A Criterion in a Time of Hollow Men
Like other poets before him, Eliot woke to find himself famous; but still he labored in the cellars of Lloyd’s Bank—tidying the assets of the German propagandist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, after his death in 1927, among other chores, and dealing with all claims and obligations of Lloyd’s that arose out of the Versailles Treaty. The Waste Land had been a high success: yet a success, at first, chiefly among those who themselves wrote or aspired to write. It was nothing like the popular triumphs of Scott and Byron, more than a century before, or even like the popularity of John Betjeman, four decades later.
“Success” meant that the American first edition (for which its publisher paid Eliot a tardy advance of a hundred and fifty dollars) sold out promptly, and that another thousand copies were printed. It meant that the Dial Award (two thousand dollars, actually by pre-arrangement with that magazine, which published the poem first in its pages) went to Eliot. It would mean, in time, that Eliot’s name would be known to millions who had read next to nothing that he wrote. Yet this early success left him literally beneath a London pavement, people’s heels tapping incessantly on the green glass cubes of the walk just above his head as he sat at his Lloyd’s table.
Success as a poet made Eliot more noticed in the Bank itself. In Switzerland, young I. A. Richards encountered an officer of Lloyd’s, Mr. W., who inquired of him whether Mr. Eliot was a good poet; and on Richards having assured him that Eliot was such, Mr. W. declared himself pleased:
“You know, I myself am really very glad indeed to hear you say that. Many of my colleagues wouldn’t agree at all. They think a Banker has no business whatever to be a poet. … But I believe that anything a man does, whatever his hobby may be, it’s all the better if he is really keen on it and does it well. … In fact, if he goes on as he has been doing, I don’t see why—in time, of course, in time—he mightn’t even become a Branch Manager.”1
Actually, Eliot might have risen still higher than that in the City, had he persisted—as he might have risen at Harvard, or at Oxbridge; it was his talent for executing business, indeed, that soon would find him a place with a new publishing house. Like Harvard, the Bank had expected him to persist. Probably he preferred his work at Lloyd’s to a university lectureship; he told Richards, in those days, that “No, he wasn’t at all sure that an academic life would be what he would choose.”
But either he must leave the bank and find some other means of supporting himself and his wife, or else cease to write: he had collapsed before from overwork, and now that he was editing a review in addition to his other undertakings, he was on the verge of a second collapse. In June 1920, Ezra Pound had written to John Quinn, a New York patron of arts and letters, asking for a subvention for Eliot: “His wife hasn’t a cent and is an invalid always cracking up, & needing doctors, & incapable of earning anything—though she has tried—poor little brute.” By the beginning of 1923, Lloyd’s was paying Eliot a salary of six hundred pounds annually; it was not so much lack of money that oppressed him as it was the endeavor to be simultaneously a banker and a man of letters. What might be done for him?
The Woolfs hoped that a salaried editorship might be secured for Great Tom. At this time, the leading lights of Liberalism were reorganizing their chief serious periodical, The Nation and Athenaeum. Would not Eliot make a good literary editor—or perhaps assistant literary editor, under Leonard Woolf? Virginia Woolf appealed to Lytton Strachey for support, writing to him in February that Eliot was becoming, “in his highly American way, which is tedious and long-winded to a degree,” desperate; he might have to leave the Bank in any event. Maynard Keynes also strongly supported Eliot’s candidacy for this post. But most of the Nation’s directors either had not heard of Eliot or entertained certain reservations, perhaps suspecting his politics—not without cause. At length they did offer him a place, but at a salary less by two hundred pounds than that he received from Lloyd’s, and guaranteeing only six months’ tenure; he could not take that. Early in March, he wrote to John Quinn that he had not leisure enough to visit a dentist or a barber. “I am worn out. I cannot go on.”
During 1922, two attempts had been made to raise a regular subsidy for the author of The Waste Land. In March, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and May Sinclair, associated in Bel Esprit (a little association got up by Pound), had commenced endeavors to obtain three hundred pounds annually, for at least five years, the money to be paid to Eliot that he might “devote his whole time to literature.” To William Carlos Williams, Pound wrote: “The point is that Eliot is at the last gasp. Has had one breakdown. We have got to do something at once.” A Bel Esprit circular, concocted without Eliot’s knowledge, appealed for substantial help. “The facts are that his bank work has diminished his output of poetry, and that his prose has grown tired. Last winter he broke down and was sent off for three months’ rest.”
John Quinn contributed three hundred dollars in cash, and twenty-one other donors were found; Bel Esprit appears to have obtained money or pledges that might have sufficed to provide a hundred and twenty pounds annually for Eliot. Pound also had urged donors to send money directly to Eliot, if they liked, and the appeal leaked into newspapers: anonymous gifts, including four postage stamps, reached Eliot, and his family in America grew indignant on learning of the scheme. Eliot then refused to accept Bel Esprit’s benefaction. Having accomplished nothing for Eliot or any other writer or artist, Pound’s creation, Bel Esprit, ceased to exist in 1923, though the group’s example had persuaded some Frenchmen to subsidize Paul Valéry. Quinn later sent Eliot four hundred dollars, promised annual gifts, and tried to obtain another annual two hundred dollars from Otto Kahn; but Quinn already was near his end.
What Pound could not do from Paris, Bloomsbury might essay. During the summer of 1922, the Woolf circle took up the good cause, trying to found the Eliot Fellowship Fund; Aldington was treasurer, and Lady Ottoline Morrell, Leonard Woolf, and Harry Norton formed the fund’s committee for England. Calling Eliot “one of the most original and distinguished writers of our day,” the committee had declared that “It is impossible that he should continue to produce good poetry unless he has more leisure than he can now hope to obtain, but his literary work is of far too high and original a quality to afford by itself a means of livelihood.”
Lytton Strachey, though he gave a hundred pounds to this fund, thought the appeal somewhat absurd—especially after Eliot formally objected that it must be his own decision as to whether he should leave the Bank; Strachey parodied the Eliot appeal in a letter to the Woolfs, asking for his own fund, “The Lytton Strachey Donation.” This project, too, fell through.*
In the end, very little was done for the exhausted Eliot during 1922 and 1923. While all these futile negotiations were in progress, Eliot was embarking upon the heavy and unremunerated labor of founding his own literary review, the Criterion. That quarterly—for one brief period a monthly—was to endure for nearly seventeen years, the most important journal of criticism and reflection on either side of the Atlantic. The first number appeared in October 1922.
This bold act of commencing the Criterion signified that Eliot, unlike Gerontion, did not despair of grace; and that he hoped to restore and reinvigorate Heartbreak House. The Criterion was meant to be a work of renewal, stirring up the hopes and enlivening the imagination of educated people who might recognize some worth in Tradition. Then, too, it was intended to assist in the recovery of the common cultural patrimony of Europe by attracting to its pages writers from many countries, the men who would recognize their common cause. And it would scourge the ragged follies of the time. Even though this review’s subscribers (as things would turn out) at no time numbered more than eight hundred, Eliot was addressing himself to what Matthew Arnold (after Isaiah) had called The Remnant. Of missions to the masses, the twentieth century knew too many; Eliot’s mission was to the educated classes. The drift toward Marxism, or toward some other totalist ideology, was apparent already among literary people: Eliot would offer them an alternative—in philosophy and religion, in humane letters, in politics.
Three numbers of the Criterion appeared without editorial apology; but in the number for July 1923, the editor would insert a leaflet explaining his review’s purpose: “the Criterion aims at the examination of first principles in criticism, at the valuation of new, and the revaluation of old works of literature according to principles, and the illustration of these principles in creative writing. It aims at the affirmation and development of tradition. It aims at the determination of the value of literature to other humane pursuits. It aims at the assertion of order and discipline in literary taste.”
