Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922

by T. S. Eliot

  11–The old name for the Victoria & Albert Museum (until 1899).

  12–By 1900 there were about 135,000 Jews in London, most of whom lived within the East End around the Whitechapel area. In East London (1898), the Christian missionary Henry Walker noted of Whitechapel, ‘Here, in spite of the English-looking surroundings, [the stranger] is practically in a foreign land, so far as language and race are concerned. The people are neither French nor English, Germans nor Americans, but Jews.’

  13–An apterix is ‘A New Zealand bird, about the size of a goose, with merely rudimentary wings and no tail, called by the natives Kiwi’ (OED). TSE wrote three reviews for the Egoist in 1918 under the pseudonym ‘Apteryx’, or ‘T. S. Apteryx’.

  TO Edward Forbes1

  MS Harvard

  22 May [1911]

  c/o Credit Lyonnais, 19 bvd des

  Italiens [Paris]

  My dear Mr Forbes

  I have just arranged with Alphonse-Picard that they should send you a copy of the Trocadero catalogue.2 It appears to be a new edition. As for the Luxembourg, there is no catalogue. I suppose that the museum is conceived to be never in a stable enough condition to warrant it.3 There are three ‘guides’ containing selections (illustrations) of the sculptures only. If you would like them, let me know, but I judged them useless for museum purposes.

  This is a long time since you wrote asking for the catalogues, and no doubt you thought that your letter was never received. Perhaps you have already obtained the catalogue through someone else, or perhaps the lack of it may have bothered you a great deal. In any case, I hope you will not attribute my delinquency to gross negligence, but rather to a fundamental failing of character. I have been known to procrastinate even longer.

  — — — — — — — — — — —

  I have enjoyed my winter very keenly, and have gained, I think, a great deal. My opinions on art, as well as other subjects, have modified radically. At Christmas I travelled for two weeks in France, and saw several things not often visited – including Poitiers, Angoulême, Toulouse, Albi, Moissac, and other places in the south west. My Easter vacation I spent in London. At present, I am commencing a series of trips to towns about Paris, and began last Sunday with Rouen.

  After the middle of June I shall go to Munich for some time, to study German.4 I hope to spend a few weeks, at least, in Italy.5

  If you come to Europe this summer, I shall hope to see you. In case the catalogue does not arrive, send me word of it.

  Please remember me to Mrs Forbes

  Sincerely yours

  Thomas Eliot.

  1–Edward Forbes (1873–1969): collector and Harvard benefactor; Director of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, 1909–44. TSE had taken his course Fine Arts 20b in 1909–10.

  2–Camille Enlart, Le Musée de Sculpture Comparée du Trocadero (1911).

  3–The Luxembourg Museum was devoted to works by living painters and sculptors. They remained there for ten years after the artist’s death, and the best of them were then selected for the Louvre.

  4–He left France in July 1911 for Munich and northern Italy before returning to Harvard for the autumn to work for his doctorate in philosophy. In a letter to Eudo Mason (21 Feb. 1936), he was to recall that most of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was written ‘in the summer of 1911 when I was in Munich’.

  5–See TSE’s ‘Notes on Italy’ (Houghton).

  FROM Jean Verdenal

  MS Houghton

  Dimanche [July? 1911]

  [Paris]

  Mon cher ami,

  Je suis impatient de vous voir trouver du papier à lettres en Bavière, et d’en recevoir un échantillon couvert de votre belle écriture avant que la bière allemande n’ait engourdi votre esprit. Elle y aurait d’ailleurs de la peine, si lourde soit-elle, et nous voyons que quelques naturels du pays y échappèrent; l’histoire conte que le terrible Schopenhauer en était fort amateur. Il jouait aussi de la clarinette, mais c’était peut-être pour embêter ses voisins.1 Voilà bien assez de choses pour nous rattacher à la vie. La volonté de vivre est mauvaise, cause de désirs et de peines mais la bière est appréciable – et l’on continue. O! Raison.

