Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  emerge. Ideas, views of life, they think, issue distinct from independent heads, and in consequence of their knocking violently against each other, the fittest survive, and truth rises triumphant.

  Anyone who dissents from this view must be either a mediaevalist, wishful only to set back the clock, or else a fascist, and probably both.

  If the mass of contemporary authors were really individualists,

  every one of them inspired Blakes, each with his separate vision,

  and if the mass of the contemporary public were really a mass of

  individuals there might be something to be said for this attitude.

  But this is not, and never has been, and never will be. It is not

  only that the reading individual today (or at any day) is not

  enough an individual to be able to absorb all the 'views of life' of

  all the authors pressed upon us by the publishers' advertisements

  and the reviewers, and to be able to arrive at wisdom by considering one against another. It is that the contemporary authors are not individuals enough either. It is not that the world of

  separate individuals of the liberal democrat is undesirable ; it is

  simply that this world does not exist. For the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers

  and contradictory personalities ; he is exposing himself to a mass

  movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have

  something individually to offer, but are really all working together

  in the same direction. And there never was a time, I believe, when

  the reading public was so large, or so helplessly exposed to the

  influences of its own time. There never was a time, I believe,

  when those who read at all, read so many more books by living

  authors than books by dead authors ; there never was a time so

  completely parochial, so shut off from the past. There may be too

  many publishers ; there are certainly too many books published ;

  and the journals ever incite the reader to 'keep up' with what is

  being published. Individualistic democracy has come to high

  tide : and it is more difficult today to be an individual than it ever

  was before.

  Within itself, modern literature has perfectly valid distinctions

  of good and bad, better and worse : and I do not wish to suggest

  that I confound Mr. Bernard Shaw with Mr. Noel Coward, Mrs.

  Woolf with Miss Mannin. On the other hand, I should like it to

  be clear that I am not defending a 'high'-brow against a 'low'brow literature. What I do wish to affirm is that the whole of 104

  R EL I G I ON AND L I TERATURE

  modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that it

  is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of,

  the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life : of something which I assume to be our primary concern.

  I do not want to give the impression that I have delivered a

  mere fretful jeremiad against contemporary literature. Assuming

  a common attitude between my readers, or some of my readers,

  and myself, the question is not so much, what is to be done about

  it ? as, how should we behave towards it ?

  I have suggested that the liberal attitude towards literature will

  not work. Even if the writers who make their attempt to impose

  their 'view of life' upon us were really distinct individuals, even if

  we as readers were distinct individuals, what would be the result ?

  It would be, surely, that each reader would be impressed, in his

  reading, merely by what he was previously prepared to be impressed by ; he would follow the 'line of least resistance', and there would be no assurance that he would be made a better man.

  For literary judgment we need to be acutely aware of two things

  at once : of 'what we like', and of 'what we ought to like'. Few

  people are honest enough to know either. The first means knowing what we really feel : very few know that. The second involves understandin·g our shortcomings ; for we do not really know what

  we ought to like unless we also know why we ought to like it,

  which involves knowing why we don't yet like it. It is not enough

  to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are ;

  and we do not understand what w e are, unless w e know what we

  ought to be. The two forms of self-consciousness, knowing what

  we are and what we ought to be, must go together.

  It is our business, as readers of literature, to know what we like.

  It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to

  know what we ought to like. It is our business as honest men not

  to assume that whatever we like is what we ought to like ; and it is

  our business as honest Christians not to assume that we do like

  what we ought to like. And the last thing I would wish for would

  be the existence of two literatures, one for Christian consumption

  and the other for the pagan world. What I believe to be incumbent

  upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain

  standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by

  the rest of the world ; and that by these criteria and standards

  everything that we read must be tested. We must remember that

  the greater part of our current reading matter is written for us by

  people who have no real belief in a supernatural order, though

  some of it may be written by people with individual notions of a

  supernatural order which are not ours. And the greater part of

  our reading matter is coming to be written by people who not only

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  ESSAYS O F GENERA!-J ZATION

  1 9 3 0- 1 9 6 5

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  have no such belief, but are even ignorant o f the fact that there are

  still people in the world so 'backward' or so 'eccentric' as to

  continue to believe. So long as we are conscious of the gulf fixed

  between ourselves and the greater part of contemporary literature,

  we are more or less protected from being harmed by it, and are in a

  position to extract from it what good it has to offer us.

