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Eliot and Humanism

Charles Maurras, J.M. Robertson, and Bertrand Russell

Eliot was such an indomitable warrior in the battles against Humanism conducted in the pages of the Criterion and Middleton Murry’s Athenaeum that his brief infatuation with that alternative to Christianity has been largely overlooked. Stevens, on the other hand, is widely assumed – and not without reason – to have adhered to Humanist ideas despite his statements to the contrary. It is certainly true that both poets lived and breathed in an intellectual climate in which Humanism was the most appealing option for those who had lost their religious faith but balked at the bleak prospect of social Darwinism or Socialism/ Communism. Social Darwinism’s confidence in a biological equivalent of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” guiding the blind actions of individuals was unappealing to anyone whose imaginative life was a central aspect of their self-esteem. Rather surprisingly, Communism’s equally depressing confidence in historical determinism did not prevent many artists and writers from being drawn to it – though few of Stevens’ or Eliot’s cohort groups. Eliot’s recurrent attacks on Humanism – as opposed to his relative neglect of both Darwinism and Communism – are a measure of the importance he attached to it as a threatening alternative to religion. Stevens was less hostile toward Humanism, but he too began his intellectual life in the belief that there was really no other alternative for a world in which Christian faith was no longer possible. Ultimately he found that Humanism could not meet the emotional needs that religion had satisfied.

Before looking at some poems that illustrate the degree of ambivalence that both poets felt toward Humanism, it will be helpful to look once again at the aetiology of Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism. Stevens’ purported conversion to Catholicism came too late, is too poorly attested, and is too uncertain to provide a parallel case. But there is lots of evidence of Stevens’ struggle to separate his own position from the Humanist one. I will consider Eliot’s case first.

“Humanism” is a term that has had different meanings in different historical periods, as well as for different individuals in the same period. Erasmus and St Thomas More were Christian Humanists, that is thinkers who turned their attention away from pure devotion toward an investigation of mankind’s relation to God and to one another. In pursuit of this goal they engaged in Biblical scholarship, treating the Bible and the Gospels as human documents – albeit inspired. The consequences of that scholarship played out three centuries later– in such thinkers as George Eliot and Ernest Renan – in scepticism about the inspired nature of the sacred texts. Nineteenth-century Humanism was a response to that scepticism. Its principal English voice was Matthew Arnold, whose belief that literature could replace religion as a moral guide and a social glue adequate to maintain the status quo dominated Humanist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I should make it clear that I am using “Humanism” in a somewhat more restricted sense than Jeffrey Perl does in his two admirable studies of modernism: The Tradition of Return (1984) and Skepticism and Modern Enmity (1989). Perl argues that modernism is essentially Humanist, defining Humanism as the desire for continuity and seeing it as continuous from the days of Erasmus and More to the twentieth century. He sets it against the romantic celebration of the interruption of continuity. “For its partisans,” he says, “modernism is the restitution of tradition; for detractors, an interruption of it.” He adds that Humanists (like the romantics and the moderns) were often self-deceived, believing themselves to be iconoclasts and revolutionaries: “those who most recoil from humanism, axiology, [and] the classical tradition, are most dependent on them” (Skepticism 15).

My focus is much more modest. I make no effort to place Eliot and Stevens in the context of metahistorical movements and tendencies; I seek rather to reconstruct their struggles to find their way in a world of conflicting opinion and belief played out against a background of accelerating scientific discovery and technological change. These factors led them to fear that they were witnessing the disintegration of a European (or Atlantic) culture founded on Christianity. Stevens thought men of imagination – poets, artists, and musicians – might be able to construct a new, post-Christian cultural milieu. Eliot once thought so too, but despaired of that rather Quixotic endeavour and withdrew to a variety of Christianity that had turned its back on modernity – understood here as Perl’s romantic celebration of “the interruption of continuity.”

On this more intimate level of cultural observation, we can recognize that Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Human Species (published in 1853) was a serious blow to the accommodation with early modernism – that is, everything between Descartes and Darwin – that Christianity had achieved during the first Humanist period. Darwinism spawned militantly atheistic Humanists like J.M. Robertson, who rejected the Arnoldian strain of Humanism because it retained the emotional trappings of Theistic superstition in forms of communal worship. Much of the debate about Humanism in Eliot’s day was concerned with the degree to which it was compatible with some form of belief in a higher power, of whatever nature. We shall see that, for a time, Eliot counted himself in the ranks of those who insisted on a rigorous exclusion of any theistic survivals from Christianity. The following exfoliation of Eliot’s search for a creed by which he could live must articulate the nature of the competing belief systems with which he flirted. It must also document the fact that he did, indeed, consider them as possible “faiths” at one time.

The account of Eliot’s intellectual affinities in the following pages is at odds with a strong strain of Eliot criticism, powerfully represented by Louis Menand’s 1987 study Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. Menand aligns himself with Frank Kermode’s excellent, but venerable, Romantic Image and Levenson’s A Genealogy of Modernism (1984) among others. These critics all agree that the early modernists perceived themselves to be at a moment of cultural crisis – as do I. But they perceive a species of fraud, charging that under pretense of novelty, these modernists disguise a deep indebtedness to the nineteenth century (3 & note p. 165). Oddly Menand does not mention Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson’s 1931 study, which makes the same argument. Surely it is time we stopped castigating the modernists for duplicity in disguising their origins, a practice motivated by a Marxist bias against their allegedly elitist posture. That bias is clear in Menand’s conclusion, where he invokes another 1958 study, Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society: “The critical thought of the first half of the twentieth century belongs – as Raymond Williams explains in Culture and Society (1958) – to a tradition in which ‘culture’ is required to play the role of the transcendent arbiter of value in a social formation characterized precisely by its inhospitality to transcendental agents” (163). Precisely! I could not agree more. Where I differ with Menand and Williams is that I see no reason to dismiss the resistance of the modernists to that cultural condition as wrong-headed or archaic.

Eliot’s declaration of his affiliation with the Anglican Church in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, following his baptism on 29 January 1927, was a shock to many of his admirers as well as a scandal to Williams and Menand. In declaring his aesthetic, political, and religious posture, he also inadvertently christened himself “Possum”: “I have made bold to unite these occasional essays merely as an indication of what may be expected, and to refute any accusation of playing ‘possum. The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion. I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define” (viii–ix). His good friend Ezra Pound picked up the opossum reference, and thereafter addressed his friend as “Possum” in their correspondence – a nickname that Eliot himself later canonized in the title of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

An opossum, the only marsupial native to North America, uses the defence mechanism of playing dead – an attribute that Pound detected in his phlegmatic friend. What Eliot no doubt had in mind, was the potentially perceived hypocrisy of concealing from his audience a religious affiliation not to be expected of the author of “The Hippopotamus,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” or The Waste Land. Eliot may also have been concerned about the possibility that he might be charged with playing ‘possum in the debate over Humanism with Middleton Murry and others in which he had engaged in the pages of the Criterion and Murry’s Athenaeum in the mid-twenties,¹ for he had not acknowledged a Christian belief in those exchanges. More positively, in this remark – as James Torrens has pointed out – Eliot echoed the masthead of Charles Maurras’ journal, Action française: “classique, catholique, monarchique.”² Now, in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot finally laid his ideological cards on the table so as to “refute any accusation of playing ‘possum in those debates. Of course, being Eliot, he lays them face down, in that he declares the term “classicist” to be “completely vague,” “royalist” to be “without definition,” and “anglo-catholic” to be ineffable.³

However elusive Eliot’s classicism and royalism may have been, his Anglicanism is not to be doubted.⁴ For the balance of his life he was a practising communicant in the established Church of England. We have lots of testimony of his religious convictions – both in published pieces, and in correspondence, but he has said little about the conversion itself. Conversion from agnosticism to Christian belief was not a rare thing among intellectuals of Eliot’s generation, and the one before it. Two prominent such converts were G.K. Chesterton, and Jacques Maritain – both of whom went to Rome, rather than Canterbury. Even Henri Bergson would have converted to Catholicism in his old age had he not been unwilling to abandon his Jewish co-religionists in the face of Nazi anti-Semitism.

Shortly after his baptism in the Anglican community, Eliot attempted to recruit Chesterton for the debate on Humanism in the Criterion: “I have wanted to start in the Criterion some discussion of the question of Humanism and Religion, to which I had hoped to induce you to contribute ... I want to generalise the question beyond the work of Babbitt, into the question of the possibility of any Humanism as a substitute for organised religion. (Letter to G.K. Chesterton, 21 October 1928. Eliot-Chesterton Collection British Library). Obviously the Catholic Chesterton would have been hostile to Humanism, but Eliot told him (in a letter of 6 May 1929) that he sympathized with Chesterton’s political, social, and religious views – though, of course, with reservations on the matter of religion.⁵ He had better luck with another Catholic convert, Jacques Maritain, whose contribution to the Criterion Eliot translated himself (though the translation is attributed to F.S. Flint).⁶ Another Christian convert of note with whom Eliot was associated is Paul Elmer More, a close friend of Irving Babbitt and, like Babbitt, a Humanist prior to his conversion. Eliot carried on an extensive correspondence with More from 1928 until the latter’s death in 1937.

Like most converts, Eliot possessed a “religious sensibility” from a young age, although it took him years of reflection to reach the point of conversion, as Lyndall Gordon explains: “From the first, Eliot took up the task of recording the private habits of mind, the fears and solitary impulses that led him to a religious position. That position took hold in about 1914, but many of the earliest poems, particularly those he never published, record an underground phase of religious searching, a slow incubation and maturing of motives” (Imperfect Life 33). The discussion that follows, however, will support Jewel Spears Brooker’s view that Eliot’s route to Anglicanism was much more tortuous than that envisioned by Gordon:

In the twenty years before his conversion, the years during which he had struggled to do without religion, he had been moving from one substitute to another and although his substitutes are more respectable than Yeats’s, they are “Make-Believe” just the same.

Eliot’s substitutes for religion can be roughly classified as erotic, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical ... He early associated his own experience of fragmentation and his longing for the Absolute, both of which are by definition religious, with sexual transcendence. (Brooker 1988 42)

Although I am in broad agreement with Brooker’s assessment of Eliot’s route to Anglicanism, I am not persuaded that Eliot ever agreed with his friend Ezra Pound that sexual transcendence could lead to a psychic experience analogous to mystical revelation. The Bolo poems and “Sweeney Agonistes” do not support such a view as much as the contrary view that sexual behaviour mocks spirituality. If Eliot ever did entertain hopes of some sort of Laurentian transport, his marriage to Vivien put an end to them – as Brooker herself points out (43). That qualification aside, I would merely add Humanism to her list.

In order to reconstruct Eliot’s philosophical posture as it developed and was modulated between 1913 and his baptism in 1927, it will be necessary to move back and forth between Eliot’s testimony that has survived from the early years in which his position was most fluid, and his retrospective observations on his beliefs and predilections of the early years. The result is a somewhat scattered discussion wrapped around Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Freeman’s Worship,” which Eliot identified in A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel (7 March 1948) – as an important influence on his decision to convert to Anglicanism. The “pre-Christian state of mind” to which Eliot refers in the following passage, should be understood as characteristic of his entire adult life prior to his conversion. The Unitarianism in which he was raised would hardly qualify as Christian from an Anglican perspective, and in any case he had abandoned that faith in favour of Bergsonism as an undergraduate:

No one ever attempted to convert me; and, looking back on my pre-Christian state of mind, I do not think that such a campaign would have prospered ... My only conversion, by the deliberate influence of any individual, was a temporary conversion to Bergsonism. It is perhaps impossible to say, in a particular case of conversion to Christianity, how much is due to observation of the outside world and how much to the gradual discovery of oneself; but I am sure that for me the strongest outside influences were negative. Observation of the futility of non-Christian lives has its part; and also realization of the incredibility of every alternative to Christianity that offers itself. One may become a Christian partly by pursuing scepticism to the utmost limit. I owe much, in this way, to Montaigne; something, in this way, to Bertrand Russell’s essay, “A Free Man’s Worship”: the effect this essay had upon me was certainly the reverse of anything the author intended.⁷

Montaigne’s scepticism hardly needs any discussion, since his is the classic statement of Renaissance scepticism. The influence of Bertrand Russell is a very different matter. Eliot had a complicated relationship with him as student, tenant, cuckolded husband, and beneficiary – more or less in that order.

When they first met, in the spring of 1914 in Russell’s Harvard graduate class, Russell was in his forty-second year. He had been invited to Harvard on the strength of his fame as the co-author, with Alfred North Whitehead, of Principia Mathematica. Eliot was in his twenty-sixth year and a PhD candidate. Their Harvard relationship did not develop into any sort of discipleship or student-professor friendship. That did not happen until they met accidentally in London that autumn. “The [not “A”] Free Man’s Worship” was first published in December of 1903. It is unlikely that Eliot read it at that time (he was just fifteen). Most probably he read it as republished in the collection Philosophical Essays (1910)” after registering in Russell’s graduate seminar – about the time that, according to Gordon, his religious position “took hold” (An Imperfect Life 87–94). The earliest reference to it by Eliot that I have found is in his 1918 review of Russell’s collection Mysticism and Logic (which also reprinted “The Free Man’s Worship”). He there quotes the clause “Brief and powerless is man’s life” from its conclusion, identifying it as one he knew “as well as the conclusion to the Studies in the Renaissance.”⁸ From this we can infer that he had read the essay some years before, as well as that it made a strong impact on him (“Style & Thought,” The Nation 22 [23 March 1918] 94).

