Writing in 1970 in the introduction to the volume of The New Cambridge Modern History that dealt with the decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, the volume editor, the Oxford historian J. P. Cooper, urged fellow historians to resist the temptation to rely, as he put it, upon ‘modern myths such as “dissociation of sensibility” or “the organic society”, as keys to too many, or in these two cases to any, doors’.1 Scepticism towards large explanatory concepts may scarcely have been unusual from a mid-twentieth-century academic historian, but the particular ‘modern myths’ Cooper identified as having exercised a seductive attraction over others are, in this setting, surely very striking, indeed extraordinary. Would most of those now writing or studying the history of the European seventeenth century be likely even to have heard of these two notions, let alone to be tempted to use them in structuring their accounts? Why in 1970 would historians have had to be cautioned against them, and what world of discourse did they come from in the first place?
The importance of these and related notions, and the reasons behind Cooper’s felt need to issue a caution against them, will be central elements in the story this book has to tell. For the moment, having begun with the seventeenth century, another quotation referring to the same period suggests itself. ‘It is necessary to insist upon the unique character of the seventeenth century which, just because it experienced the acute crisis of transition from the old to the new Europe (to the Europe, we might say, of 1914), is the most difficult of all centuries to understand.’ This is, by any measure, a historical statement, one that lays claim to know a good deal about what constituted both the old and the new Europe as well as to more than superficial knowledge about the seventeenth century. The rest of the paragraph that it introduces ranges widely over the place of religion in the political and international disputes of the time, including the growth of Puritanism in England and of Lutheranism and Calvinism in continental Europe. Taken by itself, the paragraph seems characteristic of the work of one of those confident, generalizing historians in the first half of the twentieth century, such as H. A. L. Fisher or perhaps of slightly later, somewhat more specialized but still wide-ranging, scholars such as G. N. Clark.
Similarly, to propose ‘a study … of the temper and mind of the period from Henry VIII to Cromwell’ that would take account of ‘influences and interests political, philosophical, theological, and social’ is, clearly, to propose a major work of history. In this latter case, the proposal was part of an application that was put before a committee of senior historians, but they were, it seems, not persuaded. They observed of the work submitted in support of the proposal that they were unable to ‘find evidence of a depth of knowledge sufficient to justify the candidate’s philosophical and historical conclusions’. That, at least, was the public form they gave to their judgement. The candidate’s backer, who had been present at the crucial meeting, reported the reasons for rejection in somewhat different terms. First, some of what he called the ‘professorial old women’ had been shocked by the lack of decorum detected in a quite other genre of the candidate’s writing than that relevant to the application. But second, and perhaps more important, had been what he called ‘the narrow angular opposition of the academic historians to any kind of research other than that which they themselves understand’. Presumably, the historians in question would not have described the grounds of their opposition in quite such reductive terms, though long experience in universities may make such a description seem both plausible and dispiritingly familiar.
At first sight, what we have here is a recognizable minor episode in academic politics in which a younger historian’s attempt to combine an overambitious project with a heterodox approach is firmly squashed by the elders of the tribe. In this instance, the episode also has an Oxford connection, since it was part of an application for a Fellowship at All Souls in 1926, and we know that the ‘academic historians’ included Sir Charles Oman, at the time the Chichele Professor of Modern History, and E. L. Woodward, later to be Professor of International Relations. So far, so familiar, but what gives this particular episode a larger interest and significance is the fact that the candidate in question was T. S. Eliot, and the full details of this episode came to light only with the publication of the relevant volume of his letters in 2012.2 In addition, the earlier quotation, about ‘the unique character of the seventeenth century’, is taken, not from one of the historians I mentioned, but from Eliot himself. It occurs in the piece of work that he submitted in support of his application, the typescript of the Clark Lectures that he had delivered at Trinity College Cambridge earlier that year (and that were to remain unpublished during his lifetime).3 By the end of those lectures, Eliot was disavowing any intention to supply the place of what he called the ‘general historian’: his bailiwick, he insisted unconvincingly, was poetry, and he had not meant, as he put it, to ‘trespass’ on the territory of ‘history, social or political’. But then, perhaps—to paraphrase another representative twentieth-century figure—he would say that, wouldn’t he?
In 1926, the year of his application to All Souls, Eliot was 38 years old: after working in Lloyds Bank for a number of years, he had recently joined the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, and it was his senior colleague Geoffrey Faber, a Fellow of All Souls, who had proposed him for election. By this date, Eliot had already established himself as the leading avant-garde poet and critic of his generation (the alleged indecency of some of the poetry may have been what had caused the ‘professorial old women’ at All Souls to take fright). Before long, he was to achieve that pontifical sway over English letters that lasted at least until the end of the 1950s. Moreover, those styles of literary criticism that claimed to take their inspiration from Eliot became the dominant fashions in the study of literature in British and American universities between the 1930s and 1960s. This reputation and this influence, the standing and reach of which may now be hard to appreciate, gives an added edge to any reconsideration of Eliot’s early critical prose that attends, instead, to its often fragmentary or covert character as an attempt to write a kind of history.
The question of the critic’s bad conscience about historians will be a recurring topic in what follows, but we should first note the surprisingly sustained character of Eliot’s engagement with history and historians in the early and mid-1920s. Writing to Ezra Pound in September 1923, Eliot defended his journal, the Criterion, against Pound’s intemperately expressed charges of timidity and conformism. As an example of the journal’s heterodoxy, Eliot instanced the hostility that he believed had been directed by the literary establishment against the Shakespearean scholar and rationalist J. M. Robertson as a result of his association with Eliot and his periodical. Writing to his mother in October 1923, Eliot cited Robertson and Charles Whibley as ‘allies … of an elder generation’. But Robertson, Eliot complained to Pound, ‘is not reviewed any longer by The Times or the bloomsbury [sic] press in consequence, and … although he is a whig the whig vermin will not associate with him’.4 It is scarcely surprising that correspondence with Pound tended to bring Eliot out in such excesses as ‘vermin’, but his choice of adjective is surely striking. If in 1923 one were looking for a single disparaging adjective with which to describe respectable literary London and its fashionable Bloomsbury offshoot, especially if one were writing from the perspective of experimental post-Imagiste poetry and unsparingly rigorous literary criticism, the term ‘whig’ does not seem an obvious choice. A label originally deriving from English party politics, it had, of course, come more generally to be applied to a style of history-writing that told a story of constitutional and social progress, celebrating the native English gift for restrained liberty. So why, looking around the influential literary editors and reviewers in London in the early 1920s, would Eliot, in writing to one of his closest confidants, choose to disparage these particular vermin as ‘whig’?
