curb;a ruler was needed,
who should at least see afar the tower of the true C i t ~ . ] ~ ~
Note: Part 1 of h e above article was published in Bells 5.
66.- Ib., pp. 259-260. Eliot's own translation.