The review in which this revealing remark is found puts Russell in the company of earlier celebrated English Humanists:

Dull critics, usually of an idealistic turn, have remarked that Mr. Russell’s empiricism is merely a more exact development of Mill’s. This observation misses precisely what makes all the difference. But there is another side on which Mr. Russell has close affinities with the generation of Mill; with George Eliot walking in the garden and denying God while she affirmed the Moral Law with fuliginous solemnity. Like these, Mr. Russell is an emancipated Puritan; a little more emancipated, for his is of a later time, but like them, he takes his emancipation seriously. We know the passage as well as the conclusion to the “Studies in the Renaissance”:

“Brief and powerless is man’s life ...” (94)

Eliot’s point seems to be that Russell was not as completely emancipated from a Christian background as he might or should have been.

If that is his point, Eliot would be reflecting the views of J.M. Robertson, a militant Humanist whose influence on Eliot has been largely overlooked. As far as I can determine, Ronald Schuchard is the only Eliot scholar to have drawn attention to Robertson. Schuchard claims that Eliot “had his students read J.M. Robertson’s Modern Humanists: Sociological Studies of Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin and Spencer (1891)” for the extension course that he offered at the University of London in three academic years – from the autumn of 1916 to the Spring of 1919 (Schuchard 2003 2–3). He adds that “the theme of Eliot’s course was that of Robertson: these were false prophets of religion and culture.” However appropriate this characterization of Eliot’s lectures might be, it rather misses the mark so far as Robertson is concerned. He is described by Odin Dekkers as “the heir of Bradlaugh’s militant lower-class atheism,” which Dekkers characterizes as remote from “the respectable middle-class agnosticism debated in the Metaphysical society.” According to Dekkers, “only the strictest rejection of religion could satisfy” Robertson ( J.M. Robertson 89).

Robertson is the twenty-third of thirty authors listed in “Supplementary Reading” for Eliot’s course. While the list is alphabetical, and the relative obscurity of Modern Humanists in the list scarcely justifies Schuchard’s assertion, it is nonetheless true that the outline for lectures 2 through 5 for the 1917/18 course offering does reflect the topics of Robertson’s book: 2. “History and Criticism – Thomas Carlyle”; 3. “A contrast in Ideas: John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold”; 4. “The Influence of Science – Darwinism in T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer”; 5. “Art and Economics – John Ruskin and William Morris.” (Schuchard 1999 40). Robertson’s chapters are: “Carlyle,” “Emerson,” “Ruskin,” “Arnold,” “Mill,” and “Spencer.” Neither Huxley nor Morris gets particular attention, though they are mentioned in the discussion of the central figures.

Although we do not have the content of Eliot’s extension lectures, we do have testimony that Eliot admired Robertson. He told Herbert Read, in a letter of September 1924 on the topic of prospective contributors for the Criterion: “For Robertson I have a very great respect: he is I believe wholly honest; I do not mind if he be called dull.” In the same letter, he links Robertson with Charles Whibley, the man who introduced him to Geoffrey Faber, an introduction that led ultimately to his position at the new house of Faber and Gwyer (Matthews 85): “Whibley and Robertson support us [that is, the project of the Criterion], and as they represent to the public such antithetical abstractions, they are both valuable. They have both shown more sympathy and kindness than anyone but myself is aware of” (Herbert Read Archives, University of Victoria). And he also acknowledges his admiration for Robertson in his retrospective essay, “To Criticize the Critic.” Speaking of the term “objective correlative,” Eliot mentions that it appeared in “Hamlet and his Problems,” written when he was “hand-in-glove with that gallant controversialist, J.M. Robertson” (“To Criticize the Critic” 19). He published nine pieces by Robertson in the Criterion between 1923 and 1930. Robertson died in 1933 at the age of seventy-nine.⁹

Although Schuchard is not mistaken in labelling Robertson a critic of Humanism, it was the weakling Humanism of the nineteenth-century British sages that Robertson criticized. Robertson was himself a militant atheist and abhorred the hypocritical persistence of religious practices in what he regarded as an age of unbelief. Self-described as a Spencerean, he roundly condemned the desire of Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Mill – and even Spencer himself – to preserve some vestige of religious practice while abandoning belief in a benevolent deity. In Modern Humanists Reconsidered, the 1927 revision of the 1891 book that Eliot had recommended to his students in 1917, Robertson sets out his disagreement with Spencer’s softness on religion:

“Religion,” he [Spencer] tells us, contains one indestructibly true element – the belief that the Reality behind the universe is Unknowable. Science, he strangely implies, has denied this, and its denial is false. For those propositions, what is the “proof” what is “Religion?”

The theorist has unavowedly made an abstraction which represents no known body of religious belief whatever, and which is the reverse of what is either tacitly or explicitly alleged by nearly every body of religious doctrine in the past. Putting aside the illusory phantom of Abstract Religion, we find that religious creeds, churches, communities, documents, always claim to give us a knowledge of the Power “behind the universe” ... Spencer has presented as the abstraction of Religion the one doctrine that no creed ever contained (save in incidental formulas such as: “God is past finding out,” which are constantly contradicted in part by positive propositions), and that most creeds explicitly and implicitly deny.¹⁰ (Robertson 177)

Eliot’s severe assessment of Russell’s concluding paragraph in “The Free Man’s Worship” seems, then, to be more in the spirit of Robertson’s atheism than in that of an apologist for Christianity. The passage Eliot remembered so well articulates Russell’s Humanism in a rather purple prose designed to stir the blood:

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals has fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power. (Russell 1910 70. My emphasis)

The injunction that man should “worship at the shrine his own hands have built” is the essence of Russell’s Humanism. It is distinct from the Humanism of any of the Victorian sages, or of Irving Babbitt, in that it recommends a self-conscious “worship” of avowed fictions as opposed to simply honouring the wisdom of the ages encapsulated in the arts. At first glance Russell’s Humanism appears to be identical to Stevens’ idea of a fiction in which one can invest belief – though without the qualification of an over-arching “supreme” fiction. We shall see that there are important differences, but that will have to wait.

In his 1918 review of Mysticism and Logic, Eliot is evasive, dealing more with style than substance. Still, it is clear that he has in mind the conclusion to “The Free Man’s Worship” in the following complaint of Russell’s “lyricism”: “The possibilities of lyricism are limited. Mr. Russell’s Man, the unglucksel’ger [unfortunate] Atlas staggering beneath the probability of the collapse of the solar system, is a descendant of Man Conceived in Sin. Elsewhere Mr. Russell has made us feel ‘the passionate splendour’ of Time and Fate and Death; here he has merely told us about it” (“Style and Thought” The Nation 22 [23 March 1918] 94). In this remark Eliot has unfairly collapsed two distinct aspect of Russell’s argument. Russell is encouraging mankind to face up, “proudly defiant,” to the absence of a benevolent God. He evoked the remote prospect of “the collapse of the solar system” in the opening pages of the essay in contrast to the fairy tale of the Second Coming and the rapture of the faithful. Russell does not suggest that the prospect of a collapse of the solar system in some remote future is some sort of punishment for human pride or disobedience – which is the essence of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Instead of reading Eliot’s comment as being motivated by a dissatisfaction with Russell’s atheism, I think it more plausible to read it as coming from a dissatisfaction with his failure to rise completely above the shadow of Christian eschatology. In the same vein, he characterizes Russell as “an emancipated Puritan” and compares his theology to that of John Stuart Mill and George Eliot – the former being a “weakling Humanist” in Robertson’s opinion. George Eliot, a more robust atheist, escaped Robertson’s strictures, receiving only positive mention.

When Eliot turns to Russell’s prose style he praises his Humanism, but once again the praise is in the spirit of Robertson’s severe scepticism: “Mr. Russell’s hardness is from within. His style has perfect lucidity; it neither increases nor dissimulates the difficulty of the subject. The liberation of English philosophy from German influence, glibly discussed in the autumn of 1914, will have been the work, not of Mill (who was an amateur), but of Mr. Russell. His victory has been largely due to the possession of a science which most admirers of German philosophy in this country but imperfectly understood, but in the end will be due to his style, a style which this science has trained” (95). Eliot’s reference to Russell’s “liberation of English philosophy from German influence” is not just a bit of wartime jingoism, but an index of Eliot’s emancipation from the Hegelian idealism of Bradley, an emancipation in which Russell and Robertson played principal roles.

John Stuart Mill is a different matter. Eliot’s mentions of Mill are singularly uncommon. I know of only three: this one; a derisive reference in his review of Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, cited below; and a mention in an unpublished letter to Herbert Read of 27 February 1926 as one in a list of candidates for a proposed series on great thinkers of the nineteenth century. The last two mentions belong to Eliot’s Anglican period. His characterization of Mill as “an amateur” is rather striking. He may have picked up this estimate from Russell, who – like Eliot – was an apostate from Bradley’s absolute idealism, and the co-author of the most influential work on logic of the early twentieth century, Principia Mathematica.¹¹ However, Eliot would also have found a debunking of Mill’s logic in Bradley, who had famously criticized Mill’s System of Logic (1843) in his Principles of Logic (1883) – something that Robertson notes in Modern Humanists Reconsidered. Robertson comes to Mill’s defence, but concedes that “Bradley’s razor was certainly a finer and stronger blade than Mill’s” (138).

Years later, in his hostile review of Why I Am Not a Christian, the Anglican Eliot rather unexpectedly lists Robertson together with Arnold, Mill, Russell, and D.H. Lawrence. He is speaking of Russell’s arguments against Christian doctrine:

Mr. Russell’s “arguments” might be dealt with one by one. They are all quite familiar. I remember that his argument of the First Cause (as put to J. Stuart Mill by James Mill) was put to me, at the age of six, by a devoutly Catholic Irish nursemaid.¹² Mr. Russell supposes that he is not a Christian because he is an Atheist. He should know, as well as anyone, that what matters is not what he thinks but how he behaves, in the psychologist’s sense of behaviour. As we become used to Atheism, we recognize that Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity. In fact, several varieties. There is the High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold, there is the Auld Licht Atheism¹³ of our friend Mr. J.M. Robertson, there is the Tin Chapel Atheism of Mr. D.H. Lawrence. And there is the decidedly Low Church Atheism of Mr. Russell. (Criterion 6 [August 1927] 179)

This put-down of Russell and the others is the mirror-image of Robertson’s strategy in Modern Humanists. For each of the nineteenth-century Humanists that he considers, Robertson finds him or her to be inadequately emancipated from Christian belief, and considers that incomplete emancipation to be a failure of nerve or of intellectual rigour. Eliot employs the same polemical strategy in his critique of Why I Am Not a Christian, but for the opposite purpose, implying that the residue of Christianity in his list of sceptics is grounds for believing that Christianity – or at least the notion of a divinity – cannot be expunged from philosophical systems. Of course, such an argument is merely a rhetorical thrust without logical force.

Although Lyndall Gordon does not mention “The Free Man’s Worship,” she does note that Eliot put Russell’s name opposite the first Tempter in the typescript for Murder in the Cathedral – an observation that supports the argument of these pages. She also mentions Eliot’s hostile review of Why I Am Not a Christian (274). She does not pursue the possibility that Eliot may have flirted with Russell’s Humanism and makes no mention at all of J.M. Robertson. Schuchard has paid some attention to Russell’s influence on Eliot – as well as Robertson’s – but he concentrates on the undoubted impact of Vivien and Russell’s adulterous affair on Eliot’s emotional life without giving much attention to either man’s belief system. Schuchard’s candidate for a crucial intellectual influence on Eliot is T.E Hulme – an issue to which we return a little later (Schuchard 1999 54–67).

Throughout his life Eliot was circumspect on the matter of his relationship with Russell. However, in a letter of 1933 to Ottoline Morrell, Russell’s former lover and still a confidant of Russell’s in 1933, Eliot did allude to the bad influence Russell had had on Vivien: “Bertie, because at first I admired him so much, is one of my lost illusions. He has done Evil, without being big enough or conscious enough to Be evil. I owe him this, that the spectacle of Bertie was one contributing influence to my conversion.” Eliot does not specify what “evil” Russell had done, nor what the “spectacle” was. The “bad influence” that Eliot says Russell had on Vivien is unrelated to marital infidelity: “Of course he had no good influence on Vivienne.¹⁴ He excited her mentally, made her read books and become a kind of pacifist, and no doubt was flattered because he thought he was influencing her ... Unfortunately she found him unattractive” (14 March 1933. Cited in Schuchard 1999 179). Given that Russell had already confessed to Ottoline that he had been intimate with Vivien, Eliot’s letter must have seemed rather pathetic to her. There seems to be no way at present of knowing if Eliot was merely preserving appearances, or if he was in truth ignorant of the actual relation between Vivien and Russell.¹⁵ But when he says that Russell was one of his “lost illusions,” it is reasonable to infer that one of those illusions was Russell’s Humanism.

Humanism – unlike Catholicism or Anglicanism – has no orthodoxy. Russell’s Humanism was much closer to Robertson’s in that it was resolutely atheistic and anti-Christian – in contrast to Victorian and American Humanism, both of which sought to preserve the emotional aspects of Christianity while abandoning its creed. “The Free Man’s Worship” begins with a scientific “Genesis,” from the formation of the solar system out of a starry nebula and proceeding to the beginning of life in the primal ooze. He contrasts this scientific view of creation to the Judæo-Christian account of mankind’s creaturely relation to a transcendent and jealous God. And in place of St John the Divine’s heated visions in Revelations of an Armageddon preceding the final rapture, Russell envisions an even less attractive conclusion to human existence: “And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula” (60).