One simple, even simplistic, way to answer the question would be to invoke the contrasting party-political label and to say that it was because Eliot identified himself as a ‘Tory’, and anyway that an element of datedness or archaism about so using these terms appealed to him. There is obviously some truth to this, though in 1923 Eliot had yet to fully elaborate that high-and-dry reactionary and Anglican persona that characterized so many of his public performances in the second half of his life. But the narrowly political reference seems an inadequate explanation for his choice, especially in the early 1920s, not least because by that date the term was far more current to describe a form of history than a form of politics. As I shall illustrate, Eliot used the term ‘whig’ with some frequency, and the association between an interpretation of history and a range of wider cultural attitudes lay at the heart of this usage.
Eliot’s Kulturkampf against what he at one point termed ‘the contemporary degeneracy that one loathes’ was conducted on many levels.5 That his poetry involved a kind of dislocation of time has become a standard characterization, but the engagement of his criticism with history in the narrower and more conventional sense tends to be neglected. In this chapter, I want to suggest that, in the early and mid-1920s in particular, Eliot found himself drawn into the task of reconfiguring the relation of the English to their past, and that this involved him in attempting to dispossess the ‘whigs’ of their ownership of that history. His chosen terrain for these endeavours was, for the most part, literary history, but, as he increasingly emphasized, it was impossible to maintain a strict demarcation between literary history and what he and his contemporaries usually referred to as ‘general history’. In other words, if one wanted to challenge the late-Romantic aesthetic represented by Georgian poetry and its admirers, one was eventually driven to becoming a historian of the seventeenth century.
One of the difficulties involved in characterizing the historical framework around which so much of Eliot’s early criticism was elaborated is deciding just how seriously to take it. By this I do not just mean the problem, familiar to readers of his writing more generally, of knowing when he is mocking various manifestations of misplaced earnestness or even parodying certain conventional styles and ways of going on. I mean that it is frequently unclear whether his apparently historical assertions are intended to be true claims about the past or whether they are more a device, a kind of rhetorical flourish, intended to endow unfamiliar or outrageous claims about poetry with some added authority. When, for example, he writes: ‘And the sixteenth century was a chaotic period which apparently has little to show for itself, but was doing the work that made the seventeenth century possible’, we would do well not to judge him by the chastest protocols of academic historiography.6 In thinking about his critical writing during its most fertile decade, we should always remember the element of cultural experimentation and role-playing in both his writing and his life, in addition to the demands of ambition as this particular recent immigrant tried to make a name for himself in literary London. Still, the more closely we scrutinize his critical writings, the more we see they are shot through with historical (or perhaps meta- or even pseudo-historical) assertions, and so, while not forgetting Old Possum’s taste for tricks and disguises, it is important to try to take the measure of these assertions.
There have been numerous interpretations of the development of Eliot’s career and reputation. Here I shall simply assert—I have tried to provide the supporting evidence elsewhere—that his standing as a critic initially rested on the review essays he wrote for the Athenaeum and the Times Literary Supplement between 1919 and 1921.7 These pieces—several of which reappeared in his first collection, The Sacred Wood, published in 1920 and others in Homage to John Dryden in 1924—memorably make the case for literary criticism understood not as a statement of personal preferences or as a rapturous enthusing over literary beauty, but as the strenuous application of intelligence. Can they also be said to have encouraged contemporary English readers to understand aspects of their history in unfamiliar terms? For the most part, his essays do this only indirectly, glancingly, almost invisibly. It certainly cannot be said that Eliot rewrites ‘general history’ in any familiar or recognizable form; it cannot even be said that he provides a coherent, joined-up alternative to the established kinds of literary history at the time. Nonetheless, I want to suggest, a form of history or quasi-history is what some of his early criticism also provides.
It is well known, of course, that in the second half of his career Eliot elaborated a variety of historical or quasi-historical views as part of his increasingly conservative social criticism.8 Those later views have a place both in Eliot’s biography and in the wider intellectual history of the period,9 but they provide less of a challenge than his earlier work precisely because they were so explicit, so self-consciously conservative, and so largely extrinsic to his literary criticism. It is in his prose of the years from 1919 to 1927 that the most interesting and complex questions arise about the presence of various kinds of historical thinking and assumption in even the purest forms of literary analysis. Or rather—to put at least one card on the table in advance—this may be to say that there are no ‘pure’ forms of literary analysis.
In his prose of these years, Eliot is a ‘historian’ in the way that T. E. Hulme was a historian, which is to say both not one at all and somebody whose thinking increasingly revolved around a revision of the widely accepted secular stories about the path of progress in thought and sensibility since the Middle Ages. Hailing a posthumous collection of T. E. Hulme’s writings in 1924, Eliot celebrated him as ‘the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century’, a conjunction of qualities for which ‘whig’ became one of his favoured shorthands.10 As early as his ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’, when he was attacking the idea of poetry as a ‘cry from the heart’, Eliot wrote that ‘I am inclined to believe that Tennyson’s verse is a “cry from the heart”—only it is the heart of Tennyson, Latitudinarian, Whig, Laureate’.11 Classifying Tennyson as a ‘Whig’ was deliberately transgressive, of course, but it is revealing that Eliot chose this historical term with which to condense so many of his antipathies. In a celebrated exchange with Middleton Murry in 1923, Eliot excoriated that blend of Romanticism and Liberalism that claimed to steer by no more fixed authority than ‘the inner voice’, adding: ‘It is a voice to which, for convenience, we may give a name: and the name I suggest is Whiggery.’12 Again, it may at first seem curious that Eliot should use this term derived from English history to designate that congeries of attitudes that constituted the opposite of his classicism. But for Eliot the term connoted all that he detested about nineteenth-century national self-congratulation, including (as his attack on Murry made clear) a faith in individuals, a lack of principles, and a belief in Muddling Through.
