George Watson

The Triumph of T. S. Eliot

HEN a great poet dies, myths crowd in. In Eliot’s case the myths began years before he died, which is natural W enough when you remember that he lived the life of an

established poet for over forty years. One of them concerns his early reputation. It now seems to be rather widely thought that Eliot had to fight hard and long to establish himself as the h t living poet of the English-speaking world; and it is even believed by some that his followers suffered persecution and ignominy for upholding a cause called ‘modernism’. This is a radical, and some- times a wilful, misunderstanding of the facts. My own notion of what happened after 1922, the year of The Wate Land--the year after which it might reasonably be called foolish to deny Eliot’s eminence as a poet-is based solely upon published evidence, since I cannot remember the Twenties. But the published evidence seems to me to contradict some of the assertions now confidently made by those who were there. In the circumstances, I don’t apologise for the disqualification of not having proved these events on my own pulse. It is just because I have not lived through them, in fact, that I have taken the trouble to look the evidence up.

I Eliot was a very successful poet. The acclaim for his early poems

was, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. There seems to have been no period after 1922 when his significance as a poet was either doubted or radically misinterpreted in the literary journals. No doubt the word ‘radically’ needs special emphasis here; no doubt it would be easy to find isolated comments in the early reviews that would now look silly. But a judicial reading would support two conclusions : first, that they are overwhelmingly favourable; and second, that when they do make objections, the objections do not usually point either to a deep misunderstanding or a lack of sympathy. It would be quite wrong to suppose that Eliot had to create out of nothing, or even out of little, the taste by which he was appreciated. That appetite increased with the years, but it was always strongly there. Admirers and detractors were equally agreed about the reality of his reputation. There is even an article of 1930 entitled ‘On the Somewhat Premature Apotheosis of Thomas

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Stearns Eliot’. Richard Aldington, in an essay written even before the appearance of The Waste Land, called Eliot’s verse the poetic equivalent of Joyce: ‘The works of Mr. James Joyce may be taken as typical of the best original prose of this [post-war] school; the poetry of Mr. Eliot occupies a similar position’ (Literary Studies and Reviews, 1924, p. 183). It seems to have been ‘an international success’, too, as John Crowe Ransom later called it in The New Criticism (1941), occurring simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. E. M, Forster, in an article of 1928 later collected in Abinger Harvest, strikes the loudest of all echoing notes-that Eliot was the poet of a whole generation. As for the young, he wrote then, The Waste Land ‘has made a profound impression on them, and given them precisely the food they needed’. For those under thirty he was ‘the most important author of their day, his influence is enormous, they are inside his idiom as the young of 1900 were inside George Meredith’s.’ When Forster wrote that, Eliot had barely reached the age of forty; and there are still earlier testimonies.

In Science and Poetry (1926), Professor I. A. Richards, then a Cambridge lecturer in English in his early thirties, interrupted his discussion of the ‘sense of desolation’ felt by his generation to acknowledge his debt to a poem published only four years before. Eliot ‘seems to me by this poem to have performed two considerable services for this generation’ : by accurately describing the contem- porary state of mind, and by ‘effecting a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs’ (pp. 64-5 n.) Something of an irony now, this second point, but it serves as a reminder how little in theTwenties Eliot was thought of as a dogmatist, and how alien his progress towards belief would come to seem to the most ardent admirers of his first celebrity. The Waste Land could then seem a masterpiece of poetic impressionism by a rebel who refreshingly refused to have a cause; the causes were to come later. In the same year Richards extended his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) with two appendices, in one of which, ‘The Poetry of T. S. Eliot’, he acknowledged the difficulty many found in reading the poems, but pleaded the case that ‘very much of the best poetry is necessarily ambiguous in its immediate effect’. The Waste Land, in his view, had an emotional unity, and in any case every part of it succeeds in a more traditional sense. ‘The poem as a whole may elude us, while every fragment, as a fragment, comes victoriously home’. Richards ends by making the point that Forster and many others were to echo through the Twenties and Thirties: some readers would find in Eliot’s poems ‘a clearer, fuller realisation of their plight, the plight of a whole generation’. Four years later Professor Empson, who had been Richards’s pupil at Cambridge, was to use a passage from The Waste Land as an example in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).