Also it aimed at political resurrection, though this was not proclaimed. From the first, the Criterion published essays touching upon political theory and institutions—this despite Eliot’s smiling rebuke to Chesterton and Wells for some recent offenses of that character.
As the Criterion progressed, Eliot’s coldness toward Matthew Arnold diminished: for Arnold had endeavored in similar fashion to do the work that Eliot had chosen—to restore culture and put down anarchy through an appeal to men of intellect. In the Criterion’s final number at the beginning of 1939, Eliot would acknowledge the bent of his quarterly—a bent long before discerned by all its subscribers: “For myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology—and economics to depend upon right ethics; leading to emphases which somewhat stretched the original framework of a literary review.” (This sentence nearly paraphrases a passage in Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership—even though that book had been somewhat condescendingly reviewed by Herbert Read in the Criterion for October 1924.) The order of the soul could not be parted from the order of the commonwealth.
No sooner had Eliot written his draft of The Waste Land than he flung himself into what Walter Bagehot had called “The Age of Discussion”: through discussion among thinking people, the Waste Land might be watered. Eliot had found a patroness, Lady Rothermere, for his review by the end of 1921, and by the following autumn the first number made its strong impact—upon the sort of readers who might perceive reality among The Waste Land’s symbols of disorder. Eliot accepted no salary as editor; Richard Aldington (said by Herbert Read to have entertained some jealousy of their friend Eliot) became assistant editor.
Since the beginning of the Age of Discussion, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the tone of civilized life and the fabric of social order had been maintained in considerable part by the serious journals of opinion and criticism. These magazines, carrying on discussion of first principles and current controversies among educated and reflective people, had exerted a profound influence upon those who more directly shaped public opinion—clergymen, professors, newspaper editors, lawyers, public men, and a great many of the men and women whose names no one ever hears, but who individually command the respect of friends and neighbors, and thus turn the mind of the public in one direction or another. In 1921, the number and influence of such sober periodicals already were decreasing and this retreat would become a rout, after the Second World War (on the close approach of which disaster, the Criterion folded its tent).
If serious reviews should go by the board, Eliot knew, the public might be left with nothing better than what, after much experience, Arthur Machen called “that damnable vile business,” daily journalism of the (then) halfpenny variety; for the better newspapers generally took their tone from the reflective quarterlies, monthlies, and weeklies. Henry Adams had said that though his North American Review enjoyed a direct circulation of merely a few hundred copies, its indirect influence was incalculable, the editors of daily papers reading it and diffusing its ideas by plagiarism.
To Eliot, much about the Age of Discussion was unattractive—and had been unattractive, ever since its infancy in the Reformation. That age had been an age of presumption, egoism, and frantic voices; it had challenged prescriptive wisdom, had denied every authority, had scoffed at tradition, and might bring mankind to the brink of destruction.
It is not always agreeable to live in a time when everything under the sun is brought perennially into question—when every principle in life is haggled over incessantly, as if the world were one sophistical debating society. Yet once men have got into an Age of Discussion, they are unlikely to return into an Age of Faith; the danger is that they may slide into an era of secular propaganda, of unthinking conformity to fad and foible, and of mass manipulation.
Serious journalism, in the sense of regularly published reflective periodicals, is not very old: it commenced not long before the approach of the French Revolution, when people in power began to find it prudent to consult or to persuade public opinion on the principal questions of the day, rather than simply to ascertain the opinions of the court, the upper clergy, the territorial magnates, and the great bankers and merchants. In Britain, as the Age of Discussion approached its zenith, The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly had led the way; similar journals of opinion and criticism had sprung up in France, Italy, Spain, the German states, and the new United States. Such periodicals attained the height of their influence in the latter half of the nineteenth century (a period, incidentally, much distrusted by Eliot), when they were found on the tables of every substantial householder. As a class of publications, already they were in decay when Eliot entered the field: during his own few years in London, The Egoist, Arts and Letters, and other reviews had come forth from the womb only to die in infancy.
In many countries after 1914, and especially in Britain, the diminished income of the upper and middle classes who had made up the bulk of the subscription lists had affected those journals. New diversions, with radio and films beginning to fill leisure hours, and the automobile functioning as a mechanical Jacobin, had begun to take their toll of leisurely readers. Despite much talk about the enlightenment of the working classes, late-Victorian and Edwardian endeavors of that sort already were collapsing before Eliot settled in London; George Gissing, in his novels, had remarked this failure. Nor had the increase of public literacy done anything to sustain the serious journals: it had become clear enough that there exists no sure relationship between compulsory schooling and voluntary reading; indeed, an inverse ratio might be postulated.
During the years of Eliot’s editorship of the Criterion, Britain—despite centuries of fairly popular government and a long history of free schools, which were made compulsory in consequence of the Reform of 1867 and the coming of economic competition from abroad—was subjected to perhaps the most vile popular press in the world. The Fortnightly and The Contemporary Review and Blackwood’s and The Quarterly and periodicals more serious survived—but survived only, dwindling in circulation; such popular magazines as the British edition of Harper’s (which, edited by Andrew Lang at the beginning of the century, had circulated a hundred thousand copies monthly) were to vanish altogether. And when the first number of the Criterion came out, few of today’s university-sponsored quarterlies had come into existence on either side of the Atlantic.
With the serious reviews that did exist in Britain or America in 1921, Eliot was unsatisfied, although he contributed to them; not altogether pleased with the new Dial, for instance, as he had been less than pleased with the old Dial.2 What reviews asked the tremendous questions? What editors shared his convictions? Was there something more to literature than diversion, or the “art for art’s sake” pose of Gosse, or the “green and pleasant land” silliness, or the American cult of the colossal, from Whitman to Sandburg? Was there something more to society than economic efficiency, and something more to politics than what H. L. Mencken called boob-bumping? What periodical was giving expression to the moral imagination and to the claims of tradition? If a serious journal might begin to raise such questions afresh, the Age of Discussion might not sink into an Age of Hollowness. The Criterion was one of T. S. Eliot’s several strong attempts to redeem the time. He would do what he might to restore standards of judgment.*
Why did not Eliot state more fully, at the beginning, his purpose for the Criterion? One reason for this reticence, probably, was the new quarterly’s financial sponsorship. Its benefactress, for its first three years, was Lilian, Lady Rothermere—who meant well, but who understood and shared little of Eliot’s concerns.
Viscountess Rothermere was the consort of a most eminent baron of the halfpenny press—of Harold Harmsworth, created (1913) Lord Rothermere, who had made a tremendous financial success of the journalistic enterprises founded by his brother, Alfred Harmsworth, created Lord Northcliffe. They had commenced by building up, in the judgment of R. C. K. Ensor, “a most lucrative business in periodicals supplying chatty unintellectual pabulum for uneducated minds.”3 They had secured a Glasgow Irishman from the slums, Kennedy Jones, to create a daily paper with the biggest circulation (already achieved by 1896) in Britain. Their papers, as Lord Salisbury had said, were “written by office-boys for office-boys.”
This denigration from Hatfield House was mild: for these papers were precisely what Arthur Machen meant by “that damnable vile business.” Northcliffe is described as boyish by his biographer, Hamilton Fyfe—“boyish his irresponsibility, his disinclination to take himself or his publications seriously; his conviction that whatever benefits them is justifiable, and that it is not his business to consider the effects of their contents on the public mind.”4 The newspapers of the Harmsworths were meant to bring money and power to the Harmsworths, and that they did. Quarter-educated men at best, Northcliffe and Rothermere were figures of the Waste Land.
