Eliot and His Age

Christians and Ideologues in Heartbreak House

At the end of twenty years in London, Eliot loomed head and shoulders—as poet and as critic—above everyone else. The rising poets, notably W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, were his admirers: and literary criticism, chiefly through his accomplishment, had grown in stature since the time of Gosse.

“His reputation was not unchallenged, even by his early friends. In a letter to The Spectator, late in 1934, Wyndham Lewis took up questions of originality and imitation, and implied that Eliot had returned poetry to the Academy (an opinion shared, with regret, by William Carlos Williams). “Mr. T. S. Eliot has even made a virtue of developing himself into an incarnate Echo, as it were (though an original Echo, if one can say that). This imitation method, of the creator-as-scholar—which may be traced ultimately to the habits of the American university, spellbound by ‘culture’—and which academic un-originality it was Mr. Ezra Pound’s particular originality to import into the adult practice of imaginative literature—does not appeal to me extremely, I confess. But at least no amateurish touchiness on the score of ‘originality’ is involved in it.”1

Yet such fulminations as those that had issued, during Eliot’s early years of writing, from the old Dial and from Arthur Waugh and from Paul Elmer More were heard no longer. The older generation of literary people, by the middle thirties, still might be puzzled by Eliot’s ascendancy, and vexed; but even they had begun to yield to the critics’ verdict that Eliot was an impressive poet—perhaps a great one.

His Collected Poems: 1909–1935, would be published early in 1936 (six thousand copies in London, nearly five thousand in New York), with his new “Burnt Norton” included. He was passing through a six-year period in which he would publish only one major poem—this “Burnt Norton,” first of his Four Quartets—aside from the verse-dramas Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion; but his domination was secure. (As he had told William Empson about 1930, soberly enough, the most important thing for many poets to do “is to write as little as possible.”)2 Though his reputation was not yet quite at its summit, already it was unsurpassed. His Elizabethan Essays were published late in 1934 (four thousand copies); his Essays Ancient and Modern would appear (two thousand, five hundred copies in London, the same number in New York) early in 1936; together, these volumes contained only six essays that had not been collected earlier, but now they were accepted as an enduring contribution to the select shelf of English criticism.

In his office at the top of Faber & Faber’s, he was becoming the Pope of Russell Square. “There cannot be many writers of my generation who were not equally intense in their veneration of Eliot, and not many of our seniors who were not astounded by it,” Desmond Hawkins says of Eliot about this time. “Eliot was championed by us, discussed, quoted, idolized (and inevitably imitated) with a partisan fervour which even Shaw or Lawrence might have envied. And yet he had no intoxicating ‘message,’ no angry polemic, no crusading banner. Everything was an incongruity—the Royalism, the incense-swinging, the correct bank-manager look, pervading a High Bohemia of armchair communists. Absurd! But it happened. It happened because the poetry got into your head like a song-hit, because the essays acquired imperceptibly the momentum of authority: the ifs and buts, the cautious buttressing, are reminders that this was an unpopular popularity. After all, the tide wasn’t running that way.”³

In those years, the tide of ideology came near to drowning Eliot’s order of the soul. Eliot’s literary triumph had not been paralleled by any discernible influence upon the course of twentieth-century society. The Criterion was much respected, but Eliot had begun to doubt whether a quarterly review still could work upon the minds of the movers and the shakers. Christopher Dawson, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, Montgomery Belgion, W. B. Yeats, William Empson, and Martin D’Arcy were eminent among the contributors to that quarterly in 1934 and 1935; A. L. Rowse, Geoffrey Grigson, George Scott Moncrieff, Michael Roberts, Janet Adam Smith, and other able writers frequently reviewed for it; there still were some American contributors.

Yet the international character of this periodical had diminished, as braggart nationalism and ravening ideology tore apart that unity of European culture which Eliot the editor had advocated. The younger writers on the Continent, in Britain, and in America were drawn toward political poles—most of them toward the Communist arm of the ideological magnet.

Already, as George Orwell would write, to be more or less “left” had become orthodox in English literary circles. By 1936 or 1937, the doctrine was spread that only men of the Left could be good writers: “Between 1935 and 1939,” according to the passionate but impartial Orwell, “the Communist Party had an almost irresistible fascination for any writer under forty. It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had ‘joined’ as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Catholicism was fashionable, to hear that so-and-so had ‘been received.’ For about three years, in fact, the central stream of English literature was more or less directly under Communist control.”4

In style and imagery, Eliot worked upon Auden and Spender and their set—but not in politics. Nor, despite the fact that more and more friends of things established saw in Eliot an ally, did the poet and his quarterly move the politicians. In the British government, ministers and members of parliament clung timorously to a raft that must break up; unsure of themselves, they professed confidence in the League of Nations. The Criterion had not been read—or if read, had not been accepted—by Coriolan.

In this political ferment, Eliot moved outwardly unperturbed; he was to poetry what Henry James had been to the novel. “One learnt by degrees that genius didn’t necessarily wear a beard and have neurotic love-affairs,” Desmond Hawkins goes on, “but might be found in a Kensington churchwarden who discussed cheese with the scholarly taste of a connoisseur. … You might have met him any morning in the Park, elegant, the rolled umbrella in position, the uncommonly handsome head a trifle bowed as if to escape the notice of the Eumenides; on his way perhaps to Lady Ottoline’s where Yeats and A. E. would be eloquent … And Mr. Eliot would bow ceremoniously and demonstrate his intellectual invulnerability with the faintly dandified good breeding that made one inquisitive.”5

The Eumenides were seeking other prey than Eliot; they were about to seize upon those who had cut the ties of European kinship. The shoddy fabric woven at Versailles would be torn to pieces by their nails. At sun-blasted Wal Wal, in the Ogaden, on December 5, 1934, Italian and Abyssinian forces came to blows: the Italian armored car killed a hundred of the Ethiopians who had tried to overturn it, and broke the swords of the rest. Mussolini would invade Ethiopia in force; the League of Nations would hesitate, act equivocally, and then fall apart. A train of events had been set in motion—from proximate causes more petty than those of Sarajevo—that would parch the Waste Land more terribly than it had been stricken in the year when Eliot had come to London.

Universal compulsory education and universal military service—so Christopher Dawson wrote in the Criterion of October 1934—had made possible the totalitarian state. From the same soil there arose the Communist and Fascist systems; indeed, all the world was overgrown with rank ideology. “How far does this new political development threaten the spiritual liberty which is essential to religion?” Dawson asked. “Ought the Church to condemn the Totalitarian State in itself and prepare itself for resistance to the secular power and for persecution? Should the Church ally itself with the political and social forces that are hostile to the new state? Or should it limit its resistance to cases of state interference in ecclesiastical matters or in theological questions? Or finally are the new forms of authority and political organization reconcilable in principle with Christian ideas and are the issues that divide Church and State accidental and temporary ones which are extraneous to the essential nature of the new political development?”

Those questions raised by Dawson filled Eliot’s mind as he wrote Murder in the Cathedral; then and thereafter, Christopher Dawson, the most perceptive Christian historian of the age, worked upon Eliot’s moral imagination, reinforcing Eliot’s own convictions long held. And Eliot’s reply to these questions, in Murder in the Cathedral and in his two books on society and culture, would be very like Dawson’s concluding affirmation:

“The state is steadily annexing all that territory that was formerly the domain of individual freedom; it has already taken more than anyone would have conceived possible a century ago,” Dawson argued. “It has taken economics, it has taken science, it has taken ethics. But there is one thing it can never take, because to quote Karl Barth … ‘Theology and Church are the natural frontiers of everything—even of the Totalitarian State.’ Only it is necessary that Christians should themselves recognize this frontier: that they should remember that it is not the business of the Church to do the same thing as the State—to build a Kingdom like the other kingdoms of men, only better; nor to create a reign of earthly peace and justice. The Church exists to be the light of the world, and if it fulfils its function, the world is transformed in spite of all the obstacles that human powers place in the way. A secularist culture can only exist, so to speak, in the dark. It is a prison in which the human spirit confines itself when it is shut out of the wider world of reality. But as soon as the light comes, all the elaborate mechanism that has been constructed for living in the dark becomes useless. The recovery of spiritual vision gives man back his spiritual freedom. And hence the freedom of the Church is in the faith of the Church and the freedom of man is in the knowledge of God.”6

The dark was closing down upon Europe; T. S. Eliot—no politician, no economist, no mover of the masses of men—would do what he might to restore spiritual vision in that prison. In his tribute, a few months later, to the dead A. R. Orage, Eliot reaffirmed his principle that the inner order of the soul and the outer order of society cannot be separated:

