Let him give one final backward glance to Chapter 7, and I shall insist
no more. There he will discover that Mr. Krutch, after desperately
building upon the premise of _discontinuity_ (of absolute separation
between man and nature, between man and man, between certain traits in
man and certain others), refutes the “new metaphysicians” on the ground
that _they are the discontinuists_; while he falls back on the
continuity of science! The reader will agree that Mr. Krutch has now
sufficiently revealed himself as a befuddled man. If he were a thorough
pessimist like Schopenhauer or Gautama, if he were a thorough
transcendentalist like St. Paul, if he were a thorough materialist like
Haeckel, if he were a thorough individualist like Rousseau, we could
disagree with him and yet respect him. But he is thoroughly nothing,
except confused. His thinking quavers between contradictory extremes of
which he is not even aware; his values are a crazy-quilt of fragments
pieced together from the worn creeds of Manichaeism, Puritanism,
Rousseauism, Nietzscheanism, Haeckelian monism, etc., etc. His emotions
are infantile. His spirit is an aggressive fear that would deny to
others the dignity it lacks. He has nonetheless been worth our scrutiny.
For his argument contains most of the clichés and most of the
implications of our current “culture.” It shows the distemper of the
modern mind, unable to bear the chaos of three centuries of ideological
destruction, and unschooled to reform that chaos. If the average pundit
in “The Nation,” “The New Republic,” “Harper’s,” “The Atlantic Monthly,”
“The Dial,” were to put down, with a like candor, his philosophy of
life, it would turn out a no less pitiful confusion. If our current
literary arts were analyzed, they, too, would reveal a message as
ill-founded. Behind the stubborn bewilderment of Theodore Dreiser,
behind the lyric bewilderment of Sherwood Anderson, behind the bravado
of Hemingway, behind the dandified despairs of Cabell and the earlier T.
S. Eliot, behind the dainty froth of Thornton Wilder and of Carl Van
Vechten—behind the materialism, the cynicism, the indifferentism, the
impertinence, the impotence of most of our popular writing[9]—exists a
failure to think straight from the facts, and to feel straight, not
identical with the failure of Mr. Krutch, but essentially related.
The key to the situation—perhaps the basic cause of the “modern
temper”—is suggested in Chapter 7 of Mr. Krutch’s book. What the author
calls the “new metaphysic” is merely the old transcendentalism. These
men whom he attacks—neo-Catholics, sentimental mysticalists,
spiritualists, deniers of the “flesh” in one way or another—answer the
“certitudes of science” by declaring that there is _another world_—their
world of value, spirit and religion. Here, you have transcendentalism
defined. And Mr. Krutch rejects it on the proper ground of
discontinuity. But he does not see that his own argument—the
separateness of parts and traits of man from other parts, and of man
from men, and of men from nature—is discontinuity no less. And he does
not see that he has blinded himself to the discontinuity of his own
thought by the naïve method of calling _his favorite part of reality the
Whole_.
Like the two ladies in Kipling’s jingle, transcendentalist and
materialist are “sisters under the skin.” The transcendentalist
(Platonist, Christian, Christian Scientist, etc.) starts by dividing the
world into (1) spirit-value-quality-soul and into (2) matter-body-evil.
Having begun this dualistically, he cannot go on. Unknown to himself,
_he must reduce this duality into a whole_. This he does by denying the
part he does not like—by denying matter. (He may be subtle about it,
like the followers of Henri Massis, or crude, like the disciples of Mrs.
Eddy.) Now, he has his Whole, which is all life, all good—which is All.
But this All will not bear the buffets of the world: for it is really a
fragment. And the transcendentalist begins his endless labor of
corrupting reality, in order to make it fit his figment.... The
materialist starts likewise. He, too, divides the world into (1)
measurable matter and (2) the unmeasurable qualities of certain kinds of
matter—good, value, love, spirit, color, poetry, dream, etc., etc. He,
too, cannot abide this dualism, and must somehow manage to resolve it
into a One. He simply rejects what the transcendentalist exalts, and
takes what the other refuses. He sacrifices everything that is not
measurable matter. Whatever cannot be measured, he says, does not exist.
