Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot
Page 26
writers, about whom one could say some nasty things in this
connection, if it were worth while (Mr. Aldington is not one of
them). Or one can be classical in tendency by doing the best one
can with the material at hand. The confusion springs from the
fact that the term is applied to literature and to the whole complex of interests and modes of behaviour and society of which literature is a part ; and it has not the same bearing in both
applications. It is much easier to be a classicist in literary criticism
than in creative art - because in criticism you are responsible only
for what you want, and in creation you are responsible for what
you can do with material which you must simply accept. And in
this material I include the emotions and feelings of the writer
himself, which, for that writer, are simply material which he must
accept - not virtues to be enlarged or vices to be diminished. The
question, then, about Mr. Joyce, is : how much living material
does he deal with, and how does he deal with it : deal with, not as a
legislator or exhorter, but as an artist ?
It is here that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great
importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No
one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before : it has
never before been necessary. I am not begging the question in
calling Ulysses a 'novel' ; and if you call it an epic it will not
matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a
form which will no longer serve ; it is because the novel, instead of
being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not
sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. Mr.
Joyce has written one novel - the Portrait; Mr. Wyndham Lewis
has written one novel - Tarr. I do not suppose that either of them
will ever write another 'novel'. The novel ended with Flaubert
and with James. It is, I think, because Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lewis,
being 'in advance' of their time, felt a conscious or probably
unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are
more formless than those of a dozen clever writers who are
unaware of its obsolescence.
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a
method which others must pursue after him. They will not be
imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of
an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already
adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe
Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It
1 77
APPREC I AT I ONS OF I N D I V ,.DUAL AUTHORS
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
·
is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology
(such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious),
ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible
what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative
method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously
believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art,
toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly
desires. And only those who have won their own discipline in
secret and without aid, in a world which offers very little assistance
to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance.
LANCELOT ANDREWES
The Right Reverend Father i n God, Lancelot Bishop of Winchester, died on September 25, 1 626. During his lifetime he enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the excellence of his sermons, for the conduct of his diocese, for his ability in controversy displayed against Cardinal Bellarmine, and for the decorum and
devotion of his private life. Some years after Andrewes's death
Lord Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, expressed regret
that Andrewes had not been chosen instead of Abbott to the
Archbishopric of Canterbury, for thus affairs in England might
have taken a different course. By authorities on the history of the
English Church Andrewes is still accorded a high, perhaps the
highest, place ; among persons interested in devotion his Private
Prayers are not unknown. But among those persons who read
sermons, if they read them at all, as specimens of English prose,
Andrewes is little known. His sermons are too well built to be
readily quotable ; they stick too closely to the point to be entertaining. Yet they rank with the finest English prose of their time, of any time. Before attempting to remove the remains of his
reputation to a last resting place in the dreary cemetery of literature, it is desirable to remind the reader of Andrewes's position in history.
The Church of England is the creation not of the reign of
Henry VIII or of the reign of Edward VI, but of the reign of
Elizabeth. The via media which is the spirit of Anglicanism was
the spirit of Elizabeth in all things ; the last of the humble Welsh
family of Tudor was the first and most complete incarnation of
English policy. The taste or sensibility of Elizabeth, developed by
her intuitive knowledge of the right policy for the hour and her
ability to choose the right men to carry out that policy, determined the future of the English Church. In its persistence in finding a mean between Papacy and Presbytery the English
Church under Elizabeth became something representative of the
finest spirit of England of the time. It came to reflect not only the
personality of Elizabeth herself, but the best community of her
subjects of every rank. Other religious impulses, of varying
179
APPRECI AT I ONS OF I N D I V I£>UAL AUTHORS
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
•
degrees o f spiritual value, were to assert themselves with greater
vehemence during the next two reigns. But the Church at the end
of the reign of Elizabeth, and as developed in certain directions
under the next reign, was a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship. The same authority that made use of Gresham, and of Walsingham, and of Cecil, appointed Parker to the Archbishopric
of Canterbury ; the same authority was later to appoint Whitgift
to the same office.