Of the politics of these barons of the press, nothing more charitable may be said than that they shared what Bagehot had called “the ignorant democratic conservatism of the masses.” They stuffed their newspapers with fraudulent and distorted “news” for the sake of sensation and circulation. Readers enjoy a good hate, said Alfred Harmsworth; the brothers and their editors conjured up images to be detested; they did well out of hothouse anger, successively, against the French, the Boers, the Boxers, the Germans. In the gratified expectation of more money, the Harmsworths had done their full share to extend the boundaries of the Waste Land.
A brother-in-law’s and a husband’s tastes are not necessarily those of a lady-patroness of a new critical quarterly; yet from the first Eliot must have been acutely uncomfortable with such a connection. What he hoped to undo, the Harmsworth interest was increasing. With such backing, it was best not to mention at all, in early numbers of the Criterion, certain ends of that quarterly.
Happily for Eliot, the sponsorship did not continue long. Though she did not interfere overmuch with her editor, Lady Rothermere had desired a different sort of publication. In 1925 she summoned Eliot to Switzerland, and he learned that her subsidy (through Cobden Sanderson, who had published the magazine during its first three years) was to be discontinued. A few months earlier, Eliot had written to Herbert Read concerning his ambitions for the review and concerning Lady Rothermere’s different expectations. She had desired “a more chic and brilliant Arts and Letters, which might have a fashionable vogue among a wealthy few”; Eliot had no complaint, for she had been “quite as appreciative as one could expect a person of her antecedents and connections to be.”
Some thought, he told Read, that as editor he had been making money from the Criterion—though actually he had taken no salary; others, including his American relatives, had thought that he must be bringing out the review “for other discreditable reasons.” He had been silent as to his motives and policy in editing the quarterly, he went on, because he did not wish to be accused of a hunger for leadership. “If one maintains a cause, one is either a fanatic or a hypocrite: and if one has any definite dogmas, then one is imposing those dogmas upon those who cooperate.”
Although he desired to bring together writers of similar views, this homogeneity was indefinable: “I do not expect everybody to subscribe to all the articles of my own faith, or to read Arnold, Newman, Bradley, or Maurras with my eyes.” Dogma and a creed were desirable at that time, he added, but none of us is wholly consistent; he did not trouble himself about the charge that his own verse and his own prose did not well consist. “Why then should I bother myself about particular differences of formulation between myself and those whom I should like to find working with me?”5
This new review would become the principal rival of the well-established, but dull, London Mercury; indeed, the Mercury would cease publication before the Criterion did. From the first, the “Criterion group” included many men whose views did not coincide with Eliot’s—John Middleton Murry the most frequent contributor among those. Eliot succeeded in attracting most of the writers he had hoped for—although the irascible Wyndham Lewis deserted the Criterion, perhaps from pressure of work, perhaps from some obscure grudge.
Eliot certainly did not intend to advance the principles—or non-principles—of Northcliffe and Rothermere. What did he mean to stand for? Even though he did not declare his “dogmas” in the first number of his review, it is easy enough to describe those doctrines by a glance at Eliot’s background.
If a man believes earnestly in Tradition, as Eliot did, it becomes lost endeavor to look for the source of his convictions mainly in the writings of his contemporaries, or even in formal political theories. Eliot’s politics took form early in his life, and were not altered substantially, though his expression of those principles improved with the passing of the decades.
The real roots of Eliot the social thinker were entwined with the history of his family and of the republic into which he had been born; with English social experience and political prescription; with the Christian concept of social order, particularly in its Anglican aspect; and with the political imagination of certain great men of letters whom he admired—notably Virgil, Dante, Dryden, Johnson, and Coleridge. Against the various political messiahs of his time, he reacted strongly, in part because they were hostile to Christian teaching and the Church. And he set his face against various political literati and social theorists of his day, from H. G. Wells to Karl Mannheim.
Of political writers during his era, two especially are mentioned in his essays and editorial commentaries: Charles Maurras and T. E. Hulme. The latter was reinforcement only, for Eliot knew nothing of Hulme until Herbert Read brought out (in 1924) the dead man’s Speculations—by which year Eliot had made up his mind already concerning the first principles of society.* Maurras, read much by Eliot as early as 1910, endured with him a long while: Eliot admired in the founder of Action Française his advocacy of cultural continuity, his defense of the genius of Christianity (even though Eliot himself was not yet a professed Christian), his zeal for order: all these expressed in a noble prose. Yet on most points, Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership is closer to Eliot than any of Maurras’ writings.
As for those political philosophers whose names stand grand in the college manuals of politics, Eliot was to mention them seldom—and then perhaps slightingly. (Of Thomas Hobbes, he was contemptuous in truly cavalier fashion.) J. M. Cameron, the shrewdest essayist on Eliot’s politics, wonders why “Mr. Eliot fails to see that his real affinities are not with Maurras (so radical in his positivism) but with those who are the prophets and apologists of the liberal societies of England and the United States: with Jefferson and Burke, with Acton and Maitland.”6 The reasons are not far to seek, however. As for Jefferson, T. S. Eliot grew up an heir of the Federalists, like his distant kinsman Henry Adams, and the name of Jefferson was anathema, with cause; more than once, Eliot remarked that his America had ended with the public’s rejection of John Quincy Adams as president of the United States. As for Burke (who, nevertheless, influenced Eliot through Babbitt in his early years, and directly during his last two decades)—why, Burke was a Whig, and Samuel Johnson had told everyone that the first Whig was the Devil.
The political exemplar of Eliot’s youth had been a gentleman as real to the St. Louis boy as if he still had sat at the head of the dining table on Locust Street: the grandfather he never actually saw, the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, “the nineteenth-century descendant of Chaucer’s parson.”7 That grandfather had been a Christian hero—and a pillar of the visible community, a reforming conservative, as well as a buttress of the community of souls. In St. Louis he had reformed the schools; founded the university; become the apostle of gradual emancipation of the slaves, the champion of national union, the leader in a dozen other turbulent causes of reform—but always in the light of the permanent things. William Greenleaf Eliot had cherished, in the words of Tom Eliot’s mother, “all that was sacred and memorable in the past, as a priceless legacy, a repository of truth, even though commingled with error.” His grandfather’s notion of perfectibility, and some other beliefs (among them the grandfather’s zeal for prohibiting strong drink), T. S. Eliot would discard; yet a grandfather like that must weigh more lifelong, for an adherent of Tradition, than all the political metaphysicians in the books.
Some commentators on Eliot tend to forget how American he remained in some aspects, despite his having become a British subject; and the conservative side of the American political experience, as represented by Federalism and even by St. Louis Republicanism, colored Eliot’s thought more strongly than did anything from the European continent of his own years. He remained familiar with American practical politics to his last years, and I conversed with him on such topics (corruption in the United States Senate, for instance), several times in the fifties; he quickly apprehended political allusions by which almost any Englishman would have been bewildered. Despite his veneration of King Charles the Martyr, there ran through Eliot’s political assumptions much of his learned and fearless kinsman President John Adams—a fertile virgin teritory, this, for any doctoral candidate.* “No one wholly English in culture could have brought himself in the nineteen-twenties to confess to ‘Royalism’ as a political creed,” J. M. Cameron comments, “and though the An glo-Catholicism with which Mr. Eliot linked his Royalism is by definition English, as worn by him it has a less insular cut than is common. This slight eccentricity to English styles of thinking has sometimes, though not always, been of immense advantage to Mr. Eliot in his political writings. In the heady days of the Popular Front he managed to keep his balance when many writers lost theirs, and this without yielding to the complacency which marked the conservatism of Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.”8
Just so: Eliot remained sufficiently American in political background to judge of British political affairs with something like detachment. There was no English writer on politics of his own time who influenced Eliot so much as had Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Consider this passage, for instance, that Eliot took to heart:
“Reaction may be, and in the true sense is, something utterly different from this futile dreaming; it is essentially to answer action with action, to oppose to the welter of circumstance the force of discrimination and selection, to direct the aimless tide of change by reference to the co-existing law of the immutable fact, to carry the experiences of the past into the diverse impulses of the present, and so to move forward in an orderly progression. If any young man, feeling now within himself the power of accomplishment, hesitates to be called a reactionary, in the better sense of this term, because of the charge of effeminacy, let him take courage.”