  There are a very large number of people in the world today who

  believe that all ills are fundamentally economic. Some believe that

  various specific economic changes alone would be enough to set

  the world right ; others demand more or less drastic changes in the

  social as well, changes chiefly of two opposed types. These

  changes demanded, and in some places carried out, are alike in

  one respect, that they hold the assumptions of what I call

  Secularism : they concern themselves only with changes of a

  temporal, material, and external nature ; they concern themselves

  with morals only of a collective nature. In an exposition of one

  such new faith I read the following words :

  'In our morality the one single test of any moral question is

  whether it impedes or destroys in any way the power of the

  individual to serve the State. [The individual] must answer the

  questions : "Does this action injure the nation ? Does it injure

  other members of the nation ? Does it injure my ability to serve

  the nation ?" And if the answer is clear on all those questions, the

  individual has absolute liberty to do as he will.'

  Now I do not deny that this is a kind of
morality, and that it is

  capable of great good within limits ; but I think that we should all

  repudiate a morality which had no higher ideal to set before us

  than that. It represents, of course, one of the violent reactions we

  are witnessing, against the view that the community is solely for

  the benefit of the individual ; but it is equally a gospel of this

  world, and of this world alone. My complaint against modern

  literature is of the same kind. It is not that modern literature is in

  the ordinary sense 'immoral' or even 'amoral' ; and in any case to

  prefer that charge would not be enough. It is simply that it

  repudiates, or is wholly ignorant of, our most fundamental and

  important beliefs ; and that in consequence its tendency is to

  encourage its readers to get what they can out of life while it lasts,

  to miss no 'experience' that presents itself, and to sacrifice themselves, if they make any sacrifice at all, only for the sake of tangible benefits to others in this world either now or in the future. We

  shall certainly continue to read the best of its kind, of what our

  time provides ; but we must tirelessly criticize it according to our

  own principles, and not merely according to the principles

  admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the

  public press.

  IQ6

  from THE MUS I C OF POETRY1

  The poet, when he talks or writes about poetry, has peculiar

  qualifications and peculiar limitations : if we allow for the latter

  we can better appreciate the former - a caution which I recommend to poets themselves as well as to the readers of what they say about poetry. I can never re-read any of my own prose writings

  without acute embarrassment : I shirk the task, and consequently

  may not take account of all the assertions to which I have at one

  time or another committed myself; I may often repeat what I have

  said before, and I may often contradict myself. But I believe that

  the critical writings of poets, of which in the past there have been

  some very distinguished examples, owe a great deal of their

  interest to the fact that the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as

  his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of

  poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to

  write. Especially when he is young, and actively engaged in

  battling for the kind of poetry which he practises, he sees the

  poetry of the past in relation to his own : and his gratitude to those

  dead poets from whom he has learned, as well as his indifference

  to those whose aims have been alien to his own, may be exaggerated. He is not so much a judge as an advocate. His knowledge even is likely to be partial : for his studies will have led him to

  concentrate on certain authors to the neglect of others. When he

  theorizes about poetic creation, he is likely to be generalizing one

  type of experience ; when he ventures into aesthetics, he is likely

  to be less, rather than more competent than the philosopher ; and

  he may do best merely to report, for the information of the

  philosopher, the data of his own introspection. What he writes

  about poetry, in short, must be assessed in relation to the poetry

  he writes. We must return to the scholar for ascertainment of

  facts, and to the more detached critic for impartial judgment. The

  critic, certainly, should be something of a scholar, and the scholar

  something of a critic. Ker, whose attention was devoted mainly to

  1 The third W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture, delivered at Glasgow

  University in 1942, and published by Glasgow University Press in the

  same year.

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  ESSAYS OF GENERAL! ZATION

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  the literature o f the past, and to problems of historical relationship, must be put in the category of scholars ; but he had in a high degree the sense of value, the good taste, the understanding of

  critical canons and the ability to apply them, without which the

  scholar's contribution can be only indirect.

  There is another, more particular respect in which the scholar's

  and the practitioner's acquaintance with versification differ. Here,

  perhaps, I should be prudent to speak only of myself. I have never

  been able to retain the names of feet and metres, or to pay the

  proper respect to the accepted rules of scansion. At school, I enjoyed very much reciting Homer or Virgil - in my own fashion.

