"ELEMENTS THAT ARE WANTED"
369
quoting Arnold once again: of criticism he said that "it must be apt
to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual per–
fection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in
the practical sphere may be maleficent." It is with this sentence in
mind that I urge the importance of Mr. Eliot's book.
In the imagination of the Left Mr. Eliot has always figured
with excessive simplicity. His story was supposed to be nothing
more than this: that from the horrible realities of the Wasteland
he escaped into the arms of Anglo-Catholic theology. This account
may or may not be adequate; but as we review the ten years in
which Marxism flourished among the intellectuals and then de–
cayed, we can scarcely believe that this story, if true, is the worst
that could be told of a man in our time. Whatever is censurable in
it depends on the blind power of that weary word "escape" and on
our attitude to theology. For theology I certainly do not make a
stand, but when Mr. Eliot is accused of "faith," of the "surrender"
of his intellect to "authority," it is hard to see, when the accusers
are Marxist intellectuals, how their own action was always so very
different.
If
we have the right to measure the personal and moral
value of convictions by the disinterested intellectual effort through
which they are arrived at, we might find that Mr. Eliot's conversion
was notably more honorable than that of many who impugned
his decision.
Mr. Eliot's book is a small one, it is not overtly dramatic and
it does not have an air of "power." To readers of a different per–
suasion it cannot offer a solution that will seem more comprehen–
sive or more practicable than their own; it can only serve them by
questioning their assumptions. Its point of departure is simple,
even obvious. Mr. Eliot, believing that a nation's political philos–
ophy is not to be found in the conscious formulation of its ideal
aims but, rather, in "the sub-stratum of collective temperament,
ways of behaviour and unconscious values" which go to make up
the formulation, is unable to find, what most people so easily find,
a polar difference between the political philosophy of the western
democracies and that of the totalitarian states. He does not say
they are the same; their forms differ and their qualities differ. Yet
the difference seems to him not one of principle but of degree; and
when he considers how democracy is forced to defend itself from
totalitarianism by adopting the totalitarian forms, he cannot think