Charles Maurras? Not at all: this is drawn from Paul Elmer More’s volume On Being Human, the final collection of The New Shelburne Essays, published early in 1936, a few months after More’s death. In Eliot’s editorial Commentary for July 1936, will be found these sentences:
“The only reactionaries today are those who object to the dictatorship of finance and the dictatorship of a bureaucracy under whatever political name it is assembled; and those who would have some law and some ideal not purely of this world. But the movement, towards the Right so-called, … is far more profound than any mere machinations of consciously designing interests can make it. …”
Paul Elmer More’s “young man, feeling now within himself the power of accomplishment,” had been a Harvard undergraduate when, in 1906, More became literary editor of The Nation. It was More’s call to imaginative reaction, echoing down the years, that reinforced Eliot’s courage in scourging the follics of the time. Through Eliot, as through More, there spoke something out of the old New England; and with Eliot, that voice returned, affirming, to the country from which it had withdrawn, negating, three centuries earlier.*
So his American background remained powerful in the politics of Eliot. No one would deny that his embracing of English life and institutions contributed mightily to the conservative inclination of his social convictions. As much by accident as from choice, the young Eliot had taken lodging in Heartbreak House; and he had found his apartment agreeable enough, despite the holes in the roof and the rats in the cellar. He came to love London, from the Wren spires to the Underground; and the English villages and countryside. Heartbreak House though Britain might be, and much though Eliot might despise most of Britain’s public men in his time, still there was shade in this corner of the Waste Land, as under the red rock. Freedom and order and justice survived more hopefully in Britain, during those years, than anywhere else in the world: the crown in parliament, the constitution, and the common law still protected a national community. To this prescriptive pattern of politics, Eliot gave his allegiance.
Distrust of political abstractions had served the English well for a long while. Theirs had been called the politics of empiricism; but more accurately, the British social structure and the British political institutions were the product of custom and convention, prescription and prejudice, a beneficent continuity centuries old. Here much that was good in the civil social order might be preserved, and perhaps reinvigorated. In Britain, Eliot found a Tradition worth defending: a Tradition imperilled, but not doomed utterly. Eliot took up a cause conservative, having faith in that Tradition, though not (at least until his later years) a Conservative with a capital. The politicians of that party which professed attachment to continuity and convention were a feeble lot, Eliot perceived. As a body, the Conservative leaders of Eliot’s years have been sufficiently described by W. L. Burn:
“Having abandoned the old aristocratic concept of government they did nothing to create a new aristocracy; they relied confidently on their skill in riding the wild horses of democracy; they were gamblers who would pocket their winnings and pay their losses cheerfully without seeking to alter the rules of the game. What did they do to maintain the family as the basic unit of society? There may be answers to this question, but they are not, in recollection, very obvious. … A certain tolerance and a certain efficiency, of which Baldwin and Chamberlain were the respective representatives; and in addition, the opportunity to pad oneself against the more unpleasant impacts of society. The process of proletarianisation was allowed to continue, but a man who was sufficiently wealthy could withdraw himself from contact with it. The chief difference today is that the process of proletarianisation has been accelerated while most of the exemptions have been cancelled.”9
To that, Eliot would have said Amen. To redeem the time in England from the Conservatives, as well as from the Socialists and the Liberals and various glum ideological factions, was from the first a principal purpose of Eliot’s Criterion. A standard must be raised, in politics as in literature. Eliot did not hesitate to proclaim himself a reactionary in twentieth-century Britain: he had no desire to conserve decadence and ugliness; something might be accomplished if thinking Englishmen could be reminded of what had been said and done in that realm during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and earlier. Nothing was more natural for Eliot than that he should become, in these circumstances, a Tory. (Toryism, John Henry Newman had said, is loyalty to persons.) “I always was a natural Tory,” James Russell Lowell had written to Thomas Hughes in 1875, “and in England should be a staunch one. I would not give up a thing that had roots to it, though it might suck up its food from graveyards.”10 What Lowell might have become, Eliot did become—but trusting that England still had more life in it than did the graveyard round the Chapel Perilous. Coleridge’s “constitution of church and state, according to the idea of each” would be Eliot’s thereafter.
Eliot’s fundamental assumptions about social order, then, were drawn in considerable part from his American inheritance and his English situation, illuminated by his historical consciousness. What of influence by political theorists? In England, there had been only five practical leaders who also were men of thought and rhetoric, Eliot suggests in his essay on Charles Whibley (1931): Clarendon, Halifax, Bolingbroke, Burke, and Disraeli; and of those, he entertained doubts about Bolingbroke. But the most certain influence upon Eliot came from three poets and critics, incidentally men of political thought, who loom large in Eliot’s writings: John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Of these, probably Johnson, in politics, meant most to Eliot.11
Far from being an absolutist, Johnson stood for the rule of law in a polity, the libido dominandi restrained by custom and statute. He was not particular as to the frame of government, provided that it was a government founded upon prescription: if men’s morality is tolerably strong, Johnson reasoned, almost any political system will work well enough; while if morality is decayed, constitutions are ropes of sand. These assumptions, together with the loyalty of the Tories to the throne and their strong attachment to the Church of England, were what Johnson and Coleridge and others passed on to Eliot.
So it was natural enough that Eliot, whose understanding of political man closely resembled Johnson’s, stood up for something very like the high old Toryism—in a time at least as uncongenial for Tories as Johnson’s age had been. Eliot’s politics, like Johnson’s, were far more historical than theoretical in their roots. With Johnson, Eliot retained strong sympathies for the Old Cause—even though, as he would write later, “We cannot follow an antique drum.” He believed in the need for aristocracy, hereditary and intellectual: the alternative to an aristocratic element in a polity was the rule of an oligarchy. He saw the Whigs as fathers of the Liberals of his own day; like Yeats, he abhorred the thoroughgoing Whig, the shallow rationalist and sophister, with—
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.
The Criterion would take its stand against leveling radicalism and against plutocracy. It would oppose political cults of personality. It would endeavor to find a middle ground between the degradation of the democratic dogma and the new totalism of Communists, Nazis, and Fascists. It would try to save men of intellect from dishonest servitude to ideology and faction: from what Benda was to call “the treason of the intellectuals” (more accurately translated, by borrowing a word from Coleridge, as “the treason of the clerisy”).
“The Whigs will live and die in the heresy that the world is governed by little tracts and pamphlets,” Walter Scott once wrote to a friend. Eliot did not fall into that Whiggish error: he knew that his journal could work only upon a few minds, and upon those slowly. But in Britain, when the early numbers of the Criterion appeared, the old framework of class and politics still stood, if here or there eaten through by rust. Through persistence and appeal to the literate, the Fabians had moved the nation in one direction; by similar endeavors, conceivably Eliot and a handful of friends could contrive to shift the nation in another direction.