But the part of the Whole which he has legislated into nullity still
“functions” in him. He wears himself out, denying the domains of emotion
and thought which his petty “whole” has no room for. He becomes the
tired cynic, like Mr. Krutch; or the arrogant pseudo-scientific clown,
like Dr. Watson.
(Of these two sisters, it must be avowed that the transcendentalist is
less foolish. Both find “living matter.” The one rejects matter and
retains the abstract living: the other accepts matter and denies life.
But it is plain that we are more sure of the undifferentiate quality of
_living_ than we are of matter. Living without form does not exist, of
course: living-matter cannot be divided. But there is a difference of
degree in the folly of the camps.)
Between dogmatic transcendentalist and dogmatic materialist—each
hoisting his “part” into a Whole—stands the agnostic, of whom Bertrand
Russell is an illustrious instance. Mr. Russell understands the
limitations of the language of mathematics, and how they must limit the
scientific universe which mathematics symbolizes. He says that there are
two general logics: the logic of quantity and the logic of quality or
feeling. He says that both are right.[10] But since the logic of
quantity (measurement and science) is within the mind of the observer
who personally must follow the logic of feeling, Mr. Russell concludes
that there is no way of measuring the _measure_ value. So he decides
that it is all no use: man can never know anything since in order to do
so he would have to “get out of himself.” And of this agnosticism he
makes a dogmatic virtue.
The agnostic is not so different, after all, from the other two. He also
has begun wrong: he has arbitrarily divided the world into two parts, of
which one theoretically is “the truth,” and its expression into two
languages or logics. Having made this dualism, he also irresistibly is
driven to seek his Whole: and this he does, not by the sacrifice of one
part _to_ the other, but—since he cannot separate them—by the sacrifice
of both! For the Zero of the agnostic is a kind of Whole: nescience is
an assumed omniscience. The man who _knows_ that we cannot know is
dogmatic also. Again, in this agnosticism,[11] there is the same false
premise: the dividing of reality into two parts. Wherever this is done,
there must ineluctably follow confusion and falsehood, agnosticism or
despair....
d.
The voices of confusion, agnosticism, despair, are the popular voices of
today. The average American reader of the so-called educated classes has
been brought up on literature and science that were crassly dualistic.
He probably left a dualistic church when he was young. He has fallen at
once into the camp of Rousseau (the individual as a separate, perfect
atom), or into the camp of dogmatic science (only measurable matter
exists), or into some allied camp like that of vulgar collectivism
(society is real, but its individual integers are not). These
statements, of course, are caricatures: that is why they express the
distorting effect of modern doctrine on the average mind.
The consequence has been that the common reader of books (the kind that
calls himself an intellectual) is helplessly lost and helplessly
confused. For his doctrine and the world will not go together. “Feeling”
draws him imperiously one way; “knowing” another. He is miserable. And
misery loves company. The literary art which makes that misery
respectable by “proof” that there is no other course, and by decking out
impotence in gracious gestures, becomes the popular art. Books have
engendered the modern distemper. The least they can do, now, is to
justify it.
The curative, recreative task is very hard. It is the work of the ages
before us. And those of us who choose it for our own will have to labor
in the cold of an unfrequented dawn. Yet, although it is the task of
generations—of armies of artists, of corps of truly scientific
thinkers—the essence of it can be stated very simply.
We have seen how even the dualist and discontinuist is irresistibly
drawn to believe in a Whole, and to create a Whole (out of his favorite
fragment). The concept of wholeness, the experience of wholeness, the
living of wholeness are the unavoidable aspiration of human life.[12]
This is so inevitable that even the intellectual denier of wholeness in
the effort of his thought and deed belies his rejection. The right
beginning, therefore, of our task must be to conceive a Whole _that will
be the Whole_. Let us passionately refuse all dualism, all denials, at
the outset. If science is so foolish as to say: “There is no color in
the colored thing,” let us challenge that science. If religion is so
foolish as to say: “Man’s soul is separate from his body,” let us
challenge that religion. If mathematics is so foolish as to say: “_x_
and _y_, although they are in the universe, are not joined, but are
discrete and separate,” let us challenge that mathematics. Let us say:
“There is one and only one irrefutable truth: _the universe exists_. Men
differ about what it is, men differ about where it is. Some say it is
all ‘matter,’ and outside; some say it is all ‘thought,’ and within. All
must agree that it _is_.
