Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  not Christian. It is not even that the poets were not devout

  Christians ; for a pattern of orthodoxy of principle, and sincere

  piety of feeling, you may look long before you find a poet more

  genuine than Samuel Johnson. Yet there are evidences of a deeper

  religious sensibility in the poetry of Shakespeare, whose belief and

  practice can be only a matter of conjecture. And this restriction

  of religious sensibility itself produces a kind of provinciality

  (though we must add that in this sense the nineteenth century

  was more provincial still) : the provinciality which indicates the

  disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a common belief and

  a common culture. It would seem then, that our eighteenth century, in spite of its classical achievement - an achievement, I believe, which still has great importance as an example for the

  future - was lacking some condition which makes the creation of

  a true classic possible. What this condition is, we must return to

  Virgil to discover.

  I should like first to rehearse the characteristics which I have

  already attributed to the classic, with special application to Virgil,

  to his language, his civilization, and the particular moment in the

  history of that language and civilization at which he arrived.

  Maturity of mind : this needs history, and the consciousness of

  history. Consciousness of history cannot be fully awake, except

  where there is other history than the history of the poet's own

  people : we need this in order to see our own place in history. There

  must be the knowledge of the history of at least one other highly

  civilized people, and of a people whose civilization is sufficiently

  cognate to have influenced and entered into our own. This is a

  consciousness which the Romans had, and which the Greeks, however much more highly we may estimate their achievement - and indeed, we may respect it all the more on this account - could

  not possess. It was a consciousness, certainly, which Virgil himself did much to develop. From the beginning, Virgil, like his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, was constantly adapting and using the discoveries, traditions and inventions of Greek

  poetry : to make use of a foreign literature in this way marks a

  further stage of civilization beyond making use only of the earlier

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  stages of one's own - though I think we can say that no poet has

  ever shown a finer sense of proportion than Virgil, in the uses he

  made of Greek and of earlier Latin poetry. It is this development

  of one literature, or one civilization, in relation to another, which

  gives a peculiar significance to the subject of Virgil's epic. In

  Homer, the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans is hardly

  larger in scope than a feud between one Greek city-state and a

  coalition of other city-states : behind the story of Aeneas is the

  consciousness of a more radical distinction, a distinction, which is

  at the same time a statement of relatedness, between two great

  cultures, and, finally, of their reconciliation under an allembracing destiny.

  Virgil's maturity of mind, and the maturity of his age, are exhibited in this awareness of history. With maturity of mind I have associated maturity of manners and absence of provinciality. I

  suppose that, to a modern European suddenly precipitated into

  the past; the social behaviour of the Romans and the Athenians

  would seem indifferently coarse, barbarous and offensive. But if

  the poet can portray something superior to contemporary practice,

  it is not in the way of anticipating some later, and quite different

  code of behaviour, but by an insight into what the conduct of his

  own people at his own time might be, at its best. House parties of

  the wealthy, in Edwardian England, were not exactly what we

  read of in the pages of Henry James : but Mr. James's society was

  an idealization, of a kind, of that society, and not an anticipation

  of any other. I think that we are conscious, in Virgil more than in

  any other Latin poet - for Catullus and Propertius seem ruffians,

  and Horace somewhat plebeian, by comparison - of a refinement

  of manners springing from a delicate sensibility, and particularly

  in that test of manners, private and public conduct between the

  sexes. It is not for me, in a gathering of people, all of whom may be

  better scholars than I , to review the story of Aeneas and Dido.

  But I have always thought the meeting of Aeneas with the shade

  of Dido, in Book VI, not only one of the most poignant, but one of

  the most civilized passages in poetry. It is complex in meaning and

  economical in expression, for it not only tells us about the attitude

  of Dido - still more important is what it tells us about the attitude

  of Aeneas. Dido's behaviour appears almost as a projection of

  Aeneas' own conscience : this, we feel, is the way in which Aeneas'

  conscience would expect Dido to behave to him. The point, it

  seems to me, is not that Dido is unforgiving - though it is important that, instead of railing at him, she merely snubs him - perhaps the most telling snub in all poetry : what matters most is, that

  Aeneas does not forgive himself - and this, significantly, in spite

  of the fact of which he is well aware, that all that he has done has

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  been i n compliance with destiny, o r i n consequence o f the machinations of gods who are themselves, we feel, only instruments of a greater inscrutable power. Here, what I chose as an instance of

  civilized manners, proceeds to testify to civilized consciousness

  and conscience : but all of the levels at which we may consider a

  particular episode, belong to one whole. It will be observed,

  finally, that the behaviour of Virgil's characters (I might except

  Turn us, the man without a destiny) never appears to be according

  to some purely local or tribal code of manners : it is in its time,

  both Roman and European. Virgil certainly, on the plane of

  manners, is not provincial.