  Je viens de lire hier soir la Mère et l’Enfant de Philippe,2 quelle belle et bonne chose; blanche comme le pain et le lait, sans procédés, sans littérature. Il faut l’aimer, bien l’aimer pour la comprendre. J’ai compris à propos de ce bon Philippe tout ce qu’a d’inférieur la critique purement intellectuelle, un jour où j’ai entendu quelque Sorbonnard dire à propos de ses romans: ‘Très intéressant! Comme il a bien étudié la vie des humbles.’ Pauvre, pauvre ami, plus que toutes les misères, cette phrase lui eût été douloureuse. Avoir souffert, vécu chacune de ses lignes pour servir de sujet d’étude au professeur de littérature – qui n’y verra rien – tant il est vrai que c’est nous-mêmes que nous projetons sur toutes les choses extérieures. Il faudrait, en critique, réserver la raison à démolir, à cogner sur les faux bonshommes, à cogner dur pour mettre par terre les faiseurs, falsificateurs professionnels de l’art. Les bonnes choses restent à la lumière; il faut en parler pour les faire connaître, comme on prête un livre à un ami. Tout essai de démonstration par l’intelligence de la beauté d’une oeuvre d’art est, sans aucun doute, une contradiction. Monsieur Dana en tressaillerait derrière ses lorgnons d’or, mais c’est comme cela, le critique rationnel m’a toujours fait penser à l’enfant qui casse son jouet mécanique pour voir ce qu’il y a dedans. Et que dire des critiques scientifiques? Mais ceux-ci ne sont pas dangereux, ils sont trop embêtants et personne ne les lit.

  Au revoir, mon vieux, je vous serre la pince cordialement.

  Jean Verdenal.3

  1–The daily routine of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), author of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819), involved a good intake of beer as well as clarinet practice. TSE later noted that his (and Verdenal’s) literary hero Laforgue was fascinated by ‘the Kantian pseudo-Buddhism of Schopenhauer’ (VMP, 216).

  2–La Mere et l’Enfant (1900), by Charles-Louis Philippe (1874–1909). TSE’s copy of this novel (Édition de la NRF, 4th edition), is inscribed ‘T. S. Eliot / Paris / September 1911’ (Houghton). In his preface to a translation of Philippe’s Bubu of Montparnasse, TSE would praise the author’s ‘sincerity’; comparing him to Dickens and Dostoevsky, he called him ‘perhaps the most faithful to the point of view of the humble and oppressed themselves … more their spokesman than their champion’ (Bubu of Montparnasse, trans. Laurence Vail [Paris, 1932], 10).

  3–Translation: My dear friend, I am waiting impatiently to hear that you have found some notepaper in Bavaria, and to receive an example of it covered with your beautiful handwriting, before German beer has dulled your wits. As a matter of fact, it would have some difficulty in doing so, and we see that even a few natives of the country escaped its effects; history tells us that the formidable Schopenhauer was a great beer-lover. He also played the clarinet, but perhaps that was just to annoy his neighbours. Such things are quite enough to make us cling to life. The will to live is evil, a source of desires and sufferings, but beer is not to be despised – and so we carry on. O Reason!

  I have just read – only last evening – Mother and Child by Philippe, what a good and beautiful book; as wholesome as bread and milk, without artifice or rhetoric. To understand it, you have to like it, really like it. It was in connection with Philippe that I realised what is so unsatisfactory about purely intellectual criticism, one day when I overheard some Sorbonne professor saying about his novels: ‘Very interesting! How well he has studied the lives of humble people.’ Poor, good fellow, the remark would have hurt him more than the worst of his sad experiences. To have suffered and lived every line he wrote only to become a subject of study for a professor of literature – who will miss the point – so true it is that we project ourselves on to everything outside us. Reason, in criticism, should be reserved for demolishing, for hammering charlatans, for hammering phoneys and falsifiers of a
rt until they are laid low. The good things stand out of their own accord; they have to be talked about to make them known, as you lend a book to a friend. Any attempt on the part of the intelligence to demonstrate the beauty of a work of art is, undoubtedly, a contradiction in terms. Monsieur Dana would shudder behind his gold pince-nez if he heard this, but it’s true; a rationalistic critic always makes me think of a child breaking his clockwork toy to see what there is inside. As for scientific critics? But they are not dangerous; they are too boring and no one reads them.

  Goodbye, my dear fellow, I shake you warmly by the hand. Jean Verdenal.

  FROM Jean Verdenal

  MS Houghton

  [Mid-July 1911]

  151 bis rue St Jacques, Paris

  Mon cher ami,

  Je reçois votre lettre1 au moment où je vais quitter Paris pour aller quinze jours là-bas aux Pyrénées. Tout le monde a quitté déjà, à part Fellows;2 et des figures de passage remplissent la maison; presque toutes repondent à l’étiquette ‘vieille fille americaine’. Cela suffit.