“There is, to this one truth, one corollary that is irrefutable also:
_the universe, for each of us, is focused from the self_. Self—whatever
it is—looks out, or looks in, on the universe. Men differ about that.
Yet must agree that self _is_ that focus of the universe which knows the
universe exists. Self, therefore, is _of_ the universe (it may be the
whole of it, of course) which self asserts.
“All my words, all my thought, all my action, shall be determined by
this single common truth—this single common premise of existence. My
words will be such that when they point to a ‘thing’ or a ‘state’ (as
all words do) they will imply the tentative existence of the thing or
state, within the certain Whole. For the thing is vague and fleeting:
only the universe is certain.... My thought will be such, that when it
represents a ‘thing’ or a ‘state’ or an ‘action,’ as all thought must,
it will imply its tentative existence within the certain Whole; and its
valuation of the ‘thing’ or the ‘state’ will be the relating of it with
the universe which alone is certain.... And my action will be such, that
it expresses this relationship of self and of all things involved,
within the Whole that is the premise of all thought and all behavior.”
If these few words, necessarily insufficient, suggest the revolutionary
task that challenges human life—the re-creating of language, of society
and of man in the image of the Whole which is God—they will have served
their purpose. But the task is not impossible. The ant is born with the
capacity to fulfill his function. Savage man was born with the capacity
to fulfill his. Why should historic man alone, of all creatures in the
world, be born without the capacity to realize himself? All history
attests that man’s nature is a striving toward the divine achievement:
the focusing of the Whole in his thought, the enacting of the Whole
(this is called holiness) in his deed. But whereas all art, all science,
all religion, are the striving toward this consummation, they have
always been too weak: so they have broken. Dualism, with its rejections,
its denials, its corruptions, is the symbol of this breakdown. Dualism,
in its twin forms of transcendentalism and materialism, has always
brought a temporary death to man’s immortal effort. History is a short
tale. It has been just long enough to tell us what, as men, we have to
do.
But let us Americans not delude ourselves. Only the Remnant lives. And
this is so, because the way of death is easier than life. Mr. Krutch has
stated well the inevitable end to which the dualist—whether he calls
himself materialist or transcendentalist or agnostic—is ineluctably
brought. “Ours is a lost cause,” he closes, “and there is no place for
us in the natural universe.” So he elects to die. This is the death,
indeed, of the race of men who look upon themselves as alien from the
remotest star, and who put their loyalty in life upon one jot less than
the Whole which is God. Let them die.... And for the race, still at its
dawn, let Spinoza speak:
_A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is
not a meditation upon death, but upon life._
_1929_
9. THE “UNIVERSE” OF T. S. ELIOT
The collected essays of Mr. Eliot provide a portrait of a mind that for
the past twelve years has prominently played on the American literary
scene. The volume contains theoretical chapters from “The Sacred Wood,”
eleven papers on the Elizabethan dramatists, the entire brochure on
Dante, essays on the Metaphysical Poets and on Dryden, Blake,
Baudelaire, Swinburne. It represents Mr. Eliot’s social and theological
position in the studies of Lancelot Andrewes, in “Thoughts after
Lambeth,” and in the two essays on Babbitt et al., which did so much
more to discomfit the new humanists than the lunges of their foes. And
finally, it reveals the more casual man—delightfully—on topics like
poetry in drama, Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Marie Lloyd. The book
portrays a sensitive, finely endowed person. Itself an accumulation of
comments on many matters, it suggests a review of like nature: one is
tempted to pass from page to page detailing, comparing, dissenting. But
the place of Mr. Eliot as a literary influence in our time, and the
cultural crisis of our time, make this method inadvisable. It is
important to employ the book as a means for seeing the man whole; and,
having done so, to deduce a measure of his values as a leader and
thereby a measure of the time which took him as a leader.