Looking back from the perspective of the Anglican Eliot, one would not expect him to respond positively to such a travesty of Christian eschatological belief. But despite his later mocking of Russell’s Humanism, there is good reason to believe that his response to it was at first positive. A neglected bit of evidence in support of my view is Eliot’s exchange with the mathematical prodigy Norbert Wiener on the topic of philosophical relativism. It took place while Eliot was working on his thesis at Oxford. Wiener, of cybernetic fame, was then a fresh Harvard PhD in philosophy, pursuing post-doctoral studies at Cambridge – with Russell, among others. The exchange took place early in 1915, not long after Eliot’s accidental encounter with Russell the previous October. Russell likely put the two Harvard philosophy students in touch, although I have seen no evidence to corroborate that presumption.

In a letter to Wiener of 6 January 1915, Eliot acknowledged that the “scientific view” of the universe was unavoidable, implicitly dismissing the “religious view”: “The only way in which we can talk about the ‘universe’ at all, it seems to me, is with reference to the universe of physical science; or, in other words the mechanistic world is that to which one would tend to conform” (Letters 80). He told Wiener: “[My] relativism made me see so many sides to questions that I became hopelessly involved, and wrote a thesis perfectly unintelligible to anyone but myself,” adding that he planned to rewrite it (Letters 81).

Eliot’s essay “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centers” – which was written after he had finished his thesis, and which Russell helped to get placed in the Monist – suggests that Eliot had moved on from Bradley. In that essay he characterized the philosophical posture of both Leibniz and Bradley as “disquieting and dangerous ... leaving one disconcerted at the end” (Knowledge and Experience 198). Bradley’s relativistic idealism, he says, holds that “relations are the work of the mind. Time exists only from finite points of view. Nothing is real, except experiences present in finite centres. The world, for Bradley, is simply the intending of a world by several souls or centres” (203). His continuation makes Bradley’s philosophy appear to be compatible with Stevens’: “For Bradley, I take it, an object is a common intention of several souls, cut out (as in a sense are the souls themselves) from immediate experience. The genesis of the common world can only be described by admitted fictions, since in the end there is no question of its origin in time: on the one hand our experiences are similar because they are of the same objects, and on the other hand the objects are only ‘intellectual constructions’ out of various and quite independent experiences” (204. My emphasis). It is clear from these remarks that he had moved beyond Bradley by late 1915; just as he had previously moved from Bergson to Bradley, he was now moving from Bradley to Russell.

“The Free Man’s Worship” – which Russell republished several times without revision – presumably represents views he still held in 1915. His dismissal there of the Judæo-Christian world view is followed by an account of the scientific world view as equally bleak: “Such, in outline,” he continues, “but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.” These remarks lead to a survey of the alternatives to religion which might provide the emotional glue required to hold society together. Except for his contempt for religion, Russell is so far very much in line with the Humanist project initiated by Matthew Arnold and the other Victorians examined by Robertson.

It is worth bearing in mind that the young Eliot reading “The Free Man’s Worship” was in many respects a refugee from Arnoldian Humanism as reflected in American Humanism. Eliot had undertaken a fairly extensive reading of Arnold in 1908, his junior year at Harvard¹⁶ – perhaps prompted by his Harvard French teacher, Irving Babbitt, a prominent Humanist. More evidence of Arnold’s influence on Eliot is that his name recurs frequently in Eliot’s social criticism – though not always with approval. But Arnold was not the only early Humanist influence on Eliot. According to Kenneth Asher, Eliot was exposed to the French Humanist Charles Maurras as early as 1910. He points out: “Babbitt had been won over to the Maurrasian line during his own Parisian visit in 1908. After returning to Harvard, he proceeded, for the next quarter century, to drum the demonization of Rousseau and anti-Romanticism into an admiring Eliot and his successors.” When Maurras and the journal Action française were condemned by the pope in 1926, Eliot soon rose to Maurras’ defence, revealing in a 1920 Criterion “Commentary” that he had “been a reader of the work of Maurras for eighteen years,” that is, since 1910, his summer in France. Asher concludes that “it was a highly receptive Eliot who encountered firsthand the works of Maurras during his time in France” (“T.S. Eliot and Charles Maurras” 24).

We have already seen that Eliot’s declaration of his Anglicanism echoed the masthead of Action française: “classique, catholique, monarchique.” But Maurras’ Catholicism was cynical. The movement he headed grew out of the Dreyfus affair and was militantly anti-Semitic, as well as anti-German and Royalist. Its adherence to the Catholic Church was purely strategic; it was the only effective institution in France that could support the Royalist project. Babbitt had no interest in either Catholicism or Royalism, but took only the movement’s hostility to Romanticism and preference for the classical – a preference that Eliot adopted.¹⁷

I am not concerned here with Eliot’s political or literary critical attitudes, however, but with the development of his religious beliefs. His interest in Maurras represents a curious stage. On his own testimony, Eliot became an admiring reader of Maurras even before he undertook his study of Bradley. Insofar as he did so under the tutelage of Irving Babbitt, it seems reasonable to assume that it was Maurras’ classicism that appealed to Eliot rather than his Humanism – although the two are clearly compatible. Such a supposition is supported by the fact that the only thing by Maurras that Eliot published in the Criterion, “Prologue to an Essay on Criticism,” translated by Eliot himself and published in the January and February numbers of Criterion 4 (1928). Maurras had first published it in1896, several years before he joined the Action Française, a movement that, according to Edward Tannenbaum, was motivated by the desire to engender a world that would allow writers a freedom from monetary concerns: “Their sensitive natures revolted against the mercenary spirit of modern society. In order to earn a living they had to appeal to the general public. Since they could not satisfy its tastes, they also expressed their longing for a return to the Old Regime in their literary criticism” (Tannenbaum, The Action Française, quoted by Margolis 90). Obviously, such a movement would appeal to Eliot – as it would not to Stevens, who was determined to find his way out of colourless modernity by going forward, not by returning to an earlier cultural and social condition.

It is clear from Eliot’s reaction to the papal condemnation of Maurras, however, that it was not just Maurras’classicism that he admired. The papal condemnation was announced in December of 1926. Eliot was baptised on 29 June1927, just six months later. The proximity of these events led Paul Elmer More, a contemporary and close friend of Irving Babbitt, and later of Eliot – himself a Humanist who belatedly embraced Christianity – to speculate that “some time between The Waste Land and For Lancelot Andrews [Eliot] underwent a kind of conversion, due largely I believe to the influence of Maurras and the Action Française.”¹⁸ On the basis of More’s testimony, both Margolis and Asher speculate that the condemnation of Maurras may have prompted Eliot to get off the fence and embrace Anglicanism – in contrast to Maurras who remained a Humanist sceptic until near death.¹⁹

Whatever the merit of these speculations, Eliot was undeniably shaken by the condemnation of Maurras and the Action Française. He took the occasion of a Catholic defence of that action by Leo Ward, The Condemnation of the Action Française, to come to Maurras’ defence in his “Commentary” for March 1928. He conceded Ward’s accusation that Maurras’ thought was a “gradual development from the humble and (I admit) grotesque origins of Positivism,” but bristled at Ward’s accusation that Maurras disguised his atheism so as to recruit the support of Catholics for his political program. “It is,” Eliot wrote, “an imputation of unscrupulousness and even of dishonesty ... [Maurras’] attitude is that of an unbeliever who cannot believe, and who is too honest to pretend to himself or to others that he does believe; if others can believe, so much the better not only for them but for the world at large. The peculiarity of Maurras’s agnosticism (or atheism if you like) is that he recognises that he has much more in common, in the temporal sphere, with Catholics than with Protestants or atheists. Had he wished to trim his sails to a political breeze, he might have done better for himself by a brilliant and dishonest ‘conversion’” (Criterion 7, 3 March 1928 197–8).

This is a very strange remark to come from a man on the eve of his own conversion, and very unlike what we have seen, and will see, him saying about other Humanists. True, Eliot praises Maurras for his honesty in not converting, but at the same time excuses him the hypocrisy of endorsing the institution of the Catholic Church while denying its dogma – exactly the charge that Robertson had made against Arnold and Spencer.

In this lengthy “Commentary,” Eliot quibbles in detail over Ward’s exposure of Maurras’ atheism, attempting to excuse his hero, and he appends an extensive bibliography that demonstrates considerable familiarity with Maurras’ works, including secondary articulations of the philosophy of the Action Française. And he invites Ward to respond – which Ward does in Criterion 7 (June 1928). There he offers a summation of Maurras’ ideological position, which is worth citing since it demonstrates how incompatible it is with Eliot’s political thought:

Maurras perceived long ago that France needs above all to be held together and stabilized, especially by monarchical and authoritarian institutions. Nothing is so fissiparous as mysticism and individualism. Christ was the Mystic and therefore Individualist par excellence. He is therefore the most dangerous of disruptive influences. France therefore must be de-Christianized, but the Roman Church (which Maurras regards as Greco-Latin and not necessarily Christian) is systematic and institutional and cohesive. Therefore he would establish the Church as a social glue seeing that no better way can be found of de-Christianizing France. (76)

Eliot appends his rebuttal to Ward’s article. His remarks are astonishing given that he was about to embrace Anglicanism: “Mr. Ward, asserts again that Maurras is a profoundly anti-Christian thinker. How can Maurras be anti-Christian, when he admits that Catholic Christianity is essential to civilization? Mr. Ward would, on the same assumptions, be obliged to affirm that Mr. Irving Babbitt is ‘profoundly anti-Christian.’ What Mr. Ward says of M. Maurras, he ought to say of several other people of importance: and amongst persons of no importance, he might say it of myself” (86. My emphasis). Ward’s claim is that to embrace the institution and practices of a Christian Church in the absence of belief in its dogma is “profoundly anti-Christian.” Eliot’s lame defence, which would permit a hypocritical support of such an institution in the absence of belief, and his remark that such an accusation would apply to himself, suggests that at this point he was merely a sentimental and politic Christian, if one at all. Certainly it lends credence to More’s speculation that it was the influence of Maurras that prompted Eliot’s conversion – though it was not so much his example as the spectacle of his condemnation by the Vatican that was in play. Eliot was no longer comfortable playing ‘possum in the face of that shock.

Eliot apparently met Maurras, but just when is a matter of speculation. In an unpublished letter to the Bookman (dated 31 March 1930) in which he contests the allegation that he felt “open enmity” for Maurras and Babbitt, Eliot protested that his “personal acquaintance with M. Maurras is but slight,” in contrast to his long association with Irving Babbitt, adding: “Your critic quite overlooks the circumstances: that when I have spoken of Maurras it has been to defend him against what I believed to be injustice” (cited in Kojecky 74). That was in 1930. Five years earlier, discussing the launch of the Criterion in a letter to Herbert Read, Eliot remarked parenthetically: “I have thought that there was a conspiracy of silence in England against Maurras also, to whom I have thought of devoting a future No. Who has ever heard of Georges Sorel but ourselves?” (13 March 1925. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). And in a letter of 14 September, he proposed a series on foreign writers, including one on Maurras, which he would write himself, and he refers to it again in a letter of 11 December, admitting that he would “have to look into Comte, Joseph de Maistre etc.”

As late as 1955, in “The Literature of Politics, “he was still speaking in defence of Maurras: “I think of a man whom I held in respect and admiration, although some of his views were exasperating and some deplorable – but a great writer, a genuine lover of his country, and a man who deserved a better fate than that which he had in the end to meet²⁰ ... But with the reservations compelled by this awareness, I have sometimes thought that if Charles Maurras had confined himself to literature and to the literature of political theory, and had never attempted to found a political party, a movement ... then those of his ideas which were sound and strong might have spread more widely and penetrated more deeply, and affected more sensibly the contemporary mind” (To Criticize the Critic 142–4). Clearly Eliot never abandoned his admiration for Maurras, despite his persistent atheism.²¹ Eliot wrote an article, “Hommage à Charles Maurras” for the right wing journal Aspects de la France et du Monde (April 25 1948), in support of Maurras, who was then on trial for treason. He there listed L’Avenir de l’intelligence, Anthinéa, Les Amants de Venise, and La Leçon de Dante as books by Maurras that he had read, and mentioned that he had purchased L’Avenir de l’intelligence in Paris in 1911 (Kojecky 68, Margolis n88).

Eliot’s persistent defence of Maurras contrasts strongly with his later criticism of Russell, the third Humanist mentor after Babbitt (whose thought he also criticizes), and Maurras. Another potent Humanist influence belongs to an earlier age – Matthew Arnold. Eliot’s later antipathy for Arnoldian Humanism is manifest, but I believe it is the antipathy of an apostate.²² The grounds of his dissatisfaction with Arnold are revealed with especial clarity in his December 1927 review of the reissue of Bradley’s Ethical Studies, written just six months after his baptism. Eliot aligns Bradley (for whom he declared an undiminished admiration) with Arnold in their common opposition to Utilitarianism. Although both of them were, he wrote, “catholic, and civilized and universal,” they shared a common reliance on an inner moral compass – a survival no doubt of Luther’s confidence in the “inner light” – as a governor and guide of moral behaviour:

In Culture and Anarchy, which is probably his greatest book, we hear something said about “the will of God”; but the “will of God” seems to become superseded in importance by “our best self, or right reason, to which we want to give authority”; and this best self looks very much like Matthew Arnold slightly disguised ...

