BOOKS OF . THE WEEK
A Great Critic
MR. ELIo.r, both as poet and critic, has had a greater influence on his times than any other living writer. This in itself is enough to Command our respect ; it is not necessarily sufficient to compel our admiration. And I must confess that, very greatly as I admire Mr. Eliot's poetry, I approached the re-reading and reading of his prose in a somewhat diffident way, as of one who knows that there is much good there, but who still is prepared to detect not exactly evil, but some disagreeable qualities. I was thinking of his attack (I do not think the word is too strong to use) on Milton, and of some other things. To the essays on Milton I shall refer later ; as for the other things, I now find them quaint and endearing rather than disagreeable. There is, for example, Mr. Eliot's extraordinary meticulousness. He will spend so very many sentences in carefully explaining what he is not trying to say, that, by the time he reaches his real predication, one is on the verge of losing interest in what it can be.
Mr. Hayward, in his excellent introduction, writes of this process as follows : " In this dialectical teasing of his subject he shows a kind of feline skill worthy of his progeny of practical ' cats." But I doubt whether " skill " is the right word to use of the prolonged fumblings of a dignified puss with the shadow of its idea of a mouse. All the same the mouse is there all right, and in the end, at whatever strain to the reader's patience, Mr. Eliot does invariably reveal him- self as a practical cat. He is even better at playing the part of "old 'possum." lie is reluctant to describe himself as "a poet " and pre- fers the words " a practitioner in verse." Though he will sometimes, with a charming suddenness, admit to having made a mistake, at other times he will attempt to demonstrate that by being wrong he has somehow contrived to be right. I can think of no hunter capable of " winkling him out " from his prepared positions. _ An example of Mr. Eliot in the role of 'possum can be found in the two essays on Milton. In " Milton I " (1936) Mr. Eliot makes, among others, the surprising statement that " on analysis the marks against him appear both more numerous and more significant than the marks to his credit." In " Milton II," published eleven years later, Mr. Eliot attempts a palinode which is quite fascinating in its dexterity, which is full of interest, and which leaves us with the final impression that, in Mr. Eliot's view, it was wrong to read Milton in 1936 but that it is quite all right to read him from now on. Intriguing.as are Mr. Eliot's arguments on this occasion, I rather prefer him when, after having• stated first that George Herbert is a minor poet and then, some years later, that he is a major poet, Mr. Eliot explains in a footnote, "/ I agree with my later opinion." Yet in the general context of Mr. Eliot's work these vagaries and idiosyncrasies are rather charming than disagreeable. For in the scope and aim of his criticism the 'possum takes on the qualities of the lion. " From time to time," Mr. Eliot writes, " every hundred Years or so, it is desirable that some critic shall appear to review the Past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order." This was the task performed by Dryden, JohnSon and Arnold ; and it is to this tremendous task that Mr. Eliot has addressed himself. Moreover it should be remembered that for Mr. Eliot this task has been, of necessity, a harder one than it could have been for the great critics of the past. Not only are there more poets to be revalued, but the revaluation has had to be made in a period of moral, spiritual• and material disintegration. So, if we sometimes miss in Mr. Eliot's criticism the broad full-blooded generosity of Dr. Johnson, we should not blame Mr. Eliot for the lack. Dr. Johnson could afford to throw his weight .about because he was, in some sense, supported on all sides by a living and, on the whole, a coherent tradition. Mr. Eliot has had to make the infinitely difficult attempt, requiring such great single-mindedness and sincerity, to explore and to re-define a tradition that is in danger of melting away.
His occupation with literary criticism has led him into theological and sociological enquiries, and the fact that he has pursued these so energetically is a measure both of his own greatness as a critic and of the greatness of the difficulties which have confronted him. In a most interesting essay on " Religion and Literature " (very difficult to find outside this volume) Mr. Eliot writes : " The 'greatness ' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be deter- mined only by literary standards." I find this sentence exciting not because of any profundity of thought but for the plain fact that there are so few critics who are aware of the distinction which Mr. Eliot makes and at the samp time preserve it in their estimations of others.
Of the gradual emergence and development of Mr. Eliot's views, both on purely literary standards and of the importance of religious, educational and sociological tradition, it is rather difficult to gr:t a clear idea from this book. Mr. Hayward had either to arrange the extracts according to subjects (which he has done) or chronologically. He could not have done both. And it may seem from such an essay as that on the Metaphysical Poets (1921) that Mr. Eliot had sprung fully armed into the arena. There is all the same a great development, not so much of standards as of taste and of expression, to be noticed. One doubts whether in 1920 Mr. Eliot would have found the sympathy for Tennyson's In Memoriam which he shows in 1936. And when one comes to his latest essay, " Poetry and Drama" (1950), one will admire not only the precision and depth of the enquiry but also a most gratifying and delightful geniality. At last, and in the most interesting terms, Mr. Eliot speaks about himself, and in describing his own difficulties and, to use his own words, " partial successes " in the writing of poetic drama he will not only interest the general reader but greatly help other " practitioners " in the same field.
It was inevitable that Mr. Hayward should have had to print in an anthology of this kind many short extracts detached from their contexts. I wish that one of these (on Thomas Hardy), which comes from a book which the author has allowed to go out of print, had been omitted. It is difficult to believe that, as it stands, it contains all that Mr. Eliot would have to say about a novelist who had virtues as well as faults. But on the whole the selection is admirable, and Mr. Hayward can scarcely be blamed for not including more pages than the publishers wished to have. The 250 pages of this volume are sufficient to give a clear enough idea of Mr. Eliot's great aims and of his great achievement. No critic of our times has attempted so much and, with .such undeviating honesty and careful perception, succeeded so well. The " hebdomadary reviewer " (to use one of Mr. Eliot's phrases) must feel, above all other feelings, gratitude and admiration when he reads work of such scope and of such
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