  Le spectacle de Paris ces jours-ci (fête du 14 juillet) était assez intéressant. C’est, avec les jours gras, la vraie fête de Paris, maintenant que l’ ‘antique renouveau des fêtes surannées ne fleurit plus aux vieux pavés du siècle dur’. Je crois même que l’expression artistique est plus parfaite qu’au Mardi gras, rien ne sonne de travers. Illuminations officielles, revue et cocardes, populo dansant; horribles orchestres dont les valses vous suggestionnent totalement; c’est une atmosphère chaude, poussiéreuse, suante sous un ciel ardent; c’est tricolore, commandé par l’État et les gens s’en donnent de rigoler. L’après-midi les gosses triomphent, les sales gosses à mirlitons; le soir il monte une excitation sensuelle qui va en grandissant; le cheveux des filles sont collés aux tempes de sueur; la roue des loteries tourne; la roue des chevaux de bois tourne entraînante, attirante de lumière, chaque oscillation des chevaux cambrant le torse souple des poules, une jambe bien prise est entrevue par la ‘jupe fendue à la mode’; un souffle lourd et gras passe chaudement.

  Toute cette manifestation extérieure répond bien, sans aucun doute, à l’actuelle tendance régnant dans le peuple de Paris. C’est, tendance peu élevée, matérialiste, mais je ne dirais pas grossière, car le peuple Parisien reste fin, sceptique et distingué malgré tout; dans les instants graves il saura être généreux, je crois. On peut considérer qu’il subit la même poussée que l’aristocratie au XVIIIe siècle. Vous rencontrerez constamment aujourd’hui le type ‘ouvrier intelligent et instruit’; il ne croit plus aux vieilles histoires de jadis; beaucoup croient à la science (!) mais surtout beaucoup ont refoulé les bons élans intérieurs, attirés par le désir de raisonner. Sans doute la plupart restent de braves gens et de bons types, malgré tout, et intuitivement, mais leur système les condamne, logiquement. Vous entendez des gens du monde dire avec sourire que ‘la demi-culture, la demiscience, le demi-intellectualisme ne leur donnera rien’. Mais, ô braves gens, est-ce que l’intellectualisme tout entier vous donnera beaucoup plus? Cependant que le positivisme (matérialisme mal déguisé) descend et se vulgarise, voici qu’une tendance vers l’Idée se montre dans l’Élite, chaque jour plus forte. Toute la fin du XIXe siècle en est pleine et la manifestation la plus marquée est sans doute dans la poésie moderne, puis dans la musique. La forme souvent prise est celle d’un retour au christianisme catholique ou évangélique galiléen. Quelle valeur y a-t-il dans les innombrables et diverses oeuvres ayant cet aspect? Quelles différences en effet! aperçues dès qu’on prend q[uel]ques noms (Verlaine, Huysmans, Barrès, Francis Jammes, Péguy, Bourget, Claudel, Le Cardonnel etc.).3 Je fais cette salade exprès, pour montrer le tri à faire. Nous en recauserons si vous voulez. Il serait convenable de discerner en chacun ce qui revient à diverses causes: snobisme, intérêt, sincère repentir, defaut d’intelligence, croyance catholique et littérale du dogme, point de vue social (national, provincial, traditionnel, école), évocation du passé, procédé littéraire, pragmatisme, etc. Il convient surtout de dire pour chacun en quelle mesure il peut influencer notre vie intérieure vers la connaissance du bien suprême.

  Mon vieux, je serai là en septembre, bien content de vous revoir; croyez à toute mon amitié.

  Jean Verdenal

  1) J’ai lu le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc.4 J’aime surtout le récit que Madame Gervaise fait de la Passion (Bethléem et finit à Jérusalem). J. V.

  2) Tâchez donc si possible d’entendre qq. chose de Wagner à Munich. J’étais l’autre jour au Crépuscule dirigé par Nikisch;5 la fin est sans doute un des points les plus hauts où l’homme se soit élevé.

  3) J’oubliais encore de vous dire que le semaine d’avant j’ai eu plusieurs fois le plaisir d’aller avec Prichard6 boire de l’eau minérale et manger des haricots verts, en divers restaurants. Quelle âme belle et forte, mais un peu raide quand on ne la connaît pas encore.7

  1–TSE was staying at Pension Bürger, Luisenstrasse 50, Munich.

  2–Unidentified.

