Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  using the qualification sole, and brutally frank in attributing this

  'humorousness' to 'the unreclaimed Teutonic element in us'. But

  it strikes me that Mr. Murry, and this other voice, are either too

  obstinate or too tolerant. The question is, the first question, not

  what comes natural or what comes easy to us, but what is right ?

  Either one attitude is better than the other, or else it is indifferent.

  But how can such a choice be indifferent ? Surely the reference to

  racial origins, or the mere statement that the French are thus, and

  the English otherwise, is not expected to settle the question :

  which, of two antithetical views, is right ? And I cannot understand why the opposition between Classicism and Romanticism should be profound enough in Latin countries (Mr. Murry says

  it is) and yet of no significance among ourselves. For if the French

  are naturally classical, why should there be any 'opposition' - in

  France, any more than there is here ? And if Classicism is not

  natural to them, but something acquired, why not acquire it here ?

  Were the French in the year 16oo classical, and the English in the

  same year romantic ? A more important difference, to my mind,

  is that the French in the year 16oo had already a more mature

  prose.

  I I I

  This discussion may seem to have led us a long way from the

  subject of this paper. But it was worth my while to follow Mr.

  Murry's comparison of Outside Authority with the Inner Voice.

  For to those who obey the inner voice (perhaps 'obey' is not the

  word) nothing that I can say about criticism will have the slightest

  value. For they will not be interested in the attempt to find any

  common principles for the pursuit of criticism. Why have

  principles, when one has the inner voice ? If I like a thing, that is

  all I want ; and if enough of us, shouting all together, like it, that

  should be all that you (who don't like it} ought to want. The law

  of art, said Mr. Clutton Brock, is all case law. And we can not only

  like whatever we like to like but we can like it for any reason we

  choose. We are not, in fact, concerned with literary perfection at

  all - the search for perfection is a sign of pettiness, for it shows that

  the writer has admitted the existence of an unquestioned spiritual

  authority outside himself, to which he has attempted to conform.

  We are not in fact interested in art. We will not worship Baal.

  'The principle of classical leadership is that obeisance is made to

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  THE FUNCT I O N O F CR I T I C I S M

  the office or to the tradition, never to the man.' And w e want, not

  principles, but men.

  Thus speaks the Inner Voice. It is a voice to which, for convenience, we may give a name : and the name I suggest is Whiggery.

  I V

  Leaving, then, those whose calling and election are sure and

  returning to those who shamefully depend upon tradition and the

  accumulated wisdom of time, and restricting the discussion to

  those who sympathize with each other in this frailty, we may

  comment for a moment upon the use of the terms 'critical' and

  'creative' by one whose place, on the whole, is with the weaker

  brethren. Matthew Arnold distinguishes far too bluntly, it seems

  to me, between the two activities : he overlooks the capital

  importance of criticism in the work of creation itself. Probably,

  indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his

  work is critical labour ; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing : this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism ; and (as I think I have said

  before) that some creative writers are superior to others solely

  because their critical faculty is superior. There is a tendency, and

  I think it is a whiggery tendency, to decry this critical toil of the

  artist ; to propound the thesis that the great artist is an unconscious artist, unconsciously inscribing on his banner the words Muddle Through. Those of us who are Inner Deaf Mutes are,

  however, sometimes compensated by a humble conscience, which,

  though without oracular expertness, counsels us to do the best

  we can, reminds us that our compositions ought to be as free from

  defects as possible (to atone for their lack of inspiration), and, in

  short, makes us waste a good deal of time. We are aware, too, that

  the critical discrimination which comes so hardly to us has in more

  fortunate men flashed in the very heat of creation ; and we do not

  assume that because works have been composed without apparent

  critical labour, no critical labour has been done. We do not know

  what previous labours have prepared, or what goes on, in the way

  of criticism, all the time in the minds of the creators.

  But this affirmation recoils upon us. If so large a part of creation

  is really criticism, is not a large part of what is called 'critical

  writing' really creative ? If so, is there not creative criticism in the

  ordinary sense ? The answer seems to be, that there is no equation.

  I have assumed as axiomatic that a creation, a work of art, is

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  •

  autotelic ; and that criticism, by definition, i s about something

  other than itself. Hence you cannorfuse creation with criticism as

  you can fuse criticism with creation. The critical activity finds its

  highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the

  labour of the artist.

