by T. S. Eliot
speaks through Jeremiah, that “my people hath forgotten me” (Jeremiah
18:15), or “their fathers have forgotten my name” (Jeremiah 23:27). The
other, the invocation “O Sion,” or “O Zion,” is more typical of the prophet
Isaiah (Isaiah 40:9, 52:1).
9. The financial crisis of the theaters was a recurrent subject in newspapers
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 18 4
2 4 1
throughout the first six months of 1921. But the situation was already
improving when Eliot was writing. See Anonymous, “The Theatres: The
‘Slump’ Waning,” Times, 13 June 1921, 8, col. 3.
10. Norman Macdermott, a Liverpool businessman, purchased a drill hall
which he converted into a theater and opened in 1920 as the Everyman.
It was dedicated to performing contemporary works that might not be com-
mercially viable. The first season (autumn 1920) included such works as
Arnold Bennett’s The Honeymoon and a children’s play, Through the Crack; John Galsworthy’s The Foundations and The Little Man; and John Masefield’s The Tragedy of Nan. The second season (spring 1921) was a retrospective
of the works of George Bernard Shaw. See Norman Macdermott, Everymania:
The History of the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, 1920–1926 (London: Society
for Theatre Research, 1975). The Théâtre du Vieux Colombier was estab-
lished in 1913 by Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), a close friend of André Gide
and one of his collaborators in forming La Nouvelle Revue française in 1908.
The theater was dedicated to reacting “against all the evils of the commercial
theater” and to “supporting the reverence for classical masterpieces, French
or foreign,” and its activities helped to bring about a significant change in
French theater of the period between 1913 and 1940. It was inaugurated on
22 October 1913, and continued until 1973. (It was reopened in 1993 under
the auspices of the Comédie-Française but is now devoted to a predomi-
nantly contemporary repertory.)
11. Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) was a ballet impresario who in 1909 brought
the Ballet Russe, an independent company which had never performed in
Russia, to Paris for the first time, and thereafter made annual visits. It came
to London in 1918–1919, 1920, and twice in 1921.
12. Leonide Massine (1895–1979) danced and choreographed for the Ballet
Russe from 1914 to 1920, but left in early 1921 when he married. Madame
Lydia Lopokova (1891–1981) was the principal female dancer of the com-
pany from 1916 through 1921. In 1925 she married the celebrated econo-
mist John Maynard Keynes. See the Daily News, 13 June 1921, 4, col. 6,
“lopokova,” a review by H. Willson Disher, who praises her extravagantly.
13. See n. 1, 238.
14. The Diaghilev Company first came to London for six months at the Coli-
seum, from 5 September 1918 to 29 March 1919. A second series of perfor-
mances took place at the Alhambra Theatre from 30 April to 30 July 1920,
the one referred to by Eliot (“Two years ago . . .”). That series revived The
Good-Humoured Ladies, which had already been part of the repertory earlier
at the Coliseum, and premiered three entirely new ballets, La Boutique fan-
tasque, The Three-Cornered Hat, and The Gardens of Aranjues. The Alhambra series also featured four other revivals: Petrouchka, L’Oiseau de feu (The
firebird), Narcisse, and Daphnis et Chloé. In addition, it gave the London premiere of Parade, the ballet with script by Jean Cocteau and stage decor by
Pablo Picasso which had debuted in Paris in 1917. On 13 May 1920, Eliot
went with Jack and Mary Hutchinson and Brigit Patmore to see Le Carnaval,
2 4 2
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 18 4 – 18 5
which had been added to the program, Good-Humoured Ladies, and The Firebird. He returned again on 22 July with his wife, Vivien, and the Sitwells to see the first night of The Three-Cornered Hat, with music by Manuel de Falla, stage decor by Picasso, and choreography by Leonide Massine, who also
danced the role of the Miller. One contemporary wrote of the performance:
“Massine was superb as the Miller and dominated the ballet throughout. In
his hip-tight and ankle-tight black silk trousers and purple waistcoat edged
with white, he danced like one possessed, and received a tremendous ova-
tion. Few of those who saw that first night will have forgotten the colour
and bravura with which he invested his Farruca, the slow snap of the fingers
followed by the pulsating thump of his feet, then the flickering movement
of his hands held horizontally before him, palms facing and almost touching
his breast. All at once this gave place to a new movement in which his feet
chopped the ground faster and faster until he suddenly dropped to the
ground on his hands, and as quickly leapt to his feet and stopped dead, his
e¤orts greeted with thunderous applause” (Cyril Beaumont, The Diaghilev
Ballet in London: A Personal Record, 3d ed. [London: Adam and Charles Black, 1951], 145). The evening’s performance also included Papillons and Prince Igor, and Eliot returned the next night with the Hutchinsons to see the same three ballets. During the third series of performances given by the Ballet
Russe, Eliot went on Monday, 27 June, to the first performance of Stravin-
sky’s Le Sacre du printemps, which he describes more fully in his London
Letter, September 1921 (see 188–189).