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Some views were balanced. In The Calendar of Modern Letters of May 1925 Edwin Muir had acclaimed Eliot’s Homage to Dryden for its doctrine of a 17th-century ‘dissociation of sensibility’, an analysis of English poetry already ‘accepted as a truism by in- telligent people today’. But he disagreed with Eliot’s abrupt dis- missal of Milton and of the Romantics; and in his Transition (1928) he put his careful reservations about the poems, while still calling Eliot ‘the most complete writer of our time’. Meanwhile, in a different context, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, in their Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), had already compared The Waste Land favourably with Tennyson’s In Memoriam and even with the Aeneid, on the grounds that Eliot does not confine himself to a single metre, but by metrical changes exploits ‘delicate transi- tions from one atmosphere to another’, so that the poem succeeds ‘as a unified whole’ (pp. 50-1). Other academics besides Richards were now crowding into the field. In a lecture written before For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) and collected soon after for the Clarendon Press in The Lamp and the Lute (1929), Professor Bonamy Dobrke unreservedly called Eliot’s criticism ‘the most important in English since Coleridge wrote his Biographia Literaria’; and as for the poetry, ‘I would be prepared to lay odds that the year 1922, which saw The Waste Land, will prove to be as important a year in the history of the development of English poetry as the year 1798 . . .’ (pp. 129-30). By 1932 at least six works had appeared entirely devoted to Eliot, published from points as scattered as London, Paris, Seattle, Finland and Peking. In one of them Mr. Hugh Ross Williamson confirmed Dobrte’s cataclysmic view of what had happened; in The Poetry of 7’. S. Eliot (1932) he calls Eliot ‘the most important influence in English poetry at the present time,’ and The Waste Land comparable with Lyrical Ballads ‘both as a turning-point and as a force’ (p. 10). Among writers in their twenties, he goes on, Eliot by 1932 was ‘an established and even slightly out-moded institution . . . By them his importance has long been taken for granted,’ though he may still be suspected by older readers.

What is more, this immense celebrity was not confined to isolated admirers in literary cliques or in the little reviews, however much the more intense admirers were given, from the start, to striking em- battled attitudes. The journals of the literary Establishment, if there is or was such a thing, acclaimed Eliot too. The Times Literary Supplement, it is true, disliked Prufrock (1917) as ‘untouched by any genuine rush of feeling’ and ‘purely analytical’ (21st June 1917); but it greeted The Waste Land with real warmth, recognized Eliot’s debt to Laforgue, and called him ‘a poet capable of a style more refined than that of any of his generation’, though it found the parodies tasteless and the structure fragmentary (20th September 1923). It welcomed the early collections of essays, too-not

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surprisingly, since Eliot had been contributing to TLS since 1919, when he was thirty-one, and had first published some of the essays as reviews there. Years later he wrote a generous tribute to Bruce Richmond, the first editor, who had taught him ‘to moderate my dislikes and crotchets, to write in a temperate and impartial way’ (TLS, 13th January 1961), adding that he had tried to apply the same standards when in 1922 he began to edit The Criterion. By that date Eliot was a mere thirty-four. He seems to have been one who never had to wait.

I1 The case of the academics after Richards and Empson is more

contentious than that of the journalists. Oxford, of course, was a special case, since it protected itself at that time by an English syllabus which stopped at 1830, and Professor Helen Gardner’s study The Art of T. S. Eliot appeared as late as 1949. It would be interesting to know what happened elsewhere; but here I must confine myself to the uniquely well documented case of Cambridge. There, it is quite clear, Eliot’s academic influence was immediate and massive. I have already cited the case of Richards-a truly extraordinary case, since it would be difficult to parallel in literary history the example of a poem being quoted as a model in two academic treatises within four years of its publication. Empson followed almost at once. From then on the evidence is almost tediously one-sided. Indeed, what impresses in the mass of Eliot allusions in Cambridge in the Twenties and after is not just that so many assert his significance and influence, but that so many speak of it all as a matter of common knowledge. ‘It is superfluous’, wrote Mr. J. Bronowski on For Lancelot Andrewes in the Cambridge Review in November 1928, ‘to say that all these essays, with the exception perhaps of those on Middleton and Baudelaire, are important,’ and he goes on to urge Eliot to publish the Clark Lectures, ‘The School of Donne’, which he had delivered in Cam- bridge several years before-advice, by the way, that Eliot to the end of his life failed to take. But it brings the literary situation in Cambridge in the Twenties into sharper focus : difficult to see anyone invited by the Master and Fellows of Trinity College to deliver the Clark Lectures before the age of forty as one whom the gods or the people did not love. But then nobody in the Twenties seems to have made that mistake. Dr. F. R. Leavis, reviewing Cambridge Poetry 1929 in the Cambridge Review, mentions laconically that ‘Mr. Eliot’s influence, . . . of course, predominates’ (1st March 1929). It wouldn’t, at that time, have occurred to anyone to doubt it. Dr. Muriel Bradbrook, in a collection of 1947 edited by Professor Rajan, recalling years later the sort of celebrity that Eliot then enjoyed, suavely assured Eliot that ‘the incense no longer fumes upon the local altars with quite its old intensity’. Some of his