The first revelation is of a man with an exquisite, almost infallible,
taste for the stuffs of literary art. Whether he touches a line of Dante
or of Swinburne, a melodrama of Cyril Tourneur or of Wilkie Collins, the
prosody of Baudelaire or of Blake, Mr. Eliot evinces an esthetic delight
which implies true contact with his subject. This first trait is
particularly distinguished in an age in which the field of literary
discussion has been almost monopolized by writers who may know something
of baseball or economics but who ignore the nature of literary art. The
second trait of Mr. Eliot, not less pervasive but more subtly entextured
in his book, is his moral sense; and this, coupled with his first, is
even more rare. We have had plenty of moralists—More, Mencken, Lewisohn,
are examples—writing on literature and totally insensitive to literary
esthetics; we have had a few “estheticians” disclaiming the moral sense
(as if esthetic form were some kind of insubstantial absolute and not an
organic configuration of ordinary human experience and motive), and
therefore writing with even worse futility on books. When Mr. Eliot
compares lines in Massinger and Shakespeare, contrasts tropes in Dryden
and Milton, draws a prosodic sequence from Donne to Shelley, he reveals,
in his taste and judgment, the moral integer: he knows the _human
nature_ of esthetics. This moral sense is organic in the man; it is no
mere acceptance of rules, it is not moralistic. Being the permeation,
within his specific literary experience, of his general view of life,
the moral quality in Mr. Eliot is religious. Everywhere, although he may
be discussing merely a choice of verbs in Middleton, he reveals a
general and definite attitude toward existence taken as a whole: and
this attitude, when logically formed, becomes religion.
T. S. Eliot, then, is portrayed by this book as a man with a sense of
the whole, with a conviction of his place in the whole, as a man engaged
in an activity (literature) for which he is fitted and to which he gives
his entire equipment. Such a crystallization comes close to what
Nietzsche meant by a cultural act; and in an epoch whose literary
critics have been insensitive and incompetent men, it makes Mr. Eliot an
exceedingly welcome figure. If, however, we turn from those
contemporaries in contrast with whose nullity he looms, and measure him
rather by his own subjects and by the literary exigencies of our epoch,
Mr. Eliot dwindles. No single major essay in this book, for instance,
can be said to be organic either as a presentation of its subject or as
a literary essay. Consider the “Dante” in whose study he is at his best:
every observation is exact, many a phrase stands forth a luminous gem;
but the observations merely mount arithmetically into so many pages of
running comment. Dante and his work are never objectified, never
dimensionally re-created either in the world of Dante or in the world of
T. S. Eliot. Or consider the justly admired pages on the Elizabethans:
they contain glimpses both precise and profound into the art of the
theatre, into the poets and their world. But none of the plays, none of
the dramatists, is made to stand whole, either in the epoch, in the
drama, or in some total conception of the critic.
If, then, as I have stated, there is wholeness in Mr. Eliot, we are led
to question what kind of wholeness it must be that can focus so superbly
on details in a dozen poets and a dozen epochs, and yet fail to envelop
any one of them. It is true that this failure is not always complete. In
the “Baudelaire,” for instance, or the “Swinburne,” we obtain a kind of
two-dimensional cross section, built from the prosodic study, which we
can place for ourselves in the organic milieu of the nineteenth century.
But in the essays on the more cosmic men there are no dimensions beyond
mere points of light. And in the studies of dynamic but little-discussed
figures, the failure is disastrous. The pages on Bradley, for example,
proceed without the faintest evocation of the two ideological
worlds—Hegelianism and English individualism—which Bradley sought to
synthesize. The chapter on Lancelot Andrewes is a mere ringing of
personal responses to the old priest’s music, which become sentimental
and pretentious, since there is no effort to place this music in the
symphony of Roman Catholic, Jewish and Arabic exegesis, from which it
was never truly independent.
T. S. Eliot, it becomes plain, is a man of integrity in the real sense
of the word; but his vision is such that it can never hold more than
details; and his energy is too weak to give organic form either to his
subjects or to his essays. Unlike most of his fellows, who suffer in a
chaos, he lives in a “universe.” But this “universe” of Mr. Eliot’s is
evidently small and minor. It is achieved by huge and deliberate
exclusions. It scarcely contacts with the modern world—the world whose
radical transformations in physics, psychology and economics have
dissolved all the old formal values. Nor does it really embrace the past
worlds with which Mr. Eliot is so sympathetic: Dantean Europe or
Jacobean England. This failure of mastery even on Mr. Eliot’s chosen
ground is revealing. No one can understand a living past who is not
actively engaged in the living present. For any past age is an integer
in the creating of today, and only by conscious sharing of this creation
can the past, as part of it, be understood. Fundamentally, Mr. Eliot’s
subjective love of the Anglo-Catholic tradition leaves him as remote
from what England really was as his distaste for modern problems leaves
him remote from us—and for the same reason.