15. Vaslav Nijinsky (1888–1950) was considered the greatest male dancer of his
age. He toured with the Diaghilev company until 1916 but was fired by Dia-
ghilev when he married Romola de Pulszky, a Hungarian dancer. After 1916
he su¤ered from schizophrenia and spent many years in and out of mental
hospitals. Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) toured with Diaghilev in 1909 and 1910
but then formed her own company, which continued to tour for a further
fifteen years.
16. William Congreve (1670–1729) was the author of four comedies, including
Love for Love (1695), which Eliot saw together with Virginia and Leonard
Woolf on 20 March 1921 at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in a produc-
tion sponsored by the Phoenix Society.
17. Gordon Craig, “Puppets and Poets,” Chapbook, no. 20 (February 1921): 3–36.
18. Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921) was
spectacularly successful. The Autobiography of Margot Asquith, vol. 1 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1920), written by the wife of the former prime minister Herbert H. Asquith, was a notable book with lively anecdotes and telling
bons mots. The second volume appeared in 1922.
19. When Strachey published Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus,
1918), it became an immediate and spectacular success. “Tout entier à sa
proie attaché” changes to the masculine gender a French phrase “toute en-
tière à sa proie attachée” which appears in Phèdre (1677), by Jean Racine,
in the concluding speech of act I, scene iii. Phaedra confesses that she is in
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 18 6 – 18 8
2 4 3
love with Hippolytus, driven to it by Venus: “C’est Venus toute entière à
sa proie attachée.” Or in English: “It is Venus wholly fastened on her prey.”
Eliot has adapted the phrase so that Lytton Strachey takes the place
of Venus,
Queen Victoria that of Phaedra.
20. Gladstone and Disraeli are treated by Strachey in chapter 8, “Mr. Gladstone
and Lord Beaconsfield,” 240–268.
21. On Gibbon, see “Prose and Verse,” n. 4, 222. Thomas Babington Macaulay
(1800–1859) was a politician and journalist. His oratorical triumphs in the
Reform Bill debates of 1831–1832 made him famous. The first two volumes
of his History of England from the Accession of James II appeared in 1848,
the fifth and last after his death, in 1861. He had a nervous, pithy style, quite
di¤erent from the orotund prose of Gibbon.
22. William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848), was a Whig prime
minister from 1835 to 1841 and became an informal tutor to Queen Victoria
after she ascended to the throne in 1837. Strachey writes of him: “Probably,
if he had been born a little earlier, he would have been a simpler and a hap-
pier man. As it was, he was a child of the eighteenth century whose lot was
cast in a new, diªcult, unsympathetic age. He was an autumn rose” (63).
Thomas Creevey (1768–1838) was a Whig politician who was elected to the
House of Commons many times and occupied several prominent positions
in various Whig governments. Strachey cites his diary entries for 1837
and 1838 to show the high spirits of Queen Victoria in her first years on
the throne: “Mr. Creevey, grown old now, and very near his end, catching
a glimpse of her at Brighton, was much amused, in his sharp fashion, by
the ingenuous gaiety of ‘little Vic’” (66).
23. Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was an influential French philosopher, especially
in the period 1900–1914. Eliot at first viewed his work with interest but later
dismissed it as merely a late and degraded form of romanticism.
24. Ronald Firbank (1886–1926), a gay writer who by 1921 had published four
novels in a style that would now be called camp: Vainglory (1915), Inclinations (1916), Caprice (1917), and Valmouth (1919).
25. Monday or Tuesday (London: Hogarth, 1921) was a collection of short stories and sketches which signaled a new experimentalism in the work of Virginia
Woolf. It was followed the next year by her first major novel, Jacob’s Room.
26. For Walter Pater, see “Prose and Verse,” n. 16, 224, and Eliot’s comments on
him in the essay itself, 162–163.
London Letter, September 1921
1. The date of September 1921 was furnished by the editors of the Dial, an attempt to make the essay seem timely. But in the essay itself, Eliot states that
George Bernard Shaw’s play The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet is “now run-
ning at the Court Theatre.” Although Blanco Posnet ran not at the Court but at the Queen’s Theatre, it began running on 28 July, and its last performance
was on Saturday, 13 August. Eliot must have written his essay sometime
2 4 4
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e 18 8
before its closing date. On the weekend of 6–7 August, however, he was busy
escorting his mother to Garsington, the home of Ottoline Morrell, while the
next weekend he took his brother Henry there. (“I have had to devote the last
2 weekends to taking various members of my family to Garsington” [ LOTSE,
463].) Presumably the essay was composed by about 15 August and typed
between 20 and 25 August, since Eliot used the new typewriter that his
brother Henry had left him as a present when he returned to America on
20 August. Its date of composition explains why it refers to events which
took place chiefly in June and July, the period when Stravinsky was “our
two months’ lion.” On the Dial, see London Letter, March 1921, n. 1, 202.
2. On the exhibition by Picasso which took place in January 1921, see the last
sentence of London Letter, March 1921, and the accompanying note.
3. Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1983), a Polish-American pianist, studied in Warsaw
and Berlin, making his debut in 1900 with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.