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admirers, as the years passed, were even led to demur at the extra- vagance of his reputation, or to complain that it was often upheld for the wrong reasons, by which they usually meant Anglicanism. In the Thirties, according to Mrs. Leavis, Eliot had ‘become res- pectable for extra-literary reasons’. ‘Mr. Eliot has accordingly been incorporated into the canon of accepted literature’. That was in Scrutiny in 1943. But Miss Bradbrook, in the same article of 1947, makes it clear that there was nothing belated about Eliot’s sainthood, in Cambridge at least. The Sacred Wood (1920) and Homage to John Dryden (1924)’ the first collections of critical essays, were ‘canonized in the Cambridge of the time’, for which Eliot ‘quite dazzlingly set the fashion’, If this makes Eliot’s SUCC~SS sound a little too much like Byron’s, it is only because the analogy with Byron is insufficient. Byron did not dominate the poetic climate of his age, as Eliot did; nor was he quoted by academics in books and lectures within a few years of publication, for what that is worth. And Eliot’s fame in the Thirties was in no sense confined to academics who were professionally concerned with literature. R. G. Collingwood of Oxford, in no way a literary avant-gardiste, used him in The Principles of Art (1938) as the supreme contemporary example of one who performs the true function of poetry: ‘In literature, those who chiefly matter have made the choice, and made it rightly. The credit for this belongs in the main to one great poet, who has set the example by taking as his theme in a long series of poems a subject that interests every one, the decay of our civilization’. And when, in his last pages, Collingwood summarizes The Waste Land, it is as a prime example of his notion of a great poet’s duty: ‘to speak out, to make a clean breast’, and not of his own secrets only, but ‘as spokesman of his community’.

The real issue in the literary debate over Eliot’s status since the Thirties, I suspect, has lain here. It has never in its essence been a debate between those who admired Eliot and those who did not: it has rather been between those who saw that Eliot spoke for a community and perhaps for mankind, and those who wanted to keep him for themselves. It is the cry of ‘I saw him first’ that sounds through this later controversy. Amusing, by the way, to observe how early this spirit of possessiveness obscured the issue. In the Spectator of 1932 there is a revealing, even slightly unseemly, altercation between Miss Rebecca West and Mr. I. M. Parsons. The latter had greeted Eliot’s Selected Essays of 1932 in a review contlrming his claim ‘to be regarded as the most important con- temporary critic of English letters’ (8th October 1932). ‘Eliot’s prose has a quality, a texture, which stamps it at once as the product of an adult and trained sensibility’, and he goes on to attack a review by Miss West which had just appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Miss West, in an acid letter in the next issue of the Spectator,

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replies that she had always known that ‘if I dared question the claims of Mr. T. S. Eliot to supremacy I should receive a great deal of hysterical abuse’, and moves heavily into the attack :

Mr. Parsons cannot think. But he is sure he can think because he is a follower of Mr. Eliot; and he is sure other people cannot think because they are not followers of Mr. Eliot. And he knows all the proper patter to use to impress the casual reader with the sense that he is on the right side-‘‘scholarship”, “perception”, “exact and scrupulous use of language”, “adult and trained sensibility” . . .

She even speaks of ‘this intellectual tarantism among the young’. Evidently the ‘proper patter’ of Scrutiny was already in something like full working order as early as 1932, the year in which that quarterly was launched. But according to Miss West it was also in play in the United States, from which she had just returned in indignation :

Any dull young man [in the U.S.] who could put up a show of scholar- ship, could express a hunger for authority and tradition, could claim to be under the leadership of Professors Babbitt and More or Mr. Eliot, and be exalted to a position (academic or other) far above that attainable by any writer who omitted this rite and set to honest work. The trouble now, evidently, is that anyone can get in. The proper

patter of discipleship grows progressively sourer as the Thirties revealed the range of Eliot’s reputation, a reputation that could not be limited, by that date, to any place or generation or clique. The demand that the world should admire Eliot more than it did was not made by Scrutiny in the Thirties-how could it have been? The cry was rather that his current notoriety was based on the wrong reasons, and that in any case it did not start soon enough. This last is a claim which, as I have shown, the published evidence of the Twenties does not support. It is all the more instructive to see in what terms it is made. In December 1947, reviewing in Scrutiny the Rajan collection from which I have already quoted, Dr. Leavis wrote :