  Perhaps I had some instinctive suspicion that nobody really knew

  how Greek ought to be pronounced, or what interweaving of

  Greek and native rhythms the Roman ear might appreciate in

  Virgil ; perhaps I had only an instinct of protective laziness. But

  certainly, when it came to applying rules of scansion to English

  verse, with its very different stresses and variable syllabic values, I

  wanted to know why one line was good and another bad ; and this,

  scansion could not tell me. The only way to learn to manipulate

  any kind of English verse seemed to be by assimilation and imitation, by becoming so engrossed in the work of a particular poet that one could produce a recognizable derivative. This is not to

  say that I consider the analytical study of metric, of the abstract

  forms which sound so extraordinarily different when handled by

  different poets, to be an utter waste of time. It is only that a study

  of anatomy will not teach you how to make a hen lay eggs. I do not

  recommend any other way of beginning the study of Greek and

  Latin verse than with the aid of those rules of scansion which

  were established by grammarians after most of the poetry had

  been written ; but if we could revive those languages sufficiently to

  be able to speak and hear them as the authors did, we could regard

  the rules with indifference. We have to learn a dead language by

  an artificial method, and we have to approach its versification by

  an artificial method, and our methods of teaching have to be

  applied to pupils most of whom have only a moderate gift for

  language. Even in approaching the poetry of our own language,

  we may find the classification of metres, of lines with different

  numbers of syllables and stresses in different places, useful at a

  preliminary stage, as a simplified map of a complicated territory :

  but it is only the study, not of poetry but of poems, that can train

  our ear. It is not from rules, or by cold-blooded imitation of style,

  that we learn to write : we learn by imitation indeed, but by a

  deeper imitation than is achieved by analysis of style. When we

  imitated Shelley, it was not so much from a desire to write as he

  did, as from an invasion of the adolescent self by Shelley, which

  10�

  THE MUS I C O F POETRY

  made Shelley's way, for the time, the only way m which to

  write.

  The practice of English versification has, no doubt, been

  affected by awareness of the rules of prosody : it is a matter for the

  historical scholar to determine the influence of Latin upon the

  innovators Wyatt and Surrey. The great grammarian Otto

  Jespersen has maintained that the structure of English grammar

  has been misunderstood in our attempts to make it conform to the

&
nbsp; categories of Latin - as in the supposed 'subjunctive'. In the

  history of versification, the question whether poets have misunderstood the rhythms of the language in imitating foreign models does not arise : we must accept the practices of great poets

  of the past, because they are practices upon which our ear has

  been trained and must be trained. I believe that a number of

  foreign influences have gone to enrich the range and variety of

  English vefse. Some classical scholars hold the view - this is a

  matter beyond my competence - that the native measure of Latin

  poetry was accentual rather than syllabic, that it was overlaid by

  the influence of a very different language - Greek - and that it

  reverted in something approximating to its early form, in poems

  such as the Pervigilium Veneris and the early Christian hymns. If

  so, I cannot help suspecting that to the cultivated audience of the

  age of Virgil, part of the pleasure in the poetry arose from the

  presence in it of two metrical schemes in a kind of counterpoint :

  even though "the audience may not necessarily have been able to

  analyse the experience. Similarly, it may be possible that the

  beauty of some English poetry is due to the presence of more than

  one metrical structure in it. Deliberate attempts to devise English

  metres on Latin models are usually very frigid. Among the most

  successful are a few exercises by Campion, in his brief but too

  little read treatise on metrics ; among the most eminent failures, in

  my opinion, are the experiments of Robert Bridges - I would give

  all his ingenious inventions for his earlier and more traditional

  lyrics. But when a poet has so thoroughly absorbed Latin poetry

  that its movement informs his verse without deliberate artifice -

  as with Milton and in some of Tennyson's poems - the result can

  be among the great triumphs of English versification.

  What I think we have, in English poetry, is a kind of amalgam

  of systems of divers sources (though I do not like to use the word

  'system', for it has a suggestion of conscious invention rather than

  growth) : an amalgam like the amalgam of races, and indeed partly

  due to racial origins. The rhythms of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic,

  Norman French, of Middle English and Scots, have all made their