“We are really, you see, up against the very difficult problem of the spiritual and the temporal, the problem of which the problem of Church and State is a derivative. The danger, for those who start from the temporal end, is Utopianism; settle the problem of distribution—of wheat, coffee, aspirin or wireless sets—and all the problems of evil will disappear. The danger, for those who start from the spiritual end, is Indifferentism; neglect the affairs of the world and save as many souls out of the wreckage as possible. Sudden in this difficulty, and in pity at our distress, appears no one but the divine Sophia. She tells us that we have to begin from both ends at once. She tells us that if we devote ourselves too unreservedly to particular economic remedies, we may only separate into minute and negligible chirping sects; sects which will have nothing in common except the unexamined values of contemporary barbarism. And she tells us, that if we devote our attention, as do some of our French friends, to le spirituel, we may attain only a feeble approximation to catholicism, and a feeble approximation to Guild Socialism.”7

It cannot be said that Eliot himself offered much that was new toward the diminishing of those economic perplexities and national rivalries which tormented the world in the middle thirties; nor did the Criterion publish much that might help directly—Eliot believing that practical political and economic measures were beyond the proper scope of such a journal as his. The editor and many of the Criterion group, for years, had put considerable trust in a “chirping sect,” the Social Credit concepts of Major C. H. Douglas: Pound, Lewis, Aldington, Eliot himself, and others were in danger of becoming “money cranks”—though Eliot less in peril than were his associates, for his years as a banker had made him aware at least of the complexities of the credit mechanism, even if contemptuous of bankers’ narrow views.

The Criterion group sympathized, too, with the Distributism of Chesterton and Belloc. Property and purchasing power must be restored to the average citizen: economic concentration, setting up a vulgar oligarchy in a nominal democracy, lay at the root of economic confusion and social discontent, they believed; Marxism was the bastard child of Benthamism.

Social Credit promised to work that salutary transformation of the economy. Pound became an ideologue of Social Credit: the scheme intruded upon his poetry, and he reproached Eliot for fretting about theological questions, when money was the root of all evil and Social Credit was the way, the truth, and the light. This hypnotizing of the Criterion group by the lantern of Major Douglas may seem odd enough half a century later, but it occurred in a time of economic eccentricity: it was less odd, surely, than the cult of Technocracy, then seriously discussed in the United States. A Social Credit party would achieve political power only upon the gaunt prairies of Alberta—and even there, on a provincial scale, enthusiasts would find it impossible to give flesh to a scheme meant for the centers of finance and industry; Social Credit in Alberta was as great a paradox as was Marxism in Russia.

Ten years earlier, the ablest succinct demolition of the notion of Social Credit had been published in the Criterion itself—a review by J. MacAlpin, who shared Hulme’s and Eliot’s attachment to classicism. “Major Douglas is the inventor of a scheme for the granting of credit to consumers instead of to producers, and it is apparent that his analysis of the economic system has been inspired by the ardour of propagating this scheme,” MacAlpin had written. “It is, therefore, not surprising that he arrives at fantastic conclusions: behind the schemes of High Finance in London, Frankfurt, Paris, and New York lies the ‘Invisible Government’—the hidden hand of some few financiers utilising a money power under which a misguided world approaches its doom. The ‘Invisible Government’ derives its power from the exploitation of the doctrine of rewards and punishments, a doctrine which Major Douglas maintains not only supplies a machinery which imposes on the world the policy of limitation and inhibition dictated by the classical attitude toward life—his conception of classicism is commonplace, the classical and moral mind, he asserts, is characterized by a devastating rigidity of thought—but also the doctrine which Labour nurtures through the conviction that work alone gives title to the fruits of production. …

“The chaos and dislocation of trade which accompany inflation and deflation have their chief cause in money becoming an unreliable measure of value, and, in assuming that the problem of value measurement is illusory, Major Douglas has based his proposals on a fallacy which renders them wholly inflationist in character. … Social Credit is an extravagant and pretentious book.”

Too true, yet Eliot clung for years thereafter, if hesitantly, to Social Credit, much as Henry Adams and Brooks Adams (despite their powers of insight into many matters) had developed out of monetary theories resembling those of William Jennings Bryan a gloomy economic determinism. Replying, in 1933, to Pound’s attack on his “conception of the good life,” Eliot still expressed his hope “that Major Douglas is right from top to bottom and copper-plated; but whether he is right or wrong does not matter a fig to my argument for the priority of ethics over politics.”* One will not find economic realism in the Criterion of this period. It may be said for Eliot, nevertheless, that his economic specifics were no stranger than various economic experiments then being undertaken in great states by a diversity of Coriolans. What one does encounter in Eliot’s Commentaries about this time is a defense of the human person against collectivism, and a ringing expression of the moral basis of politics.

At a time when the intellectuals were infatuated with the abstract charms of collectivism, Eliot defended the claims of the person and of true community. By 1935, Middleton Murry (forever seeking a revelation, but not the one experienced already) had become a thoroughgoing theoretical Communist. To him, Eliot replied that he was not enchanted by the magic adjectives “organic” and “dynamic.” Christianity is dualistic:

“The City of God is at best only realizable on earth under an imperfect likeness. … It is true that some forms of government, of social and economic organization, are incompatible with Christianity; it is not true that Christianity dictates any particular form of organization.” John Middleton Murry’s Marxism “is a very different thing from any government we should ever see in practice. I should be more interested to see Communism advocated as a workable scheme for eliminating a great deal of ordinary suffering and injustice, than as a means for experiencing the mystical ecstacies of depersonalization.”

To rest the case for Communism upon the abstractions of Hegel was like resting the whole case for Christianity upon the system of Aquinas. “Marxism may be, for a few philosophers, a religious experience: for the man of action it will only be another style of the art of ruling men.”8

While the debate about political and economic theory filled the English reviews, in Africa, Coriolan marched. In October 1935, Italian divisions thrust into Abyssinia from Eritrea and Somaliland. Confronted by this war in the horn of Africa (which would not end in Africa, Eliot feared), the editor of the Criterion endeavored to maintain some standard of equity against the ideologues of the Left and the ideologues of the Right.

In the October number of his quarterly, Eliot set himself in opposition to the sort of imperialism represented by the Daily Express—or, in another fashion, by the Times. The newly discovered Tari Furora people of Papua might be ruined by having modern technological and commercial influences thrust upon them; they might be destroyed, for that matter, by the mentality of the London Times (in which one writer had expressed concern for those Papuans’ future). The authors of other leading articles in the same newspaper were willing—nay, eager—to “civilize” Abyssinia; they cried up the virtues of gadgets, and recognized that Italy had “some title” to transform Ethiopia.

The concept of Empire is not necessarily ignoble, Eliot wrote (thinking, doubtless, of Virgil)—not “the notion of extending law, justice, humanity, and civilization—with no other interest than glory, and no other motive than a sense of vocation. But in the present state of things, the glory of the administrators is quickly followed, if not accompanied, by the ignominy of exploiters. How many lower peoples have been, on balance, really helped by our European intervention? And until we set in order our own crazy economic and financial systems, to say nothing of our philosophy of life, can we be sure that our helping hands to the barbarian and the savage will be any more desirable than the embrace of the leper?”

Eliot’s opposition to the Italian invasion of the lands of the Negus Negusti was very different from the attitude of such friends of his as Ezra Pound and Roy Campbell (although later, in the Second World War, Campbell would lead a company of the King’s African Rifles against the Italian garrisons of the Ogaden). His stand carried him, too, into grave misgivings about the French Right, for which he had long felt sympathy. The Abyssinian war had provoked manifestoes from three groups of intellectuals: from the Right, from the Left, from the Catholics. With the last, Eliot took his stand.

About the time when the Criterion for January 1936, was published, Marshal Badoglio was bombing the Tembien with high explosives and mustard gas. The French Right was arguing that any inteference with the Italians in Abyssinia would be “an attack upon the civilization of the West.” This case Eliot found flimsy—except so far as it was a veil for French interests. Even the statement of the Left (though it, too, was a veil—for Soviet interests) came nearer to Christian teaching, Eliot wrote.

Races, like individuals, remain unequal in condition. “But the fundamental identity in humanity must always be asserted; as must the equal sanctity of moral obligation to people of every race. All men are equal before God; if they cannot all be equal in this world, yet our moral obligation towards inferiors is exactly the same as that towards our equals,” Eliot said. “And to say that to maintain Christian principles, in a crisis such as that which has called forth these various declarations, is to weaken our defences against communism, is a confession of cowardice. It is an admission that the truth is not strong enough to prevail against its imitations; it is to fight the devil with the powers of evil. That is not to deny that between the Christian and the Communist there is a great gulf fixed, and that in this country we are in danger from amiable bridge-builders.”9

In 1935, the total state—Communist or Fascist—was striking down the permanent things. When reasons of state are given precedence over everything, including the first principles of morality; when Coriolan demands the total obedience of his subjects— what shall the Christian do? Although the totalitarian state is a modern creation, that general difficulty has been encountered for many centuries. And that question, to which martyrs have given their answer, is asked in Murder in the Cathedral.