That reason brings us to the heart of our portrait. Any living world,
whether it be Seneca’s or Shakespeare’s or our own, in so far as it
lives, is dynamic; and Mr. Eliot’s world is static. Wherefore, in
confrontation with a chaos of dynamic forces like our modern era, a
chaos which our dynamic will must meet, grapple with, and mold, Mr.
Eliot can only ignore; and in confrontation with dynamic worlds of the
past, he can only rather sentimentally adore. His own static vision
picks out details, reflects them and variates them into a kind of
series, like the stills of a cinema, whose total effect may be sensitive
and delightful, but cannot be organic.
This same static quality explains Mr. Eliot’s loyalty to a class and a
class creed. A static universe does not evolve, cannot believe in
evolving. It does, however, accumulate, and its “additions” make a
quantitative change—the one kind of change and of cultural contribution
which Mr. Eliot admits (see his essays on “Tradition,” “Individual
Talent” and “The Function of Criticism”). In a static universe,
transfiguration and revelation, and the capacity for these, are all
stratified in the past. And this is another way of saying that Mr.
Eliot’s spiritual experiences, from which issue his moral and esthetic
taste, although they are real, have the form not of life, but of an
inherited convention. Thus Mr. Eliot, with a religious sense, conceives
of no religion except the orthodox Christian; with a tragic sense,
conceives of man’s struggle exclusively in the cant meanings of Original
Sin; with a sense of the spirit’s need of discipline and order—both in
society and in the person—dreams of no method but that of a moneyed
class ruling through church and state.
Are such views valid, in the sense of having a relationship with
reality? Is there a position from which the universe is static; in which
transfiguration and revelation are past; in which Good, Evil, and the
given political and economic forms are absolute? The answer is Yes, in
the sense that death, being real, is valid. The living world of the mind
is as dynamic as the material world (they are one); there, too, the
individual life must partake of the dynamism of the whole, and when it
is severed from that dynamism we call it dead. The only difference is,
that in the world of the mind we do not commonly employ the term
“death”; we prefer to say conventional, dogmatic, static. Mr. Eliot’s
position is that of a man who has withdrawn from growth—in our meaning,
withdrawn from life. _He_ is static, his soul’s transfiguration is past,
whatever progress he conceives must be a mere consolidation of himself
into forms already uttered. His intellectual, spiritual and poetic
“life” is a rationalization of this death deep within him.
We hold now, I believe, the key to T. S. Eliot. He is a man who has
abdicated; but since he has been deeply sensitized to life, the
articulation of his experience remains an exquisite, lingering echo.
Such abdicated men have always existed, and have never been vital: even
in periods of cultural stability (like that of Dante, for example), the
cultural whole had constantly to be re-created by dynamic men. But in
our age, where stability has foundered into chaos, and where the need
for spiritual growth has become absolutely identified with the bare
struggle for survival, the discrepancy between a man like Mr. Eliot and
adequate leadership becomes enormous.
What we have really defined in our portrait of T. S. Eliot is a type of
minor poet. He is in the tradition, neither of our major poets—Poe,
Whitman, Melville—nor of the great Victorians. He is close to a
cultivated and popular figure like Thomas Gray; and his “Waste Land” is
a poem as good, and of the same nature, as the “Elegy.” Gray also was a
technical innovator with an immense appeal because he foreshadowed,
unconsciously, what was to become the dominant appetite of Europe:
closeness to nature. From the energy of this appetite, Titans were to
evolve the method for absorbing and controlling nature. But in Gray, the
motion took a reactionary form: a sentimental harking back to the values
of Puritanism (and to the language of Milton). The analogy with “The
Waste Land” is complete. Here, too, is technical innovation together
with a vague foreshadowing of what is _now_ the dominant need of the
world: the need of an organic, a livable Whole in which all men and all
man may function. This foreshadowed need gives to the poem its pathos,
its unity and its importance. But, as in Gray, it is negatively stated
by an evocation of a sentimental memory and by the use of old
materials—in Mr. Eliot’s case, more diffused and catholic, since no
strong Milton stands immediately behind him.