To the ordinary cultivated student of civilization the genesis of
a Church is of little interest, and at all events we must not confound the history of a Church with its spiritual meaning. To the ordinary observer the English Church in history means Hooker
and Jeremy Taylor - and should mean Andrewes also : it means
George Herbert, and it means the churches of Christopher Wren.
This is not an error : a Church is to be judged by its intellectual
fruits, by its influence on the sensibility of the most sensitive and
on the intellect of the most intelligent, and it must be made real
to the eye by monuments of artistic merit. The English Church
has no literary monument equal to that of Dante, no intellectual
monument equal to that of St. Thomas, no devotional monument
equal to that of St. John of the Cross, no building so beautiful as
But there are those for whom the City churches are as precious
as any of the four hundred odd churches in Rome which are in
no danger of demolition, and for whom St. Paul's, in comparison
with St. Peter's, is not lacking in decency ; and the English
devotional verse of the seventeenth century - admitting the one
difficult case of conversion, that of Crashaw - finer than that of
any other country or religious communion at the time.
The intellectual achievement and the prose style of Hooker and
Andrewes came to complete the structure of the English Church
as the philosophy of the thirteenth century crowns the Catholic
Church. To make this statement is not to compare the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity with the Summa. The seventeenth century
was not an age in which the Churches occupied themselves with
metaphysics, and none of the writings of the fathers of the
English Church belongs to the category of speculative philosophy.
But the achievement of Hooker and Andrewes was to make the
English Church more worthy of intellectual assent. No religion
can survive the judgment of history unless the best minds of its
time have collaborated in its construction ; if the Church of
Elizabeth is worthy of the age of Shakespeare and Jonson, that is
because of the work of Hooker and Andrewes.
The writings of both Hooker and Andrewes illustrate that
determination to stick to essentials, that awareness of the needs of
1 80
LAN CELOT ANDREWES
the time, the desire for clarity and precision on matters of
importance, and the indifference to matters indifferent, which was
the general policy of Elizabeth. These characteristics are illustrated in the definition of the Church in the second book of the Ecclesiastical Polity. ('The Church of Christ which was from the
beginning is and continueth until the end.') And in both Hooker
and Andrewes - the latter the friend and intimate of Isaac
Casaubon - we find also that breadth of culture, an ease with
humanism and Renaissance learning, which helped to put them
on terms of equality with their continental antagonists and to
elevate their Church above the position of a local heretical sect.
They were fathers of a national Church and they were Europeans.
Compare a sermon of Andrewes with a sermon by another earlier
master, Latimer. It is not merely that Andrewes knew Greek, or
that Latimer was addressing a far less cultivated public, or that
the sermons of Andrewes are peppered with allusion and quotation. It is rather that Latimer, the preacher of Henry VIII and Edward VI, is merely a Protestant ; but the voice of Andrewes is
the voice of a man who has a formed visible Church behind him,
who speaks with the old authority and the new culture. It is the
difference of negative and positive : Andrewes is the first great
preacher of the English Catholic Church.
The sermons of Andrewes are not easy reading. They are only
for the reader who can elevate himself to the subject. The most
conspicuous qualities of the style are three : ordonnance, or
arrangement and structure, precision in the use of words, and
relevant intensity. The last remains to be defined. All of them are
best elucidated by comparison with a prose which is much more
widely known, but to which I believe that we must assign a lower
place - that of Donne. Donne's sermons, or fragments from
Donne's sermons, are certainly known to hundreds who have
hardly heard of Andrewes ; and they are known precisely for the
reasons because of which they are inferior to those of Andrewes.
In the introduction to an admirable selection of passages from
Donne's sermons, which was published a few years ago by the
Oxford Press, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, after 'trying to explain
Donne's sermons and account for them in a satisfactory manner',
observes :
And yet in these, as in his poems, there remains something baffling
and enigmatic which still eludes our last analysis. Reading these old
hortatory and dogmatic pages, the thought suggests itself that Donne is
often saying something else, something poignant and personal, and yet,
in the end, incommunicable to us.