Professor Irving Babbitt, has said again and again that the old curbs of class, of authoritative governments, and of religion must be supplied in our time by something he calls the “inner check.” The inner check looks very much like the “best self” of Matthew Arnold; and though supported by wider erudition and closer reasoning, is perhaps open to the same objections. (Times Literary Supplement [29 December 1927] 981–2, Selected Essays 452)

Although in 1927 Eliot faults Arnold for holding a Humanistic notion of divinity which is nothing more than a projection of our “best self,” his criticism of 1920 was on entirely the other foot. In a letter to his friend Sydney Schiff (responding to Schiff’s comments on The Sacred Wood, published in November 1920) Eliot criticized Arnold for his failure to be a fully Humanistic “free man” – just as Robertson had done: “Of course Arnold is tarred with his own brush. He is not really a free man, in the best sense of the word; who in England was, at his time? Who in England is now?” (Letters 406. My emphasis). Excusing Arnold’s failure to become a “free man” on the grounds that no one of Arnold’s era went so far, Eliot implies that he and Schiff (a non-observant Jew) were so emancipated. After confessing a long-standing interest in Arnold’s social criticism, Eliot observed: “What makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again” (xi), a labour that Eliot doubtless felt he had begun in The Sacred Wood.²³ That labour, of course, was to emancipate mankind from religious superstition and to replace religion with “culture.”

We do not have Schiff’s comments on The Sacred Wood, but it would seem that he complained that Eliot gave Arnold too much respect, for as Eliot explained: “[I was] using Arnold a little as a stalking horse, or as a cloak of invisibility-respectability to protect me from the elderly. I wanted him as a scarecrow with a real gun under his arm” (406). The general purpose of the Introduction to The Sacred Wood was to redefine the role of the poet as critic, using Arnold’s critical theories as a contrasting mode or “stalking horse.” In any event, Eliot acknowledged his long-standing familiarity with Arnold in a remark to which Robertson alluded in Modern Humanists: “To any one who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of justice, it is gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one has vaguely depreciated [sic] for some years. The faults and foibles of Matthew Arnold are no less evident to me now than twelve years ago, after my first admiration for him; but I hope that now, on rereading some of his prose with more care, I can better appreciate his position” (The Sacred Wood xi). Arnold’s “position” was Humanism, the belief that societies can maintain ethical standards in the absence of belief in divine sanctions, that “sweetness and light” can prevail through the example of literature and the arts. It is one that Eliot could “better appreciate” in 1920 than he could in 1913 or 1914, when he was still under the influence of Bradley.

Arnold’s “labour” requires that we be able to discriminate between the first and second rate in the arts so as to generate a culture adequate to the role of displacing religious belief. For if literature is to fill the role of religion in human societies, it must be purged of the transient and local as well as of the tawdry and clumsy; that is to say, literature must be classic as Maurras also believed: “It is part of the business of the critic to preserve tradition – where a good tradition exists. It is part of his business to see literature steadily and to see it whole; [a self-conscious echo of Arnold] and this is eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time; to see the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred years ago with the same eyes” (xv–xvi). Nothing could be more Arnoldian than that.

What Eliot saw as central to Arnold’s inadequacy was, rather surprisingly, his failure to become a literary critic: “In a society in which the arts were seriously studied, in which the writing was respected, Arnold might have become a literary critic.” “How astonishing it would be,” Eliot mused, “if a man like Arnold had concerned himself with the art of the novel, had compared Thackeray with Flaubert, had analysed the work of Dickens, had shown his contemporaries exactly why the author of Amos Barton is a more serious writer than Dickens” (xiii). A “critic,” then, for Eliot is not someone who – like Arnold – sets out the theoretical criteria that govern the classification and assessment of artworks, but rather one who gets down in the trenches and cleanses the literary canon of unworthy and inappropriate works.

Eliot’s comments on Arnold are all the more instructive because of the date, for they come shortly after the Eliots broke with Russell early in 1919. In effect, the Schiffs, a wealthy couple who held a literary London salon, replaced Russell in the lives of Tom and Vivien for a time.²⁴ As guest editor, Schiff published two of Eliot’s satirical poems in the summer 1919 issue of Art and Letters: “Burbank with a Baedeker” and “Sweeney Erect.” Schiff was the principal financial angel of Art and Letters, edited and founded by Frank Rutter and Herbert Read. The journal foundered when Schiff withdrew his support. (Its demise was a major factor in Eliot’s decision to found the Criterion in 1921.) Eliot sent Schiff “Gerontion” for his opinion in 1919 – though not for publication in Art and Letters. He also read and commented upon the draft versions of Schiff’s autobiographical novels, Richard Kurt and Richard, Myrtle and I – both published over the pseudonym Stephen Hudson.²⁵

In his introduction to The Sacred Wood, Eliot endorsed Arnold’s negative assessment of Romantic poetry – “the poetry of the first quarter of this [the nineteenth] century” – as “premature.” He applied the same judgment to the poetry of his own generation, presumably including his own poetry prior to The Waste Land: “This judgement of the Romantic Generation has not, so far as I know, ever been successfully controverted; and it has not, so far as I know, ever made very much impression on popular opinion. Once a poet is accepted, his reputation is seldom disturbed, for better or worse. So little impression has Arnold’s opinion made, that his statement will probably be as true of the first quarter of the twentieth century as it was of the nineteenth” (xii. My emphasis).

We can conclude, then, that Eliot had not yet “depreciated” Arnold when he read “The Free Man’s Worship” in 1914. At that date, he was just emerging from his infatuation with Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France he had attended three years earlier (from early January to 17 February 1911) – perhaps prompted by his reading of Maurras.

Bergson had offered Eliot a world view that permitted a force (élan vital) transcendent of the merely human, though immanent in the world, not transcendent of it. Unlike Darwinian evolution, which is dependent on random variation, élan vital is endowed with direction and “purpose.” Bergson’s vitalism thus offered Eliot a way out of a cosmos devoid of purpose or ethical principle. It also represented a way of avoiding the brutal implication of Darwinian evolution represented by Herbert Spencer’s world ruled by purposeless survival of the fittest. And it was the Spencerian version of evolution that dominated his childhood world, as Eliot told his Magdalene audience: “Herbert Spencer’s generalized theory of evolution was in my childhood environment regarded as the key to the mystery of the universe “(Magdalene 5). Bergsonism also offered the possibility of a rational basis for faith in that extra-rational “best self” in which Arnold had placed his trust, since one could see it as a manifestation of Bergson’s élan vital. But in the end Bergson proved inadequate to Eliot’s needs.

In “The Free Man’s Worship” Russell also dismissed the optimism common to Herbert Spencer, the American pragmatists,²⁶ and Bergson. Whereas Bradley – who had displaced Bergson in Eliot’s favour – paints an optimistic picture of a purposeful cosmos, Russell’s cosmos is devoid of any purpose or direction:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feelings can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. (Philosophical Essays 60–1. My emphasis.)

One could scarcely ask for a more uncompromising expression of what Eliot later called “the futility of non-Christian lives.” But Eliot perhaps needed more life experience than he had undergone in 1914 in order to appreciate that futility. His marriage to a sickly woman and Russell’s betrayal of his trust may well have provided the necessary life experience.

Russell rejected Spencerian social Darwinism as antipathetic to Humanism, pointing out that “those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest,” have also succumbed to the counsels of despair. Many, he said, recoil from such views, as being “repugnant to the moral sense.” Instead they “adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be” (62. My emphasis). Like Robertson, Russell had no doubt that the scientific view was broadly correct and that religious or poetic inventions were nothing more than whistling in the dark. In this they were both in agreement with Humanism as defined in Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilisation, according to which it is “the study and practice of the principle of human happiness uncomplicated by naturistic dogmas [Darwinism] on the one side and religious dogmas on the other.”²⁷

But – unlike Robertson and the American Humanists – Russell also believed that human societies require illusions, such as those provided by religion, if they are to survive. His conviction that the residue of religious beliefs can be retained for their social utility even though known to be the product of the human imagination, is the founding principle of his Humanism – as it was of Arnold’s. Such a view is of course incompatible with Christianity and represents a serious threat to an adherent of any religion founded on stories passed down from the past – such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some – among whom Wallace Stevens – could accept such scepticism in the hope that those inventions (human and error-prone as they were) might nonetheless reach toward an ineffable truth, even if it could never be fully attained. Such is the posture of American pragmatism with respect to scientific truths. But that was not Russell’s position. For him – as for Maurras – religious fables could not be presumed to have any truth value at all. Their only utility lay in their capacity to influence individual behaviour for the better and to provide some emotional solace.

The key component of Humanism, then, may be seen as “the study and practice of the principle of human happiness.” Its goal is to make existence bearable in a meaningless cosmos of random events. Eliot later saw this mildly hedonistic component of Humanism as its principal feature and, for him, its principal shortcoming. In a lecture he gave to the Shakespeare Association in March of 1927, three months before his baptism, he mocked Stoicism as the root of “a number of versions of cheering oneself up,” and contrasted it to Christian humility (Selected Essays 132). Although Eliot did not target Humanism specifically, Russell can be accused of recommending just such a “whistling in the dark” in “The Free Man’s Worship”: “How, in such an alien and inhuman world,” he asks, “can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished?” His answer is that since we can no longer believe in the reality of an omnipotent God, or other varieties of the divine, we should consciously and deliberately choose to worship fictions frankly acknowledged as the products of the human imagination. Moreover, he portrays religious worship as being motivated by craven fear, asking: “Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation of our own conscience?” (63. My emphasis).

Russell’s “free man” is not a Nietzschean “free spirit” confronting a hostile universe in “a spirit of fiery revolt.” In Russell’s view Nietzschean “indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world” (64). Like Eliot, Russell preferred Christian humility to Nietzschean or Stoic defiance: “Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion” (64). “This degree of submission to Power,” Russell added,”is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom” (65). But submission is not enough. We also need dreams:

But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple. (65–6. My emphasis)

I suppose it was rhetoric such as this that led Eliot to complain of Russell’s “lyricism” in his review of Mysticism and Logic. All the same, the notion that literature can formulate an ideal world to which we can aspire would surely have appealed to the young Eliot on the rebound from Bergson, and contemplating a study of the idealist, Bradley.

Just when Eliot read “The Free Man’s Worship” is a matter of some interest for my hypothesis that it drew him toward Humanism. I have assumed – as seems probable – that he read it in 1914 – either just before or during the course he took from Russell in the spring term, or perhaps after he reconnected with Russell in London in October, 1914. We do know, however – on the evidence of two graduate papers that he wrote at Harvard in 1914 – that Eliot’s disenchantment with Bergson was in place by the Spring of that year.²⁸ It is unlikely that the course he took from Russell – beginning on 27 March 1914 – was a factor in Eliot’s rejection of Bergson, for it was a course on symbolic logic. The spur may have been his reading of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. He purchased a copy of it in June of 1913 (Gordon 71) and most likely read it before the Fall term of 1913. Since it was Bradley – not Russell or Bergson – that he chose to study for his dissertation, it is reasonable to assume that he found Bradley’s monistic idealism an attractive alternative to Bergsonism.

In a 1914 graduate paper Eliot faults Bergson, as well as the pragmatist William James, for confusing “human and cosmic activity.” His complaint that Bergson “denies human values” would fit a Humanist perspective, but that conclusion is misleading for he complains of James’ pragmatism – that it is Humanist: “for pragmatism, man is the measure of all things” (cited in Childs, “Fantastic Views,” Lobb 120).

Humanism, he thinks, is too easy. He spells out the Humanist project in the same terms as Russell: “It may be true that man does not live by bread alone, but by making fictions and swallowing them alive & whole.” But unlike Russell, Eliot finds such a scheme unacceptable: “This seems to reduce the high cost of living by eliminating living” (Childs 121). Eliot is unwilling to accept a meretricious belief as a substitute for religious faith: “If all meaning is human meaning, then there is no meaning. If you assume only human standards, what standards have you? ... Complete freedom, or complete determination for a human being, is unthinkable” (Childs 122–3). “Complete freedom” is what the Humanist would claim, and “complete determination” is the equally unattractive option that nineteenth-century physical sciences offered.²⁹ Eliot, then, was not sympathetic toward Humanism in the spring of 1914. He apparently believed that Bradley offered an alternative to both Humanism and Bergsonism, on the one hand, and to scientific materialism on the other. Another graduate essay of the same period articulates a quite different critique of Bergson, one now informed by his reading of Bradley, for he deploys Bradley’s notion of “pure identity” in a critique of Bergson’s notion of durée.³⁰

In his dissertation, a study of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Eliot discusses “pure identity.” For monistic idealism such as Bradley’s, identity is a problem, since in a monistic universe an existent cannot be isolated from knowledge of it, the existent. If it could be, we would fall back into the dualism of idea and thing. On the other hand, if an existent cannot be separated from knowledge of it, we run the risk of solipsism.³¹ In the paper Eliot claims that if Bergson had accepted the Bradleyan view, he would not have hung his philosophical cloak on durée but rather on arrest. And that would have reversed “the apparent conclusions of his theory, time would be the child of space; the formula being/time = eternity/space.” But he adds that had Bergson done so, it would have exposed him to the charge of neo-Platonism, and as a consequence “science in the narrower sense of the word would of course find short shrift.” Eliot contrasts these unfortunate consequences of Bergsonism to Bradley’s more acceptable doctrine: “the absolute, as Bradley says, bears buds + flowers + fruit at once; time gives the menue monnaie [small change] ad infinitum” (cited in Douglass 61). In short, for Bradley there is no process, no movement, no force – such as Bergson’s élan vital – guiding the cosmos toward some ever-receding goal. For Bradley everything is always present in the absolute, which therefore “bears buds + flowers + fruit at once.” There is neither a Darwinian anti-entropic development, nor a thermodynamic entropy – a running down toward absolute stillness – but rather an eternal present. On the strength of this graduate paper it would seem that it was Eliot’s reading of Bradley, not of Russell, that led him away from what he called Bergson’s “weakling mysticism.”