The Witness of Blood

Early in 1935, Eliot was invited to write a play for the Canterbury Festival, to be performed that June; E. Martin Browne would direct it. The success of The Rock had brought about this invitation, and (being given a freer hand for the Canterbury Festival than he had been given by the Forty-Five Churches Fund) Eliot accepted. At first he meant to call his drama about Saint Thomas à Becket “Fear in the Way”; he even thought (having been an occasional reviewer of thrillers) of “The Archbishop Murder Case”; but Mrs. Browne suggested Murder in the Cathedral.

In the medieval chapter house of Canterbury cathedral, the play was presented for a few afternoons, with Robert Speaight in the role of Becket; then Ashley Dukes carried off the drama to London, where (beginning November 1, 1935) it ran for a year at the Mercury Theatre, and for several months thereafter at the Duchess. In the United States, the Federal Theater of the Works Progress Administration took Murder on tour; the Dukes production later made its way to Boston and New York.

Murder in the Cathedral has been produced many times since then, in several countries, with especial success in ecclesiastical buildings. It would be made into a film sixteen years later, with some changes in the script, the first contemporary verse-drama adapted to the screen.10 The various English and American editions and printings of the play, between 1935 and 1965, ran to a total of nearly seventy-five thousand copies.

The first performance of this drama, in the chapter house with its door opening upon Canterbury’s cloisters, occurred within a few yards of that spot in the north transept where the masterful Archbishop had fallen beneath the swords of Henry’s knights, in the year 1170; and hard by the violated site of Becket’s shrine in Trinity Chapel, erected in 1220 and destroyed by Henry VIII in 1538. To Canterbury, Chaucer’s pilgrims, and Piers Plowman’s and countless others, had made their progress for centuries, “the holy blisful martir for to seke,” multitudes along the Old Road from Winchester, the Pilgrims’ Way that had existed before history was written. Thomas à Becket, the “Cheapside brat,” the towering martyr, spoke through Eliot to the twentieth century.

In the quarrel “between the Soul and the State: that is, between things eternal, personal, inward, and things civic, communal …” as Hilaire Belloc had written of the murder of Becket, “violence, our modern method, attempted to cut the knot. At once, and as it always must, fool violence produced the opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream to Canterbury, and à Becket’s tomb became, after Rome, the chief shrine of Christendom.”11

Eliot’s drama has to do with things personal—the triumph of Becket over temptation; and with things communal—the resistance of the Church against political absolutism. Eliot’s Archbishop is the primate of Daniel-Rops’ description: “a man of culture, high intelligence, and subtle pride, a minister experienced in business and of unlimited devotion to duty …” who “underwent a psychological transformation by the promptings of divine grace.”¹² He is the saint of the hagiography by Guernes de Pont-Saint-Maxence, of the painted windows in the cathedrals at Paris, Sens, and of the popular cult that chastened English royal power for three centuries and a half. And, so far as one can determine historical fact, Eliot’s Becket is truer than Tennyson’s or Anouilh’s.

Grover Smith calls Eliot’s Becket “novel and peculiarly unhistorical … Instead of assuming the common judgment of Becket as overwhelmingly arrogant, waging a battle of personal and ecclesiastical spleen with a foe hardly more impoverished in spiritual attributes, Eliot depicts him as humbly submissive, accepting death, not resisting it.”¹³

But this portrait scarcely is novel: Chaucer’s pilgrims never doubted it. And unhistorical? That depends upon whether one has been brought up to accept, uncritically, the “Whig interpretation of history” and the sketch of Becket in Dickens’ Child’s History of England (as, indeed, many in Eliot’s audiences had been brought up).

Henry VIII and the Reformation annihilated Becket’s cult, dear to the Old Profession and to the poor; Whiggery and Rationalism meant to lay Becket’s ghost forever. Becket had demanded the canonizing of Archbishop Anselm, who had defied King Rufus; he had defended clerics, even criminous ones, against suffering two penalties for one offense; he had stood up for appeals to Rome, for the Church’s privileges and jurisdictions, for Christian asceticism, for the Rock. By dying, Becket had defeated the monarch who had hoped to make his power absolute. Would none among those cowards who ate his bread, Henry had asked, rid him of this pestilent priest? Thinking to please the king, four knights had made their way to Canterbury; and by striking down Becket, they had undone Henry and (what endured longer, quite against their intention) they had buttressed the Church.

Unlike historians in the line of Macaulay, Eliot did not entertain what Leslie Stephen had called the Whigs’ “invincible suspicion of parsons”; nor did he assume that reasons of state always should prevail over the voice of the Church. “Two there are by whom this world is ruled,” Saint Gelasius had declared at the end of the fifth century: by church, by state. A champion of the claims of the Church need not be a bladder of pride and vanity. Because we cannot know the heart, we must judge men by their actions, and so Eliot judged Becket. Recognition of our sins may transform us; grace does operate upon some men.

The Becket whose magnificence had been the wonder of London, the Becket who (standing six feet four in his mail) had directed the Toulouse campaign of 1159—this Becket gave way to Becket of the hair shirt, washing in secret the feet of the poor. Why assume that the early Becket was the true man, and the martyr false? Eliot’s Archbishop was the hero purged by grace, not the rash adventurer of the eleventh edition of the Britannica, the ultramontanist whose name the Reformers rightly had expunged from the Anglican calendar. “It is evident that in the course of his long struggle with the state he fell more and more under the domination of personal motives,” the Britannica said of Becket. But can even the Encyclopaedia Britannica know the heart? One recalls Eliot’s “Animula”:

The pain of living and the drug of dreams

Curl up the small soul in the window seat

Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Grace does not operate through the Benthamite Britannica; had Eliot thought that any encyclopaedia might rouse the moral imagination, it would have been such an encyclopaedia as Coleridge had projected but never completed. So Eliot’s Becket is a man imprudent, perhaps, as the Britannica had assayed him; but a man redeemed, who knows that in his end is his beginning.

More perhaps than any other drama that has got out of the closet, Murder in the Cathedral has been the subject of critical essays out of all proportion to the theater audiences it has attracted; so a new minute analysis is not required here. What I attempt is an examination of Murder in the Cathedral as an expression of the two aspects of order—the order personal, and the order civic. In 1935, as in 1922, the inner order and the outer lay supine in the Waste Land.

It is the chorus of the poor Women of Canterbury that regains the inward order through this drama; for Becket already is saved, and the four Tempters that assail him are foredoomed to defeat as was the Satan who tempted Jesus in the wilderness. By witnessing the Archbishop’s suffering and his transcendence of that agony in a moment of time, the Women learn to praise God anew:

For the blood of Thy martyrs and saints

Shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places.

In his “strife with shadows,” Becket encounters first the temptation of self-seeking prudence: “The easy man lives to eat the best dinners.” Return to the pleasures of this world, the kissing below stairs, the First Tempter counsels him, and the king’s friendship will be restored; Becket has done no more than to exchange low vices for high vices. But the Archbishop knows that no man steps in the same river twice. From generation to generation, the same things occur repeatedly, a chronicle of folly; yet no man “can turn the wheel on which he turns.” This temptation Becket repels easily enough, though the impossible still is seductive; the only mischief done by such “voices under sleep” is to distract the mind in the present.

Offering the prize of secular power, the Second Tempter is more subtle. Power can promote the common good:

Disarm the ruffian, strengthen the laws.

Rule for the good of the better cause. …

Power must be purchased, this Tempter admits—at the price of submission to the princes of this world. What then? “Private policy is public profit.” Yet Becket will not take this, either:

Those who put their faith in worldly order

Not controlled by the order of God,

In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder

Make it fast, breed fatal disease,

Degrade what they exalt.

Representing himself as a hearty Norman proprietor, “a rough straightforward Englishman,” John Bull, the Third Tempter, offers an alliance between the Archbishop and the barons, making common cause against the Angevin throne. As Thomas made Henry, so might he break him; at worst, he might be Samson in Gaza. But Becket will not betray his king, to run “a wolf among wolves.”

The Fourth Tempter (invisible in the later film version) surprises Becket, who does not know his face or expect him: he is an evil angel—or perhaps (as Eliot suggested to Martin Browne in 1956) a good angel in disguise, “leading Becket on to his sudden resolution and simplification of his difficulties.” This visitor holds in contempt the earlier temptations: wantonness is despicable, the King will not forgive, and the barons cannot unseat Henry. What counsel? Why, “Fare forward to the end.”