Macaulay, most celebrated of Whig historians, was a particular bugbear. Eliot frequently inveighed against ‘the influence, for the most part pernicious, of Macaulay on literary and other opinion in England’.13 For example, in 1923 he declared: ‘The style of Macaulay is an eighteenth-century style debased by a journalistic exuberance and theatrical emotion.’ Carlyle’s style may have had its weaknesses, ‘but if open licence is better than concealed depravity, his style is healthier than Macaulay’s’.14 ‘Theatrical emotion’, ‘concealed depravity’: these are scarcely minor failings or confined to the more technical aspects of writing history. And the emphasis on ‘concealment’ pointed to something that particularly irked Eliot about Whig history. ‘Some of the most satisfactory historians’, he ruled in a later unpublished piece, ‘are those whose bias in unconcealed’.15 It may be partly because his ‘bias’ was so little concealed that the Victorian historian whom Eliot relied upon with the fewest reservations was J. A. Froude, whose The Reign of Elizabeth was the text Eliot recommended for ‘historical background’ when he gave his first course of lectures on ‘Elizabethan Literature’ in 1918–19.16 By contrast, when reviewing a reissue of G. P. Gooch’s English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century in the Criterion in 1927 Eliot complained: ‘It is one of those liberal-historical treatises which appear wholly impartial and are in fact extremely biased. … The tendency is Republican and the author appears to be in sympathy with religious movements in so far as they are rebellious.’17 (Gooch’s book has more recently been described as ‘a defence of Protestant individualism as the basis of modern egalitarian ideas’.18) After this, it comes as no surprise to find that the most authoritative modern account of early twentieth-century English historiography briskly characterizes Gooch as ‘a confirmed whig’.19 By contrast, the historians whom Eliot cultivated, such as Charles Whibley, Kenneth Pickthorn, and Charles Smyth, were all strongly identified as anti-Whig—which is clearly what Whibley meant when he recommended Pickthorn to Eliot as ‘a sound historian with sound views’.20
Eliot’s parallel engagement with the question of how literary history might be written began earlier and was more extensive than is commonly recognized. Remarkably, no fewer than five of the reviews he wrote for the Athenaeum between April and August 1919 were about such works.21 Predictably, he finds shortcomings in all of them, chiefly those written by professors, and especially those written by American professors. Where the authors attempt to sketch in the relevant general history, they merely produce, claims Eliot, ‘a jumble of stage properties in [the] background’.22 And yet something on this scale is essential, for, as he tellingly observes (in a sentence that serves as an epigraph to this book): ‘The historian of literature must count with as shifting and as massive forces as the historian of politics.’23 The beginnings of a recipe for better literary history emerge from the least unfavourable of these pieces, a review of a volume of George Saintsbury’s History of the French Novel: ‘Mr Saintsbury is a master of the literary history—a form of writing which demands qualifications of its own. The literary historian needs critical gifts, but his task is not that of the critic. He needs a sense of values, but he has little occasion to exercise it beyond the mere indication of the place of the great … ’, and so on.24
In the course of the early and mid-1920s, Eliot toyed with ways to replace conventional literary history with accounts that were driven by the critic’s ‘sense of values’. At the same time, as part of his own spiritual development, he took his distance from almost all post-medieval literature, since it had all been corrupted by the taint of ‘humanism’. An extreme but revealing illustration of his radically revisionist handling of literary history is provided by a lecture that he gave in Cambridge in 1924 but never published (it was published for the first time as part of the online Complete Prose in 2014). Entitled, modestly but misleadingly, ‘A Neglected Aspect of Chapman’, the lecture ranged back to Dante and forward to Dostoevsky. Chapman, like Donne, is criticized for ‘an internal incoherence, as of an era of transition and decay’. Eliot proposes, invoking Hulme, to ‘call the period which includes Chapman and Dostoevski the humanist period’. ‘My point is’, Eliot underlined, ‘that Chapman and Dostoevski and ourselves are all part of a modern world and that Dante belonged to another and perhaps a wiser one’. And he drove home the revisionist moral: ‘I know that the Elizabethan literature is usually regarded as a golden age, instead of an age of decomposition,’ but he insisted that Chapman (and Donne) must be seen as part of that long development, coming down to the present, ‘which accepted the divorce of human and divine, denied the divine, and asserted the perfection of the human to be the divine’.25 The lecture was, by Eliot’s own admission, hurriedly composed and more than usually scrappy—two days before he was due to deliver it, he described it to Richard Aldington as ‘still in very rough shape’, a judgement borne out by the evidence of the unpolished typescript; writing to Virginia Woolf several days later he reported that the lecture was ‘unworthy of subsequent publication’—but it presented in correspondingly stark form the concerns that were agitating him as he struggled to reshape his, and his culture’s, literary inheritance.26
In the end, he did not write a general literary history himself—indeed, Eliot, notoriously, did not write books: he wrote essays, lectures, and reviews, and then made books out of a selection of these shorter forms. The three most sustained pieces of prose he wrote were his Ph.D. dissertation, his Clark Lectures, and his Norton Lectures in 1933, and it is telling that, first, all three were instances of what Larkin later termed ‘required writing’, and, second, that two of them remained unpublished in his lifetime. But, although in the case of the Clark Lectures that decision may have reflected more than even his usual level of self-criticism and dissatisfaction, there is a case for saying that they constituted the most sustained piece of history that Eliot wrote in the first half of his career, and it is for what they tell us about the historical character of his thinking at this point that I want to use them here.
