THREE: BOOKS (continued 2)

Chapter 4. A display of the same dualism and an assumption of the same discontinuity between the various functions of man, and between man and his world. The author’s attitude toward sex is worthy of the hermit in the Egyptian desert. Sex, as an energy expressing the whole man and woman, linking them in a full human relation, mobilizing their creative as well as their possessive nature, is unreal for the author. But unlike the antique gymnosophist whose rejection of sex he shares (while ignoring his science of self-control and despising his God), Mr. Krutch has not the courage or the will to carry out his own convictions. He considers himself superior to his sex; but he is quite willing to capitulate before it.

212Chapter 5. The finest writing of the book is here. Mr. Krutch discourses on Tragedy “as it once was” with discernment and fervor. It is plain that he is attached to Tragedy, “dead child of fallacy and illusion”; he can write with loving observation about the body of a “fraud.” (a) and (b) assume discontinuity, once more. (c) and (d) misread the modern status of literary art. Human dignity still exists, noble action and noble lives still persevere. The disappearance of the anthropocentric cosmos and of the personal heaven have enhanced man’s sense of dignity within himself. He is responsible now, not as the child of a mythic Father, but as the father of himself. Yet more is needed than dignity and noble action for the production of Tragedy. Tragedy is a social form. It must enact man’s dignity in communicable, common terms. These terms are wanting. The modern conscience of the world has not yet bridged from private into public symbols. There is nothing discouraging in this. There were ages of social preparation, also, before Sophocles and before Shakespeare: ages in which individual men had dignity, in which men lived nobly, and yet in which no great Tragedy was written.

Chapter 6. (a) begins with a dubious statement. The medieval science of life was inexact; it was, indeed, founded upon self-contradictory laws, and the dualism of these laws, which were supposed to conform to life but did not, eventually disrupted medieval science. In “The Re-Discovery of America,” I have gone into this question at some length. Here it is not centrally cogent, so we let it pass. (d) and (e) again imply discontinuity and discreteness not alone between man and the universe, but between man and man. Men, says the author, have so little relation among themselves that (f) if each man lived his truth according to his essence, these multiple truths would sum to anarchy! If men are essentially related, if the reality or truth of each is a focus of the interplay 213of the whole (as philosophy, psychology and social sciences agree), then their living by the light of their individual reality and truth would bring them into active relation with one another, and would result in harmony. These premises are denied by Mr. Krutch. The rest of the chapter is less essential. It is interesting to note, however, that it implies the impossibility of man’s ever achieving any inner principle of order or control, whereby he might integrate his life within the vicissitudes of the world. The chapter is the final admission of man’s impotence. The artist is the creator of a kind of order. Man can be an artist, says the author, when he deals with words or pigment or marble. When he deals with life, man can be only an amoeba.

c.

But the reader has had enough of this dissection of a dreary argument. 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, 214Haeckelian 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 215own 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 216is 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 217never 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 218books (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 219exists. 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, 220the 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 221theological 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 222Mr. 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 223of 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 224of 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; 225with 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 226a 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.

The questions remain: why has Mr. Eliot been a leader and what does his leadership reveal about our literary generation? The questions are swiftly answered. Even in an age of confused standards, there is recognition of literary merit. Mr. Eliot’s clarity, it is true, is achieved not by integrating the chaos that has bewildered us, but by withdrawal. Yet to the men whom the cultural dissolution has frightened and weakened (the majority of men), these limitations make him only more acceptable. A long time ago, I wrote of what I 227called “the comfort of the limit,” and explained its appeal to many types of mind lost in our modern chaos. Only athletic souls can face a world that has become, perhaps more than any other era, an overwhelmingly open and darkened future. The temptation to limit this world, either by rationalistically charting its future (a disguised reactionism) or by merely advocating its reform in an image of the past, is great and manifold.

All the dogmatisms of our day are really such “limits”—such simplifications of the real. There is the dogmatism of science (the comfort of limiting reality and its mastery to problems of mechanics and addition); there is the dogmatism of cynical despair (the comfort of giving up hope and therefore struggle); there is the dogmatism of a pseudo-Marxian dialectic (the comfort of explaining the human tragedy in terms solely of a simple, solvable class struggle). And, for the weakly poetic, there is the haven of an elegiac past, like Mr. Eliot’s, in which great poets still sing and sure priests thunder.

The one way of life that has no limit and affords no comfort is the way ahead—into the bitter and dark and bloody dawn of a new world, wherein mankind shall integrate without loss the stormy elements that make the chaos of our day, and its promise.

1932