Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot
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in itself any more a matter for regret than it is for gratulation. It
did happen that the history of Rome was such, the character of the
Latin language was such, that at a certain moment a uniquely
classical poet was possible : though we must remember that it
needed that particular poet, and a lifetime oflabour on the part of
that poet, to make the classic out of his material. And, of course,
Virgil couldn't know that that was what he was doing. He was, if
any poet ever was, acutely aware of what he was trying to do ; the
one thing he couldn't aim at, or know that he was doing, was to
compose a classic : for it is only by hindsight, and in historical
perspective, that a classic can be known as such.
If there is one word on which we can fix, which will suggest the
maximum of what I mean by the term 'a classic', it is the word
maturity. I shall distinguish between the universal classic, like
Virgil, and the classic which is only such in relation to the other
literature in its own language, or according to the view of life of a
particular period. A classic can only occur when a civilization is
mature ; when a language and a literature are mature ; and it must
be the work of a mature mind. It is the importance of that civilization and of that language, as well as the comprehensiveness of the mind of the individual poet, which gives the universality. To
define maturity without assuming that the hearer already knows
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what it means, is almost impossible : let us say then, that if we are
properly mature, as well as educated persons, we can recognize
maturity in a civilization and in a literature, as we do in the other
human beings whom we encounter. To make the meaning of
maturity really apprehensible - indeed, even to make it acceptable - to the immature, is perhaps impossible. But if we are mature we either recognize maturity immediately, or come to
know it on more intimate acquaintance. No reader of Shakespeare,
for instance, can fail to recognize, increasingly as he himself grows
up, the gradual ripening of Shakespeare's mind : even a less
developed reader can perceive the rapid development of Elizabethan literature and drama as a whole, from early Tudor crudity to the plays of Shakespeare, and perceive a decline in the work of
Shakespeare's successors. We can also observe, upon a little conversance, that the plays of Christopher Marlowe exhibit a greater maturity of mind and of style, than the plays which Shakespeare
wrote at the same age : it is interesting to speculate whether, if
Marlowe had lived as long as Shakespeare, his development
would have continued at the same pace. I doubt it : for we observe
some minds maturing earlier than others, and we observe that
those which mature very early do not always develop very far. I
raise this point as a reminder, first that the value of maturity
depends upon the value of that which matures, and second, that
we should know when we are concerned with the maturity of
individual writers, and when with the relative maturity of literary
periods. A writer who individually has a more mature mind, may
belong to a less mature period than another, so that in that respect
his work will be less mature. The maturity of a literature is the
reflection of that of the society in which it is produced : an
individual author - notably Shakespeare and Virgil - can do much
to develop his language : but he cannot bring that language to
maturity unless the work of his predecessors has prepared it for
his final touch. A mature literature, therefore, has a history behind
it : a history, that is not merely a chronicle, an accumulation of
manuscripts and writings of this kind and that, but an ordered
though unconscious progress of a language to realize its own
potentialities within its own limitations.
It is to be observed, that a society, and a literature, like an
individual human being, do not necessarily mature equally and
concurrently in every respect. The precocious child is often, in
some obvious ways, childish for his age in comparison with
ordinary children. Is there any one period of English literature to
which we can point as being fully mature, comprehensively and in
equilibrium ? I do not think so : and, as I shall repeat later, I hope
it is not so. We cannot say that any individual poet in English has
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i n the course of his life become a more mature man than Shakespeare : we cannot even say that apy poet has done so much, to make the English language capable of expressing the most subtle
thought or the most refined shades of feeling. Yet we cannot but
feel that a play like Congreve's Way of the World is in some way
more mature than any play of Shakespeare's : but only in this
respect, that it reflects a more mature society - that is, it reflects
a greater maturity of manners. The society for which Congreve
wrote was, from our point of view, coarse and brutal enough : yet
it is nearer to ours than the society of the Tudors : perhaps for
that reason we judge it the more severely. Nevertheless, it was a
society more polished and less provincial : its mind was shallower,
its sensibility more restricted ; it has lost some promise of maturity
but realized another. So to maturity of mind we must add maturity
of manners.
