Current Literature
Mr. Eliot's new collection of essays (Faber and Faber, 6S.). is intended to take the place of For Lancelot Andrewes, which is now out of print. Of the essays which appeared in the earlier collection three have been omitted : those on Machiavelli and on Crashaw, with which Mr. Eliot is no longei satisfied, and that on Thomas Middleton which he has included in Elizabethan Essays. In their place five other essays, not previously collected, have been added, namely, the essay on " Religion and Literature " which appeared in the volume Faith that Illuminates, edited by the Rev. V. A. Demant, which was published in 1934 ; an essay on the Pensies of Pascal which formed the Introduction to the English translation of that work in Everyman's Library ; and essays on " Catho- licism and International Order, Modern. Modern Education and the Classics " and In Memoriam. The essay on " Catholicism and International Order " is perfunctory and contains some criticisms of the League of Nations, which seems to Mr. Eliot " to illustrate that exaggerated faith in human reason to which people of undisciplined emotions are prone," to which readers of the liberal mind of which Mr. Eliot is so curiously suspicious will be able to make some sharp retorts. From the essay on " Modern Education and the Classics " we learn little more than that Mr. Eliot values Latin and Greek mainly for their associations with Christianity, and the argument of the essay' on " Religion and Literature " follows from the proposition, enunciated in its opening paragraph, that " Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint." The remaining two added essays, on Tennyson and on Pascal, illustrate once more, though further illustration is for most of Mr. Eliot's readers barely necessary, how much more satisfactory as a critic Mr. Eliot is when he is writing literary criticism than when he is eluei‘ dating the ethical or other principles on which he works: The essay on Pascal, in particular, is a brilliant and profound piece of writing, quite one of the best essays which Mr. Eliot has written in recent years, and the essay on In Memoriam is little inferior to it. The book is completed by the tributes to Lancelot Andrewes and John Bramhall, the essay on F. H. Bradley, the assessment 'Of Professor Irving Babbit's Humanism, and the defence of Baudelaire, which have been salvaged from For Lancelot Andrewes.
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