  But no writer is completely self-sufficient, and many creative

  writers have a critical activity which is not all discharged into

  their work. Some seem to require to keep their critical powers in

  condition for the real work by exercising them miscellaneously ;

  others, on completing a work, need to continue the critical activity

  by commenting on it. There is no general rule. And as men can

  learn from each other, so some of these treatises have been useful

  to other writers. And some of them have been useful to those who

  were not writers.

  At one time I was inclined to take the extreme position that the

  011/y critics worth reading were the critics who practised, and

  practised well, the art of which they wrote. But I had to stretch

  this frame to make some important inclusions ; and I have since

  been in search of a formula which should cover everything I

  wished to include, even if it included more than I wanted. And

  the most important qualification which I have been able to find,

  which accounts for the peculiar importance of the criticism of

  practitioners, is that a critic must have a very highly developed

  sense of fact. This is by no means a trifling or frequent gift. And

  it is not one which easily wins popular commendations. The sense

  of fact is something very slow to develop, and its complete

  development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilization. For

  there are so many spheres of fact to be mastered, and our outermost sphere of fact, of knowledge, of control, will be ringed with narcotic fan
cies in the sphere beyond. To the member of the

  Browning Study Circle, the discussion of poets about poetry may

  seem arid, technical, and limited. It is merely that the practitioners have clarified and reduced to a state of fact all the feelings that the member can only enjoy in the most nebulous form ; the

  dry technique implies, for those who have mastered it, all that the

  member thrills to ; only that has been made into something

  precise, tractable, under control. That, at all events, is one reason

  for the value of the practitioner's criticism - he is dealing with his

  facts, and he can help us to do the same.

  And at every level of criticism I find the same necessity regnant.

  There is a large part of critical writing which consists in 'interpreting' an author, a work. This is not on the level of the Study Circle either ; it occasionally happens that one person obtains an

  understanding of another, or a creative writer, which he can

  partially communicate, and which we feel to be true and illumi-

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  nating. I t i s difficult to confirm the 'interpretation' by external

  evidence. To anyone who is skilled in fact on this level there will

  be evidence enough. But who is to prove his own skill ? And for

  every success in this type of writing there arc thousands of impostures. Instead of insight, you get a fiction. Your test is to apply it again and again to the original, with your view of the original

  to guide you. But there is no one to guarantee your competence,

  and once again we find ourselves in a dilemma.

  We must ourselves decide what is useful to us and what is not ;

  and it is quite likely that we are not competent to decide. But it is

  fairly certain that 'interpretation' (I am not touching upon the

  acrostic element in literature) is only legitimate when it is not

  interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of

  facts which he would otherwise have missed. I have had some

  experience of Extension lecturing, and I have found only two

  ways of leading any pupils to like anything with the right liking :

  to present them with a selection of the simpler kind of facts about

  a work - its conditions, its setting, its genesis - or else to spring

  the work on them in such a way that they were not prepared to be

  prejudiced against it. There were many facts to help them with

  Elizabethan drama : the poems of T. E. Hulme only needed to be

  read aloud to have immediate effect.

  Comparison and analysis, I have said before, and Remy de

  Gourmont has said before me (a real master of fact - sometimes, I

  am afraid, when he moved outside of literature, a master illusionist of fact), are the chief tools of the critic. It is obvious indeed that they are tools, to be handled with care, and not

  employed in an inquiry into the number of times giraffes are

  mentioned in the English novel. They are not used with conspicuous success by many contemporary writers. You must know what to compare and what to analyse. The late Professor Ker had

  skill in the use of these tools. Comparison and analysis need only

  the cadavers on the table ; but interpretation is always producing

  parts of the body from its pockets, and fixing them in place. And

  any book, any essay, any note in Notes a11d Qperies, which produces a fact even of the lowest order about a work of art is a better piece of work than nine-tenths of the most pretentious critical

  journalism, in journals or in books. We assume, of course, that

  we are masters and not servants of facts, and that we know that

  the discovery of Shakespeare's laundry bills would not be of much

  use to us ; but we must always reserve final judgment as to the

  futility of the research which has discovered them, in the possibility that some genius will appear who will know of a use to which to put them. Scholarship, even in its humblest forms, has