However, if Bradley did lead Eliot away from Bergson, to what did he lead him? Certainly not to Anglicanism, for that was still more than a decade in the future, a future that would include a catastrophic world war, a ruinous marriage, and undreamt-of acclaim as the poet of modern angst. After all of that, Eliot returned, less approvingly, to the Bradleyan perception in Burnt Norton, in which he expressed a disaffection with the inhumanity of a world in which everything is already fulfilled in an eternal present:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. (I, ll. 1–10)

Though these lines were written decades later, they put their finger on what Eliot found unsatisfactory about Bradley’s idealism – its fatalism.

However, the next section of “Burnt Norton” seems to revisit Bradley’s notion of an eternal present, now adapted to the Christian notion of incarnation; that is, what in “Dry Salvages” Eliot calls “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time”:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. (II, ll. 16–21)

But in 1914 Eliot had not reached that accommodation, and Russell’s suggestion that man should “worship at the shrine that his own hands have built” must have seemed an attractive alternative to Bergson’s Darwinian optimism as well as to Bradley’s idealistic fatalism.

Although Eliot most likely would not have known it when he was writing these essays, Russell had gone through a disillusionment quite similar to his own. However, Russell’s response to his crisis of belief was to renounce it, and to become, like Robertson, a champion of unbelief so far as the transcendent was concerned – though not, of course, a philosophical sceptic. “The Free Man’s Worship” was, in effect, a declaration of that renunciation. A further parallel is that Russell was a Bradleyan for a time. His biographer, Ray Monk, tells us that “Russell’s adoption of a rigorous philosophical monism that rejects the reality of relations was no doubt influenced by Bradley’s influential book Appearance and Reality, which Russell re-read in the summer of 1897,” when he was twenty-five. According to Monk, Russell abandoned Bradley for exactly the reason that Eliot was attracted to him, and eventually found him inadequate: “An important element in Russell’s abandonment of this conception of the world was his rejection of the emotional and religious comforts it provided.” Russell explained his rejection of Bradley’s idealism and of religious knowledge in a paper presented to the Apostles³² late in 1897. Monk concludes on the evidence of this paper that “Russell’s original hopes for philosophy – and, especially for McTaggart’s metaphysics – were misplaced. He concluded that ‘we cannot find in philosophy the consolations of religion’” (Monk, Spirit 115). Eliot was to come to the same conclusion seventeen years later, although his response was the contrary of Russell’s: he turned away from philosophy toward religion.

Although we have no way of knowing the details, it is difficult to imagine that Eliot did not discuss Bradley’s philosophy with Russell during their years of intimacy – years in which Eliot was writing his dissertation on “Appearance and Reality.” We know from the letter to Norbert Wiener of 6 January 1915, cited above, that he entirely rewrote his dissertation after he and Vivien had co-habited with Russell for nearly four months. He told Wiener that “the second version [would] be entirely destructive”³³ (Letters 81). Clearly something had happened in Eliot’s intellectual life to change his attitude toward Bradley’s philosophy between the two versions of the dissertation. The most likely source of the change is his new-found admiration for Russell and their intimacy from 1914 to 1917. Eliot revised his thesis in that period, finishing by April 1916.

Although in retrospect Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism seems inevitable, it could not have appeared so to him in 1915 or 1916. He was then very much under Russell’s influence, and also in his debt – intellectually, professionally, and even financially.³⁴ His letters of those years give ample evidence of his admiration for Russell and his gratitude for Russell’s help and guidance. Nonetheless, Eliot retained his intellectual independence. He even presumed to patronize Russell in a letter to Eleanor Hinkley (21 March 1915). Russell, he wrote, “has a sensitive, but hardly a cultivated mind, and I begin to realise how unbalanced he is.” (I presume by “unbalanced” Eliot means “not well-rounded” rather than “off his head.”) He added, “I do enjoy him quite as much as any man I know ... and [he] is wonderfully perceptive, but in some way an immature mind: wonderfully set off in contrast by Santayana”³⁵ (who was also at Cambridge) (Letters 92).

“The Free Man’s Worship” was first published in 1902, only five years after the paper Russell had presented to the Apostles abandoning Bradley’s idealism. It expresses the accommodation Russell had reached with religious belief from his new sceptical perspective, an accommodation that, from a religious perspective, amounts to idolatry – worshipping “at the shrine his own hands have built.” One would have thought that this would be one aspect of the essay that would have rubbed Eliot the wrong way, but I have found no indication that it did. Rather surprisingly, even after his conversion Eliot did not seem to have shared the Biblical prophets’ horror of idolatry. In a “Commentary” of April 1933, for example, he conceded that the idolatry that he saw as an aspect of Communism was preferable to no worship at all, alluding to the canonical incident of idolatry in Exodus (32: 1–35): “My only objection to it [Communism] is the same as my objection to the cult of the Golden Calf. It is better to worship a golden calf than to worship nothing; but that, after all, is not, in the circumstances, an adequate excuse. My objection is that it just happens to be mistaken.”³⁶

We can see perhaps in this tolerance of idolatry some residue of Eliot’s early idealism, which allowed no firm distinction between the real and the imagined.³⁷ In any case, Eliot’s mature objection to the Humanist strategy of investing fictions with belief was not so much that it is a form of idolatry as that it is founded on an error. “Man is man,” he wrote in “Second Thoughts about Humanism” (1929), “because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them.” He sees this point as a test that distinguishes theism from naturalism: “Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma, you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist” (Selected Essays 485). Few of us are so rigorous.

But Eliot would not have put the modern dilemma so starkly in 1914. Shortly after his arrival in England, following a remark on a mutual friend’s lapse from religious belief, Eliot confessed to Hinkley that he may have “come very near to drifting ... into something rather similar” himself. “I have had for several years,” he added, “a distrust of strong convictions in any theory or creed which can be formulated. One must have theories, but one need not believe in them!” (27 November 1914. Letters 72–3. My emphasis). If we take his “several years” at face value, we can date his relativism to his undergraduate years. In that case, he thought of himself as a philosophical relativist at the time he was attracted to Bergson. It seems odd that he still saw his philosophical posture as relativism during his Bradleyan phase, but that reflects perhaps the influence not only of Russell but of Maurras as well, for, as we have seen, the latter endorsed the Catholic church despite being an unbeliever.

Eliot explicitly adopted philosophical relativism in his dissertation – the final draft of which was written in his Russellian phase. His philosophical relativism is very like Stevens’ idea of holding contingently a belief in what is known to be a fiction. Here is Eliot in the dissertation – essentially channelling Bradley: “We have the right to say that the world is a construction. Not to say that it is my construction, for in that way ‘I’ am as much ‘my’ construction as the world is ... the world is a construction out of finite centres³⁸ ... Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself” (Knowledge and Experience 166. My emphasis). These comments arise out of Bradley’s belief that we exist within an embracing Absolute to which we all have fleeting access as experiencing “finite centres.” As Eliot put it in the graduate essay, cited above: “time gives the menue monnaie [small change].” We subsist in the Absolute as a fish in water, aware of the circumambient reality only fleetingly and occasionally. For the experiencing human, the “sea” is the eternal present of the Bradleyan Absolute.

It should be clear, then, that Eliot’s relativism was not equivalent to Humanism. The former is a philosophical – indeed metaphysical – posture which holds that human reason cannot have incorrigible knowledge of the nature of the world. Bradley was not a relativist, nor was Russell. Both believed that incorrigible – though not complete – knowledge is possible, at least in principle. Humanism is not a philosophical position at all, but essentially a sociological one. The Humanist is concerned to find a modus vivendi in a world lacking the ethical guidance and moral sanctions of some transcendent reality. For the Humanist within post-Christian societies, the essential issue is how to retain the good features of Christian societies – respect for persons and property, care for one’s fellow citizens, fairness in social relations, and so forth – in the absence of the fear of God.

The most prominent feature of Russell’s behaviour on the social and ethical front was his pacifism, which he discussed with Eliot over tea on their first meeting in London. Eliot told Eleanor Hinkley that even before that conversation, he had suspected that Russell was a pacifist, though he was not himself a pacifist. On the other hand, he found that Russell “talked very interestingly on the European situation” (Letters 64). Russell, for his part, was shocked by Eliot’s support of the war (Monk, Spirit 424). After that chance encounter, he took the somewhat forlorn Eliot under his wing. He not only got him opportunities to review books, but later became his landlord and fellow lodger when the newly married Tom and Vivien accepted his invitation to share his tiny London flat. They remained with him for four months – from September 1915 until January of 1916. Afterward, Russell and the young couple continued to share country weekends at hotels, and eventually shared the rental of a cottage in Bosham – from January 1918 until Russell’s imprisonment in May of that year for pacifist activity.

Some indication that Eliot was influenced by Russell’s philosophy is provided by the recollection of Brand Blanshard, a young American undergraduate student at Oxford, who shared lodgings in Swanage, Dorset during the Christmas break of 1914–15 with Eliot and another Oxonian, Karl Culpin. They were all philosophy students, although Eliot was considerably older than Blanshard and Sculpin. (Sculpin, an Englishman, was called up and killed at the front.) Blanshard’s recollection of that holiday portrays Eliot as being very much preoccupied with Russell’s philosophy – even studying Principia Mathematic assiduously: “I well remember Eliot’s figure as he sat at the dining room table each morning with a huge volume of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica propped open before him. He had a certain facility in dealing with its kind of symbols; he said that manipulating them gave him a curious sense of power. Russell was the most accomplished philosopher he had met. Like Eliot, he had been a disciple of Bradley, but he had turned strongly against him. Eliot was so much affected by Russell that for the present he had laid his Bradley aside. But in the contest for Eliot’s mind, Bradley won” (Blanshard in Olney 32). Blanshard’s judgment that Bradley won is disputable – although there is no doubt that Russell lost in the “contest for Eliot’s mind.”³⁹ More important for my argument is Blanshard’s view that “Eliot was so much affected by Russell” that he had “laid his Bradley aside” at that time – the Christmas break of 1914–15.

There are grounds, then, for concluding that during the few years of their intimacy, Eliot thought that Humanism could be an adequate “belief” for him. Even though he had been deeply influenced by the Humanism of Babbitt and Maurras, his turn to Bradley suggests that he found their Humanism – focused on culture and society as it was – unsatisfactory. He would most likely have turned to Anglicanism in any event, but the years of his closeness with Russell were undoubtedly crucial in shaping Eliot’s mature philosophical and religious beliefs. In addition it can hardly be doubted that Russell’s seduction of Vivien during that period contributed to Eliot’s turn away from Humanism. Why that turn should have been toward Anglican Christianity is a question that Lyndall Gordon has addressed in her biographies of Eliot. What Gordon, and most commentators, have overlooked, however, is the few years of Eliot’s flirtation with Humanism.⁴⁰

When Eliot told Ottoline Morrell, “the spectacle of Bertie was one contributing influence to my conversion,” it is reasonable to assume that the “spectacle” included Russell’s seduction of Vivien – even though Eliot never admitted knowledge of their affair. But Eliot was not baptised until a good eight years after his break with Russell. The “spectacle of Bertie” was only “one contributing influence,” and clearly a negative one. As we have seen, the papal condemnation of Maurras of December 1926 seems to have been the final spur that led to his baptism on 29 June 1927. “The Free Man’s Worship” stands in Eliot’s Magdalene sermon as a synecdoche for Russell’s entire “negative” influence on him. Although Russell’s behaviour could hardly have legitimized Anglicanism,⁴¹ taken together with the Maurras disaster, it might well have tipped Eliot toward thinking that Humanism was not the solution to the modern dilemma.⁴²

Russell’s Humanism, like Arnold’s, was deeply inflected by his Christian childhood and was not unlike the Unitarianism of Eliot’s childhood. Even more than Eliot, Russell had a strong social conscience. He was a founding member of the Fabian movement, a British socialist movement that called for gradual reform of capitalist society along socialist lines, as opposed to Marx’s call for violent revolution. The Fabian movement spawned the British Labour Party – for which Russell stood unsuccessfully in the election of 1922. And Russell had a lifelong interest in promoting the welfare of ordinary men and women. During the war Russell’s humanitarian and socialist principles led him to oppose the war with sufficient vigour that the authorities indicted him for sedition, and he was sentenced to a six-month jail sentence – which he served in 1917. Eliot visited him in jail. Decades later the nearly nonagenarian Russell was jailed again for his opposition to nuclear weapons – though only for seven days. However, his humanitarian instincts were often at odds with a self-centred personal life that left quite a few damaged individuals in its wake – Tom and Vivien among them.