The progress towards maturity of language is, I think, more
easily recognized and more readily acknowledged in the development of prose, than in that of poetry. In considering prose we are less distracted by individual differences in greatness, and more
inclined to demand approximation towards a common standard, a
common vocabulary and a common sentence structure : it is often,
in fact, the prose which departs the farthest from these common
standards, which is individual to the extreme, that we are apt to
denominate 'poetic prose'. At a time when England had already
accomplished miracles in poetry, her prose was relatively immature, developed sufficiently for certain purposes but not for others : at that same time, when the French language had given
little promise of poetry as great as that in English, French prose
was much more mature than English prose. You have only to
compare any Tudor writer with Montaigne - and Montaigne himself, as a stylist, is only a precursor, his style not ripe enough to fulfil the French requirements for the classic. Our prose was
ready for some tasks before it could cope with others : a Malory
could comt: long before a Hooker, a Hooker before a Hobbes, and
a Hobbes before an Addison. Whatever difficulties we have in
applying this standard to poetry, it is possible to see that the
development of a classic prose is the development towards a
common style. By this 1 do not mean that the best writers are
indistinguishable from each other. The essential and characteristic
differences remain : it is not that the differences are less, but that
they are more subtle and refined. To a sensitive palate the
difference between the prose of Addison and that of Swift will be
as marked as the difference between two vintage wines to a
connoisseur. What we find, in a period of classic prose, is not a mere common convention of writing, like the common style of newsuS
WHAT I S A CLASS I C ?
paper leader writers, but a community of taste. The age which
precedes a classic age, may exhibit both eccentricity and monotony : monotony because the resources of the language have not yet been explored, and eccentricity because there is yet no
generally accepted standard - if, indeed, that can be called
eccentric where there is no centre. Its writing may be at the same
time pedantic and licentious. The age following a classic age, may
also exhibit eccentricity and monotony : monotony because the
resources of the language have, for the time at least, been exhausted, and eccentricity because originality comes to be more valued than correctness. But the age in which we find a common
style, will be an age when society has achieved a moment of order
and stability, of equilibrium and harmony ; as the age which manifests the greatest extremes of individual style will be an age of immaturity or an age of senility.
Maturity of language may naturally be expected to accompany
maturity of mind and manners. We may expect the language to
approach maturity at the moment when men have a critical sense
of the past, a confidence in the present, and no conscious doubt of
the future. In literature, this means that the poet is aware of his
predecessors, and that we are aware of the predecessors behind his
work, as we may be aware of ancestral traits in a person who is at
the same time individual and unique. The predecessors should be
themselves great and honoured : but their accomplishment must
be such as to. suggest still undeveloped resources of the language,
and not such as to oppress the younger writers with the fear that
everything that can be done has been done, in their language. The
poet, certainly, in a mature age, may still obtain stimulus from the
hope of doing something that his predecessors have not done ; he
may even be in revolt against them, as a promising adolescent may
revolt against the beliefs, the habits and the manners of his parents ;
but, in retrospect, we can see that he is also the continuer of their
traditions, that he preserves essential family characteristics, and
that his difference of behaviour is a difference in the circumstances of another age. And, on the other hand, just as we sometimes observe men whose lives are overshadowed by the fame of a father or grandfather, men of whom any achievement of which
they are capable appears comparatively insignificant, so a late age
of poetry may be consciously impotent to compete with its distinguished ancestry. We meet poets of this kind at the end of any age, poets with a sense of the past only, or alternatively, poet-;
whose hope of the future is founded upon the attempt to renounce
the past. The persistence of literary creativeness in any people,
accordingly, consists in the maintenance of an unconscious
balance between tradition in the larger sense - the collective
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personality, so to speak, realized in the literature of the past - and
the originality of the living generation.
