Writing in 1920 of Algernon Swinburne, the appeal of whose enraptured lyricism was not self-evident to the generation that had survived the Great War, T. S. Eliot pronounced, in that marvelously authoritative tone of his, that “it is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any particular poet” before delivering the sort of definitive verdict that his readers came to relish.
That Eliot should have given serious reconsideration to a poet whom many of his contemporaries thought passé was characteristic. Throughout his career, he would come to the defense of other unfashionable poets, particularly Dryden, Tennyson, and Kipling, each of whom, as some of the uncollected early pieces in this magnificent edition show, had a strong influence on his fledgling talent. Yet to come to the defense of Swinburne in 1920 showed great critical confidence. Here, in a reassessment of what most critics might have regarded as the poet’s greatest liability, we can see the emergence of an altogether new critical intelligence.
Eliot also saw in Swinburne precisely the sort of poet-critic—Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, and Arnold were others—whom he was working to emulate. For Eliot, “Swinburne’s essays have the value of notes of an important poet upon important poets.” And the proof was that, like Eliot himself, “he read everything, and he read with the single interest in finding literature.” No one who revisits both pieces gathered here on Swinburne will fail to concede Eliot’s contention, which is as true of himself as it is of Swinburne:
Since Eliot’s death in 1965, admirers of his work have often criticized his literary executor, Valerie Eliot, for not bringing out her husband’s complete prose sooner. After all, if it had been made available at an earlier date, many of the attacks on Eliot’s reputation might have been more easily parried. Yet, now that this laudable edition has appeared, it is clear that Valerie Eliot (who died in 2012) proved an admirably meticulous, thorough, and above all responsible executor of her husband’s literary estate. This edition will stand as a monument to her good judgment and good taste, especially since she chose Ronald Schuchard, who has done such splendid work on Oxford’s Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, as editor in chief.
Here, Schuchard is overseeing what promises to be a veritable intellectual biography of Eliot. This searchable online edition—which is also being prepared for print publication—will, when all eight volumes are complete, include all of Eliot’s collected essays, reviews, lectures, commentaries from the Criterion, and letters to editors, including more than 800 uncollected and 150 unpublished pieces from 1905 to 1965.
As Schuchard shows, Eliot was ambivalent about the quality of his uncollected prose, telling his friend John Hayward (whom he initially thought to make his literary executor) that he could never revisit his scattered pieces “without acute embarrassment.” Indeed, Eliot dissuaded Hayward from preparing any of his uncollected pieces for publication because, as he said, “I have had to write at one time or another a lot of junk in periodicals the greater portion of which ought never to be reprinted.”
Later, after making his wife his executor, he relaxed this astringency. Yet Schuchard is certainly right to quote something Eliot wrote of Baudelaire in 1927 to justify this exhaustive edition.
One can revel in many of the uncollected pieces included here without denying that the fastidious judge in Eliot saved the best for the collections published in his lifetime, including The Sacred Wood (1920), For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), Selected Essays (1932, 1934, 1951), and On Poetry and Poets (1957). Nevertheless, while both the collected and uncollected pieces enhance Eliot’s stature as a critic of genius, they also show him to have been an impassioned champion of what Cardinal Newman called “the sovereignty of Truth.” Moreover, many of the pieces show that, for all of his brashness, Eliot had a certain humility that makes his brilliance doubly winning. In a 1959 letter recalling a tutorial course he taught at University College London in 1916, he wrote:
Most of the pieces in these first two volumes are either philosophical papers written when Eliot was contemplating a career in philosophy at Harvard or literary pieces. What is striking about the philosophy papers is that they have the same witty self-assurance as the literary essays. On the idealist philosopher T. H. Green, for example, Eliot observes that “Green’s philosophy, like most others, is built upon facts which everyone can acknowledge, but he proceeds in the familiar way by throwing a rope in the air and clambering up it; and it is not until he has disappeared from view that we break the spell and realize that the magician was on the ground the whole time.”