Since Eliot’s Harvard graduate essays were unsympathetic to Humanism – celebrating instead Bradley’s idealism – we can safely infer that the influence of Maurras and Babbitt was confined to literary and cultural issues. But by the time he finished his dissertation in 1916, Eliot had distanced himself from Bradley in his turn. As we have seen, he declared himself a relativist in a letter of January 1915 to Norbert Wiener. He repeated the sentiment in a letter of August 1916 to Conrad Aiken (21 April 1916): “I am still a relativist, a cracker of small theories like nuts, essentially an egoist perhaps, but I have not the leisure to be cynical, a good thing perhaps, life is always positively something or the opposite, it has a sense, if only that” (Letters 146). Of course, a relativist need not be a Humanist. As I indicated above, Humanism is not a philosophical position, but an ethical and social one, and is compatible with a range of philosophical positions – except for theism. From about 1915 to 1919 we find Eliot writing reviews that reflect a Humanist hostility toward religious belief. They were also the years in which he was choosing his career – whether to become a professor as his parents hoped, or a poet and public intellectual as was his eventual choice. Russell helped launch him as a philosopher by getting him reviews in philosophical journals. Ezra Pound helped launch him as a poet by getting him published. If we were to think of these years as a tug-of-war between Russell and Pound, Pound won.

Eliot returned to the United States in the summer of 1915 – leaving Vivien in Russell’s tender care – and arranged to return to Harvard the following autumn to finish his degree. He was obliged to return to England prematurely (in mid-August) because of a serious illness that befell Vivien (Letters 112–13). Shortly after returning to London (11 September), he wrote to J.H. Woods, the chair of graduate studies at Harvard, informing him that he would not be returning after all, but would complete his thesis in England (Letters 116–17). He had still not decided to abandon an academic career, but seems to have become disenchanted with his Bradley thesis, for he temporarily abandoned it in favour of reviewing philosophical books (Monk, Spirit 443).

Although Eliot wrote some poetry of an undeniably religious – if not mystical – cast in 1913 and 1914 (Gordon, An Imperfect Life 84–94), he did not choose the religious path at that time. After coming under Russell’s influence, he seems to have moved still further from religious belief. A series of reviews and articles published between January 1916 and October 1918 clearly reflect a Humanist posture. They were written both before and after he finished the dissertation in April of 1916.⁴³

Indeed, it was through Russell that Eliot got the opportunity to review in International Journal of Ethics (Letters 143). Most of the books he reviewed are concerned in one way or another with the issue of religious belief. All the reviews display an attitude of sceptical relativism, if not Humanism, on Eliot’s part.⁴⁴ In addition, during the period of these reviews he attended Russell’s 1916 lecture series (later published as Principles of Social Reconstruction) and wrote a commentary on it early in1917, which he sent to Russell. From what hints are to be found in the correspondence, that lecture series seems to mark a beginning of his disaffection with Russell’s Humanism. Eliot’s comments on Russell’s lectures will be discussed below.

The earliest – and longest – of the reviews was of Theism and Humanism by Arthur Balfour (IJE, 26 [January 1916] 284–9). Balfour had been the Tory premier of Britain from 1902 to 1906, and (as foreign secretary) the signatory of the famous “Balfour Declaration” (1917), which promised Zionists a national home in Jerusalem. Eliot makes no reference to the eminence of the author, indeed showing him little respect. He rejects Balfour’s argument that “belief in a conscious purpose or design” can alone “explain the existence of value and of truth” (284–5). The attitude toward religious belief that Eliot articulates in the review is quite clear, and thoroughly relativistic: “If Mr. Balfour is matching a popular materialism against an enlightened theism, it is not a fair fight; if he matches a popular materialism against a popular theism, the struggle is of no interest; and if a philosophic materialism against a philosophic theism, then the evidence fails to show any advantage to one side more than the other” (285–6). It is not possible to say whether these sentiments reflect a Bradleyan idealism or a Russellian scepticism, but there can be little doubt of Eliot’s hostility to Balfour’s Theism. Since Balfour identifies Humanism as the alternative to Theism, a friendliness toward Humanism is at least implied.

The next review is of Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics by the Reverend Hastings Rashdall (IJE 27 [October 1916] 111–12). In this brief review Eliot rather curtly dismisses Rashdall’s defence of Christianity: “We find Dr. Rashdall taking up a position hardly different from Unitarianism. But Dr. Rashdall has an argument of his own. He proceeds, I believe, first to assimilate Christ’s teaching to his own morality, then makes Christ the representative of this morality” (112). The next review, also in the October number, is of Group Theories of Religion and the Religion of the Individual by Clement C.J. Webb. It is a hostile survey of positivistic explanations of religion by anthropologists (IJE 27 [October 1916] 115–17). Eliot pays particular attention to Webb’s criticism of Lévy-Bruhl’s hypothesis of a primitive mentality that is contrasted to the logical/empirical mentality of civilized man. Eliot finds the contrast to be sound: “Lévy-Bruhl maintains that a sharp differentiation of function is necessary, without abandoning either of two essential attitudes of the human mind” (116).⁴⁵ He also takes issue with Webb’s criticism of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who held a positivistic view of religious belief. While Eliot is willing to allow for what he calls “the rights of ‘individual’ religion,” he does “not sympathise with [Webb’s] demand for the personality of God nor with his demand for individual immortality.” All in all, the review is clearly written from the atheistic perspective of Humanism.

Eliot also reviewed Religion and Science: A Philosophical Essay by John Theodore Merz in the same number of International Journal of Ethics. Judging from Eliot’s account, Merz offers an idealistic treatment of the issue of religion versus science, drawing on both Bergson and Bradley. According to Eliot, for Merz personality “is that which is most real,” and Merz believes that the “highest experience which we can have is the feeling of absolute dependence ... which we trace to the influence of a Higher Power.” Perhaps Eliot’s most damning comment is that Merz’s views constitute “a form of anti-intellectualism which suggests Bergson.” He concludes the brief review dismissively: “The phrases ‘stream of thought’ and ‘firmament of consciousness’ recur many times. Those who feel that not only their own creed but religion itself stands in need of defence should not neglect the aid which this book offers them (IJE 27 [October 1916] 126). For those of us accustomed to Eliot’s later dismissal of Humanist arguments, it is difficult to recognize the same man in these remarks.

Another of Eliot’s brief reviews in the October number of the International Journal of Ethics is of Emile Boutroux’s Philosophy and War –a very topical issue in 1916 (IJE 27 [October 1916] 128). Eliot complains that Boutroux buries a criticism of German philosophy – which Eliot thinks is justified – “in a volume of commonplace patriotism.” Nonetheless he agrees that Boutroux makes “a few critical reflections upon German philosophy which should have been made long ago.” Among them, he says, is “the lack of humanism in German scholarship.” However, it seems that Eliot does not have Humanism in mind, for he elaborates: German scholarhip’s “aim is specialisation, laborious precision of detail, research jobbed out among a swarm of students – and nowhere the synthesis of a controlling mind.” He paraphrases with approval Boutroux’s assertion that,”The pure intellect, dedicated to abstractions, becomes sophistical and immoral; the pure will ‘takes itself as an end, and wills simply in order to will.’” “Such,” Eliot continues, “is the fatality of monism.” Then he asserts – presumably still paraphrasing Boutroux: “In the philosophy of Aristotle, on the other hand, we find a god who is intelligence and goodness, apart from whom is material force which he permeates with desire and thought.” Aristotelian dualism, of course, has been the rock bed of Christian theology since St Thomas Aquinas. That Eliot finds all that Boutroux says on German philosophy “admirable” reflects his apostasy from the monism of Bradley, more than any attraction to Christian theology.

Eliot’s review of Mens Creatrix by William Temple and Religion and Philosophy by R.G. Collingwood in the July 1917 issue of the International Journal of Ethics is quite substantial, and reveals a thoroughly Humanist rejection of religious belief. Temple was one of those admirers of Bradley who expected that his idealism would culminate in the validation of Christianity. The publication of Appearance and Reality, the work Eliot studied in his dissertation, dashed those hopes. Temple’s book is an attempt to “complete” Bradley’s philosophy by arguing that it should culminate in Anglican Christianity. His arguments sound very like those Eliot will make as an Anglican apologist, but in 1917 Eliot rejects them: “There is much that is suggestive, and even cogent, in the course of the argument. But to agree with the author we must not only concede that “Intellect and Imagination, Science and Art, would reach their culmination in the apprehension and contemplation of the supreme principle of the universe adequately embodied and incarnate,” but that this culmination is found in Christianity. And might it not be maintained that religion, however poor our lives would be without it, is only one form of satisfaction among others, rather than the culminating satisfaction of all satisfactions?” (542–3. My emphasis). The italicized remark would seem to endorse participation in religious ritual even in the absence of belief. Both Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer attended Anglican service despite their agnosticism, and they were castigated for such a hypocritical and “weakling” practice by J.M. Robertson⁴⁶ – whose views Eliot admired. In effect the practice aestheticized religious ritual. Maurras, also, recommended church attendance – even for atheists like himself. That Eliot should consider religion “one form of satisfaction” reflects the therapeutic view of religion held by many Humanists and roundly condemned by the Anglican Eliot.

Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy, the second book Eliot reviewed in the July issue, belongs to the effort, quite widespread at the time among Christian thinkers, to preserve Christianity by “demythologizing” it. That is not how Eliot sees it, however. He considers Collingwood’s project to be much the same as Temple’s: “Mr. Collingwood has conceived a task very similar to that of Mr. Temple (“Mens Creatrix”) – the necessary completion of philosophy in religion.” But Temple argued that philosophy is fulfilled in religion; Collingwood’s preface declares that his intention is to demonstrate that Christianity – whether defensible on historical grounds or not – contains a philosophy that can be defended on rational grounds: “This book is the result of an attempt to treat the Christian creed not as dogma but as a critical solution of a philosophical problem. Christianity, in other words, is approached as a philosophy, and its various doctrines are regarded as varying aspects of a single idea which, according to the language in which it is expressed, may be called a metaphysic, an ethic, or a theology” (Collingwood xiii). Nevertheless, Collingwood insists on the actuality of Christ as a historical personage:

The whole value of an example is lost unless it is historical ... if the life of Jesus is a myth, it is more preposterous to ask a man to imitate it than to ask him to imitate Herakles. Any valid command must guarantee the possibility of carrying it out; and the historical life of Jesus is the guarantee that man can be perfect if he will.

Further, in that perfection, or the struggle towards it, the religious man somehow feels that he is in personal touch with a risen Christ. We do not at present demand an explanation of this feeling, or ask whether there is a real intercourse; it is enough that the feeling exists and is an integral part of the Christian consciousness. The presence of Christ is as real to the believer as the love of God. But it can hardly be real if Christ is a myth.

... The belief that Christ really lived, whether it is true or false, colours the whole consciousness of the believer. (53–4)

If Eliot had been leaning toward Anglicanism at the time of the review, one would expect him to have found Collingwood’s argument attractive, but he rejects Collingwood’s insistence on the historicity of Christ: “It is true that history and philosophy, as Mr. Collingwood contends, are interdependent. But philosophy depends upon the whole course of history, not upon any particular signal and unique fact; and its freedom of interpretation is limited only by its obligation to exclude nothing” (543). Rather revealingly, Eliot seizes on a particularly “difficult” component of the Christian story as one that Collingwood cannot get around: “Religion ... or at least the Christian religion, depends upon one important fact. Philosophy may show, if it can, the meaning of the statement that Jesus was the son of God. But Christianity – orthodox Christianity – must base itself upon a unique fact: that Jesus was born of a virgin: a proposition which is either true or false, its terms having a fixed meaning. It seems therefore insufficient to claim, what seems to be the extent of Mr. Collingwood’s historical demands, that Jesus was an historical person” (543). Although Collingwood spends considerable time defending the doctrine of incarnation, he is entirely silent on the question of the virgin birth. That Eliot should choose to attack an inessential and “difficult” feature of Christian belief – moreover, one that Collingwood does not defend – once again reflects his Humanist bias.

Near the end of the review Eliot mocks Collingwood’s defence of Christianity against the charge that it cannot account for the existence of evil. He takes Collingwood to task for the following remarks: “The perfection of the universe depends on its being a totality; and, as we have already said, it is only a totality in posse, not a totality in esse. The non-existence of evil, its destruction by goodness, is neither an accomplished fact nor an automatic and inevitable conclusion. It is a process, and yet not a process if that means something never actually fulfilled; rather an activity, a process like that of seeing or thinking, which is complete at every moment and is not a sum of successive states (Religion and Philosophy 142). Although Collingwood’s position here is consistent with Bradley as well as with Anglicanism – not to mention “Burnt Norton” – Eliot mocks it: “Mr. Collingwood admits that the universe is a totality only in posse. One is tempted to ask whether the omnipotence and absolute good will of God are also in posse.”

The suggestion that the “absolute good will of God” exists only in posse – that is, is potential rather than actual – is certainly one that a believing Christian could make – as, indeed Collingwood does. After all, he is discussing the undeniable existence of evil in the world, and is disinclined to deploy a Manichean postulate of an evil Demiurge opposing God’s will. Of course, from a logical perspective, one cannot have an omnipotent and benevolent deity while at the same time admitting limitations to his omnipotence and benevolence – an admission that the existence of evil seems to require. Collingwood attempts to finesse this problem by deploying the same argument that Bradley uses: God’s omnipotence and benevolence will be fully manifest only in the fullness of time, hence they are in posse. But the Humanist Eliot is not persuaded.