The Criterion’s first issue appeared at an hour of crisis for true-blue Tories. On October 17, 1922, at the Carleton Club, Lloyd George’s Coalition government was brought down by Stanley Baldwin, then President of the Board of Trade. Lloyd George was a dynamic force, Baldwin told the Conservatives at that meeting, but “a dynamic force is a very terrible thing.” Withdrawing from the Coalition, the Conservatives resolved to fight the next general election as an independent party with their own leader. At least Heartbreak House was freed of Lloyd George’s management.
In the general election of 1922, the Conservatives won 344 seats out of the 615 in the House of Commons, and Bonar Law became prime minister as a Conservative, rather than as a Coalitionist (which had been his standing for a short time after Lloyd George’s resignation). Law scarcely fulfilled Eliot’s model of a statesman, though a man more honest than Lloyd George had been. Might it be possible, in the confusion of parties then, for something like the moral imagination of Dryden and Johnson and Coleridge to work upon the practical politics of Britain? Such hope was indulged by Eliot when he launched the Criterion; and though never rewarded, that hope persisted in Eliot so long as his magazine endured.
A Strong Cry from a City Cellar
Despite Eliot’s talk of dogma, the Criterion welcomed a wide variety of literary schools and a diversity of social and religious persuasions. The first number contained, in addition to The Waste Land, George Saintsbury (an older staunch Tory, if a skeptical one) on Dullness; T. Sturge Moore on Tristram and Isolt; a ghostly tale by May Sinclair; the plan of Dostoevsky’s novel The Life of a Great Sinner; Hermann Hesse on recent German poetry; Valery Larbaud on Joyce’s Ulysses. Later numbers during the first year of publication included contributions by Ernst Robert Curtius, Ezra Pound, Roger Fry, Luigi Pirandello, Julien Benda, Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read, W. B. Yeats, Owen Barfield, E. M. Forster, Paul Valéry, and other people of stature. The only directly political piece, in 1922–23, was an appreciation of Bolingbroke, in two parts, by Charles Whibley.
Eliot himself contributed to the second number one of his more enduring short essays, “In Memoriam: Marie Lloyd.” This praise of “the greatest music hall artist in England” touched upon the decay of class, now extending to the lower class: “The middle classes, in England as elsewhere, under democracy, are morally dependent upon the aristocracy, and the aristocracy are morally in fear of the middle class, which is gradually absorbing and destroying them.” With the coming of a classless society, boredom reigns. The Melanesians, W. H. R. Rivers had written, are dwindling toward extinction because “civilization” has deprived them of their native culture: literally they are bored to death. “When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas,” Eliot concluded, “when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheaper motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories through a wireless receiver attached to its ears, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilised world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.” The boredom of a total egalitarianism would run through Eliot’s writings thereafter, as it had been an occasional theme with George Saintsbury before him.
From the third number forward, reviews of French, German, and American periodicals were published. Although the cultural unity of Europe was a principal interest of the editor of the Criterion, the early contributions from famous European writers who looked upon Europe as one historic community may have been somewhat disappointing to Eliot; articles about these leaders of European thought were more satisfactory. More Continental writers were persuaded to contribute to the second volume of the quarterly—among them Hofmannsthal, Lévy-Bruhl, Proust, and Cavafy—and the roster of distinguished authors grew: Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Hugh Walpole, J. Middleton Murry, Sacheverell Sitwell, W. B. Yeats, Osbert Sitwell, Harold Monro, David Garnett. F. W. Bain wrote on Disraeli, and Charles Whibley on Chesterfield. Book reviews commenced with the number for July 1924.
In its second year, Eliot contributed to his magazine two essays, two reviews, and two editorial Commentaries. In “The Function of Criticism” (October 1923), he belabored Romanticism and Whiggery, on behalf of Classicism and Catholicism; he defended Tradition and Outside Authority against Middleton Murry’s Inner Voice:
“If, then, a man’s interest is political, he must, I presume, profess an allegiance to principles, or to a form of government, or to a monarch; and if he is interested in religion, and has one, to a Church; and if he happens to be interested in literature, he must acknowledge, it seems to me, just that sort of allegiance. … There is, nevertheless, an alternative, which Mr. Murry has expressed. ‘The English writer, the English divine, the English statesman, inherit no rules from their forebears; they inherit only this: a sense that in the last resort they must depend upon the inner voice.’ This statement does, I admit, appear to cover certain cases; it throws a flood of light upon Mr. Lloyd George. But why ‘in the last resort’? Do they, then, avoid the dictates of an inner voice up to the last extremity? My belief is that those who possess this inner voice are ready enough to hearken to it, and will hear no other. The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formulated by an elder critic in the now familiar phrase of ‘doing as one likes.’ The possessors of an inner voice ride ten to a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust.”
Nothing could better express the ethical character of the Criterion than the preceding passage. Another of Eliot’s principal ethical essays appeared in February 1924: the preface to “Four Elizabethan Dramatists.” If critics who argued that Eliot idealized the past (because of his description, in The Waste Land, of Elizabeth and Leicester on the Thames, and similar lines) had read this essay with any attention, they might have been hard put to it to explain away these sentences:
“Even the philosophical basis, the general attitude toward life of the Elizabethans, is one of anarchism, of dissolution, of decay. It is in fact exactly parallel and indeed one and the same thing with their artistic greediness, their desire for every sort of effect together, their unwillingness to accept any limitation and abide by it. The Elizabethans are in fact a part of the movement of progress or deterioration which has culminated in Sir Arthur Pinero and the present regiment of Europe.”
An age that prates of progress, Eliot suggested repeatedly, probably is on its way to Avernus. In his Commentary (the first of many Criterion Commentaries) of April 1924, Eliot discussed T. E. Hulme’s posthumous Speculations, edited by Herbert Read. Hulme is “classical, reactionary, and revolutionary; he is the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century,” in Britain a solitary figure. “A new classical age will be reached when the dogma, or ideology, of the critic is so modified by contact with creative writing, and when the creative writers are so permeated by the new dogma, that a state of equilibrium is reached.
“For what is meant by a classical moment in literature is surely a moment of stasis, when the creative impulse finds a form which satisfies the best intellect of the time, a moment when a type is produced.”
Aspiring to formulate that new dogma which would introduce a classical era, Eliot laid about himself manfully in this first Commentary, cudgeling Bertrand Russell for his opinions on men of culture (which had been published in The Dial), and cudgeling Dean Ralph Inge for his “violence, prejudice, ignorance, and confusion,” unworthy of the Dean of St. Paul’s talents, when Inge wrote for newspaper readers. In his Commentary of July 1924, Eliot assailed various literary critics for obliterating just distinctions, confounding “attitudes” toward life or religion or society with literature. The most dangerous of these tendencies, he wrote, “is the tendency to confuse literature with religion—a tendency which can only have the effect of degrading literature and annihilating religion.” In the same Commentary, he cast a suspicious eye upon The Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—possibly an agency for official Soviet propaganda, he suggested. The ideologue—that is, the zealot who subverts religion to make way for the new Savage God’s fierce commandments—was Protean in his talents; but in the Criterion Eliot kept watch upon the ideologue.
In the third volume of the Criterion—the last under Lady Rothermere’s patronage—still more well-known men of letters made their appearance, among them D. H. Lawrence, whom Eliot recognized as important though distasteful. Conrad Aiken, Clive Bell, Edith Sitwell, F. G. Selby, Gilbert Seldes, A. E. Coppard, Benedetto Croce, James Joyce, and Edwin Muir were published. F. W. Bain’s essay “1789” was a blast against Jacobinism. There was considerable attention in these four numbers to music, the theater, and the ballet.