Let Thomas seize enduring supremacy: think of glory after death. “Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.” What does a sword-thrust matter? Martyred, Becket will be venerated by generations of pilgrims at his miracle-working shrine, while kings and other enemies suffer the torment eternal. True, the wheel of existence turns ceaselessly, so that nothing endures forever; the future shrine will be pillaged at last:

When miracles cease, and the faithful desert you.

And men shall only do their best to forget you.

And later is worse, when men will not hate you

Enough to defame or to execrate you,

But pondering the qualities that you lacked

Will only try to find the historical fact.

So be it: there exists an enduring crown, worn by the saint in the presence of God. Martyred, Becket will stand high in heaven, beholding far below in the gulf his persecutors’ “parched passion, beyond expiation.” Choose eternal grandeur.

But Becket recognizes this prize, in truth, for the damning sin of pride, his own vice, once overmastering.

Can I neither act nor suffer

Without perdition?

The Fourth Tempter replies in mystical phrases: the wheel turns and yet is forever still; action is suffering, and suffering action; we must submit in patience to the divine will. These final counsels are not diabolical.

Though the Tempters have worked upon Becket as they might, he remains unmoved. He pulls down his vanity—even the vanity of action. All four Tempters join to mock him, now employing terror in place of promise—the terror of unreality and insubstantiality, of the vanity of human wishes, of the Self adrift in a nightmare:

This man is obstinate, blind, intent

On self-destruction,

Passing from deception to deception,

From grandeur to grandeur to final illusion,

Lost in the wonder of his own greatness,

The enemy of society, enemy of himself.

The priests implore the Archbishop to equivocate, awaiting a better hour; the Chorus entreat him to save himself, that they may be saved. Yet Thomas is resolute:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

As the unwilling servant of God (“You have not chosen Me: I have chosen you”) he has run greater chance of sin and sorrow than when he was the king’s good servant. In the greater cause, being feeble as all men are, God’s servant may make that cause political merely. But that’s done with: now Becket will submit himself passively to the will of God. He has restored order in his soul.

There follows the Archbishop’s Christmas sermon—in simple and moving twentieth-century prose. “A Christian martyrdom is never an accident,” Thomas says, “for Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man’s will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways.”

The Knights, now come to murder Becket, are the Tempters transmuted into powers of violence. The Archbishop refuses to absolve the bishops—servile to Henry—whom he had suspended; he will not return to France; he asserts the authority of the Rock. The Chorus scents the bestial under the skin of man: when moral authority is rejected, there emerges “the horror of the ape.” But the Women will forget the terrors of the impending moment, the Archbishop tells them; mercifully, memory is feeble; Eliot says here, as he had written before and would write again, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

Against “beasts with the souls of damned men,” the Archbishop will not bar Canterbury’s doors: the Church is not a Fortress of oak and stone. We conquer by suffering; and Thomas will repay by his blood the blood that Christ shed. The Knights hew him down.

“Hitler had been long enough in power to ensure that the four knightly murderers of Becket would be recognized as figures of the day, four perfect Nazis defending their act on the most orthodox totalitarian grounds,” Ashley Dukes writes.14 But also these knights are modern Englishmen, speaking in the tones of members of the House of Commons or of a leading article in the Times; they make it clear that past and present are one. Their speeches to the audience are mumblings in the Waste Land. Becket was “well qualified for the highest rank of the Civil Service,” says Hugh de Morville; if only Becket had done the king’s will, spiritual and temporal administration might have been united perfectly.

At “a just subordination of the pretensions of the Church to the welfare of the State,” modern society has arrived. Becket’s murderers know they deserve the applause of a modern audience—if one approves this condition of the commonwealth. The Fourth Knight (who has been silent during most of the action, and may be a diabolical power working upon the intellect, rather than a creature of flesh) offers a psychiatric analysis of Becket, whose death really amounted to suicide while of unsound mind: “a charitable verdict.” With their appeals to the English way of looking at both sides, their commonsensical phrases, and their “charitable verdict” upon alleged disturbance of the brain, these Knights of Eliot’s irony are more clearly liberal than they are National Socialist.

By Becket’s martyrdom, the Chorus—the common men and women—have been awakened to consciousness of sin; and upon that consciousness, redemption may follow. Upon their heads is the sin of the world, for they are those—“Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;/ Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God. …” In that fear is the beginning of wisdom.

In the days that were crowding upon the modern Waste Land, there would be found martyrs—bishops among them. The total state would demand obedience to “the final utter uttermost death of spirit”; and while most men and women would consent to the last humiliation, some would offer to faith the witness of blood. By martyrdom, even in the hour of the death-bringers, “grey necks twisting, rat tails twining,” the time might be redeemed.

To cultivate the spirit alone would be to abandon the Women of Canterbury to violence; to cultivate the secular alone would be to reduce humankind to the horror of the ape. In the Terrestrial City, Coriolan will represent one power always; but always Becket will represent another power; in that tension, justice is possible.

The Loss of a Standard

Over the Criterion, during the last three years of its existence, there hung a cloud of weariness. Beyond denying, now, things were in the saddle, and rode mankind: Waldo the Guardian had been right enough in that. And the worst were full of passionate intensity—the line of Yeats, who died in the year of the Criterion’s end. While the totalist powers paraded toward Armageddon, the democracies lacked all conviction. Nothing that would alter events could be said in such a quarterly as Eliot’s.

From 1935 to 1939, those events broke down what remained of the comity of nations. The Hoare-Laval pact for the partition of Abyssinia; the Italian conquest of that barbaric realm, in defiance of the League; Hitler’s reoccupation and fortification of the Rhineland, uncontested; the eruption of civil war in Spain; the Nazi seizure of Austria; Neville Chamberlain’s ruinous missions to Hitler at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg; the terrible blunder at Munich; the abandoning of Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s mercy—these disasters, Eliot knew, smothered what hopes he had entertained when he had begun to publish his review.

And Eliot understood, too, that this descent of Europe could not now be arrested by men of letters—certainly not by “intellectuals,” themselves servile to ideology. (Eliot would have concurred with Bertrand Russell in that aristocratic liberal’s later definition of an “intellectual”: a person who thinks he knows more than he knows.) Even the humane scholar cannot sit long in the statesman’s Siege Perilous. All that Eliot and his friends could do was to occupy an intellectual redoubt between the strongholds of ideology, and to say what they might in the cause of international order. In his Commentary of July 1936, Eliot objected to the Bishop of Durham’s remarks on “just wars”; little militant justice was in prospect:

“I cannot agree with those who maintain that no war can be just: for a just war seems to me perfectly conceivable,” the editor of the Criterion wrote. “But in practice, if we refuse to consider the causes, and consider a war only at the moment when it breaks out, there is likely to be a good deal of justice on both sides: and if we do consider its causes, we are likely to find a good deal of injustice on both sides. The believer in just war is in danger of inferring, at the moment when war is seen to be inevitable, that the war is necessarily just; on the other hand the person who sees clearly the injustice behind the war may be equally in error in as suming that because the war is unjust, he is justified in refusing to take part in it. And it is almost impossible to say anything about the subject without being misunderstood by one or both parties of simplifiers. … If we gave enough thought and effort to the institution of justice during the condition of ‘peace,’ we might not need to exercise our consciences so violently in anticipation of war.”