  3–Paul Verlaine (1844–96), poet; Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), author of À Rebours; Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), nationalist intellectual and polemicist; Francis Jammes (1868–1938), poet; Charles Péguy (1873–1914), poet and Catholic nationalist, discussed by TSE in NS 8 (7 Oct. 1916); Paul Bourget (1852–1935), novelist, whose Lazarine was reviewed by TSE in NS 9 (25 Aug. 1917, unsigned); Paul Claudel (1868–1955), influential Catholic poet, dramatist and essayist, to whom TSE paid tribute (Le Figaro Littéraire 10, 5 Mar. 1955); Louis Le Cardonnel (1862–1936), religious poet.

  4–Charles Péguy, Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1909). Much of Péguy’s drama takes the form of a theological dialogue between Madame Gervaise and Jeanne. Mme Gervaise’s meditation on the Passion includes: ‘Vie commence à Bethlehem et finie à Jerusalem / Vie comprise entre Bethlehem et Jerusalem. / Vie inscrite entre Bethlehem et Jerusalem … / Vie commence à Bethlehem et qui ne finit pas à Jerusalem’ (Oeuvres poétiques complètes [1975], 437).

  5–The Hungarian Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922) became in 1895 principal conductor of both the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Berlin Philarmonic. Götterdämmerung (‘The Twilight of the Gods’) is the last opera in Wagner’s tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelungs: TSE refers to the song of the Rheinmaidens in his notes to l. 266 of TWL.

  6–Matthew Prichard (1865–1936), English aesthete who had become secretary to the Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1902. Henry Eliot had given TSE an introduction to him.

  7–Translation: My dear friend, I have received your letter just as I am on the point of leaving Paris to go down for a fortnight to the Pyrenees. Everyone has already gone, apart from Fellows; and the house is filled with ephemeral visitors, almost all corresponding to the label ‘elderly American spinster’. No more need be said.

  Paris has presented quite an interesting spectacle recently (14 July, Bastille Day). Together with the period around Shrove Tuesday, it is the true Parisian holiday, now that ‘the antique renewal of age-old feast-days no longer flowers on the ancient cobblestones of this hard century’. I even believe that it takes a more artistic form than Shrove Tuesday; nothing is out of key. Official illuminations, march-past, patriotic rosettes, the common folk dancing in the streets; appalling bands playing overpoweringly emotional waltzes; the atmosphere is warm, dusty and sweaty, under a blazing sky; a tricolour, State-commissioned atmosphere, and the populace enjoys itself up to the hilt. In the afternoon, the children take over, wretched urchins blowing tin trumpets; the evening is filled with an ever-mounting sensual excitement; sweat makes the girls’ hair stick to their temples; lottery wheels spin; a merry-go-round, attractively lit and alluring, also revolves, and with every jerk of the wooden horses, the whores brace their supple busts and a shapely leg can be glimpsed through the slit of a ‘fashionably split skirt’; a heavy, sensuous gust flows warmly by.

  All this outward demonstration corresponds, without doubt, to the present dominant t
endency among the Parisian populace. Not being a very elevated tendency, it is materialistic, but I would not call it coarse, since your average Parisian, even so, remains subtle, sceptical and refined; in time of danger, he will, I believe, know how to behave generously. There is reason to think that the Parisian working class is undergoing the same evolution as the aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Today, you constantly come across examples of the ‘educated, intelligent worker’; he no longer believes in the old stories dating from the past; many of them believe in science (!) but, what is more important, many have repressed their good inner impulses through a desire to think rationally. (No doubt, most of them remain nice people and decent fellows, intuitively and in spite of all this, but, logically, they are doomed by their system.) You can hear upper-class people remarking with a smile that ‘semi-culture, semi-science and semi-intellectualism will bring them no advantage’. But, my dear, good people, will complete intellectualism give you much more? While positivism (materialism poorly disguised) spreads downwards through society, an aspiration towards the Idea can be seen growing daily stronger among the Elite. The end of the nineteenth century is permeated by it, and it shows itself most markedly, no doubt, in modern poetry, then in music. It frequently takes the form of a return to Christianity, whether Catholic or Galilean and evangelical. What value is there in the innumerable and varied works showing this feature? What differences appear, indeed, as soon as you think of a few names! (Verlaine, Huysmans, Barrès, Francis Jammes, Péguy, Bourget, Claudel, Le Cardonnel, etc.). I deliberately quote them at random to show the sorting out to be done. We’ll talk about all this again some time, if you like. It would be appropriate to decide, in each case, how far various causes have operated: snobbishness, self-interest, sincere repentance, flawed intelligence, literal Catholic belief in the dogma, social attitudes (national, provincial, traditional, sectarian), harking back to the past, literary artifice, pragmatism, etc. But the main thing is to say, in the case of each, how far he can influence our inner life towards the knowledge of the supreme good.