In January 1925, appeared “Three Poems by Thomas Eliot”—to be discussed later, for they were fragments of “The Hollow Men.” In the same number, Eliot published his “dialogue” or short story “On the Eve”; much of its first draft had been the work of Vivienne Eliot, and it was a literary form in which Eliot did not persevere. Its theme is the phenomenon of the rich and well-connected anarchist—an interesting subject that had been taken up some years earlier by Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and G. K. Chesterton. In this dialogue, the remarks of one of the aristocratic diners, Alexander, generally reflect Eliot’s own misgivings and suspicions—except for Alexander’s acceptance of dictatorship as a palliative.
Alexander, quoting Disraeli, expresses his loathing for those rich Liberals who play at pulling down the laws, the empire, and the religion of England. “They are ‘capitalists’ because they live upon a civilisation to which they contribute nothing—and they are ‘anarchists’ because they are ready to destroy the civilisation which bore and nourished them. There is a certain irony, of course, about the fate of these Gadarene swine. They have always stood for ‘progress’—and the progress which they have set in motion is on the point of obliterating them for ever. …
“They have stood for the extension of democracy—and now that democracy is extended to the utmost, democracy is on the point of deposing them in favour of a new oligarchy stronger and more terrible than their own. …
“They cling, at the last, to the paltry satisfaction of ‘holding the balance of power’ between the two parties both of which they affect to despise. They have been squandering everything that the humble people have worked to create—soldiers and generals and diplomats and administrators are humble people, in my opinion,” said Alexander acidly. “The Whigs have no principles,” he continued, summing up judicially. “Look at their policies toward Russia, and Ireland, and India. …
“But they will never see what has happened. It is at their dinner-tables that one hears the most antiquated political theories, and the most unintelligent expressions of the most snobbish and insincere literary taste. …”
Here Eliot, through Alexander, was excoriating the Liberals who had entered into the “Lib-Lab” government of Ramsay MacDonald, which took office as a coalition after the general election of 1923 (even though Labour had obtained only 30.7 percent of the votes, and the Liberals 29.9 percent, the Conservatives remaining the largest party). Sidney and Beatrice Webb were the intellectual architects of this domination; and Eliot knew that the Webbs looked to the Soviets for light.12 But Britain was not really on the eve of revolution. By the autumn of 1924, as D. C. Somervell observes, “The Liberals were heartily sick of maintaining in office by their votes a government which, in order to convince the world that it was not a protégé of Liberalism, did nothing but revile and abuse its benefactors.”13
In the general election, which occurred between the writing of “On the Eve” and that story’s publication, the MacDonald government fell; and never again would the Liberals win a general election. Yet the phenomenon of the rich radical would rise again—though Eliot would not again discuss the danger with such vehemence.
In his Commentary of January 1925, Eliot made some amends to Matthew Arnold—who now appeared as the champion (despite many weaknesses) of genuine culture against Marxist degradation of culture. Were Arnold still alive, said Eliot, “he would find Populace and Barbarians more philistinised, and Philistia more barbaric and proletarianised, than in his own time.” Trotsky’s Problems of Life had been published in English translation. In that book, Eliot had hoped to find the description of a new revolutionary culture that doubtless would have been repellent to him, but fascinating. Instead, what he found in Trotsky’s pages was boredom. The Soviet culture could not justify the horror of the Revolution:
“It is not justified by the dreary picture of Montessori schools, crèches, abstinence from swearing and alcohol, a population warmly clad (or soon to be warmly clad), and with its mind filled (or in process of being filled) with nineteenth-century superstitions about Nature and her forces. Yet such phenomena as these are what Mr. Trotsky proudly presents as the outcome of his revolution; these form his ‘culture.’ Here is the Eastern prophet of the new age speaking in the smuggest tones of a New Bourgeoisie:
“‘The cinema amuses, educates, strikes the imagination by images, and liberates you from the need of crossing the Church door.’
“It remains only to observe that there is no mention in Mr. Trotsky’s Encheiridion of Culture of such an institution as the ballet; and that his portrait shows a slight resemblance to the face of Mr. Sidney Webb.”
That the Trotskys and the Webbs should not dominate the culture of the future, Eliot in his poverty was working fifteen hours a day. He chose a passage from Arnold—that on Oxford, in Culture and Anarchy—to describe the endeavor of the Criterion:
“We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our communications with the future.”
Those communications with the future, nevertheless, Lady Rothermere was about to suspend. For three years, Eliot—an amiable autocrat as editor—had brought out a wonderfully interesting quarterly, in it the promise of moving the minds and hearts of the rising generation, as already The Waste Land functioned as catalyst. He had made his quarterly better than Paris’ Nouvelle Revue Française and New York’s Dial. Yet the Criterion was about to slide into oblivion, when Eliot’s circumstances were altered.
One change was misery: the deterioration of Vivienne Eliot. Under the pseudonyms of Fanny Marlow, Feiron Morris, Felix Morrison, and F. M., Eliot’s wife had written a half-dozen flirtatious vignettes and some book reviews for the Criterion; she would write no more. She had contributed a poem, too: “Necesse est Perstare?” Now she was ceasing to endure.
In Vivienne Eliot’s verses, people insist upon talking at lunch about “the eternal Aldous Huxley—Elizabeth Bibesco—Clive Bell—unceasing clamour of inanities.” Her husband, “like some very old monkey,” grows weary of this chatter; she grows wearier:
Is it necessary—
Is this necessary—
Tell me, is it necessary that we go through this?
Hyacinths bloom in two of her Criterion vignettes; in the winter of 1924 her hyacinths “are bursting clumsily out of their pots, as they always do, coming into misshapen bloom before their time. And this is the essential spring—spring in winter, spring in London, grey and misty spring, grey twilights, piano organs, flower women at street crossings. …
“Now one begins to beat against the bars of the cage: the typewriter and the telephone, and the sight of one’s face in the glass. One’s soul stirs stiffly out of the dead endurance of the winter—but toward what spring? … What happy meetings, what luminous conversations in twilight rooms filled with the scent of hyacinths, await me now? The uncompromising voice of truth inside me answers, None at all. For I am not the same person who once played—as it seems to me—a leading part in those spring fantasies. …
“Why do I always feel when I see Bernard Shaw that I must go up to him and take his hand and tell him all about the winter’s isolation, the typewriter and the telephone, the sight of one’s face in the glass and how one started life by being a beautiful Princess admired and worshipped by all men and living in a house of rosy glass through which one watched the envious world go by and how one is cast out of the glass house and wants to get back, inside, safe and beautiful and secure?”*
Yes, those hyacinths: one thinks immediately of the “hyacinth girl” in her husband’s “Burial of the Dead,” the first part of The Waste Land, written two and a half years earlier. Which came first—The Waste Land, or Vivienne’s recurrent misshapen and premature hyacinths?
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.