When in 1929 an innocent young editor printed an article of mine on Mr. Eliot’s criticism in 7he Cambridge Review (a reply to a contemptuous dismissal of him by a Cambridge ‘English’ don in Mr. Desmond M[a]cCarthy’s Life and Letters) he very soon had cause to realize that he had committed a scandalous impropriety, and I myself was left in no doubt as to the unforgivableness of my offence. The passage is repeated in the 1950 ‘Retrospect’ to New Bearings

(p. 219)’ misspelling and all. It offers a very implausible account of the state of literary opinion in 1929, and it is not surprising if it turns out to be inaccurate. In fact Dr. Leavis’s article in the Cam- bridge Review of 8th February 1929, an article entitled ‘T. s. Eliot- A Reply to the Condescending’, was in answer to an anonymous review of For Lancelot Andrewes in the New Statesman of 29th December 1928. Short shrift for Desmond MacCarthy, who not

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only has his name misspelt but finds himself saddled with an article he had nothing to do with. As a matter of fact Life and Letters, from its inception in 1928, seems to have been as pro-Eliot as anyone: as early as March 1929 it published a defence of Eliot by Peter Quennell in reply to Edwin Muir’s Transition, calling him the one contemporary English poet who is ‘consistently and unremitting- ly serious’; and three months later it published Mr. E. M. Forster’s eulogy. As for the author of the anonymous review in the New Statesman being a Cambridge English don, this is a matter that only personal knowledge could con-, and I am working here on published evidence. But, in any case, the Statesman review is not a contemptuous dismissal, or a dismissal of any kind. It makes the usual reference to ‘Mr. Eliot’s great reputation among the young’ and finds much of the book ‘admirable’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘capable’, though it catches Eliot out neatly on a failure to interpret Shelley’s

Keen as are the arrows Of that silver Sphere . . .

in ‘To a Skylark’, about which Eliot had complained: ‘I should be grateful for any explanation of this stanza; until now I am still ignorant to what Sphere Shelley refers, or why it should have silver arrows’. The reviewer naturally replies that the Sphere is the Moon, the Moon Diana, and Diana a huntress. If Eliot’s admirers in the Twenties were enraged by this sort of thing they must have been very touchy. Even the great are fallible, But the Leavis reply of 1929, unlike his 1947 article, makes no assertions about the neglect of Eliot, or about any dangers inherent in being found to admire him. On the contrary, it speaks in the usual vein about ‘the vogue that Mr. Eliot enjoys, and suffers from’.

By 1947, however, Eliot has been transformed in the memory into a kind of Christ-figure guarded by a tiny group of disciples against barbarian soldiery. It was ‘unforgivable’, around 1930, to have admired him; so much so, according to the same review, that New Bearings (1932) was thought ‘so much the worse than imprudent’ that academics ‘declined (or so the gloating whisper ran) to have anything to do with it, and The Cambridge Review could find no reviewer for it in Cambridge’, the offence being found ‘rank, disas- trous and unpardonable’. This makes the Cambridge of the early Thirties sound a very exciting place to live in; the bit about the gloating whisper is particularly good. Nobody would guess from reading this that New Bearings was late in the field of academic eulogies of Eliot. Apart from Richards’s two books of six years before, and Empson’s Seven Types, there had been a mass of com- mendatory essays and reviews, beginning with the welcome accorded to The Sacred Wood in the Times Literary Supplement of 2nd December 1920, and mounting into a barrage in the late Twenties, with at least six works entirely devoted to Eliot. And

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there had been Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle in 1931, a study of European symbolism in which Eliot was awarded an entire chapter as one who was ‘for his generation a leader’, one who ‘has probably affected literary opinion, during the period since the War, more profoundly than any other critic writing English’. It is natural, in these circumstances, that Leavis’s chapter on Eliot in New Bearings should not strike, and should not at the time have been thought to strike, any sort of radical note. It acknowledges the acclaim Eliot had already received, commends Richards’s appendix to the Principles of 1926, and maintains a careful balance between the continuing need to ‘say elementary things’ about Eliot’s poems, and ‘the fear of dwelling on the obvious to the extent of insulting the reader’. I find it inconceivable that so conservative a work should have been felt to be alarming as late as 1932. It is not now possible to discover why the Cambridge Review omitted to review it; but, after all, journals omit to review books all the time, and if for some inconceivable reason it found the book outrageous it only had to say so. Other and more influential journals seem to have taken the book in their stride, calmly enough, as a competent statement of a view of poetry which, by 1932, was familiar and widely accepted, a view they associated with the names of Eliot, Richards and Empson. The New Statesman, for example, which found the chapter on Eliot ‘an admirable piece of exposition and appreciation’ in which ‘the texture of The Waste Land is examined with sensitiveness and intelligence’, noted that ‘Mr. Leavis owes his method to Mr. 1. A. Richards and Mr. William Empson’, and that his remarks on Hardy, Yeats and de la Mare were ‘an intelligent expansion of part of Mr. I. A. Richards’s Science and Poetry’ (27th February 1932). No sign here of anything in the book to send anyone’s temperature up; all rather old hat, in fact. The Spectator review, which was by Richard Church, on the whole confirms this. It concedes that the book ‘will begin by infuriating’ its readers, but only because it starts by appearing to throw all the Victorians out of the window except Hopkins. The author is a Richards disciple, after all ; over-enthusiastic about ‘difficulty’ perhaps, as they all are, but none the less the author of an enjoyable book. Neither review has much inherent distinction, and I quote them here only as being symptomatic. But they are symptoms of Eliot’s widespread acceptance in the journals by the beginning of the Thirties, if not earlier.