The revolutionaries of the age, with their enthusiasm for the total state, were bringing on war and injustice and destroying freedom, Eliot continued; the reactionaries (reacting against the drift toward the Total State) were attached to the concept of order, which makes peace possible. “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 there were revolutions of the Right, as of the Left; and the Right revolution of that sort, already triumphant in Germany and Italy, was “a symptom of the desolation of secularism, of that loss of vitality, through the lack of replenishment from spiritual sources, which we have witnessed elsewhere, and which becomes ready for the application of the artificial stimulants of nationalism and class.”15

It was possible also, Eliot perceived, to become an impractical ideologue of “peace”—to assume a pose of pacifism which actually might encourage aggressors. By the autumn of 1936—when Hitler commenced his four-year plans, guns instead of butter, to prepare the German economy for war—England was aflutter with petitions for peace: a peace through a militant League of Nations, a peace through disarmament, perhaps a peace at any price. Eliot refused to subscribe his name to the petitions of the International Peace Campaign or similar appeals to “artists and writers” and “scientists and other intellectual workers.” Only the Christian pacifists, he wrote, held a position logically consistent, and they were few in numbers. No one in Britain, and few elsewhere, advocated (at that moment) war on principle, or professed hostility toward civilization—though such attitudes might come later, possibly among the very folk now circulating “peace” petitions. The actual line of demarcation was not between the advocates of peace and the advocates of war:

“The real issue is between the secularists—whatever political or moral philosophy they support—and the antisecularists; between those who believe only in values realizable in time and on earth, and those who believe also in values realized out of time. Here again the frontiers are vague, but for a different reason: only because of vague thinking and the human tendency to think that we believe in one philosophy, while we are really living according to another.”16

While Eliot wrote these sentences, Socialists and Liberals were demanding action of some sort against Nazis and Fascists—and yet opposing, simultaneously, any effective armament of Britain, which had lost parity in the air with Germany not long before. Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain still put their trust in the League of Nations, in part because they knew that Britain was unprepared to fight; but just who was to fight the League Militant’s battles, if Britain could not, no one suggested. The war, indeed, already had begun—in Spain, where Roy Campbell had been trapped in Toledo by the Communist terrorists, to escape during the siege of the Alcazar. Wyndham Lewis’ best novel, The Revenge for Love, published in 1937, describes with grim derision the climate of opinion among London’s intellectuals at that hour.* Eliot retained some faint hope that the great powers still might be dissuaded from entering upon a general conflict in which the passions of ideology, nationalism, and economic interest would be joined; and through his Commentaries ran an urgent concern for Britain’s neutrality. Though nearly everyone prated of peace, very few intellectuals really shared that concern for neutrality.

Their concern, as a class, during those years, was for power. No one perceived this appetite of the intellectuals better than did Wyndham Lewis (who had recovered abruptly in 1932, as befitted an iconoclast, from his passing infatuation with Hitler during 1931). The Revenge for Love (written in 1935, but published only after many difficulties, two years later) has for its backdrop Spain on the eve of explosion, but most of its scenes occur in the literary-radical circles of London, exposed by Lewis as repellent combinations of inverted snobbery, appetite for power, muddled humanitarianism, private interest, and conspiratorial malice—a novel discerning as Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. The only decent people in Lewis’ book are dupes, Victor and Margot Stamp, a poverty-stricken painter of small talents and his dreamy wife; they are used as bait by the London Communists, and go over a cliff in the Pyrenees. Margot, who reads Ruskin, sees the whole set for what they are—though this does not save her; she senses the inhumanity of these reformers, sufficiently represented by Gillian Phipps, the young woman with the boarding-school tones who likes to be kissed by men of the lower orders:

“Margot understood that no bridge existed across which she could pass to commune as an equal with this Communist ‘lady’—living in a rat-infested cellar out of swank (as it appeared to her from her painfully constructed gimcrack pagoda of gentility). Nor did she wish to very much, because—for Victor’s sake—she dreaded and disliked all these false politics, of the sharp underdogs (as she felt them to be), politics which made such a lavish use of the poor and unfortunate, of the ‘proletariat’—as they called her class—to advertise injustice to the profit of a predatory Party, of sham underdogs athirst for power: whose doctrine was a universal Sicilian Vespers, and which yet treated the real poor, when they were encountered, with such overweening contempt, and even derision.”

Such ears, in the late thirties, were deaf to Eliot’s genuine plea for peace. Yet the inner circle of the Criterion group (Montgomery Belgion writing regularly from Paris, for one), among them some recent recruits to that standard, refused to submit themselves to Giant Ideology. In the Criterion for January 1937, William G. Peck’s essay on “Divine Democracy” paralleled Eliot’s convictions. “The failure of what has passed for democracy in the modern world,” Peck wrote, “the rise of the totalitarian State, whether communist or fascist, must not be allowed to confuse Christian thought. The conclusion is not that democracy is incongruous with Christianity, but that the only true, indeed the only possible, democracy must be Christian.” In the same num ber, Eliot himself refused to accept either The New Statesman’s argument that the Spanish “Loyalist” government “represented an enlightened and progressive liberalism,” or the Tablet’s declaration that the Spanish Nationalists took up arms only in defense of Christianity and civilization:

“Political fanaticism in releasing generous passions will release evil ones too,” Eliot remarked. “Whichever side wins will not be the better for having had to fight for its victory. The victory of the Right will be the victory of a secular Right, not of a spiritual Right, which is a very different thing; the victory of the Left will be the victory of the worst rather than of the best features; and if it ends in something called Communism, that will be a travesty of the humanitarian ideals which have led so many people in that direction. And those who have at heart the interests of Christianity in the long run—which is not quite the same thing as a nominal respect paid to an ecclesiastical hierarchy with a freedom circumscribed by the interests of a secular State—have especial reason for suspending judgment.”17

In the next issue of his review, Eliot took to task C. Day Lewis, as representative of the Popular Front mentality then dominant among the intellectuals. For Lewis, Soviet Russia could do no wrong; to obtain peace, one should lend a hand to Communists everywhere. “He is the opposite of a Jingo; for though he does want to fight, he is not so sure about wanting the ships, the men, the money too,” Eliot wrote of Day Lewis. The time might come, Eliot suggested, when Russia would aspire to an imperialism more grandiose than the “imperialist powers” ever had dreamed about:

“The great danger at the moment seems to me to be the delusion of the ‘Popular Front,’ which is so seductive to the intelligentsia of every country. Our Liberal practitioners have so hypnotized themselves with the bogey of fascism that they seem to be like Tibetan initiates, in a fair way to give it form and activity. Those professed ‘realists,’ who so far surrender principles as to join in a Popular Front which is meaningless unless it is an extreme Left Front, will have only themselves to thank if they find that they have conjured up a spirit which will not go back into the bottle, and which will be an Unpopular Front.”¹⁸

As it became clear, however, that Hitler was bent upon conquest of central Europe, regardless of British opinion or action, Eliot abandoned his defense of British neutrality; indeed, he ceased almost wholly to comment upon international affairs. Hitler’s annexation of Austria, and then the Chamberlain government’s pusillanimity at Munich, made Eliot despair of averting war. Two decades later, he told William Turner Levy of his admiration for Anthony Eden when that foreign secretary resigned from the cabinet, on the eve of the fall of Austria, in February 1938.

“I felt a deep personal guilt and shame for my country and for myself as a part of the country,” Eliot said of Britain’s desertion of Austria and Czechoslovakia. “Our whole national life seemed fraudulent. If our culture led to an act of betrayal of that kind, then such a culture was worthless, worthless because it was bankrupt. It had no morality because it did not finally believe in anything. We were concerned with safety, with our possessions, with money, not with right and wrong. We had forgot Goethe’s advice: ‘The dangers of life are infinite and safety is among them.’”²⁰

So it is that editorial Commentaries for the last two volumes of the Criterion contain no reference to diplomacy and war—except for that of October 1938. In devastated Spain, the Nationalists then were about to launch their counter-offensive along the Ebro; clearly General Franco was close to victory. But Eliot was not heartened much by the triumph of one set of ideologues over another. He took his stand with Jacques Maritain, recently denounced by Serrano Suñer, Nationalist minister of the interior. Eliot could not accept the propaganda of the Left, which had represented the Communists and Anarchists as champions of liberty; he could not accept the propaganda of the Right, which represented the campaign of Franco’s forces as a “holy war.” The heirs of liberalism, Eliot wrote, found “an emotional outlet in denouncing the iniquity of something called ‘fascism.’ If the intellectual is a person of philosophical mind philosophically trained, who thinks things out for himself, then there are very few intellectuals about, and indeed the position of M. Maritain is as ‘intellectual’ a position (as well as being Christian) as anyone could adopt.

“The irresponsible ‘anti-fascist,’ the patron of mass-meetings and manifestoes, is a danger in several ways. His activities, when exploited by a foreign press, are capable of nourishing abroad the very ideas which he so vehemently repudiates; they confuse the issues of real politics with misplaced religious fanaticism; and they distract attention from the true evils in their own society.”

The genuine difficulties of England, Eliot wrote, were not to be remedied by ideological slogans. “Urbanization of mind” lay at the root of much of the evil—in agriculture, in finance, in education, in the whole outlook upon life. “One sees no hope either in the Labour Party or in the equally unimaginative dominant section of the Conservative Party. There seems no hope in contemporary politics at all. Meanwhile the supposed progressive and enlightened ‘intellectuals’ shout themselves hoarse in denunciations of foreign systems of life which they have not taken the trouble to comprehend; having never considered that the preliminary to criticizing anything must be an attempt to understand how it came about, and that criticism involves discerning the good from which we might profit, as a qualification for condemning the evil which we wish to avoid. Another characteristic of the type of mind which is doctrinaire without being truly philosophic, is to assume that all problems are soluble: which leads to an ignoring of those which are of such large compass as to appear to present insuperable difficulties.”21

As this number of the Criterion had gone to the printer, Neville Chamberlain had given Hitler what he desired, at Munich, on September 30; and Czechoslovakia had submitted that day. Eliot had despaired of Chamberlain’s diplomacy, and of peace in Europe, at least eight months earlier. The Anschluss had been the Criterion’s death-wound, and that review’s grave was dug—alongside many other graves—at Munich. In the quarterly’s concluding numbers, what could be said about things civic? Why, fragments might be shored against ruin; and Britain, like the Fisher King of the Waste Land, might set her lands in order.