However one takes the hyacinth symbol, the marriage that may have been an idyll in 1915 steadily descended into torment: people rarely return to houses of rosy glass. Not long after The Waste Land had been published, that Hyacinth Girl whom Eliot had won—to his later sorrow—had begun to recede into a Waste Land of her own. In the spring of 1923—so Eliot had written to Bertrand Russell—Vivienne had barely weathered a frightful illness. By May 1925, he was writing to Russell that Vivienne’s health was a thousand times worse than it had been a decade earlier, when Russell had known her. It might be better—were it possible—for her to live alone, Eliot thought: “living with me has done her so much damage. …” After ten years of marriage, he still found Vivienne baffling and deceptive, “like a child of six with an immensely clever and precocious mind”; she could write extremely well, Eliot declared. He felt desperate.*
Now that Vivienne was too ill for money to do much for her (if ever it could have), Eliot’s material circumstances abruptly improved. During 1925, Geoffrey Faber—a poet turned entrepreneur, whose second volume of verse Eliot had reviewed in 1918—decided to shift from brewing into general publishing. The existing firm of The Scientific Press, managed by C. W. Stewart, became the partnership of Faber & Gwyer, and the proprietors looked about for a staff. Bruce Richmond of the Times Literary Supplement, and Hugh Walpole, and Charles Whibley, are said to have suggested Eliot’s name for a post. An offer was made and accepted: Eliot’s leanest days were over, and with this publishing firm (later Faber & Faber) he was to remain until his retirement. Thereafter Faber & Faber would publish Eliot’s own books, and he would help, as author and as director, to make the firm famous.
As a man of business, rather than as a man of letters, Eliot was engaged. “It isn’t even as if his colleagues at Faber & Gwyer were acknowledged or ardent admirers of Eliot’s literary judgement,” Frank Morley writes. “In 1925 I doubt if any of them saw any particular reason to defer to him in literary matters. What then were his assets? He was a gentleman; he was literate; he was patient; he got on well with difficult people; he had charm; and, he had been in the City. … At the start of a publishing house solvency is the greatest aim, and there was possibly something solid and comforting, something magical, in having a banker in the crew.”14
As a man of business, Eliot was to perform efficiently, after his fashion at Lloyd’s Bank. Morley describes him a few years later, when (in 1929) Faber & Gwyer had become Faber & Faber:
“He no longer wore the black coat. His face, rather pale from overwork, was now to be seen above an ordinary dark lounge suit but he had not given up the caution of the banker. He had a theory you were not likely to lose money on the books you didn’t publish. It was difficult to bully him; he had the courage to say No. But he could also say Yes. He was extremely perceptive in detecting the right character in manuscripts which might have been thought beyond his range. He made mistakes, of course, but his mistakes as a rule were not costly, and some of his far shots paid well. … One of the nicknames for Eliot was Possum (the reference here is to Uncle Remus), and another was Elephant (because he didn’t forget). … He wasn’t apt to fight for anybody that any other publisher would publish; but he could fight for people at whom no other publisher would look.”15
Eliot already was with Faber & Gwyer when Lady Rothermere’s subsidy to the Criterion ceased. It appears that the directors of Faber & Gwyer may have expected him to propose that the firm should assume publication of his quarterly; the annual deficit of the magazine was not large. But to the “Criterion group” that was accustomed to meet frequently at The Grove public house in South Kensington, Eliot gave no hope that he ever would make any such suggestion. Although the Criterion and “the Criterion crowd” mattered much to him, he would not propose to his employers a project that must bring loss in the short run, whatever eventual prestige it might confer upon Faber & Gwyer: he was too much the man of business for that.
Frank Morley, a new friend of Eliot’s, conferred with C. W. Stewart, who suggested that he and Richard de la Mare (now production manager for Faber & Gwyer) could manage affairs if some outside benefactor should pay the deficit; with that prospect, probably Faber & Gwyer would invite Eliot to let them publish his review. Morley advised Eliot not to dissolve the Criterion, even though one number (Autumn, 1925) already had been canceled: funds might yet be found. “‘All right,’ said Tom. ‘I’m tough. Who pays the bills?’”16
Morley went next to Bruce Richmond, who chuckled—and ten minutes later presented Morley with a list of a dozen names, probable sponsors of a Criterion fund. That money was found speedily; Charles Whibley and Frederick Scott Oliver, staunch Tories, were among the donors. Both Faber and Gwyer soon invited Eliot to put their firm’s imprint upon the Criterion, having this subsidy to defray loss; and after publication of a few more numbers, Faber made the review (by this time the New Criterion) a subsidiary of the publisher. There was no need until 1928 for a fresh subsidy fund.
The poet had been emancipated from the Bank, and the review had been snatched back from Limbo. But Eliot, grand though his reputation was in certain circles, still could not be called a popular author. His slim Homage to John Dryden, published in 1924, had come out in an edition of approximately two thousand copies—and there was no New York edition. Late in November 1925, Faber & Gwyer published his Poems: 1909–1925, in an edition of 1,460 copies. This volume included Prufrock, the Poems of 1920, The Waste Land, and “The Hollow Men”; the collection was dedicated to his father, who had died in 1919, and whom the younger Eliot had not seen since a brief, solitary, unhappy trip to Massachusetts just after his marriage.
“The Hollow Men” describes the spiritual vacuity of the modern age—and the vacuity not merely of ordinary people who have ceased to attend church services. In “The Idea of a Literary Review,” Eliot’s preface to the resurrected Criterion of January 1926, Eliot declared that he could perceive a tendency toward “a higher and clearer conception of Reason, and a more severe and serene control of the emotions by Reason”: a new classicism, thrice welcome. This tendency might be found in books by Sorel, Maurras, Benda, Hulme, Maritain, and Babbitt.
“And against this group of books I will set another group of books … which represent to my mind that part of the present which is already dead:
“Christina Alberta’s Father, by H. G. Wells; St. Joan, by Bernard Shaw; and What I Believe, by Bertrand Russell. (I am sorry to include the name of Mr. Russell, whose intellect would have reached the first rank even in the thirteenth century, but when he trespasses outside of mathematical philosophy his excursions are often descents.) Between these writers there are many and great differences, as between the others. And they all have their moments: at one point in his novel Mr. Wells lapses from vulgarity into high seriousness; at two points, if not more, in his long series of plays Mr. Shaw reveals himself as the artist whose development was checked at puberty. But they all hold curious amateur religions based apparently upon amateur or second-hand biology, and on The Way of All Flesh. They all exhibit intelligence at the mercy of emotion. … But we must find our own faith, and having found it, fight for it against all comers.”
Not simply, then, at the hollowness of nameless folk is “The Hollow Men” directed: it is aimed, too, at such as Wells and Shaw and Russell, at the intellectual enemies of the permanent things, those who wander amusingly into contrived corridors of the spirit—and beguile others, less gifted, after them. Also, as Hollow Men, Eliot has in mind the politicians of his time—though in Britain the Conservatives then held office. Political measures devoid of moral imagination are hollow indeed. In foreign affairs, as the politicians held out fond promises of the perpetual peace to be achieved through the League of Nations, they stumbled toward a greater war; in affairs domestic, the politicians were proceeding to settle for the boredom of the welfare state, rather than to undertake the hard and austere labor of thinking through a program for restoring true community. (In this last stricture, Eliot took common ground with Chesterton.)
During the years 1925 and 1926 there may have been drawn an historical line of demarcation, after which Eliot’s imaginative Toryism had scant prospect of success. The politicians who drew that line were not all Socialists: some were the men of Stanley Baldwin’s second Conservative government.
“Our party differences of the old sort were almost extinct,” Keith Feiling writes of this period. “One dividing line vanished with the Irish treaty; another, older still, of Church against Dissent, faded away with a decline of religious faith. A third, of free trade against protection, was in abeyance. … Nor, again, was the democracy, which Peel had so dreaded and which Salisbury found so perilous in foreign affairs, any longer in question. … In essence, the controversy was no more about democracy, or even about Socialism: rather, over the degree to which Socialism could be wisely applied or economic democracy asserted. So with Conservative Cabinets, as with Labour, the power of the State continually advanced.”17
For in 1925 and 1926, acts of Parliament established pensions for all widows and for all the aged—not for the destitute or in emergency, but for everyone, forever. Similar provisions for unemployment and sickness would follow. That these acts promised far more than they could provide in reality, and were wretchedly financed, escaped notice for a time. “The State was no longer to be the occasional intervener in times of stress and strain and the reliever of dire poverty, but the habitual and actually compulsory channel to which, in many of the normal eventualities of life, all people without distinction of means, class, and occupation would look for financial assistance.”18 After the Second World War, the Beveridge Plan would be merely an enlargement of the policies of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. It was ominous that the great General Strike followed right in the heels of these welfare-state measures: the working classes were not conspicuously grateful, and the Baldwin government would fall in 1929.