We cannot call the literature of the Elizabethan period, great as
it is, wholly mature : we cannot call it classical. No close parallel
can be drawn between the development of Greek and Latin literature, for Latin had Greek behind it; still less can we draw a parallel between these and any modern literature, for modern literatures
have both Latin and Greek behind them. In the Renaissance there
is an early semblance of maturity, which is borrowed from antiquity. We are aware of approaching nearer to maturity with Milton. Milton •,;as in a better position to have a critical sense of
the past - of a past in English literature - than his great predecessors. To read Milton is to be confirmed in respect for the genius of Spenser, and in gratitude to Spenser for having contributed towards making the verse of Milton possible. Yet the style of Milton is not a classic style : it is a style of a language still in formation, the
style of a writer whose masters were not English, but Latin and to
a less degree Greek. This, I think, is only saying what Johnson
and in turn Landor said, when they complained of Milton's style
not being quite English . Let us qualify this judgment by saying
immediately that Milton did much to develop the language. One
of the signs of approach towards a classic style is a development
towards greater complexity of sentence and period structure. Such
development is apparent in the single work of Shakespeare, when
we trace his style from the early to the late pia ys : we can even say
that in his late plays he goes as far in the direction of complexity
as is possible within the limits of dramatic verse, which are narrower than those of other kinds. But complexity for its own sake is not a proper goal : its purpose must be, first, the precise expression
of finer shades of feeling and thought ; second, the introduction of
greater refinement and variety of music. When an author appears,
in his love of the elaborate structure, to have lost the ability to say
anything simply ; when his addiction to pattern becomes such that
he says things elaborately which should properly be said simply,
and thus limits his range of expression, the process of complexity ceases to be quite healthy, and the writer is losing touch with the spoken language. Nevertheless, as verse develops, in the
hands of one poet after another, it tends from monotony to
variety, from simplicity to complexity ; as it declines, it tends
towards monotony again, though it may perpetuate the formal
structure to which genius gave life and meaning. You will judge
for yourselves how far this generalization is applicable to the
predecessors and followers of Virgil : we can all see this secondary
monotony in the eighteenth-century imitators of Milton - who
himself is never monotonous. There comes a time when a new
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simplicity, even a relative crudity, may be the only alternative.
You will have anticipated the conclusion towards which I have
been drawing : that those qualities of the classic which I have so
far mentioned - maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity
of language and perfection of the common style - are most nearly
to be illustrated, in English literature, in the eighteenth century ;
and, in poetry, most in the poetry of Pope. If that were all I had
to say on the matter, it would certainly not be new, and it would
not be worth saying. That would be merely proposing a choice
between two errors at which men have arrived before : one, that
the eighteenth century is the finest period of English literature ;
and the other, that the classical idea should be wholly discredited.
My own opinion is, that we have no classic age, and no classic
poet, in English ; that when we see why this is so, we have not the
slightest reason for regret ; but that, nevertheless, we must maintain the classic ideal before our eyes. Because we must maintain it, and because the English genius oflanguage has had other things
to do than to realize it, we cannot afford either to reject or to overrate the age of Pope ; we cannot see English literature as a whole, or aim rightly i
n the future, without a critical appreciation of the
degree to which the classical qualities are exemplified in the work
of Pope : which means that unless we are able to enjoy the work
of Pope, we cannot arrive at a full understanding of English
poetry.
It is fairly obvious that the realization of classical qualities by
Pope was obtained at a high price - to the exclusion of some
greater potentialities of English verse. Now, to some extent, the
sacrifice of some potentialities in order to realize others, is a condition of artistic creation, as it is a condition of life in general. In life the man who refuses to sacrifice anything, to gain anything
else, ends in mediocrity or failure ; though, on the other hand,
there is the specialist who has sacrificed too much for too little, or
who has been born too completely the specialist to have had anything to sacrifice. But in the English eighteenth century, we have reason for feeling that too much was excluded. There was the
mature mind : but it was a narrow one. English society and English
letters were not provincial, in the sense that they were not isolated
from, and not lingering behind, the best European society and
letters. Yet the age itself was, in a manner of speaking, a provincial
age. When one thinks of a Shakespeare, a Jere my Taylor, a Milton,
in England - of a Racine, a Moliere, a Pascal, in France - in the
seventeenth century, one is inclined to say that the eighteenth
century had perfected its formal garden, only by restricting the
area under cultivation. We feel that if the classic is really a worthy
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ideal, it must b e capable o f exhibiting a n amplitude, a catholicity,
to which the eighteenth century cannot lay claim ; qualities which
are present in some great authors, like Chaucer, who cannot be
regarded in my sense as classics of English literature ; and which
are fully present in the mediaeval mind of Dante. For in the
Divine Comedy, if anywhere, we find the classic in a modern
European language. I n the eighteenth century, we are oppressed
by the limited range of sensibility, and especially in the scale of
religious feeling. It is not that, in England at least, the poetry is