So the Commentaries of the Criterion’s last six numbers are concerned with the decay of culture and with the decline of community in Britain. Britain’s two most serious problems, apart from religion, were Education and the Land, Eliot wrote: neither was being studied intelligently. Ideologues ignored these afflictions, or else plastered them over with slogans; people in power did nothing effective to reduce them. Education was regarded as a quantitative and utilitarian matter, “the old liberal panacea of more education for everybody”; the attempt was being made to create a mass culture by governmental direction—but it would fail. Centralized planning does not build a public for poetry, or make happier those upon whom approved poetry is thrust. Schemes like that for a National Theatre would stifle artistic freedom: “It seems to me possible that, once the Government takes an active and overt part in the cultivation of the Arts, such confusion will ensure that in time there will be a call for a ‘dictator of the arts’ (will it, by that time, be Mr. Hore-Belisha or Mr. Duff Cooper?) to put things to rights.”

With dismaying speed, the countryside was being depopulated and its old leadership drained away, by taxation or by the false attractions of London. (Here Eliot reminds one of George Gissing in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.) “I believe that the real and spontaneous country life—not legislated country life—is the right life for the great majority in any nation.”22 Britain may be left with swollen cities, sprawling suburbs, and a few preserved “beauty spots.”

The body of intellectuals, fascinated by grandiose declarations and universal schemes, neglect these vital particulars. Eliot discussed the dangers of ideological domination of arts and letters in a criticism of the Exhibition of the “Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development.” Artistic talents do not confer authority in social concerns. “I fear that the groups of ‘artists’ who engage in political affirmations may bring about for themselves just the opposite of what they intend: instead of influencing political directions they may merely be cutting themselves off from the world of events.”23

In this Britain, its imagination parched, those publications which help to form intelligent public opinion were wilting; increased costs of publication, including the price of paper, told against them. The newspaper press was mostly mischievous: “It helps, surely, to affirm them [the general public] as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass, suggestible to head-lines and photographs, ready to be inflamed to enthusiasm or soothed to passivity, perhaps more easily bamboozled than any previous generation upon earth.”

Britain, and every country, needed a considerable number of small independent periodicals, not run for profit, with two thousand to five thousand purchasers: the means of communication among cultivated people. But the days of such publications might be numbered. “Independent opinion finds greater and greater obstacles to expression. We assume that we have ‘freedom’ of the Press so long as we have violent differences of opinion finding their way into print; so long as a silly official position on any matter can be attacked by an opposition with a policy still sillier. This is the freedom of two mobs. It is a higher degree of freedom when thoughtful and independent individuals have the opportunity of addressing each other. If they have no vehicles by which they can express their opinion, then for them the freedom of the press does not exist.”²⁴

In January 1939, the best of such publications in Britain came to an end—about the time when Chamberlain and Halifax were paying a visit to Mussolini. That Coriolan, we learn from Count Ciano’s diary, looked upon the British statesmen with contempt. “These men,” said Mussolini, “are not made of the same stuff as Francis Drake and the other magnificent adventurers who created the Empire. They are after all the tired sons of a long line of rich men.”

For the preceding two years, Eliot had thought of terminating his editorship. As war became virtually certain, he made plans for suspending publication; even though it still was possible to bring out the Criterion early in 1939, he was too disheartened to carry on. “A stale editor cannot do his contributors justice.”

That renewal of the unity of European culture, the Criterion’s principal end during the first half of its existence, now seemed to Eliot a hopeless undertaking. “Gradually communications became more difficult, contributions more uncertain, and new and important foreign contributors more difficult to discover. The ‘European mind,’ which one had mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view: there were fewer writers in any country who seemed to have anything to say to the intellectual public of another. Divisions of political theory became more important; alien minds took alien ways, and Britain and France appeared to be progressing nowhere.”

In this new age, Eliot continued, his attention had turned increasingly to political theory. “For myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology—and right economics to depend upon right ethics: leading to emphases which somewhat stretched the original framework of a literary review.” He had come to wonder whether it might have been better, from the beginning, to have paid less attention to literary standards and instead “to have endeavoured to rally intellectual effort to affirm those principles of life and policy from the lack of which we are suffering disastrous consequences.”

Small and obscure reviews, perhaps for a long time to come, must be depended upon to maintain the continuity of culture, under painful handicaps. It would be well if these could be sold cheaply: “I suspect that the price at which the Criterion has had to be published is prohibitive to most of the readers who are qualified to appreciate what is good in it, and to criticize what is faulty.” (Although Eliot did not know it, George Orwell, in 1935, had written to a friend that he could not afford to buy the Criterion, which cost seven shillings and sixpence.) However that might be, Eliot’s quarterly would appear no more. “In the present state of public affairs—which has induced in myself a depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion—I no longer feel the enthusiasm necessary to make a literary review what it should be.”25

In the years after the Second World War, although many long-established magazines would go under, some periodicals intended to sustain the continuity of culture would arise—among them, the one nearest to Eliot’s Criterion in character and tendency being The Cambridge Journal, edited by Michael Oakeshott, but not destined to endure so long as had the Criterion. Despite the rapid increase of population, the number and circulation of serious journals have diminished; and in the surviving reviews (with the partial exception of some American literary quarterlies, university-supported) concern for the moral imagination has given ground before sociological interests.

The times having been what they were, it is surprising not that the Criterion perished, but that it lived so long. Eliot knew this; also he knew that though he had addressed a small Remnant, in subtle ways his review may have quickened the minds of people whom he never would meet, but who might make their mark during the next thirty years or longer. Yet the Criterion ended upon a dying fall, with the lights of Europe going out again. That review had consumed a great part of his time during fruitful years; editorial labors may have been one reason why Eliot never wrote, in maturity, a concerted book so long as his Harvard dissertation. He found none of his Commentaries and few of his reviews for his own quarterly enduring enough to include in his several volumes of collected essays. Yet anyone who can afford to acquire the eighteen reprinted bound volumes of the Criterion will encounter there some of the best writing and some of the more seminal thought of the twentieth century.

Reunion at Heartbreak House

Two months after the final number of the Criterion was published, there was performed in London the first of Eliot’s four verse-plays about modern life: The Family Reunion. Faber & Faber brought out their first edition of the play (more than six thousand copies) in the same month, and a few days later, in New York, Harcourt Brace came out with the American edition of two thousand, five hundred copies. Early audiences of The Family Reunion would have done well to read and discuss that drama before going to the theater; as it was, many people left the theater thoroughly puzzled.

For the play was almost as innovating as The Waste Land had been, and as subtle. It could be understood, if apprehended at all, on several levels of meaning. On the stage, though not a failure, neither was it a grand success; later, radio presentations of this play were well received, for it is not at all necessary to see the characters of The Family Reunion. Eliot, who had begun to write this play not long after Murder in the Cathedral had been applauded at Canterbury, had here two objects, the first declared, the second somewhat veiled: to revive the verse-play in a prosaic time; and to restore an awareness of the spiritual and the transcendent among a people who dismissed Christianity as an incredible body of doctrine. It was meant for an audience much more heterodox (or ignorant of religion) than that which had attended performances of Murder in the Cathedral, and more numerous than the readers of his poems.

Eliot’s critics are divided on the merits of this experimental play—some dismissing it as a mistake, others finding both remarkable virtues and remarkable vices in it, and a number declaring that it stands with the best of Eliot’s work. However that may be, I believe that Eliot’s plays of the twentieth-century drawing room can be better examined by a thorough analysis of The Cocktail Party, in a later chapter. For one thing, the severest criticism of The Family Reunion came from its author himself, in his lecture on “Poetry and the Drama,” twelve years later—reprinted in On Poetry and Poets (1957); and that essay, being Eliot’s only lengthy disquisition on any of his own writings, is more worth reading than anything I could set down here. So I confine myself to an inquiry into what convictions Eliot endeavored to convey to his time through The Family Reunion.

