even if they are unconcerned with the objects which the writers
had in view. And I would add that though a scientific, or historical, or theological, or philosophic work which is also 'literature', may become superannuated as anything but literature, yet it is
not likely to be 'literature' unless it had its scientific or other
value for its own time. While I acknowledge the legitimacy of this
enjoyment, I am more acutely aware of its abuse. The persons
who enjoy these writings solely because of their literary merit are
essentially parasites ; and we know that parasites, when they
become too numerous, are pests. I could fulminate against the
men of letters who have gone into ecstasies over 'the Bible as
literature', the Bible as 'the noblest monument of English prose'.
Those who talk of the Bible as a 'monument of English prose' are
merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.
I must try to avoid the by-paths of my discourse : it is enough to
suggest that just as the work of Clarendon, or Gibbon, or Buffon
or Bradley would be of inferior literary value if it were insignificant as history, science and philosophy respectively, so the Bible has had a literary influence upon English literature not
because it has been considered as literature, but because it has
been considered as the report of the Word of God. And the fact
that men of letters now discuss it as 'literature' probably indicates
the end of its 'literary' influence.
The second kind of relation of religion to literature is that which
is found in what is called 'religious' or 'devotional' poetry. Now
what is the usual attitude of the lover of poetry - and I mean the
person who is a genuine and first-hand enjoyer and appreciator of
poetry, not the person who follows the admirations of others -
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towards this department of poetry ? I believe, all that may be
implied in his calling it a department. He believes, not always
explicitly, that when you qualify poetry as 'religious' you are
indicating very clear limitations. For the great majority of people
who love poetry, 'religious poetry' is a variety of minor poetry : the
religious poet is not a poet who is treating the whole subject
matter of poetry in a religious spirit, but a poet who is dealing
with a confined part of this subject matter : who is leaving out
what men consider their major passions, and thereby confessing
his ignorance of them. I think that this is the real attitude of most
poetry lovers towards such poets as Vaughan, or Southwell, or
Crashaw, or George Herbert, or Gerard Hopkins.
But what is more, I am ready to admit that up to a point these
critics are right. For there is a kind of poetry, such as most of the
work of the authors I have mentioned, which is the product of a
special religious awareness, which may exist without the general
awareness which we expect of the major poet. In some poets, or in
some of their works, this general awareness may have existed ; but
the preliminary steps which represent it may have been suppressed, and only the end-product presented. Between these, and those in which the religious or devotional genius represents the
special and limited awareness, it may be very difficult to discriminate. I do not pretend to offer Vaughan, or Southwell, or George Herbert, or Hopkins as major poets : 1 I feel sure that the
first three, at least, are poets of this limited awareness. They are
not great religious poets in the sense in which Dante, or Cornielle,
or Racine, even in those of their plays which do not touch upon
Christian themes, are great Christian religious poets. Or even in
the sense in which Villon and Baudelaire, with all their imperfections and delinquencies, are Christian poets. Since the time of Chaucer, Christian poetry (in the sense in which I shall mean
it) has been limited in England almost exclusively to minor
poetry.
I r5peat that when I am considering Religion and Literature, I
speak of these things only to make clear that I am not concerned
primarily with Religious Literature. I am concerned with what
should be the relation between Religion and all Literature.
Therefore the third type of 'religious literature' may be more
quickly passed over. I mean the literary works of men who are
sincerely desirous of forwarding the cause of religion : that which
1 I note that in an address delivered in Swansea some years later
(subsequently published in The Welsh Reriew under the title of 'What
Is Minor Poetry ?') I stated with some emphasis my opinion that
Herbert is a major, not a minor poet. I agree with my later opinion.
r 1949]
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ESS A Y S OF GENER A L I ZATION · 1 9 3 0- 1 9 0 5
may come under the heading of Propaganda. I a m thinking, of
course, of such delightful fiction as Mr. Chesterton's Man Who
Was Thursday, or his Father Brown. No one admires and enjoys
these things more than I do ; I would only remark that when the
same effect is aimed at by zealous persons of less talent than Mr.