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At this point I seem to see the figures of two sexagenarians rise before me. One of them, who is inclined to be portly, is asking rather testily what all the fuss is about. Everyone who was there in the Twenties and Thirties has always known that Eliot’s recognition

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as a poet was instantaneous. In answer I wave him to the second sexagenarian, who is altogether leaner, tenser and more angular, his eyes still gleaming with the fires of battles long ago. He has been protesting for some time that, unless you were there, you could not hope to know what it was like. He then tells several stories in rising indignation: of sneers in daily newspapers, of reactionary rumblings in Senior Common Rooms. It is not always easy, at this point in the argument, to be as civil as one would like. How can one explain to some one ‘who was there’, without unpardonable condescension, that this is just what one has been saying all along? Of course Eliot, as the hero of one generation, was felt to be the enemy of another. Medical science has given us longevity, and longevity has given us ever bitterer intellectual quarrels-a process that may still have a long way to go, by the way, so we had better start cultivating longer tempers as well as longer lives. But you cannot expect to have it every way at once. If Eliot successfully captured the mind of a generation by appealing to them as a generation, it makes no sense to complain that he failed to capture the minds of their parents too. It is like asking that a radical leader should be applauded even in the Carlton Club. The Eliot party, if they may be so called-and they certainly evinced remarkable cohesion in policy and tactics-fought the war as a war of genera- tions, won it in no time at all, and in the act of doing so made enemies as well as friends. Not all the enemies were stupid, either: I have quoted one or two cases where the radicals were caught out. Or old men, either : there is Charles Williams’s uncomprehending chapter in Poetry at Present (1930), and there is the special case of Mr. Yvor Winters and his one-man stand in the Thirties against the rising tide of Modernism. But a movement of this kind that failed to alienate would have failed absolutely. On the longer view, it is now possible to see in what sense Eliot’s poetry was continuous from that of the Victorians-and not just from Hopkins’s; that Eliot and his early followers were Romantics too, in a way they could not or would not understand. But the seemingly fragmentary form in which they offered their poems, and their use of metre and of industrial imagery, were surely meant to outrage elderly opinion, and I think they would have been disappointed if it had turned out otherwise. There was always something of the leg-puller in Eliot’s genius in the Twenties, after all, both as poet and critic; you were ‘in’ (‘intelligent’ was the common cant) if you saw the joke. But somebody else had to be out, or there was no point in it. Naturally, if my soundings had not been confined to the intellectual journals, or if I had been favoured with tape-recordings of elderly writers and academics between the wars, a different answer would have emerged. But an answer to a different question. It would not affect the conclusions I have arrived at here.

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That conclusion is simple. It is that Eliot’s success was not only profoundly merited, but was total and instantaneous within the terms it had set itself: the capture of young intellectuals of creative energy in England and the United States in the 1920’s. That capture involved, in a very few years, the capture of the seats of literary power, of the London literary journals and of influential younger teachers of literature in the universities. If this seems a complacent conclusion, it is not a sufficient reason for denying the evidence. There is no point in re-writing history in order to depress ourselves. This was a memorable moment in the history of the English critical intelligence, and one of which it has no cause to be ashamed. It is good to record an event so rapid, so painless, on the whole so beneficent.

The Art of Biography

PAUL MURRAY KENDALL Professor Kendall, distinguished biographer of kings and king-makers reveals the hazards and hardships of the art of writing biography and its relationship with other literary arts. ‘This is not a manual for would-be biographers, nor (though it contains chapters on great biographers of the past) is it a history of biography. It is, rather, a biography of biography, a live of lives; and there’s not a dead or weary word anywhere in it.’ The Scotsman ‘stimulating, wise and witty book. . .’ Birminghain Post 21s.

ALLEN & UNWIN