Bernard Shaw had begun to write Heartbreak House on the eve of the First World War; a quarter of a century later, Eliot wrote The Family Reunion in an hour of crisis grimmer still. Wishwood, the country house of Eliot’s play, has its similarities to Heartbreak House; certainly Wishwood always had been a “cold house,” a heart-breaker. The afflictions of the inhabitants of Heartbreak House were levity and selfishness (from neither of which vices Shaw was exempt); the people of Wishwood House suffer from self-delusion and dullness; both of these country-house sets in some degree are what Matthew Arnold had called Philistine, though not so Philistine as the folk of Horseback Hall. In both plays, there stirs a yearning for the life of the spirit. “Life with a blessing! that is what I want,” says Shaw’s young Ellie. Eliot’s Harry Monchensey is near to obtaining that blessing, though not in a manner that Shaw would have chosen.

What Shaw desires is a revolution; what Eliot seeks is a rediscovery. Neither Heartbreak House nor Wishwood House can stand much longer. Upon the ruins of Heartbreak, Shaw would build “Utopia for the common people.” Upon the site of Wishwood, Eliot would restore the City of God. The inmates of both houses are the upper classes of England, vacant rather than truly leisured. War will disintegrate their fabric of security; in part, war is the result of their lack of belief in anything worth believing. In Heartbreak House, life is flirtation; in Wishwood, life is conformity to ephemeral convention. Is there nothing more satisfying than these follies of the time?

To Wishwood, there returns—after seven years of aimless wandering—a modern Orestes: Harry, Lord Monchensey, haunted by the Furies. Attempting to escape from the domination of his dowager mother, Harry had fallen into a miserable marriage; but the wench is dead. She had become unendurable, and Harry had pushed her over a liner’s rail—or so it appears, and so he says. Yet did he? May it not have been accident or suicide? Sometimes Harry fancies that he is a character in someone else’s dream. Morally, in any event, he is his wife’s slayer, for he desired her death; and as a man who lusts after a woman commits adultery in his heart, so a husband who desires his wife’s destruction breaks the Sixth Commandment.

For three hours only, Lord Monchensey returns to the house of his youth, Wishwood—to his mother, Amy, who would reduce him to servitude again; who is a prisoner of time, unable to accept death, vainly bent upon keeping unchanged what by nature must be mutable. He returns to Mary, the cousin that Amy meant to become his wife, and for the first time is drawn to her—until the Furies intervene. He returns to dull uncles and to a haunted house of childhood memories that is no sanctuary, for the Furies are visible to him even there.

And he returns to his Aunt Agatha—who, he discovers after all these years, has been his mother in spirit. What Agatha reveals to Harry is the source of the curse that has lain upon him. Harry’s father had come, suddenly, to love Agatha, a few months before Harry was born: the older Lord Monchensey would have murdered Amy to gain Agatha, but Agatha prevented him for the sake of the baby in her sister’s womb. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons: Harry’s unrest is the product of his father’s sin and its effect upon all the family. There must be expiation.

So far, the frame of this play is that of Aeschylus. But Eliot’s Hellenic legend is a mask; or Eliot rows with muffled oars. For Eliot knew that his audiences would refuse assent—in an era soon to be called “post-Christian”—to a drama openly drawn from what they would call the Christian Myth. A classical myth, nevertheless, they might tolerate as remote, harmless, and undemanding. Let Christ or Saint Paul never be mentioned, and those audiences might listen. Eliot will be all things to all men.

By enlightenment of his plight, by coming to understand the causes—deep-rooted in the past—of his misery, Harry is redeemed. The remainder of The Family Reunion is Christian teaching in the riddle of a mirror—though the words of theology and faith are not uttered explicitly. Harry will expiate his father’s sin and his own; he will renounce the love of created beings, in the sense of attachment to Wishwood and its tenants, though his departure will bring about the death of his time-captive mother. The Furies become the Eumenides, no longer dreadful, and Harry no longer flees from staring eyes, for they will be the eyes of God. He will seek “a stony sanctuary and a primitive altar,” perhaps like Charles de Foucauld, “a care over the lives of humble people.” His destination remains uncertain, but no longer is he in flight from the past or from the nature of things. (Michael Redgrave, who played Monchensey in the first production, asked Eliot “What does happen to this young man at the end of the play?” Eliot replied that he thought Harry and his servant would work in the East End of London—and even provided Redgrave with lines to make clear this intention of good works, though those lines are not included in the printed version of the play.) By coming to understand the continuity of his family, Harry had found it possible to live; more, he had found it possible to live with purpose and hope.

The preceding bald summary may reduce everything to bathos; for that matter, The Family Reunion is easily burlesqued; but one must see or read the play, which has many lines of power and beauty, close enough to twentieth-century speech for an audience to find reality in this fable. Although all the commentators upon this play recognize the Christian symbolism, still several of the better-known glosses on The Family Reunion are oddly naïve—perhaps because, as Eliot had expected, the critics retain a smattering of Christian knowledge, yet only as a congeries of abstractions; they do not perceive how Christian faith permeates the play.

Some critics object, for instance, that Harry (ignoring his own crime of act or of intention) endeavors only to efface the family curse, of his father’s bringing. But really, Eliot is not writing about the house of Atreus. This “curse” is Original Sin, and Eliot’s lesson is the first one in the New England Primer: “In Adam’s fall we sinned all.” There is more of Baudelaire than of Aeschylus in this drama. All fathers and all sons are sinners in some way: by faith and works we redeem the past and our own time.

The same critics, or others—among them ardent admirers of Eliot—are scandalized that Harry expresses no remorse for the death of his wife. But the blessing of the regenerate is that sins are washed away. Remorse—subconscious remorse, at least, symbolized by the Furies—is precisely what Harry has been tormented by; now that he enters upon the life of grace, and has purgatorial hope, the horror of relentless memory is removed. Penance and atonement may be Harry’s lifelong; but that is different from brooding remorse. “Let the dead bury the dead,” according to Saint Matthew.

Another complaint of certain critics is that Harry abandons his mother to death. Yet why is Harry’s departure from Wishwood inconsonant with his purgation? Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples to leave parents and to follow Him. Amy, as she says herself, is “an old woman in a damned house”; for Harry to submit to her afresh would be to fall into her own error that time can have a stop. Whether Harry stays or goes, death must take her soon, and deferential sons who linger to the last beside hard domineering mothers, after all, are not the highest type of humanity. Life is for moral action, not for apron-strings.

So the play is internally consistent, I believe—which is not to say that it is strong at all points. A dozen years later, Eliot picked his own play almost to pieces. He had given attention to versifying, at the expense of plot and character, he said; old Lady Monchensey alone was fully delineated. His use of the Family as chorus had not been really successful; he had introduced poetic passages that could not be justified dramatically. Worse, he had used up too much time in presenting the situation, which had left him short of time for development. Worse still, he had not adequately reconciled the Greek legend and the modern situation; the Furies should have been invisible, not members of the cast: “I should either have stuck closer to Aeschylus or else taken a great deal more liberty with his myth.” Worst of all, “we are left in a divided frame of mind, not knowing whether to consider the play the tragedy of the mother or the salvation of the son.” Finally, “my hero now strikes me as an insufferable prig.”

These strictures by the author are harsh, but concede them: still, Eliot succeeded in two things with The Family Reunion. First, he opened the way for a reinvigorated verse-drama that could assert meaning and dignity on the stage again, without the archaic language or the shallow prettiness of the Georgian poets and playwrights. “What we have to do is to bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives and to which it returns when it leaves the theatre; not to transport the audience into some imaginary world totally unlike its own, an unreal world in which poetry is tolerated.” Let the audience know that they, too, can talk in poetry; then “our own sordid, dreary daily world would be suddenly illuminated and transfigured.”

Second, Eliot in this play unbarred a gate to the realm of spirit. “For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconciliation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no farther.”26 Eliot’s moral imagination, working through the drama, made possible emancipation from the prison of a moment in time and from the obsessions of the ego. The Greek drama had been meant to order the soul; Eliot returned to that purpose. With Harry Monchensey, some hereafter might follow the bright angels.

Not a few are repelled by Eliot’s search for the spiritual, in this play and in The Cocktail Party. (It was one of Eliot’s recurrent regrets for the modern British and Americans that they dreaded the word and concept “spiritual,” although a French writer would not hesitate to employ spirituel.) If “spiritual” implies a touch of the supernatural or of the preternatural, as in these plays, it is doubly rejected. “That kind of resort to the ‘supernatural’ in such a context is both indefensible and betraying: it reveals in Eliot an inner pressure towards the worst kind of insincerity, that which is unconscious,” F. R. Leavis writes.

