BOOKS
53
between the cultures of North and South.
Purity of race and unity of
tradition resting solidly on the Catholic Church are the white hope of
civilization and art.
As Eliot has been donning his clerical robes, he has sought to shift
his literary theories to fit his religious aims. For example, two of Eliot's
most cherished ideas were that the task of the critic is to stick to literature,
without straying onto the thorny paths of psychology, sociology or
philosophy, and that the beliefs in a literary work are relevant to any
judgment of its value only insofar as the beliefs must be mature.
The
contradictions which follow are obviously tremendous, but Eliot solves
them by the simple method of making unproven assertions.
In
After
Strange Gods
he announces frankly, "I ascended the platform of these
lectures only in the role of moralist," and he concludes with the state-
ment that "there are standards of criticism ....
which we may apply
to whatever is offered to us as works of philosophy or of art, which might
help to render them safe and more profitable for us." Eliot tries to use
these religious standards in evaluating the work of Lawrence, Hardy,
Joyce, Pound and Yeats.
In some sleight-of-hand fashion, which I con-
fess I follow very imperfectly, Lawrence emerges a heretic, and Joyce
an example of orthodoxy.
An illustration of Eliot's new criterion is
his theory that "with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with
the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings
presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction today tend to become
less and less real." Finally, in contradiction to his theory of belief in
poetry, Eliot does a little log-rolling for devotional poetry.
,The Use of Poetry
has some of the merits of Eliot's early criticism
and most of the absurdities of hIS later work.
Scattered through the
book are suggestive apen.;us into the form and style of various poets, the
relation of some criticism to poetry of a period, and the sensibility and
perception of some critics.
But the frame of his ideas wobbles on the
quicksand of his confusions. And there is the old evasiveness, the thousand
and one qualifications, the authoritarianism,
which Eliot has so effectively
stylized. And political reaction breaks through here and here, sometimes
more, sometimes less, directly.
Eliot's conclusion: "I have no general theory of my own" really
defines the character of the book. A number of theories from Campion
to the moderns are reviewed, to show, as Eliot says, the constant re-
adaptation of criticism and poetry to each other. And, though Eliot adds
the factor of readaptation to social changes, he nowhere observes any but
the most superficial relations.
The entire book is sketchy, and one can-
not point to any important generalizations emerging from the historical
analyses. There is, however,
one healthy emphasis throughout:
an
emphasis on the practical side of criticism as against the tendency to ir-
relevant speculation.
Eliot properly points out the superiority of Dryden,
for example, over Johnson, and of \Vordsworth and Coleridge over
Arnold.
But his zeal to make this distinction carries Eliot to the ab-
surd characterization of criticism today as in the Arnold stage.
This