  To attempt to demonstrate the maturity of language and style

  of Virgil is, for the present occasion, a superflous task : many of

  you could perform it better than I, and I think that we should all

  be in accord. But it is worth repeating that Virgil's style would not

  have been possible without a literature behind him, and without

  his having a very intimate knowledge of this literature : so that he

  was, in a sense, re-writing Latin poetry - as when he borrows a

  phrase or a device from a predecessor and improves upon it. He

  was a learned author, all of whose learning was relevant to his

  task ; and he had, for his use, just enough literature behind him

  and not too much. As for maturity of style, I do not think that any

  poet has ever developed a greater command of the complex structure, both of sense and sound, without losing the resource of direct, brief and startling simplicity when the occasion required it.

  On this I need not dilate : but I think it is worth while to say a

  word more about the common style, because this is something

  which we cannot perfectly illustrate from English poetry, and to

  which we are apt to pay
less than enough deference. In modern

  European literature, the closest approximations to the ideal of a

  common style, are probably to be found in Dante and Racine ; the

  nearest we have to it in English poetry is Pope, and Pope's is a

  common style which, in comparison, is of a very narrow range. A

  common style is one which makes us exclaim, not 'this is a man of

  genius using the language' but 'this realizes the genius of the

  language'. We do not say this when we read Pope, because we are

  too conscious of all the resources of the English speech upon which

  Pope does not draw ; we can at most say 'this realizes the genius of

  the English language of a particular epoch'. We do not say this

  when we read Shakespeare or Milton, because we are always conscious of the greatness of the man, and of the miracles that he is performing with the language ; we come nearer perhaps with

  Chaucer - but that Chaucer is using a different, from our point of

  view a cruder speech. And Shakespeare and Milton, as later history shows, left open many possibilities of other uses of English in 1 24

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  poetry : whereas, after Virgil, it is truer to say that no great

  development was possible, until the Latin language became something different.

  At this point I should like to return to a question which I have

  already suggested : the question whether the achievement of a

  classic, in the sense in which I have been using the term throughout, is, for the people and the language of its origin, altogether an unmixed blessing - even though it is unquestionably a ground

  for pride. To have this question raised in one's mind, it is almost

  enough simply to have contemplated Latin poetry after Virgil, to

  have considered the extent to which later poets lived and worked

  under the shadow of his greatness : so that we praise or dispraise

  them, according to standards which he set - admiring them, sometimes, for discovering some variation which was new, or even for merely rearranging patterns of words so as to give a pleasing faint

  reminder of the remote original. But English poetry, and French

  poetry also, may be considered fortunate in this : that the greatest

  poets have exhausted only particular areas. We cannot say that,

  since the age of Shakespeare, and respectively since the time of

  Racine, there has been any really first-rate poetic drama in

  England or in France ; since Milton, we have had no great epic

  poem, though there have been great long poems. It is true that

  every supreme poet, classic or not, tends to exhaust the ground he

  cultivates, so that it must, after yielding a diminishing crop,

  finally be left in fallow for some generations.

  Here it may be objected that the effect on a literature which I

  am imputing to the classic, results not from the classic character

  of that work, but simply from its greatness : for I have denied to

  Shakespeare and to Milton the title of classics, in the sense in

  which I am employing the term throughout, and yet have admitted that no supremely great poetry of the same kind has been written since. That every great work of poetry tends to make

  impossible the production of equally great works of the same kind

  is indisputable. The reason may be stated partly in terms of

  conscious purpm:e : no first-rate poet would attempt to do again,

  what has already been done as well as it can be done in his

  language. It is only after the language - its cadence, still more than

  vocabulary and syntax - has, with time and social change, sufficiently altered, that another dramatic poet as great as Shakespeare, or another epic poet as great as Milton, can become possible. Not

  only every great poet, but every genuine, though lesser poet,

  fulfils once for all some possibility of the language, and so leaves

  one possibility less for his successors. The vein that he has

  exhausted may be a very small one ; or may represent some major

  form of poetry, the epic or dramatic. But what the great poet has

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  exhausted is merely one form, and not the whole language. When

  .the great poet is also a great classic-poet, he exhausts, not a form

  only, but the language of his time ; and the language of his time,

  as used by him, will be the language in its perfection. So that it is

  not the poet alone of whom we have to take account, but the

  language in which he writes : it is not merely that a classic poet

  exhausts the language, but that an exhaustible language is the

  kind which may produce a classic poet.