Chesterton the effect is negative. But my point is that such writings do not enter into any serious consideration of the relation of Religion and Literature : because they are conscious operations in
a world in which it is assumed that Religion and Literature are not
related. It is a conscious and limited relating. What I want is a
literature which should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately
and defiantly, Christian : because the work of Mr. Chesterton has
its point from appearing in a world which is definitely not
Christian.
I am convinced that "·e fail to realize how completely, and yet
how irrationally, we separate our literary from our religious
judgments. If there could be a complete separation, perhaps it
might not matter : but the separation is not, and never can be,
complete. If we exemplify literature by the novel - for the novel
is the form in whic,h literature affects the greatest number - we
may remark this gradual secularization of literature during at
least the last three hundred years. Bunyan, and. to some extent
Defoe, had moral purposes : the former is beyond suspicion, the
latter may be suspect. But since Defoe the secularization of the
novel has been continuous. There have been three chief phases.
In the first, the novel took the Faith, in its contemporary version,
for granted, and omitted it from its picture of life. Fielding,
Dickens and Thackeray belong to this phase. In the second, it
doubted, worried about, or contested the Faith. To this phase
belong George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. To
the third phase, in which we are living, belong nearly all contemporary novelists except Mr. James Joyce. It is the phase of those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken of as
anything but an anachronism.
Now, do people in general hold a definite opinion, that is to say
religious or anti-religious ; and do they read novels, or poetry for
that matter, with a separate compartment of their minds ? The
common ground between religion and fiction is behaviour. Our
religion imposes our ethics, our judgment a
nd criticism of ourselves, and our behaviour toward our fellow men. The fiction that we read affects our behaviour towards our fellow men, affects our
patterns of ourselves. When we read of human beings behaving in
certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his
benediction to this behaviour by his attitude towards the result of
the behaviour arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards
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behaving in the same way.1 When the contemporary novelist is an
individual thinking for himself in isolation, he may have something important to offer to those who are able to receive it. He who is alone may speak to the individual. But the majority of
novelists are persons drifting in the stream, only a little faster.
They have some sensitiveness, but little intellect.
We are expected to be broadminded about literature, to put
aside prejudice or conviction, and to look at fiction as fiction and
at drama as drama. With what is inaccurately called 'censorship'
in this country - with what is much more difficult to cope with
than an official censorship, because it represents the opinions of
individuals in an irresponsible democracy - I have very little
sympathy ; partly because it so often suppresses the wrong books,
and partly because it is little more effective than Prohibition of
Liquor ; partly because it is one manifestation of the desire that
state control should take the place of decent domestic influence ;
and wholly because it acts only from custom and habit, not from
decided theological and moral principles. I ncidentally, it gives
people a false sense of security in leading them to believe that
books which are not suppressed are harmless. Whether there is
such a thing as a harmless book I am not sure : but there very
likely are books so utterly unreadable as to be incapable of injuring
anybody. But it is certain that a book is not harmless merely
because no one is consciously offended by it. And if we, as
readers, keep our religious and moral convictions in one compartment, and take our reading merely for entertainment, or on a higher plane, for aesthetic pleasure, I would point out that the
author, whatever his conscious intentions in writing, in practice
recognizes no such distinctions. The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not ; and we are affected by it, as human beings,
whether we intend to be or not. I suppose that everything we eat
has some other effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste
and mastication ; it affects us during the process of assimilation
and digestion ; and I believe that exactly the same is true of
anything we read.
The fact that what we read does not concern merely something
called our literarJ' taste, but that it affects directly, though only
amongst many other influences, the whole of what we are, is best
elicited, I think, by a conscientious examination of the history of
our individual literary education. Consider the adolescent
reading of any person with some literary sensibility. Everyone, I
1 Here and later I am indebted to Montgomery Belgion, The 1/umall
Parrot (chapter on The Irresponsible Propagandist}.