He was noted for his lyrical interpretations of Chopin’s music and his ardent
championship of Spanish works. His enormous popularity spanned many
decades. He gave a concert at Queen’s Hall on Saturday, 11 June 1921, which
included works by Chopin, Albeniz, Saymanovsky, and Liszt. That was his
only concert before the season came to an end in mid-July.
4. Eugene Goossens (1893–1962) was an orchestral conductor. Born in
England, he received his early musical training in Bruges. In 1907 he was
awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Goossens was always
interested in presenting new music, and on Friday, 17 June 1921, he con-
ducted the first English concert program of Le Sacre du printemps, at the
Prince’s Theatre; on Thursday, 23 June, he conducted a second concert pro-
gram of Le Sacre, this time at the Queen’s Hall. The program also included
“The Eternal Rhythms,” a work by Goossens himself, as well as the “Sym-
phony for Wind Instruments” by Stravinsky. These two concerts, in turn,
were followed by three further performances of Le Sacre as accompaniment
to the ballet, all at the Prince’s Theatre. The orchestra was led by the Swiss
conductor Ernest Ansermet (1886–1969), who toured with Diaghilev’s
Ballet Russe company from 1915 to 1923. The choreography was the new
one which Leonide Massine had fashioned for the revival of Le Sacre in Paris in 1920. There were three performances, on Monday, 27 June; Wednesday,
29 June; and Friday, 1 July. Stravinsky attended all three performances. The
first featured Madame Lydia Sokolova (1896–1974) as the Chosen Virgin,
a role she had danced in the 1920 revival. The other two featured Lydia
Lopokova in the lead role (see London Letter, July 1921, n. 12, 241). Eliot’s
account leaves no doubt that he saw the first night’s performance with Soko-
lova. The anonymous reviewer for the Times commented: “Mme. Sokolova,
the ‘Chosen Virgin,’ was given a bank of white roses taller than herself.
M. Stravinsky got a laurel wreath of equal size, and the whole house roared
itself hoarse while the protagonists held their trophies and each other’s
hands and bowed themselves to the ground. Thus the London public proves
its connoisseurship in contemporary art.” The review generally damned
n o t e s t o e l i o t ’ s p r o s e , p a g e s 18 9 – 19 0
2 4 5
both the music (“and through it all Stravinsky’s orchestra tears its way in
ever-increasing harshness”) and the ballet (“There is no drama, no story only
a passionless ritual”). See “The Russian Ballet: ‘Le Sacre de Printemps,’”
Times, 29 June 1921, 8, col. 4. Eliot’s sense that Stravinsky had dominated the entire season derived from the fact that Stravinsky had also made a
personal appearance earlier, on 13 June, when the first performance of
Petrouchka was given, and he would make another later, on 4 July, when
Pulcinella was given. The anonymous Times reviewer, on 6 July, commented with scarcely concealed irony: “The whole was received with enthusiasm,
and M. Stravinsky was present to bow acknowledgments on behalf of Per-
golesi and himself.” Finally, to cap o¤ Stravinsky’s role as “our two months’
lion,” the first performance of the season of The Firebird was given on 11 J
uly, again at the Prince’s Theatre.
5. James Frazer published three editions of The Golden Bough; the first
consisted of two volumes (London: Macmillan, 1890), the second of three
(London: Macmillan, 1900), and the third of twelve (London: Macmillan,
1907–1915). The work is an encyclopedic tour of primitive rituals, and Eliot
mentions it in the first of his notes to The Waste Land; see 71.
6. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: a Metabiological Pentateuch (London: Constable, 1921; New York, Brentano’s, 1921). The play is introduced
by a Preface of thirty thousand words, in which Shaw attempts to articulate
a theory of “Creative Evolution,” one opposed to the notion of “Natural Selec-
tion” advocated by neo-Darwinians, a philosophical outlook which had, in
Shaw’s view, led to the First World War. The play itself consists of five parts
that cover the life and evolution of humanity, beginning with a scene that
is set in the garden of Eden and ending with a scene that takes place in the
year a.d. 31,290. Shaw (1856–1950) had been a journalist and theater critic
during the 1880s and 1890s, and during the decade 1904–1914 he had
dominated the London stage with his productions at the Court Theater.
After his dramatic output ground to a halt during the years of World War I,
Back to Methuselah marked his return to the stage.
7. Gilbert Seldes, “Struldbrugs and Supermen” [a review of George Bernard
Shaw, Back to Methuselah], Dial 71.2 (August 1921): 227–231. “The sombre tone and the tragic earnestness with which the ideas are presented suggest
that this is Mr. Shaw’s last word, a testament more than a pentateuch” (231).
The parenthetical remark “(already noticed by Mr. Seldes)” was added in
proof. On Norman Macdermott, see London Letter, July 1921, n. 10, 241.
8. On The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet see n. 1 to this essay.
9. Two characters, a He-Ancient and a She-Ancient who have lived eight cen-
turies and embody disillusioned wisdom, are prominent protagonists in part
five of Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah.
10. George Bernard Shaw published Common Sense about the War as a supple-
ment to the New Statesman for 14 November 1914, and then as an indepen-
dent pamphlet in 1915 (New Statesman Publishing, [1915]). Shaw argued that