  We may be inclined to ask, then, whether we are not fortunate

  in possessing a language which, instead of having produced a

  classic, can boast a rich variety in the past, and the possibility of

  further novelty in the future ? Now while we are inside a literature,

  while we speak the same language, and have fundamentally the

  same culture as that which produced the literature of the past, we

  want to maintain two things : a pride in what our literature has

  already accomplished, and a belief in what it may still accomplish

  in the future. If we cease to believe in the future, the past would

  cease to be fully our past : it would become the past of a dead

  civilization. And this consideration must operate with particular

  cogency upon the minds of those who are engaged in the attempt

  to add to the store of English literature. There is no classic in

  English : therefore, any living poet can say, there is still hope that

  I - and those after me, for no one can face with equanimity, once

  he understands what is implied, the thought of being the last

  poet - may be able to write something which will be worth preserving. But from the aspect of eternity, such interest in the future has no meaning : when two languages are both dead languages, we

  cannot say that one is greater, because of the number and variety

  of its poets, or the other because its genius is more completely

  expressed in the work of one poet. What I wish to affirm, at one

  and the same time, is this : that, because English is a living

  language and the language in which we live, we may be glad that

  it has never completely realized itself in the work of one classic

  poet ; b11t that, on the other hand, the classic criterion is of vital

  importance to us. We need it in order to judge our individual

  poets, though we refuse to judge our literature as a whole in

  comparison with one which has produced a classic. Whether a

  literature does culminate in a classic, is a matter of fortune. It is

  largely, I suspect, a question of the degree of fusion of the elements within that language ; so that the Latin languages can approximate more closely to the classic, not simply because they

  are Latin, but because they are more homogeneous than English,

  and therefore tend more naturally towards the common style :

  whereas English, being the most various of great languages in its

  constituents, tends to variety rather than perfection, needs a

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  longer time to realize its potency, and still contains, perhaps, more

  unexplored possibilities. It has, perhaps, the greatest capacity for

  changing and yet remaining itself.

  I am
now approaching the distinction between the relative and

  the absolute classic, the distinction between the literature which

  can be called classic in relation to its own language, and that which

  is classic in relation to a number of other languages. But first I wish

  to record one more characteristic of the classic, beyond those I

  have enumerated, which will help to establish this distinction, and

  to mark the difference between such a classic as Pope and such a

  classic as Virgil. It is convenient to recapitulate certain assertions

  which I made earlier.

  I suggested, at the beginning, that a frequent, if not universal

  feature of the maturing of individuals may be a process of selection (not altogether conscious), of the development of some potentialities to the exclusion of others ; and that a similarity may be found in the development of language and literature. If this is so,

  we should expect to find that in a minor classic literature, such as

  our own of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, the

  elements excluded, to arrive at maturity, will be more numerous

  or more serious ; and that satisfaction in the result, will always be

  qualified by our awareness of the possibilities of the language,

  revealed in the work of earlier authors, which have been ignored.

  The classic age of English literature is not representative of the

  total genius of the race : as I have intimated, we cannot say that

  that genius is wholly realized in any one period - with the result

  that we can still, by referring to one or another period of the past,

  envisage possibilities for the future. The English language is one

  which offers wide scope for legitimate divergencies of style ; it

  seems to be such that no one age, and certainly no one writer, can

  establish a norm. The French language has seemed to be much

  more closely tethered to a normal style ; yet, even in French,

  though the language appeared to have established itself, once for

  all, in the seventeenth century, there is an esprit gaulois, an

  element of richness present in Rabelais and in Villon, the awareness of which may qualify our judgment of the who/mess of Racine or Moliere, for we may feel that it is not only unrepresented but unreconciled. We may come to the conclusion, then, that the perfect classic must be one in which the whole genius of