We may cavil at the word 'incommunicable', and pause to ask
1 8 1
APPRECIATI ONS O F I N D I V I DUAL AUTHORS
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
•
whether the incommunicable Is not often the vague and unformed ; but the statement is essentially right. About Donne there hangs the shadow of the impure motive ; and impure motives lend
their aid to a facile success. He is a little of the religious spellbinder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy. We emphasize this aspect to the
point of the grotesque. Donne had a trained mind ; but without
belittling the intensity or the profundity of his experience, we can
suggest that this experience was not perfectly controlled, and that
he lacked spiritual discipline.
But Bishop Andrewes is one of the community of the born
spiritual, one
che in questo mondo,
contemplando, gusto di quella pace.
Intellect and sensibility were in harmony ; and hence arise the
particular qualities of his style. Those who would prove this
harmony would do well to examine, before proceeding to the
sermons, the volume of Preces Privatf£. This book, composed by
him for his private devotions, was printed only after his death ; a
few manuscript copies may have been given away during his lifetime - one bears the name of William Laud. It appears to have been written in Latin and translated by him into Greek ; some of
it is in Hebrew ; it has been several times translated into English.
The most recent edition is the translation of the late F. E.
Brightman, with an interesting introduction (Methuen, 1903).
They are almost wholly an arrangement of Biblical texts, and of
texts from elsewhere in Andrewes's immense theological reading.
Dr. Brightman has a paragraph of admirable criticism of these
prayers which deserves to be quoted in full :
But the structure is not merely an external scheme or framework : the
internal structure is as close as the external. Andrewes develops an idea
he has in his mind : every line tells and adds something. He does not
expatiate, but moves forward : if he repeats, it is because the repetition
has a real force of expression ; if he accumulates, each new word or
phrase represents a new development, a substantive addition to what
he is saying. He assimilates his material and advances by means of it.
His quotation is not decoration or irrelevance, but the matter in which
he expresses what he wants to say. His single thoughts are no doubt
often suggested by the words he borrows, but the thoughts are made
his own, and the constructive force, the fire that fuses them, is his own.
And this internal, progressive, often poetic structure is marked outwardly. The editions have not always reproduced this feature of the Preces, nor perhaps is it possible in any ordinary page to represent the
1 82
LANCELOT ANDREWES
structure adequately ; but in the manuscript the intention is clear
enough. The prayers are arranged, not merely in paragraphs, but in
lines advanced and recessed, so as in a measure to mark the inner
structure and the steps and stages of the movement. Both in form and
in matter Andrewes's prayers may often be described rather as hymns.
The first part of this excellent piece of criticism may be applied
equally well to the prose of Andrewes's sermons. The prayers
themselves, which, as Canon Brightman seems to hint, should
take for Anglicans a place beside the Exercises of St. Ignatius and
the works of St. Fran-;ois de Sales, illustrate the devotion to
private prayer (Andrewes is said to have passed nearly five hours a
day in prayer) and to public ritual which Andrewes bequeathed to
William Laud ; and his passion for order in religion is reflected in
his passion for order in prose.
Readers who hesitate before the five large volumes of
Andrewes's sermons in The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology
may find their introduction more easy through the Seventeen
Sermons on the Nativity, which were published separately in a
small volume by Griffith Farran Okeden and Welsh, in The
Ancient and Modern Library of Theological Literature, and which
can still be picked up here and tliere. It is an additional advantage
that these sermons are all on the same subject, the Incarnation ;
they are the Christmas Day sermons preached before King James
between 1605 and 1 624. And in the sermons preached before
King James, himself a theologian, Andrewes was not hampered
as he sometimes was in addressing more popular audiences. His
erudition had full play, and his erudition is essential to his
originality.
Bishop Andrewes, as was hinted above, tried to confine himself
in his sermons to the elucidation of what he considered essential
in dogma ; he said himself that in sixteen years he had never
alluded to the question of predestination, to which the Puritans,
following their continental brethren, attached so much importance. The Incarnation was to him an essential dogma, and we are able to compare seventeen developments of the same idea.
Reading Andrewes on such a theme is like listening to a great
Hellenist expounding a text of the Posterior Analytics : altering