  its rights ; we assume that we know how to use it, and how to

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  neglect it. Of course the multiplication o f critical books and essays

  may create, and I have seen it create, a vicious taste for reading

  about works of art instead of reading the works themselves, it may

  supply opinion instead of educating taste. But fact cannot corrupt

  taste ; it can at worst gratify one taste - a taste for history, let us

  say, or antiquities, or biography - under the illusion that it is

  assisting another. The real corrupters are those who supply

  opinion or fancy ; and Goethe and Coleridge are not guiltless - for

  what is Coleridge's Hamlet : is it an honest inquiry as far as the

  data permit, or is it an attempt to present Coleridge in an attractive costume ?

  We have not succeeded in finding such a test as anyone can

  apply ; we have been forced to allow ingress to innumerable dull

  and tedious books ; but we have, I think, found a test which, for

  those who are able to apply it, will dispose of the really vicious

  ones. And with this test we may return to the preliminary statement of the polity of literature and of criticism. For the kinds of critical work which we have admitted, there is the possibility of

  cooperative activity, with the further possibility of arriving at

  something outside of ourselves, which may provisionally be called

  truth. But if anyone complains that I have not defined truth, or

  fact, or reality, I can only say apologetically that it was no part of

  my purpose to do so, but only to find a scheme into which, whatever they are, they will fit, if they exist.

  E S S A Y S O F G E N E R A LI Z A T I O N

  from PREFACE TO ANABA S I S

  I am by no means convinced that a poem like Anabase requires a

  prf'face at all. It is better to read such a poem six times, and dispense with a preface. But when a poem is presented in the form of a translation, people who have never heard of it are naturally inclined to demand some testimonial. So I give mine hereunder . . . .

  For myself, once having had my attention drawn to the poem

  by a friend whose taste I trusted, there was no need for a preface.

  I did not need to be told, after one reading, that the word anabasis

  has no particular reference to Xenophon or the journey of the

  Ten Thousand, no particular reference to Asia Minor; and that no

  map of its migrations could be drawn up. Mr. Perse is using the

  word anabasis in the same literal sense in which Xenophon himself used it. The poem is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and

  foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the

  ancient East.

  I may, I trust, borrow from Mr. Fabre two notions which may

  be of use to the English reader. The first is that any obscurity of

  the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of 'links in

  the chain', of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to

  incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of

  such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images

  coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric

  civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his

  memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of

  each at the moment ; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.

  Such selection of a
sequence of images and ideas has nothing

  chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a

  logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always

  find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in the

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  ESSAYS O F GENERALoiZAT I ON

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  arrangement of images ; and even those who are capable of

  appreciating poetry cannot depend upon first impressions. I was

  not convinced of Mr. Perse's imaginative order until I had read

  the poem five or six times. And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much 'fundamental brainwork'

  as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the

  reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister

  reading an important decision on a complicated case . . . .

  from THE USE OF POETRY AND

  THE USE OF CRITI C I S M

  [i THE N E CESS I TY OF C R I T I C I S l1

  . . . The important moment for the appearance of criticism seems

  to be the time when poetry ceases to be the expression of the mind

  of a whole people. The drama of Dryden, which furnishes the

  chief occasion for his critical writing, is formed by Dryden's perception that the possibilities of writing in the mode of Shakespeare were exhausted ; the form persists in the tragedies of such a

  writer as Shirley (who is much more up to date in his comedies),

  after the mind and sensibility of England has altered. But Dryden

  was not writing plays for the whole people ; he was writing in a

  form which had not grown out of popular tradition or popular

  requirements, a form the acceptance of which had therefore to

  come by diffusion through a small society. Something similar had

  been attempted by the Senecan dramatists. But the part of

  society to which Dryden's work, and that of the Restoration

  comedians, could immediately appeal constituted something like

  an intellectual aristocracy ; when the poet finds himself in an age

  in which there is no intellectual aristocracy, when power is in the

  hands of a class so democratized that whilst still a class it represents itself to be the whole nation ; when the only alternatives seem to be to talk to a coterie or to soliloquize, the difficulties of