To make the whole people pensioners of the state, Eliot believed, was to resolve none of the discontents of modern society, but rather in time to exacerbate them: it was humanitarian concession, but not imaginative and charitable reform. In foreign policy, similarly, the Baldwin years were a time of illusion in all three British parties. Lord Curzon (one leader whom Eliot might have approved in office), only a few years earlier nearly chosen prime minister, was denied any place in the Baldwin cabinet of 1925. In Curzon’s stead, Austen Chamberlain was made secretary of state for foreign affairs: he proceeded to the silliness of Locarno, presently, and after him Neville Chamberlain would proceed to the shame of Munich. Although no economist and no diplomat, Eliot detected the hollowness of the statesmen of the twenties. Those gentlemen, too, plod round the prickly pear at five o’clock in the morning.
With “The Hollow Men” (mostly left over from the first draft of The Waste Land, and published fragmentarily in The Chap Book, The Dial, and the Criterion, before its final form appeared in Poems: 1909–1925), Eliot terminates that period of his life during which he peered into the Abyss. Thereafter he becomes a poet of belief. Some of his critics took “The Hollow Men” for a despairing epilogue to a hopeless quest; but it was neither that, nor yet an affirmation of triumph of spirit.
These Hollow Men—with their evoking of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, of Guy Fawkes’ effigy, of figures in Dante, and of Shakespeare’s murdered Caesar—are the souls that will be spewed out of His mouth. They choose to linger in their despicable death-in-life, rather than to pass through the jaws of death into “death’s other kingdom,” which might be Paradise. It is not that they have sinned violently: their vice is flaccidity of will. Life is for action, but they have not acted in spirit. Phlebas the Phoenician sailor, dying by water that he might experience rebirth, was more happy than they.
These Hollow Men dare not meet those Eyes—Christ’s, or the reproachful eyes of Dante’s Beatrice—that would demand repentance and the ordeal of regeneration; fearful, they hide in “death’s dream kingdom,” preferring illusion to transcendent reality. In one sense, they are the humanitarian and secularistic liberals who put their faith in the trauma of immanent perfection; in another sense, they are the large majority of mankind in this century, preferring the feeble comforts they know to the quest of the Chapel Perilous. John Henry Newman described them: “They who realize that awful day when they shall see him face to face whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will as little bargain to pray pleasantly now as they will think of doing so then.”
No, it is safer to scuffle about in the dream kingdom, where no Eyes invade the darkness. By their timorousness, these Hollow Men have lost personality. They huddle together in a cheerless collectivity that is not community. They are guisers, scarecrows, venerating graven images, sightless.
Upon them falls the Shadow, frustrating their feeble aspirations: their ideas slide away unrealized, their gestures accomplish nothing, their imagination is sterile, their emotions wake no responses, their desires end in barrenness, their powers remain latent only, and their being itself is nerveless. Their attempts at supplication are tardy and vain: it is too late for them to profess faith with humility. They cannot even disintegrate, with Gerontion, in fractured atoms; they will put no match to gunpowder under Parliament House; their world ends “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
In a Boston drawing room, Prufrock dared not speak of truth revealed, and so found himself in a Hell of the isolated self; in death’s dream kingdom, in the desolation of cactus and prickly pear, such Hollow Men are confined forever. This poem is the last of Eliot’s delineations of Hell. From “The Hollow Men” forward, he would be a Seeker still—but a seeker after “the perpetual star, multifoliate rose” of timeless love, now knowing that rose to be real. A man who has emptied himself of vanity and fleshly desire may struggle through suffering to that rose; but a Hollow Man, a stuffed man, stirred only by the wind of the dead land, circles endlessly round the prickly pear.
In “The Hollow Men,” Eliot gives us the image of “such a Hell as modern minds can believe in, and find worse, not better, than Limbo,” Harold F. Brooks writes: “The Hell of the Jesuit sermons in Joyce would provide disbelief; the ‘lost violent souls,’ Dante’s Farinata, Byron’s Cain, Baudelaire’s Don Juan, like Satan himself, attract romantic admiration. The Hollow Men resemble the old guy, not Fawkes the hero-villain; and what they are finally damned to is total paralysis, corresponding, for the mind and soul, to the doom forecast by scientists, in accordance with the principle of entropy, for our ‘valley of dying stars.’”19 It is the Hell of energy exhausted altogether, of universal erosion to sea level; and the way to it may be paved with good intentions.
This is the Hell of those intellectuals who put their trust in “that part of the present which is already dead”; it is the Hell of the trimmer in politics; it is the Hell of the average sensual man who prefers ephemeral diversion to duty and sacrificing love. It is the Hell into which many men have fallen in all ages; also it is the Hell most consonant with twentieth-century infidelity. Though it is not the Hell of the diabolic imagination, surely it is the Hell to which the idyllic imagination lures us. It is a Hell where no one reigns: even the Grand Anarch cannot be espied.
* The somewhat complicated story of these attempts to raise money on Eliot’s behalf may be traced through various recent collections of letters: see B. L. Reid The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (1968), 436–37, 489, 534–35, 582–83; D. D. Paige (ed.), The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 (1950), 172–76; Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (1970), 244–45; Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (1968), Vol. II, 393.
* In a letter to John Quinn, in 1920, Eliot had scoffed at the new Dial, although one of its editors, Scofield Thayer, had been at school and at Harvard with Eliot. The Dial, Eliot wrote, was an exact copy of the dull Atlantic Monthly. “There is far too much in it, and it is all second-rate and exceedingly solemn.” London had nothing better. See Reid, The Man from New York, op. cit., 434.
* Evidence turned up more recently indicates that Eliot probably did know Hulme before 1924. See Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 52–64. [BGL]
* The strong influence of John Adams upon Ezra Pound is more obvious, even though Pound’s paraphrasing of Adams probably passes unnoticed by many readers of the Cantos—as does, for that matter, Pound’s unmarked quoting of phrases and sentences from Adams. Adams and Confucius become Pound’s own cherished Guardians of the Law.
* But More was no admirer of Eliot’s verse: The Waste Land was abhorrent to him, as he told Eliot to his face.
* F. M., “Necesse est Perstare?,” Criterion, Vol. III, No. 4 (April 1925), 364; F. M., “Letters of the Moment—I,” Criterion, Vol. IV, No. 6 (February 1924), 220–22. Perhaps Vivienne Eliot’s vignettes were a concession to the taste of Lady Rothermere; once the review obtained new sponsors. Mrs. Eliot’s contributions ceased.
* Eliot’s letters to Russell during this period will be found in the fourth chapter of the second volume of Russell’s Autobiography, The Middle Years, 1914–1944. “I can never escape from the spell of her persuasive (even coercive) gift of argument,” Eliot confessed to Russell. Perhaps, as Eliot suggested, Russell understood Vivienne Eliot better than did her husband. But where women were concerned, Russell’s genuine kindness frequently came into conflict with his irrepressible lustfulness. As Freda Utley writes in her Odyssey of a Liberal (1970), she could not forget “an all too vivid vision of his hungry lips and avid eyes blotting out the image of philosopher and friend which mattered most.”