The Clark Lectures present themselves as an investigation into the character of ‘metaphysical poetry’. By this, Eliot means not just the work of those early seventeenth-century writers conventionally labelled, following Dr Johnson, ‘the Metaphysicals’. Rather, he structures the lectures around comparisons between the poetry of three periods—that of Dante and his associates in the thirteenth century, that of Donne and certain other poets in the early seventeenth century, and that of the followers of Baudelaire, especially Laforgue and Corbière, in France in the late nineteenth century. ‘It is these moments of history,’ he writes, ‘when human sensibility is momentarily enlarged in certain directions to be defined, that I propose to call the metaphysical periods’. They are periods when ‘the revolution of the sphere of thought will so to speak throw off ideas which will fall within the attraction of poetry, and which the operation of poetry will transmute into the immediacy of feeling’.27 Even these little bits of preliminary throat-clearing suggest that an enquiry into those ‘moments of history when human sensibility is momentarily enlarged in certain directions’ and into those periods when ‘the revolution of the sphere of thought … throw[s] off’ certain ideas is no narrowly literary enterprise.
Furthermore, focusing on the poetry of three periods cannot be a merely definitional or taxonomic exercise: it is bound to involve some implied story of the transitions from one to another, and hence a trajectory of some sort. In the Clark Lectures, the connections and contrasts are neither left wholly implicit but nor are they given fully historical status either. Insofar as there is a single thread, it is provided by his phrase ‘the disintegration of the intellect’. Quite what this means is never clear; it seems to have more to do with the separation of thought from feeling than any more encompassing break-up, though the culturally pessimistic implications of the phrase were obviously congenial to Eliot. At one level, the lectures are a remarkably high-handed confection of literary and intellectual history even by the standards of this notoriously high-handed critic. We are offered sketches of transitions in sensibility between centuries, even epochs, with considerable citation of philosophical and religious history to buttress the claims he makes principally on the basis of noting certain contrasts in poetic styles. They effectively assert the superiority of the unified sensibility of the thirteenth century, where feeling was allegedly suffused with the deeply held beliefs of a philosophically articulated religion, over the seventeenth century, or at least Donne, where traces of various thought-worlds are present but not fully integrated, and that period in turn was superior to the nineteenth century, where the examples of Tennyson and Swinburne demonstrate what he called ‘a further stage in the disintegration of the intellect, the further separation of sound, image and thought’.28
But the moments of confident assertion or calculated outrageousness, so familiar from Eliot’s early criticism, should not lead us to overlook those passages where he seems suddenly seized by a kind of self-consciousness or embarrassment about the extent of his bare-faced trespassing on the historian’s domain, prompting him to issue nervous disclaimers. For instance, at the end of the fifth lecture (of eight), he suddenly says of his contrasts between the work of Dante and of Donne: ‘The differences involve a certain theory of the disintegration of the intellect in modern Europe.’ But then Eliot immediately retreats, stressing that he is concerned ‘primarily with poetry, not with modern Europe and its progress or decline’. He then cannot resist adding a final sarcastic flourish to mark his distance even more emphatically, insisting that it is not for him to identify whether this ‘disintegration’ is good or bad: ‘to draw its optimistic or pessimistic conclusions is an occupation for prophets and makers of almanacks, of whom I am not one.’29 In reality, even the Eliot of this date is not averse to donning the mantle of the prophet when it suits him, but the function here of this lordly wave of the hand is to turn away in advance any expectation that he could be doing something that, he wants us to understand, is best left to quacks and hacks. Of course, the mannered disclaimer would not be necessary had he not in fact been offering just such large-scale characterizations of a species of cultural decline. It is hard to know whether to attach any significance to the fact that he does not at this point suggest that concern with ‘modern Europe and its progress or decline’ might reasonably be considered an occupation, not for ‘prophets and makers of almanacks’, but for historians.
Sometimes he does not even apologize: he hurries on like the nervous guest who does not wish to draw further attention to a faux pas. Observing the difficulty of tracing the continuity of the type of conceit characteristic of Donne in the work of the next generation, he immediately says: ‘It is only by grasping the movement of the whole period, from Elizabeth to Cromwell, as an integrity, that one can form any conception of the conceit or of this type of metaphysical poetry.’30 Such a self-interruption might have seemed less disruptive if he had written that one had to ‘grasp the movement of the whole period from (say) Jonson to Marvell’ or some other representative writers. But by insisting so emphatically that it is only ‘by grasping the movement of the whole period, from Elizabeth to Cromwell, as an integrity’ that one can ‘form any conception’ either of the conceit or of metaphysical poetry, he sets the historical bar unreachably high (and may seem to call into question the feasibility of the project of his lectures). In fact, the effect of blurting out this admission is to draw attention to the very lack in his lectures of any sustained attention to social, political, or economic history—the kind of thing that would constitute an understanding of the period ‘from Elizabeth to Cromwell’. There is a truth here that Eliot seems to want simultaneously to acknowledge, apologize for, and erase.
We encounter another instance of this half-recognition of the claims of ‘general history’ as Eliot approaches the end of his final lecture. He anticipates that some of his audience will be dissatisfied with his failure to have supplied a ‘neat and comprehensive definition’ of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and then affects to remind them of the contract between lecturer and audience: ‘But I think I warned you in advance, that I did not intend to define the seventeenth century, or the first half of it—for to do that I should have had to draw in the background much more completely, with the figures of James, and Charles, and Hooker, and Laud, and Hyde and Strafford.’31 But surely no member of the audience could, after seeing his announced title or still less after attending his first lecture, have expected him to do that. It is often a mark of the guilty that they rebut a charge that has not yet been laid against them. Whether out of an unease at addressing a largely academic audience on this occasion or out of his own sense of the impossibility of separating literary history from general history, Eliot keeps disowning an obligation of which he nonetheless feels the force.