These reviews indicate at the very least that Eliot had not yet settled on any form of belief, but was still a relativist – as he had confided to Norbert Wiener. However the necessity to choose – as a newly married man – between an academic career and an uncertain life as a poet must have been more compelling for him in 1917 and 1918 than even philosophical or religious issues. In retrospect, Eliot recalled that it was his meeting with Ezra Pound in 1914 that convinced him to abandon an academic career for the life of a poet and public intellectual (Letters xvi). However, the commitment he made to Professor J.H. Woods in 1915 that he would return to Harvard to take up a teaching position and complete his degree belies that recollection. Pound’s help and encouragement were doubtless important factors in Eliot’s decision to risk a literary career, but they did not precipitate it. Russell, on the other hand, took a direct hand in Eliot’s change of plans. He cabled Eliot’s father in support of his decision not to return to Boston to defend his thesis, a decision that pretty well put paid to the possibility of an academic career.⁴⁷ Another important factor must have been Vivien’s refusal to cross the Atlantic in wartime when passenger ships as well as freighters were being sunk by the Kaiser’s U-boats. In any case, Eliot’s decision to abandon an academic career preceded the availability of any alternative remunerative career other than the rather unsatisfactory one he had begun at Lloyds bank.

Another published item of this period which bears on Eliot’s philosophical position as well as his relation with Russell is Part I of “Eeldrop and Appleplex.” It appeared in the May 1917 issue of the Little Review. Eeldrop – described as “a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism” – is surely Eliot’s alter ego, and Appleplex – described as “ a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism”– can be none other than Russell.⁴⁸ To further support this identification we are also told “that Eeldrop was learned in theology and that Appleplex studied the physical and biological sciences.” This work might be read in place of Eliot’s lost response to Principles of Social Reconstruction, a series of lectures (discussed below) which Russell gave in January, February, and March of 1916. At the time Eliot was writing Part I of “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” Russell was serving a six-month sentence for sedition, and Eliot visited him at least once during that period. It seems reasonable to assume that Eliot was cogitating his disagreement with Russell’s theories in Principles of Social Reconstruction, and was at the same time feeling some sympathy for his friend’s plight.

It would appear that Eliot had in mind a satirical narrative along the lines of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, whose eponymous protagonists engaged in an undisciplined pursuit of scientific learning. Certainly that was Pound’s view. In a letter to Eliot he expressed puzzlement that Eliot was unwilling to republish the dialogues, remarking that the “letch toward Bouvard and Pecuchet in 1917 was of interest,” and adding: “Your best way to wipe out whatever the hell it is you object to in the dialogs wd. be to revise ‘em” (24 November [1939] Beinecke). Flaubert’s objective had been to ridicule the nineteenth-century faith that science would provide cures for society’s ills. In Eliot’s case, it would seem to be Russell’s social and political theories that are targeted – at least in the first episode. Unlike the inseparable Bouvard and Pécuchet, Eeldrop and Appleplex met only occasionally. They rented rooms in a disreputable part of town so as to observe the denizens of that neighbourhood in a spirit of sociological research. Although the second instalment was promised for the following June issue, it did not appear until September and was of a very different character than the first.

Eliot assigns the two contrasting men a common motive, which he places in quotation marks: “to apprehend the human soul in its concrete individuality” (8). In pursuit of that goal they observe the behaviour of their neighbours and acquaintances: “Appleplex entered the results of his inquiries into large note-books, filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen [sic]).” Eeldrop, in contrast, only “smoked reflectively” (8). He denies the possibility of generalizing from particular cases: “Any vital truth is incapable of being applied to another case: the essential is unique” (8–9). Such an observation fits Russell’s atomic theory of meaning based on the denial of universals, indicating that Eeldrop has some affinity with Russellian doctrine. Eeldrop, however, continues in a vein more suitable to Eliot: “Perhaps that is why it [the vital truth] is so neglected: because it is useless. What we learned about that Spaniard is incapable of being applied to any other Spaniard, or even recalled in words.” This pessimistic and sceptical conclusion prompts nostalgia for “Bishop’s books”: “With the decline of orthodox theology and its admirable theory of the soul,” Eeldrop continues, “the unique importance of events has vanished” – a remark that calls to mind Eliot’s assertion, in his 1948 talk at Magdalene College, that his observation “of the futility of non-Christian lives” played a part in his conversion to Anglicanism. In such a world, Eeldrop continues, a “man is only important as he is classed. Hence there is no tragedy, or no appreciation of tragedy, which is the same thing.”

The friends establish themselves across the street from a police station, the better to observe the dregs of society. Eeldrop notes that “whenever a malefactor was apprehended, a wave of excitement curled into the street and broke upon the doors of the police station” (8). They find that the crowd was driven by morbid curiosity more than by concern for the victim: “For the man’s neighbours the important fact is what the man killed her with? And at precisely what time? And who found the body?” (9). The concerns of the more respectable members of the public who look for sociological explanations of crime are similarly denounced: “For the ‘enlightened public’ the case is merely evidence for the Drink question, or Unemployment, or some other category of things to be reformed” (9). The narrator believes that such generalizations suck the passion and meaning out of human affairs: “The awful importance of the ruin of a life is overlooked.” Eeldrop’s view that the mediaeval world’s insistence “on the eternity of punishment, expressed something nearer the truth” (9) is close to that of the Anglican Eliot still some years in the future.

To the extent that Eeldrop is Eliot’s alter ego, this remark would seem to support the notion that he was at this date (April or May 1917) beginning to abandon a Humanist ethic in favour of a religious one. Appleplex, does not disagree with these observations. He reinforces the principle that generalizations are nugatory. “We could,” he says, “if we liked, make excellent comment upon the nature of provincial Spaniards, or of destitution (as misery is called by the philanthropists), of homes for working girls. But such is not our intention. We aim at experience in the particular centres in which alone it is evil. We avoid classification. We do not deny it. But when a man is classified something is lost” (10. My emphasis).⁴⁹ Eeldrop enthusiastically agrees, observing that most men have no real sense of identity except as “government officials, or pillars of the church, or trade unionists, or poets, or unemployed.” In such a case, Appleplex opines that we must have a “philosophy,” and says that Mrs Howexden has recommended Bergson to him – admittedly not a very Russellian posture. Eeldrop, reflecting the apostate Eliot’s animus, demurs, proposing instead a relativism compatible with Eliot’s dissertation: “Our philosophy is quite irrelevant. The essential is, that our philosophy should spring from our point of view and not return upon itself to explain our point of view” (10). (This sounds remarkably like the existential principle of authenticity, and very unlike the Anglican Eliot.)

It would seem, then, that Eliot had not yet embraced religion in early 1917, but was still attempting to articulate a secular, Humanist ethic without the firm foundation of a “grand narrative,” as we would say today. When Appleplex attempts a rejoinder, saying “At least we are...” he is cut off by Eeldrop, who supplies the continuation “individualists,” and then rejects it, along with another label, “anti-intellectuals” (10). “These also are labels,” he says, and continues: “The ‘individualist’ is a member of a mob as fully as any other man: and the mob of individualists is the most unpleasing, because it has the least character. Nietzsche was a mob-man, just as Bergson is an intellectualist. We cannot escape the label, but let it be one which carries no distinction, and arouses no self-consciousness. Sufficient that we should find simple labels, and not further exploit them” (10–11). Rather unexpectedly, Eeldrop confesses, in a coda to this remark, that (like Eliot) he is a bank clerk, and Appleplex provides the additional information that (unlike Eliot) Eeldrop has “a wife, three children, and a vegetable garden in a suburb,” information that Eeldrop confirms as “precisely the case,” adding that he will return to his suburb and spend “tomorrow in the garden” (11). Appleplex, for his part, says he will call on Mrs Howexden.

The first instalment thus ends ambivalently, with the interlocutors scornful of the mundane, conventional lives they are doomed to live but unable to rise above them to some grander purpose. At this date the relationship between Vivien and Russell was undergoing strain because of Russell’s affair with the actress Constance Malleson. In January of 1917 Russell had told Vivien that he would not be seeing her anymore. However, by October he had broken up with Malleson, and had resumed his relationship with Vivien (Monk, Spirit 482–90). Although we do not know how much Eliot knew about these developments, he cannot have been unaware of strains in their relationship with Russell, even if he remained blind to their cause. He probably knew of Russell’s affair with Constance Malleson, who is perhaps represented in “Eeldrop and Appleplex” by Mrs Howexden.

As mentioned, the second instalment of “Eeldrop and Appleplex” did not appear in June as promised but in September. The delay was probably a consequence of Eliot’s heavy workload at the time and his preoccupation with the need to formalize his military status after the United States declared war on Germany and Austria on 6 April 1917. Part II is very different in nature, being primarily a ridicule of contemporary feminists through the composite figure Scheherezade/Edith. Dora Marsden, the co-editor of the Egoist, is a probable target, though no one is unambiguously identifiable.⁵⁰ In a letter to Pound written just prior to sending Part II to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Eliot described the piece as “Eeldrop on the feminisation of modern society” (Letters 198). As well as being a feminist, Edith is portrayed as an aesthete, an anarchist (as Marsden was), and a sexual adventuress (as she was not). The philosophical debate between Eeldrop and Appleplex is not continued in Part II, and Eliot abandoned the proposed series.

Writing to John Quinn in 1919 on the contents of the forthcoming Sacred Wood, Eliot said that he would prefer to withdraw “Eeldrop and Appleplex” if there were enough material to fill a volume without them (9 July 1919. Letters 313). It was not included. Whenever their republication was later proposed, he adamantly refused. When Pound suggested including the two pieces in an anthology he was planning in 1935, Eliot replied: “They will only be republished podesta [his nickname for Pound] literally over my Dead body” (13 August 1935. Beinecke). When the issue came up again, nearly thirty years later, he was less forceful, but still refused to have them republished, telling Herbert Read: “I remain of the impression that this is a callow piece of writing which I did not wish to revive” (1 August 1963. University of Victoria). As Eliot’s only attempt to write prose narrative, they are admittedly of only marginal interest, but Part I offers a snapshot of his developing philosophical or ideological posture and its relation to Russell’s in 1917. Part II is of less interest and can only reinforce the allegation of misogyny that is frequently levelled against Eliot.

The American declaration of war on Germany and Austria distracted Eliot from philosophical and poetic endeavours, forcing him to concentrate on career issues. From April, 1917 until the end of the war he was preoccupied with the effort to secure a commission in one of the American armed forces – especially one that would keep him out of the trenches. He told Mrs Gardner in November of 1918 that it had been “the most terribly exhausting year I have ever known.” In addition to Vivien’s chronic illness and their financial uncertainty, he faced the prospect of being called up.⁵¹ After great effort he thought that he had secured a position with the navy, and accordingly resigned his position at the bank, but the navy commission fell through (Letters 250–2). Much to his relief the bank took him back. In any event, the armistice was signed four days after his letter to Mrs Gardner.

The years 1914 to 1919 had seen Eliot achieve considerable prominence as a poet. Although his great fame was still ahead of him, the die had been cast: he would be a poet not a professor. However, he had still not settled on a philosophy of life or creed. The Humanism that he found in Russell had drawn him away from Bradley, but it was not to hold him. Initially he turned away from Russell’s Humanism – as he had from Bergson and then Bradley – and toward the more political Humanism of Maurras and the Action Française. His well-known debates with Middleton Murry, Ramon Fernandez, and Irving Babbitt – Humanists all – were still ten years in the future, as was his baptism. One may well argue that, had not Russell’s betrayal of trust turned Eliot away from a “faith” that was too much like the unsatisfactory Unitarianism in which he had grown up, something else would have done. I would not dispute such a claim. The papal condemnation of Maurras was doubtless “something else.” Without that shock Eliot may well have persisted in uncertainty for several more years – or perhaps forever – but then, we would have lost much splendid poetry and some commendable plays.

One of the inadequacies of Humanism in Eliot’s view was its feeble sense of evil – as his review of Collingwood demonstrated. Humanism’s only ethical principle is “do no harm.” Eliot’s experience – and perhaps his temperament – led him to require some place for evil in his belief system. For his friend Ezra Pound – as for Stevens – beauty justified belief in a transcendent realm. But for Eliot the existence of sin and evil required such a belief. Although Lyndall Gordon argues that Eliot’s lively sense of evil was present at an early age, we cannot dismiss the relevance of the extraordinarily painful experience of Vivien’s adultery with Russell in reinforcing that sentiment. Despite the criticism recently levelled at Eliot as a husband, he was dutiful and considerate in the early years of their marriage, whatever his failings as a lover may have been. His cold behaviour in “abandoning” Vivien in 1932 after twenty-two years of marriage should not be projected back to 1915 or 1916. He then regarded his marriage as a love match, and – if his letters are to be believed – laboured mightily to make it work, apparently unaware of Russell’s duplicity and Vivien’s “fall.”⁵²

Eliot may well have been speaking of himself at this stage of his development when he described the nihilism of Valéry in his 1943 memorial essay on the French poet:

The constructive philosopher must have a religious faith, or some substitute for a religious faith; and generally he is only able to construct, because of his ability to blind himself to other points of view, or to remain unconscious of the emotive causes which attach him to his particular system. Valéry was much too conscious to be able to philosophise in this way; and so his “philosophy” lays itself open to the accusation of being only an elaborate game. Precisely, but to be able to play this game, to be able to take aesthetic delight in it, is one of the manifestations of civilised man. There is only one higher stage possible for civilised man: and that is to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith. But Valéry was not Pascal, and we have no right to ask that of him. His was, I think, a profoundly destructive mind, even nihilistic ... The agony of creation, for a mind like Valéry’s, must be very great (“Leçon de Valéry” 76. Eliot’s emphasis).