Certainly, Eliot could lay down the law with admirable dispatch. “Second Thoughts on Humanism” (1929) is included in the third volume but its force is characteristic of all of Eliot’s philosophical pieces:
The literary pieces are nicely exemplified by a 1919 essay on the French playwright and novelist Pierre de Marivaux, where Eliot’s grasp of cultural history makes an early appearance, as does his delight in provocative generality.
As a whole, the pieces here exhibit the apprenticeship of an intelligence that might have distinguished itself in history, philosophy, or theology but plumbed, instead, literary criticism because this was the discipline that could not only fuel his poetry but test his interests in history, philosophy, and theology. In his Clark Lectures on the metaphysical poets (1926), he gave his readers a good idea of the sort of eclectic criticism that he meant to produce. “The literary critic must remain a critic of literature,” he writes, “but he must have sufficient knowledge to understand the points of view of the sciences into which his literary criticism merges. You cannot know your frontiers unless you have some notion of what is beyond them.”
Yet knowledge for the sake of knowledge always incurred Eliot’s mistrust. As he insists in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919): “A poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness.” And for corroboration of this, he adduced the fact that “Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum.”
This creative understanding of knowledge accentuates the highly practical character of Eliot’s criticism. After all, although splendidly well read and full of self-deprecatory charm, he was never a litterateur. Nor was he a critic in any art for art’s sake sense. He wrote his essays, whether on the Elizabethan drama, Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Arnold, Pater, Seneca, or the darling of the music halls, Marie Lloyd, not merely to make sense of European culture but to revitalize it. Indeed, he founded the Criterion, which ran from 1922 to 1939, precisely to advance that often quixotic object.
Tackling questions of belief and unbelief was essential to this enterprise. In “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927), he says of John Donne: “In making some very commonplace investigations of the ‘thought’ of Donne, I found it quite impossible to come to the conclusion that Donne believed anything. It seemed as if, at that time, the world was filled with broken fragments of systems, and that a man like Donne merely picked up, like a magpie, various shining fragments of ideas as they struck his eye, and stuck them about here and there in his verse.”
This could be a description of the Eliot misunderstood by many modernists before he succumbed to what William Empson derided as “neo-Christianity.” Yet Eliot was never indifferent to faith: Even before converting to Christianity his reading had given him a respect for its culture. As he remarks in the piece on Seneca, “The problem of belief is very complicated and probably quite insoluble”— though he also recognized that it was not a problem that one could shirk. In an uncollected 1913 piece on Kant and agnosticism, he writes:
That use of the word “fructifying” might seem odd, unless we appreciate that for Eliot, as he wrote in his introduction to “The Pensées of Pascal” (1931), “the demon of doubt . . . is inseparable from the spirit of belief.” At the same time, he was unimpressed with the absolute posited by the British idealist F. H. Bradley, on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation: “This Absolute is mystical, because desperate. Ultimate truth remains inaccessible; and it only remains for [skeptics] to shatter what little Bradley has left standing, by urging upon us that we have no right to affirm . . . that there is truth at all.” Which led the 25-year-old Eliot to pose the overwhelming question that J. Alfred Prufrock could never bring himself to ask: If there is an absolute that can reaffirm objective truth, what is it?
Thus, even in these early years, the appeal of Christianity had already become importunate for a poet who would not be fobbed off with philosophical abstractions. In his wonderful 1926 essay on the 17th-century Anglican divine Lancelot Andrewes, he speaks of this appeal by sharing with his contemporaries the inimitable prose of someone of whom most of them had probably never heard. Bradley might have understood metaphysics as “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct,” but Andrewes saw the supernatural in altogether different terms.
Together, these fascinating pieces chart not only an arduous conversion, but the extent to which conversion was essential to the development of T. S. Eliot’s critical intelligence. With a total of eight volumes planned in this superb edition, we are in for an incomparable feast.
Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Adventures in the Book Pages: Essays and Reviews.