This tension surfaces again in a peroration in which he at last frankly acknowledges that ‘you cannot treat literary criticism as a subject isolated from every other subject of study: you must take account of general history, of philosophy, theology, economics, psychology, into all of which literary criticism merges’, and so on.32 But each time, in these final pages, that he protests his innocence, he in effect confirms his guilt. He insists that he has only been concerned with ‘the progressive deterioration of poetry, in one respect or another, since the thirteenth century’, but he at once concedes that this is ‘probably only one aspect of a general deterioration’—suggesting that the company of those ‘prophets and makers of almanacks’ is not so easy to shake off.33
The European frame of Eliot’s criticism was one way of relativizing English parochialism, just as his cultivation of the more recondite or remote features of literary and intellectual history was a way of undercutting the temporal parochialism that saw the Victorian period as the culmination of cultural progress. (As he was to express it later: ‘It is the endless task of men of letters to disturb the provincialism of their particular place and time.’)34 Eliot knew that he was addressing a readership whose self-understanding very considerably depended on forms of historical identification, and his early criticism involves a series of oblique assaults on the received celebratory story. Seen thus, his Clark Lectures may be said to constitute a kind of anti-Palgrave. Part of the drama of the development of Eliot’s literary-historical thinking in the 1920s lies in the way in which his brilliant recasting of the central notion of Imagism as a means of identifying the superiority of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry hardens into an assertion about poetry’s necessary dependence on religious, and indeed eventually ecclesiastical, orthodoxy. But from the outset there is in Eliot’s prose also the half-guilty acknowledgement that such a recasting of literary history would need to be underwritten by a larger rewriting of ‘general history’ than he could provide.
After Eliot had delivered his Clark Lectures, he had them bound in a typescript, to which he added a brief preface (this was presumably the form in which they were submitted in support of his All Souls application). Here he announced, as applicants do, that the ‘completed book’ of his lectures would be far more thorough and well documented, adding (as, again, applicants tend to do):
The completed book on The School of Donne … is intended as one volume of a trilogy under the general title of ‘The Disintegration of the Intellect’: the other two volumes will deal with Elizabethan Drama, its technical development, its versification, and its intellectual background of general ideas; and with The Sons of Ben—the development of humanism, its relation to Anglican thought, and the emergence of Hobbes and Hyde. The three together will constitute a criticism of the English Renaissance.35
This makes it sound as though Eliot had embarked on a major piece of critical intellectual history not unlike, say, Basil Willey’s Seventeenth-Century Background. But it is worth remembering that, where the announcing of never-written books is concerned, Eliot had form. The three books he was not writing in 1926 were different from the two he was not writing in 1924, as announced in the preface to Homage to John Dryden,36 and different again from the three he was not writing in 1928, as announced in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes.37 All three statements involved a certain amount of posturing and perhaps even more than the usual amount of authorly self-deception when announcing future projects (none of these volumes, needless to say, was ever written). Still, this sequence of unwritten books neatly charts Eliot’s development across the mid-1920s, away from what he came to regard as an overly pure concentration on poetry as poetry in The Sacred Wood and towards, as he put it in the 1928 introduction to the reissue of that volume, a focus on ‘the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times’38—or, in other words, a strengthening conviction that what was needed was a more extended engagement with large-scale intellectual and cultural history. It cannot be said that Eliot ever pursued that engagement in any systematic fashion, continuing instead to throw out sweeping pseudo-historical judgements such as this from his Norton Lectures:
The history of every branch of intellectual activity provides the same record of the diminution of England from the time of Queen Anne. It is not so much the intellect, but something superior to the intellect, which went for a long time into eclipse; and this luminary, by whatever name we may call it, has not yet wholly emerged from its secular obnubilation.39
The precise meaning of this cloudy assertion suffers from some obnubilation of its own, but it does suggest that there were moments when Eliot was willing to allow that a state of relative cultural or intellectual health may have persisted even beyond the Civil War and the Restoration.
I have thus far deliberately stayed away from the most obvious and best-known, as well as most influential, example of Eliot’s historical or meta-historical claims from these years. But when seen in the context of the preoccupations I have just been discussing, this claim falls into place as one of Eliot’s more provoking flirtations with a form of revisionist historical narrative. The claim in question was first formulated in the Times Literary Supplement of 20 October 1921. In a review essay loosely hung round H. J. C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, the reviewer (still at that point anonymous, of course) asserted that in Donne and other so-called ‘Metaphysical Poets’ there is a quality that can also be found in Chapman—namely, ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’. The reviewer briefly contrasted an example of this style with passages from Browning and Tennyson, and then went on:
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning. … We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. … In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered …40
In the half-century or so after its first appearance, this claim became part of the furniture of literary and intellectual discussion in Britain. As early as 1925, Edwin Muir could observe that ‘Mr Eliot’s diagnosis of the increasing psychological debility of English poetry since the time of the Elizabethans and their immediate successors is sufficiently well known … ’. Identifying the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ as the root of the decline, Muir added: ‘That this analysis is accepted as a truism by intelligent people today is due chiefly to Mr Eliot.’41 But, although the idea has been endlessly, and often critically, discussed in subsequent scholarship, perhaps even this great volume of commentary has not quite identified the peculiar character of the historical claim being made here. Obviously, Eliot is implicitly establishing an affinity between the poetry of the early seventeenth century and contemporary poetry influenced by Symbolism and Imagisme, thereby downgrading pretty much all poetry between the mid-seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries. But to explain this by claiming that ‘something … happened to the mind of England’ during the intervening period does seem to be using an extremely large and unwieldy historical sledgehammer to crack a relatively modest literary nut.