In some ways, Leavis is the most interesting critic of Eliot, because his strong praise repeatedly is modified by acerbic dissent. For Leavis, much as for Irving Babbitt, the “spiritual”—if one must use that term at all—is the apprehension of an enduring human nature, with needs that the technologist and the Benthamite cannot know. Leavis would have the literary critic leave Christian theology quite out of any discussion of Eliot’s achievement.27

But that would be very like omitting any mention of Stoic philosophy from a criticism of Seneca; or forbidding any reference to Jewish theology in an examination of Maimonides; or taking the gods away from classical authors. If Eliot can be perceived only in the light of the humanists (strong though that light often is), then one must ignore Eliot’s steady development and ruling beliefs—including his conviction that we are worked upon by powers of light and powers of darkness, above our nature and below it. If the literary critic can have no truck with theology, must the theologian have no truck with literature? Life and letters cannot endure in little coffin-like compartments. How could one criticize Pascal or Coleridge, say, without taking into account their religion? How, then, Eliot?

Dr. Leavis finds Eliot’s poetry heroically sincere, but his four drawing-room plays evasive or cheap in some respects: a spiritual shoddiness here, produced by Eliot’s alleged incapacity to “take full cognizance of full human love between the sexes.” In “Marina,” Eliot is most tender—but it is the love of father for daughter. With Eliot, Leavis continues, “in general, the relations between man and woman implied by the ‘daughter’ don’t, for the poet, exist. … The fact is that his inner disorder and his disability remained grievous and tell to its disadvantage on his concern for the spiritual.”28

In The Family Reunion, Harry Monchensey detests and destroys his wife (who appears to have been detestable), and rejects Mary for a life of asceticism—which latter choice is Pauline, and scarcely peculiar to Eliot. Throughout all of Eliot’s poems and plays, until late in his life, there does run a renunciation of the physical union of the sexes, which most critics were reluctant to analyze candidly while Eliot lived. Does this seeming aversion to the flesh, or difficulty in responding to the claims of the flesh, affect and distort Eliot’s “concern for the spiritual”? The point may as well be considered here, as we look at Eliot in 1939.

There exists a blunt but sympathetic essay on this subject of Eliot’s sexual asceticism by Arthur M. Sampley. A good woman is hard to find in Eliot’s poems and plays, Sampley remarks; as the Fisher King was wounded, so perhaps Eliot:

“His shyness and reserve … perhaps inhibited him in one of the most difficult areas of communication. His critical spirit … perhaps kept him from the full experience of love which his later poems eloquently praise. Certainly involved was the element of chance or fate which brings or does not bring to a man the woman with whom he can fully communicate.” Dismay at sexual misadventures looms disproportionately large in The Waste Land and elsewhere in Eliot’s work: “the failure of marital love seems hardly an adequate and certainly not complete cause of the threat of chaos which does indeed seem to overhang the world.”²⁹

Sexual impotence (whether or not Eliot himself ever so suffered) clearly has afflicted not a few literary men during the past century: the names come to mind, among others, of writers so various as John Ruskin, Henry James, J. M. Barrie, Lionel Johnson, and (for a considerable part of his life) George Bernard Shaw; there is the old Yeats, too. But no common pattern of thought or writing emerges from the impotence of these men. Nor does it follow that because a writer may not enjoy Amaryllis or Campaspe, he must embrace a phantom, in a debased supernaturalism. One might as well deduce from the notorious concupiscence of Bertrand Russell or H. G. Wells or C. E. M. Joad the principal tendencies of their thought. Freudian analysis of Eliot’s work—particularly The Family Reunion—has been ingenious but unconvincing.* A shy man is not necessarily a neurotic.

So I find it easier far to believe that the touches of the supernatural or the preternatural in Eliot’s plays, encountered now and again in his poems, too (“Difficulties of a Statesman,” for example), are not connected with the disability of sexual deprivation; that the Furies are not surrogates for Doris and Dusty, and that the One-Eyed Reilly’s hints of occult power are not a substitute for the love of woman. With mysticism after the fashion of Yeats or Orage, indeed, Eliot often expressed uneasiness at best, and sometimes disgust. The “supernatural world” of Yeats was “the wrong supernatural world,” Eliot said in After Strange Gods. “It was not a world of spiritual significance, not a world of real Good and Evil, of holiness or sin, but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a physician, to supply the fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant so that the dying patient may utter his last words.”³⁰

I find it much easier to believe that Eliot perceived, as he said, operations of the Evil Spirit; and was convinced that there existed Bright Angels, too; and an everlasting Rose Garden. He knew that we are enveloped in mysteries, including the mysteries of the Self and Time; but that we are not the sport of Hardy’s Immortals; that religion, Christianity in particular, is an endeavor to communicate with transcendent being—which, its nature not copying man’s nature, we call supernatural. If this understanding, and Eliot’s expression of love, seem somewhat less refined in the drawing-room plays than in the poems—why, that is not the consequence of any betraying unconscious insincerity, but because (as he declared) Eliot was trying to reach through those plays an audience broader and less educated than the public which read his poems. The more widely one seeks a following, the less abstract one’s images must be.

Finally, I suspect that even had Eliot been idyllically coupled, most of his years, with a Hyacinth Girl of infinite variety, or even with uncorseted Grishkin of the friendly bust, still he would have heard whispers of immortality; still he would have lamented over the bent world and sought the intersection of time with the timeless; still he would have encountered the devil of the stair. Others, your servant among them, have kept their metaphysics warm even in the company of Cupid and Campaspe.

The fullness of love would be Eliot’s reward, the crown of life, toward the end; but in 1939, despite the healthy humor that relieves The Family Reunion, his solitude is painful to think of. In effect a widower, though Vivienne still lived, confined to a place of retreat, sunk to a shadow; childless; his quarterly review brought to a melancholy end; ideological infatuation swallowing up the new crowd of writers; public disorder inducing that “depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years”—this was existence in Heartbreak House or Wishwood.

F. R. Leavis says that this condition had the effects of starvation on Eliot’s spirituality. “But we have to recognize, I think,” Leavis writes, “that one of those effects was intensity, and without the intensity … —I won’t develop that consideration further than to say that the distinctive Eliotic intensity was a necessary condition of that astonishing feat of sustained creative intensity, Four Quartets.”31

This makes Eliot sound desperate as Gerontion; but it was not quite so. The comical side to his nature was not extinguished, even in 1939. That October, Eliot published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (some three thousand copies), full of fun, acknowledging the help of little Fabers and Morleys and other children. Children liked him; so did cats; so, apparently, did mice.* In the autumn of 1939, it was as well to laugh with Democritus as to weep with Heraclitus.

For Britain had declared war upon Germany on the third day of September. On October 14, the battleship Royal Oak, in Scapa Flow, was torpedoed by a German submarine, and carried down with her nearly eight hundred officers and men: death by water. From this nightmare of the time, one could wake only through the life of spirit.

* “Economics are about as complicated as a gasoline engine and ignorance of them is not excusable even in prime ministers and other irresponsible relics of a disreputable era,” Pound had written to the editor of the Criterion, in “The Eleventh Year of the Fascist Revolution.” See also an exchange between F. S. Flint and Pound on this subject: “Correspondence,” The Criterion, Vol. XIV, No. 55 (January 1935), 292–304.

By 1938, Eliot remarked a certain ideological tendency in the Social Credit movement: “Social Credit, for instance, seems to me constantly in danger of petrifying in a form fifteen or twenty years old.” In his quarterly’s final number (January 1939), Eliot regretted that “the tendency of concentration upon technical economics has been to divide rather than to unite.” See The Criterion, Vol. XVII, 484; and Vol. XVIII, 273.

* “It shows how contemporary politics, like contemporary art, of the fashionable order, have been unobtrusively commandeered, by an exceedingly unpleasant and unscrupulous gang of racketeers,” Hugh Gordon Porteus would write of The Revenge for Love, in the Criterion of October 1937. “These fictions certainly stand for realities: they reveal the contemporary scene-behind-the-scenes in all its shoddiness.”

* Notably, C. L. Barber, “Strange Gods at T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Family Reunion,’” in The Southern Review, Vol. VI, 387–416, reprinted in Leonard Unger (ed.), T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique (1966), 415–43.

* When Wyndham Lewis painted his portrait of Eliot in 1938, Lewis’ studio was infested by swaggering mice, startling Lewis’ sitters. “At last, when Tom Eliot was sitting to him,” Edith Sitwell writes, “their behaviour became intolerable. They climbed on to his knee, and would sit staring up at his face. So Lewis bought a large gong which he placed near the mouse-hole, and, when matters reached a certain limit, he would strike this loudly, and the mice would retreat.” See Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters, 1919–1964, edited by John Lehmann and Derek Parker (1970), 231.