1 0 1
ESSAYS OF GENERA L I ZATION
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•
believe, who i s at all se�sible tl:! the seductions o f poetry, can
remember some moment m youth when he or she was completely
carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried
away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this
passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is
keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind
of inundation, of invasion of the undeveloped personality by the
stronger personality of the poet. The same thing may happen at a
later age to persons who have not done much reading. One author
takes complete posses!> ion of us for a time ; then another ; and
finally they begin to affect each other in our mind. We weigh one
against another ; we see that each has qualities absent from others,
and qualities incompatible with the qualities of others : we begin
to be, in fact, critical ; and it is our growing critical power which
protects us from excessive possession by any one literary personality. The good critic - and we should all try to be critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers is the man who, to a keen and abiding sensibility, joins wide and increasingly discriminating reading. Wide reading is not valuable
as a kind of hoarding, an accumulation of knowledge, or what
sometimes is meant by the term 'a well-stocked mind'. It is
valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful
personality after another, we cease to be dominated by any one,
or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar
to ourself.
It is simply not true that works of fiction, prose or verse, that is
to say works depicting the actions, thoughts and words and
passions of imaginary human beings, directly extend our knowledge of life. Direct knowledge of life is knowledge directly in relation to ourselves, it is our knowledge of how people behave in
general, of what they are like in general, in so far as that part of life
in which we ourselves have participated gives us material for
generalization. Knowledge of life obtained through fiction is only
possible by another stage of self-consciousness. That is to say, it
can only be a knowledge of other people's knowledge of life, not
of life itself. So far as we are taken up with the happenings in any
novel in the same way in which we are taken up with what happens under our eyes, we are acquiring at least as much falsehood as truth. But when we are developed enough to say : 'This is the
view of life of a person who was a good observer within his limits,
Dickens, or Thackeray, or George Eliot, or Balzac ; but he looked
at it in a different way from me, because he was a different man ;
he even selected rather different things to look at, or the same
1 02
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things in a different order of importance, because he was a
different man ; so what I am looking at is the world as seen by a
particular mind' - then we are in a position to gain something
from reading fiction. We are learning something about life from
these authors direct, just as we learn something from the reading
of history direct ; but these authors are only really helping us when
we can see, and allow for, their differences from ourselves.
Now what we get, as we gradually grow up and read more and
more, and read a greater diversity of authors, is a variety of views
of life. But what people commonly assume, I suspect, is that we
gain this experience of other men's views of life only by 'improving reading'. This, it is supposed, is a reward we get by applying ourselves to Shakespeare, and Dante, and Goethe, and Emerson,
and Carlyle, and dozens of other respectable writers. The rest of
our reading for amusement is merely killing ti
me. But I incline to
come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that
we read for 'amusement', or 'purely for pleasure' that may have
the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is the
literature which we read with the least effort that can have the
easiest and most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that
the influence of popular novelists, and of popular plays of contemporary life, requires to be scrutinized most closely. And it is chiefly contemporary literature that the majority of people ever
read in this attitude of 'purely for pleasure', of pure passivity.
The relation 'to my subject of what I have been saying should
now be a little more apparent. Though we may read literature
merely for pleasure, of 'entertainment' or of 'aesthetic enjoyment',
this reading never affects simply a sort of special sense : it affects
us as entire human beings ; it affects our moral and religious
existence. And I say that while individual modern writers of
eminence can be improving, contemporary literature as a whole
tends to be degrading. And that even the effect of the better
writers, in an age like ours, may be degrading to some readers ; for
we must remember that what a writer does to people is not
necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people are
capable of having done to them. People exercise an unconscious
selection in being influenced. A writer like D. H. Lawrence may
be in his effect either beneficial or pernicious. I am not sure that
I have not had some pernicious influence myself.
At this point I anticipate a rejoinder from the liberal-minded,
from all those who are convinced that if everybody says what he
thinks, and does what he likes, things will somehow, by some
automatic compensation and adjustment, come right in the end .
'Let everything be tried', they say, 'and if it is a mistake, then we
shall learn by experience.' This argument might have some value,
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i f we were always the same generation upon earth ; or if, as we
know to be not the case, people .ever learned much from the
experience of their elders. These liberals are convinced that only
by what is called unrestrained individualism will truth ever
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 14