Similarly, the assertion that ‘in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered’ involves a polemical surplus almost comic in its excess. The provocative form of these assertions may seem designed to make the professional historian bridle. ‘The mind of England’ has not been, shall we say, a favoured unit of analysis in modern historiography. It is also noticeable that Eliot does not even gesture towards an explanation of the change, certainly not in political, social, or economic terms: the dissociation simply ‘set in’. Poets possessed the ‘mechanism’ up till the mid-seventeenth century and then it was lost. Still, the claim cannot just be dismissed as the semaphore of the hurried reviewer or the axe-grinding of the critic who favours one type of poetry over another and wishes to furnish his preference with some weighty legitimation, though both those descriptions may say something true about the review in question. Beyond all that, the structure of Eliot’s claim evidently involves movement from a kind of wholeness to a kind of fragmentation: what had been fused in a unity was thereafter sundered into separate parts and not only in poetry. That the change, as represented, is to be regretted is clear; as in most such meta-historical claims, wholeness carries a positive charge, separation connotes a fall.
Eliot cannot be held wholly responsible for the extraordinary afterlife of this idea in literary and cultural discussion of the next forty years; it belonged, he later reflected somewhat disingenuously, among those ‘few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world’.42 But nor was he entirely innocent in the matter of its longevity; after all, he reprinted the review essay in which it occurs several times, first in the slim volume of 1924, then in his Selected Essays of 1932, and then again in the revised and expanded edition of that collection in 1951, by which time he was well aware that, partly as a by-product of his own unmatched cultural standing, his sweeping yet offhand claim had come to be treated as a serious contribution to the understanding of history.
‘Mr Eliot’ was an unignorable presence in English literary culture from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. To describe that presence as ‘pontifical’, the regulation adjective, risks suggesting that his authority rested on one particular institutional identity, but it does not exaggerate its reach. Certainly, any discussion of the ways in which understandings of history were expressed through literary criticism in these decades needs to take the measure of Eliot’s role, not least because others so often cited him, deferred to him, criticized him, misrepresented him. Thus far, we have considered his engagement with history in the prose written in, roughly, the decade leading up to his formal conversion to Anglicanism in 1927.43 In moving on to address, much more briefly, his later career, we encounter a double difficulty. First, there is the fact—and it surely is a fact, not merely a statement of aesthetic preference—that his later work on the whole lacked the intensity and sharpness of his best criticism, especially that written between, say, 1919 and 1923. And, secondly, there is the mediating presence of his reputation: what ‘Mr Eliot’ was alleged to think becomes, in these later years, almost as important in contemporary cultural discussion as what he actually thought. Of course, 1927 did not mark any kind of clean break in Eliot’s work: one can, if so minded, detect signs of an Anglo-Catholic sensibility before 1927 just as easily as one can demonstrate continuities with his earlier writing thereafter. But both Eliot’s role and the character of his writing did change once his confessional affiliation became a defining public identity, and we need at least to note, however briefly, the consequences of that change for his dealings with history.
In some ways, the slightly pompous, stilted character occasionally detectable in his later prose could be said to have gone along with the expression of rather more conventional or predictable views. The provocative ironies and wilful obliquities of the earlier prose give way to a form of statement that is more eirenic and more cautious, as well as simply more of a ‘statement’. It is also notable that his later views, though presented as those of ‘a man of letters’, derive less directly from the practice of his literary criticism.44 In particular, his later social criticism does not seem to depend so closely upon the kind of revisionist literary history that had underpinned his earlier polemical flourishes. Nonetheless, his later social criticism needs to be attended to, partly to correct any onesidedness in my treatment of the earlier writings (where I did not dwell on their religious inclinations, such as they are), and partly because his later views were such important points of reference for literary critics writing in the 1940s and 1950s.45
In one obvious respect, Eliot’s work became more explicitly historical after 1927. To define oneself as an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ was to take one’s stand upon history. As a confessional identity, this strain within Anglicanism depended upon making a case about the continuity of the ‘Catholic Church in England’, a continuity that, according to the most strenuous accounts, stretched from Augustine to the present. Anglicanism, on this view, was not created by Henry VIII, even if it was during his reign that the yoke of subjection to Rome was removed (an argument that, in turn, pushed English Roman Catholics to the margins of the national society thereafter). And so it was not in the strict sense a ‘Protestant’ church: its theology and liturgy drew upon the teachings of the sixteenth-century reformers but it blended these with older traditions, especially in matters of church governance and of ritual. Cranmer and Elizabeth played important parts, but so did Richard Hooker and such early seventeenth-century divines as Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud. Anglo-Catholicism was, therefore, an intrinsically historical identity that could involve, depending on context, emphasizing various historical reference points: ‘the ideal of the primitive church; the medieval English church; the English High Church tradition, particularly as it developed from the earlier seventeenth century; and, of course, the contemporary Western Church, as centred in Rome.’46 Eliot engaged with all these sources at different moments, but an obvious strand of continuity with his earlier literary writings was the primacy he gave to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Anglo-Catholicism could trace its own genealogy back to the Tractarian movement of the 1830s and 1840s, but it particularly flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, reaching its peak of influence in the interwar years (just as religious observance and church membership more generally were beginning what was eventually to be a precipitous decline).47 It is important to remember its prominent and partly official position during these years, since it meant that Eliot did not think of himself as speaking from a dissident or iconoclastic position: indeed, he came to be recognized as a leading Anglo-Catholic layman, and that entailed writing with a somewhat different literary voice. At the same time, his meditations led from literary history to ecclesiastical history and then on to more sociological questions about the character of ‘community’ and ‘culture’ in the modern world. His earlier pronouncements about ‘order’ had tended to be formal or doctrinal; now he made efforts to specify some of the necessary social conditions for the kinds of ‘order’ he was recommending. ‘Tradition’ became ‘social tradition’, requiring recourse to different aspects of history.