The Eliot of 1915 to 1919, like Valéry, did not have “a religious faith,” and was studying to become an academic philosopher. Events suggest that Eliot was unable to “blind himself to other points of view, or to remain unconscious of the emotive causes which attach[ed] him to his particular system.” He was unable or unwilling to “play” with ideas in a Nietzschean or postmodern manner as he thought Valéry did, and as Richard Rorty believes is the practice of the literary critic.⁵³ Had he given the matter much thought, on these grounds Eliot would surely have put Stevens’ poetry in the same camp as Valéry’s.

It may be a stretch to characterize Eliot as nihilistic – even in 1918 – but such poems as “The Hippopotamus,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” and The Waste Land fail to reveal any solid moral or religious ground for the reader to stand on. One could say of them what Eliot said of Donne’s poetry in his 1927 lecture “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”:

The problem of belief is very complicated and probably quite insoluble ... In making some very common-place investigations of the “thought” of Donne, I found it quite impossible to come to the conclusion that Donne believed anything. It seemed as if, at that time, the world was filled with broken fragments of systems, and that a man like Donne merely picked up, like a magpie, various shining fragments of ideas as they struck his eye, and stuck them about here and there in his verse ... [I find in Donne] only a vast jumble of incoherent erudition on which he drew for purely poetic effects. (Selected Essays 138–9. My emphasis)

This assessment of Donne in 1927 strikes much the same note as his assessment of Valéry sixteen years later.

Eliot was not content – as Pound was – to pick up “various shining fragments of ideas” and stick “them about here and there in his verse.” But the state of belief – if that is the right label – evoked in The Waste Land six years earlier is similarly fragmented, closing as it does with the line: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” And, of course, its unsympathetic readers found it to be “a vast jumble of incoherent erudition.” In short, Eliot saw a parallel between Donne’s period, marked by the cultural disintegration that the Reformation represented, and the twentieth century, in which the integrity of Christianity – indeed of any religious belief – was challenged, if not destroyed. And Eliot believed that the fact that the disintegration of faith was accompanied in both periods by violent political and military turmoil was no coincidence.

When writing “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” Eliot may well have had Russell in mind as a master of “the subtle school.” As already mentioned, early in 1917 Eliot had written an essay in response to the series of eight weekly lectures that Russell gave from January to March 1916. In the opinion of Russell’s biographer, Ray Monk, they “constitute one of Russell’s most original and enduring contributions to social and political thought” (1996 446). Eliot sent the essay to Russell and thanked him (in a letter of 13 March 1917) for having read it so promptly (Letters 162). Though Eliot’s critique has not survived, it is clear from this letter, and from another of 23 March, that Eliot disagreed with the position Russell adopted in the lectures. Apparently he was unable to articulate his criticism to his own satisfaction, and consigned the essay to a drawer from which it never has emerged.

While we cannot say with confidence just what it was that Eliot objected to, he did tell Russell that his “chief objection is to the passage on p.165.” Valerie Eliot thinks the passage in question is the one in which Russell celebrates the anarchic, subversive, and transgressive nature of free philosophical speculation and concludes very much in the spirit of “The Free Man’s Worship” (Letters 162): “It [free speculation] sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence: yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man” (165). It is by no means implausible to suppose that this is the passage in question, since Eliot recurrently shied away from such Stoic chest thumping, an attitude he characterized as “cheering onself up” in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (Selected Essays 132). However, that talk was given almost exactly ten years later than his initial response to Principles of Social Reconstruction and after Eliot had decided to join the Anglican communion – though he was not baptized until the following June.

I think, however, that Eliot may have taken exception to the previous paragraph, which begins on page 164 and runs on to 165, rather than the passage that Valerie Eliot cites: “The same love of adventure which takes men to the South Pole, the same passion for a conclusive trial of strength which leads some men to welcome war, can find in creative thought an outlet which is neither wasteful nor cruel, but increases the dignity of man by incarnating in life some of that shining splendour which the human spirit is bringing down out of the unknown. To give this joy, in a greater or less measure, to all who are capable of it, is the supreme end for which the education of the mind is to be valued” (164–5. My emphasis). In these remarks, Russell is elaborating the pacifist argument that forms the core of Principles of Social Reconstruction. His hope is to redirect some of the energy and passion that mankind has spent wastefully and harmfully in military conquest toward more socially redeeming behaviour. But the passage is also a triumphalist celebration of the unaided capabilities of the human mind; in other words, it is a Humanist exhortation for man to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

As we have already seen, this is an attitude that Eliot comes to find offensive. Russell can be seen as committing the Faustian and Satanic sin of claiming the divine prerogative of autonomous knowledge for the merely mortal. In short, it is the sin of pride, a sin against which Eliot railed in his December 1927 Times Literary Supplement review of a reprint of Bradley’s Ethical Studies – written shortly after his baptism on 29 June of that year. There he cites with approval a passage from Ethical Studies to the effect that the human can never be the coeval of the divine; hence submission to the divine will is the only possibility. And he insists on the difference between Bradley’s sense of the supra-personal and Arnold’s: “The words cannot be interpreted in the sense of Arnold. The distinction is not between a ‘private self’ and a ‘public self,’ it is between the individual as himself and no more, a mere numbered atom, and the individual in communion with God. The distinction is clearly drawn between man’s ‘mere will’ and ‘the will of the Divine’” (Selected Essays 452–3). If it was Russell’s Humanist celebration of the unaided capabilities of the human mind in Principles of Social Reconstruction that offended Eliot, in March of 1917 – by his own admission – he was not yet able to articulate a reasoned response, judging his critique of Russell’s lectures to be “too scattered and incoherent.” It seems appropriate to infer that he was not yet ready to embrace a faith based on belief in a supernatural realm and an omnipotent God, though he was beginning to distance himself from Russell’s Humanism.

The hypothesis that Eliot’s belief system was still in flux is supported by another letter in which he thanked Russell for supportive comments on his article: “I think what I have said is in appearance too negative and perhaps looks obscurantist.” He apparently contemplated a distinct essay discussing authority and reverence – concepts to which Russell assigned great importance in his lectures. Eliot added: “I am convinced that there is something beneath Authority in its historical forms which needs to be asserted clearly without reasserting impossible forms of political and religious organisation which have become impossible.” The redundant recurrence of “impossible” in this sentence is testimony to Eliot’s distraction at the time, a distraction to which the next sentence alludes: “But this is a task which needs impulse and hope, and without more peace of mind and contentedness, better nerves and more conviction in regard to my future, I do not feel capable of satisfying myself” (Letters 163).

Russell introduced “Authority” and “Reverence” in his discussion of education. In previous chapters he had portrayed authority as a residue of the claims that kings and popes had historically made to an authority descending from God: “All our institutions have their historic basis in Authority. The unquestioned authority of the Oriental despot found its religious expression in the omnipotent Creator, whose glory was the sole end of man, and against whom man had no rights. This authority descended to the Emperor and the Pope, to the kings of the Middle Ages, to the nobles in the feudal hierarchy, and even to every husband and father in his dealings with his wife and children” (27). Against authority, Russell places the principle of liberty, although he is perfectly aware that there must be some constraints on liberty. Part of the task of Principles of Social Reconstruction was to identify what those constraints might be. He concedes that “authority in education is to some extent unavoidable, and those who educate have to find a way of exercising authority in accordance with the spirit of liberty.” One means of mitigating the negative consequences of the assertion of authority is what he calls “reverence” (146). In the first of his letters to Russell on the lecture series, Eliot complained about this idea: “I made no positive objection to the principle of ‘reverence’ – it merely seems to me inadequate” (Letters 162).

The reverence Russell has in mind is not for divinity, nor is it a pupil’s deference toward a teacher, but rather the teacher’s respect for the child’s autonomy: “The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to ‘mould’ the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. In the presence of a child he feels an unaccountable humility – a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers” (147). It is difficult to discern in what respect Eliot found this idea inadequate. Certainly teachers should respect the children in their care, but to ask teachers to “revere” their pupils because they “embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world” perhaps struck Eliot as a kind of Bergsonian reverence for the immanent élan vital – a reverence he had belittled as “a rather weakling mysticism” in a graduate paper (cited in Childs, 1997 113).

Although Eliot does not refer to Russell’s application of the principle of reverence to the institution of marriage, it is not improbable that Eliot’s troubled marriage (and Russell’s role in it) coloured his response to the following assessment from Principles of Social Reconstruction: “A man and woman with reverence for the spirit of life in each other, with an equal sense of their own unimportance beside the whole life of man, may become comrades without interference with liberty, and may achieve the union of instinct without doing violence to the life of mind and spirit. As religion dominated the old form of marriage, so religion must dominate the new. But it must be a new religion based upon liberty, justice, and love, not upon authority and law and hellfire” (191). That Eliot was already troubled by his marriage, and had spoken to Russell about it, is attested to by a letter of 1925, in which Eliot alludes to such a conversation they had had ten years previously: “Everything has turned out as you predicted 10 years ago. You are a great psychologist” (cited in Monk, Ghost 84). Since Eliot had Vivien committed to a sanatorium near Watford in October of the year of the letter so that he could spend some time alone to write his Clark Lectures (Seymour-Jones 420), it is reasonable to assume that the prediction to which Eliot alluded was that Vivien’s ill health would eventually turn to some sort of mental deterioration.

The general aim of Principles of Social Reconstruction was “to suggest a philosophy of politics based upon the belief that impulse has more effect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives.” Russell was led to such a view by his reading in behaviourism, and he later found further confirmation in Freudian psychology (Monk, Spirit 535–6). Then, as later, Eliot was unimpressed with behaviourism. Two years later – while Russell was delivering his lectures The Philosophy of Logical Atomism – Eliot apologized for being unable to attend, and added: “Demos [Raphael Demos, a student of Russell’s] told me that he had been giving you bibliography on behaviourism. I am not convinced that Watson and those people are really very important.” Nonetheless, Eliot thought that “the avenue of investigation” Russell had suggested to him “in a conversation a few weeks ago impressed me very deeply, and I hope you will go in for it very hard. It struck me as important as anything to be done; besides, it would be very amusing to stand the biological sciences on their heads that way” (13 April 1918. Letters 229). He was presumably speaking about the content of Russell’s lectures on “logical atomism,” lectures that evince the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein on Russell’s thought. Russell’s logical atomism would “stand the biological sciences on their head” by requiring a language that had a unique term for each particular in the world. Such a requirement would render the materialist arguments of behaviourism otiose (Monk, Spirit 516–19).

Although Eliot’s objection to Principles of Social Reconstruction can be seen as evidence of the persistence of the philosophical posture he occupied in 1914, when Eliot began his Bradley studies, it does not represent a clear break with Russell’s Humanism. It merely indicates a continuing resistance to his gradual movement toward Humanism that had begun in 1915. Certainly Eliot continued to be on good terms with Russell, reviewing his Mysticism and Logic favourably in March 1918. Russell, for his part, had hoped to spend the summer of 1918 at Marlow Cottage, which he and the Eliots had jointly rented. However, that plan came to nought as a consequence of Russell’s conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act, which led to his six-month prison sentence (Monk, Spirit 519–20).

We have no clear evidence of when – if ever – Eliot became fully aware of Russell’s betrayal of his trust with Vivien. He may have learned of it by the middle of 1917.⁵⁴ Vivien may well have confessed something of it, after Russell told her he would be no longer be seeing her, something he did twice: first in November of 1916, and again on 3 January 1917 (Monk, Spirit 483, 490). Russell had found a new lover in the aristocrat Constance Malleson (her stage name was Colette O’Neil). Although he did return to Vivien briefly, when he quarrelled with Colette, Vivien must have believed that her relation with Russell was at an end by January of 1917. But if she said anything to Eliot, no record of it has appeared. In any event there was no evident breach between Russell and Eliot at this time; and Eliot’s letters to Russell give no hint that he was aware of the affair. What is clear is that the intimacy that had existed between the Eliots and Russell, beginning with their sharing of Russell’s Bury Street flat in late1915, ended in 1919.

Although Eliot remained extremely circumspect on the matter, he did suggest, many years later in “Thoughts after Lambeth” (1933), that Russell’s ethical principles could not guarantee good behaviour: “Were my religion that of Mr. Russell, my views of conduct would very likely be his also” (Selected Essays 367). And in the memoir that Valerie Eliot printed at the beginning of her edition of Letters, he attributes the state of mind that produced The Waste Land to his marriage: “To her the marriage brought no happiness ... to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land” (Letters xvii). Rather quaintly, the specific harm Eliot mentions is the same that he identified in his letter to Ottoline Morrell cited above. It was that Russell “excited her mentally, made her read books and become a kind of pacifist.”

But it is impossible to accept such a narrow reading either of The Waste Land or of Eliot’s wartime experiences. The “spectacle of Bertie” of which he complained to Ottoline Morrell can hardly be confined to his pacifism. It should not be forgotten that the whole affair took place during the horrors of the First War, and that Russell was a prominent anti-war activist. A letter Eliot wrote to his mother about the time of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (23 June 1918) attests to the strain that the war put on Eliot along with his personal difficulties: “The strain of life is very great and I fear it will be for the rest of the lives of anyone now on earth. I am very pessimistic about the world we are going to have to live in after the war” (Letters 235). Early readers of The Waste Land found that pessimism expressed there.