‘The Church of England is the creation not of the reign of Henry VIII or of the reign of Edward VI, but of the reign of Elizabeth’, since she attempted to ‘find a mean between Papacy and Presbytery’. This is Eliot, writing in 1926, the year before he was received into the Church of England, controverting the popular assumption about the beginnings of Anglicanism. He went on to analyse the differences between the sermons of Hugh Latimer and those of Lancelot Andrewes in best Anglo-Catholic manner, suggesting that the key lay not in their different audiences or occasions: ‘It is rather that Latimer, the preacher of Henry VIII and Edward VI, is merely a Protestant; but the voice of Andrewes is the voice of a man who has a formed visible Church behind him. … Andrewes is the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church.’48 The bulk of the essay is devoted to insisting on Andrewes’s superiority to Donne, not least in his greater intimacy with the traditions of the medieval church. It has some claim to be Eliot’s first significant attempt to revisit ecclesiastical history for contemporary polemical purposes. Perhaps by the very purest Anglo-Catholic standards it could still seem a little too ‘Protestant’ in not tracing the ‘English Catholic Church’ back to Augustine, but at this point Eliot’s attention was focused overwhelmingly on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
When, alerted by the new preoccupations of the piece on Lancelot Andrewes, the editor of Theology wrote to its author inviting him to contribute to his journal and proposing in the first instance a piece on a new biography of Archbishop Bramhall, Eliot, in accepting, indicated that the two further figures he was particularly keen to write about were Hooker and Laud.49 The review essay on Bramhall combined some of his earlier manner with his more recent concerns. Yet again, Eliot disclaims any standing as a historian: ‘With the purely historical matter I am not competent to deal; Bramhall’s life includes an important part of the history of the Church and the history of England.’ But, as even the second half of that sentence indicates, he is not shy about making historical claims. One of the most striking comes in the course of his undisguisedly hostile account of Bramhall’s opponent in philosophical controversy, Thomas Hobbes, including this remarkably dismissive sneer: ‘Thomas Hobbes was one of those extraordinary little upstarts whom the chaotic motions of the Renaissance tossed into an eminence which they hardly deserved and have never lost.’ No less striking is the calculated snub to liberal historical assumptions contained in the gloss to his use of ‘Renaissance’:
When I say the Renaissance I mean for this purpose the period between the decay of scholastic philosophy and the rise of modern science. The thirteenth century had the gift of philosophy, or reason; the later seventeenth century had the gift of mathematics, or science; but the period between had ceased to be rational without having learned to be scientific.50
So much for the ‘rebirth’ of Western thought.
Eliot spelled out some of his assumptions about the specific character of English history in two articles on ‘The English Tradition’ contributed to Christendom in 1940.51 One central theme was the way in which social and religious life could not be clearly separated: ‘The civil history of England, and its religious history, are the same with only a difference of emphasis and detail’, and hence ‘the chief common defect of most histories of England is that they are written with an inadequate understanding, an unexamined bias, or a lack of interest, in respect of religious forces’. He instanced the parish system to illustrate the indivisibility of church and society, but it is noticeable that, in elaborating on its dependence on communal norms of landholding and tithe-paying, he stretched the point in a potentially radical direction:
a form of tenure of land suitable to an agricultural society, in which man’s dependence upon the fruits of the soil created a responsible relationship, becomes grotesque when it applies to the subterranean stores of coal and minerals which are irreplaceable, and also when it applies to the ground ownership of urban land used for habitation or industry.52
The contention that the usual rights of private property did not apply to mineral resources and urban land was a view with a long radical pedigree in English political thought, stretching back through Fabian and New Liberal thinkers to such figures as Henry George or the more radical followers of J. S. Mill in the Land Tenure Reform Association in the 1870s.53 (Major Douglas’s ‘Social Credit’ theory, which aroused considerable interest in the 1930s among literary intellectuals, including Eliot, elaborated some not dissimilar ideas about the social bases of capitalist wealth.) Eliot does not in fact commit himself to any specific policy consequences of this claim, such as common ownership or even special taxation of land values, but what seems striking is, first, how relatively familiar this sentiment was in the social thought of the 1930s, and, second, that it could equally well sit alongside political opinions that were identified as conservative as those identified as radical.
In these articles Eliot also spells out a view of the different phases in the intertwining of church and society in English history. For example, the Erastianism detectable in the eighteenth century partly reflected, in his view, the low spiritual temperature of the eighteenth-century church and partly the close social relations between the clergy and the governing class. ‘The most important change in the nineteenth century was surely the displacement of High Church by Anglo-Catholic, the consequent dissociation from the Tory Party, the recruitment of Anglo-Catholics from various political groupings, and their critical attitude, inspired by their increasing attention to problems of social justice, to both of the political parties.’ At this point, he shows no sign of disapproving of this development or of being made at all uncomfortable by this ecumenical co-habitation with those of a radical political persuasion. Indeed, the ‘critical attitude’ is what, in one sense of the phrase, he favours, since he sees the main failing in English history to have been the assumption that ‘we were Christians in an indefectibly Christian society’—that is, that in England the union of society and religion had been assumed to be so natural and so close that the ways in which in recent centuries religion had started to be sidelined or overruled had not been sufficiently appreciated.54 ‘We’ now had to do better, a task which relied upon a more adequate grasp of the relevant social and religious history.
Eliot’s claim about a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ became, as already noted, something of a literary-historical orthodoxy in the next three or four decades, utilized and discussed in countless books and articles—hence J. P. Cooper’s warning, quoted earlier.55 But Eliot was, as ever, ahead of his commentators in registering reservations. His 1947 British Academy lecture on Milton is celebrated for its partial retraction of the charges he had earlier laid against the poet, but, in the course of his reconsideration of his great predecessor, Eliot slipped in some significant historical observations. He noted that attitudes towards Milton’s poetry cannot but be affected by attitudes towards his politics and his theology, and that these are not merely of antiquarian interest. ‘The fact is simply that the Civil War of the seventeenth century, in which Milton is a symbolic figure, has never been concluded. The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.’ He then goes on to offer this reflection on his own earlier claims about a ‘dissociation of sensibility’:
If such a dissociation did take place, I suspect that the causes are too complex and profound to justify our accounting for the change in terms of literary criticism. All we can say is, that something like this did happen; that it had something to do with the Civil War; that it would even be unwise to say that it was caused by the Civil War, but that it is a consequence of the same causes which brought about the Civil War; that we must seek the causes in Europe, not in England alone … 56
Eliot’s Milton lecture is often cited as an example of his more concessive, eirenic later manner, as he smooths away the rough edges of his earlier, more spikily performative prose. But in some ways this passage could be seen more as an extension and hardening of his original claims than a retraction of them; it certainly seems to make them more rather than less historical. First, it is worth noting that in his original 1921 review essay he had not explicitly linked the ‘dissociation’ to the Civil War at all, which is not mentioned at that point. ‘Something happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning.’ Not only was the change spoken of entirely in terms of poetry, but the timescale gestured towards seemed to run from the first half of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Secondly, the 1947 passage explicitly denies that the changes involved can be accounted for in terms of literary criticism; they are now clearly to be understood as part of a much wider historical process, which includes the causes ‘which brought about the Civil War’. And, finally, it is not something that happened only to ‘the mind of England’: the causes must be sought in Europe.
The upshot of this reformulation is to make the idea of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ much more historical, and more clearly something that happened in the seventeenth century. We are left to wonder what at this point Eliot took the causes of the Civil War to have been. His ‘dissociation of sensibility’ might, just conceivably, be grafted onto a story that foregrounded, say, the decline of Aristotelianism, the rise of Puritanism, and the beginnings of the new science; it would surely sit rather oddly with a story that emphasized, say, the rise of mercantile interests, the economic difficulties of the gentry, and the excesses of an out-of-touch court.
Or perhaps not. For, if we want a really remarkable but telling illustration of the impact of Eliot’s quasi-historical claim, we may jump ahead seven years from his British Academy lecture to the unlikely setting of the 1954 summer school held by the Communist Party Historians’ Group. The theme of the school was ‘The Rise and Decline of Capitalism in Britain’, and one of the speakers was Christopher Hill on the topic ‘Ideas and the State 1660–1760’. Everything about the occasion may seem to be utterly remote from the sketchy thoughts on poetic history of a young poet and critic at the beginning of the 1920s, but in fact we learn from the recently examined records of this group that in his paper Hill ‘sought to assess the effect of ideologies and cultures on the way the country was governed, with reference to T. S. Eliot’s idea of “integrated sensibility” ’.57
Commenting three years later still in 1957 on the influence of Eliot’s idea of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’, Frank Kermode noted that ‘enquiries into the dissociation had long ceased to be conducted entirely in terms of literary criticism. Almost every conceivable aspect of seventeenth-century life had been examined by scholars anxious to validate the concept, though it is true that the investigators were usually historians of literature by profession.’58 The caveat in Kermode’s last clause recurs to the theme of the relation between literary history and general history, and he speculated that the idea of ‘a pregnant historical crisis … was attractive because it gave design and simplicity to history; and because it explained in a subtly agreeable way the torment and division of modern life’. Kermode had no doubt that ‘Mr Eliot’s extraordinary persuasiveness’, which had led to the idea enjoying such success in the previous three decades, would mean it would continue ‘to exert a powerful influence for a long time yet’.59
Here, Kermode was more successful as a historian than as a prophet, since Eliot’s idea soon ceased to enjoy an active life among either critics or historians, partly as a result of the decline of his influence more generally from the 1960s onwards, partly for other reasons—but that, as historians like to say, ‘is not my period’. Kermode was, nevertheless, surely right to attribute some of the power and longevity of Eliot’s notion to the way in which it ‘gave design and simplicity to history’, and that design, we may say, involved, however obliquely, a fundamental repudiation of the Whig interpretation of history. The presence of some such archetypal trajectory in Eliot’s later social thought has often been remarked, but its roots in his earlier attempts to engage directly with the work of historians have attracted much less attention. As we have seen, these attempts involved him in a rather nervous negotiation of the boundary between literary criticism and history whenever he seems to be proposing any large-scale historical story, a pattern that recurs with revealing frequency in his early prose above all. Over and over again, Eliot appears to propose some large historical generalization, only to pull back from it—not so much by modifying the generalization as by disowning the intention to trespass on the territory of the general or professional historian, categories he tends to equate. But this oscillation may not be entirely attributable to Eliot’s notorious slipperiness, for there is in fact no way to draw a hard and fast boundary between literary history and general history. Literary history, as I suggested in the Introduction, always presumes a selective kind of general history and at the same time threatens to modify or even supplant it. Indeed, literary-historical orthodoxies have a way of becoming part of the narrative of general history in the next generation, just as the textbook commonplaces about historical periodization and change are, in their turn, presupposed by subsequent literary histories, however revisionist.
Eliot’s ideas entered the bloodstream of English literary and intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century; the subsequent chapters of this book will illustrate some of the ways in which those ideas were absorbed, modified, and challenged in the work of later critics. That work, too, testified, in its own way, to the constant overlap or slippage between literary and general history. In the final sentence of Romantic Image, Kermode attempted to look even further ahead to the time when poets would have rediscovered Milton: ‘And by the time they have done that, the dissociation of sensibility, the great and in some ways noxious historical myth of Symbolism … will be forgotten, except by historians crying their new categories and still unheard persuasions.’60 The idea of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ did eventually disappear from view, but in the meantime some of the most influential historical ‘categories’ and ‘persuasions’ in mid-twentieth-century Britain were disseminated by critics trespassing across the border between literary and general history for their own purposes. For that reason, the developments discussed here cannot be understood simply in terms of the work of one or even a few individuals. They were, I am tempted mischievously to say, about something that had happened to the mind of England.