ELIOT AS INTERNATIONAL HERO
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inevitable habit of mind, a habit which issues in judgment and the
representation of different levels of experience, past and present.
James supposed that his theme was the international theme:
would it not be more precise to speak of it as the transatlantic theme?
This effort at a greater exactness defines what is involved in Eliot:s
work. Henry James was concerned with the American in Europe.
Eliot cannot help but be concerned with the whole world and all
history. Tiresias sees the nature of love in all times and all places
and when Sweeney outwits a scheming whore, the fate of Agamem–
non becomes relevant. So too, in the same way exactly, Eliot must
recognize and use a correspondepce between St. Augustine and Bud–
dha in speaking of sensuality. And thus, as he writes again in his
notes to
The Waste Land,
"The collocatio.p. of these two representa–
tives of eastern and western asceticism as the culmination of
this
part
of the poem is not an accident." .And it is not an accident that the
international hero should have come from St. Louis, Missouri, or
at any rate from America. Only an American with a mind and sensi–
bility which is cosmopolitan and expatriated could have seen Europe
as it is seen in
The Waste Land.
A literary work may be important in many ways, but surely
one of the ways in which it is important is in its relationship to some
important human interest or need, or in its relationship to some new .
aspect of human existence. Eliot's work is important in relationship
to the fact that experience has become international. We have be–
come an international people, and hence an international hero is
possible. Just as the war is international, so the true causes of many
of the things in our lives art" world-wide, and we are able to under–
stand the character of our lives only when we are aware of all
history, of the philosophy of history, of primitive peoples and the
Russian Revolution, of ancient Egypt and the unconscious mind.
Thus again it is no accident that in
The Waste Land
use is made of
The Golden Bough,
and a book on the quest of the Grail; and the
way in which images and associations appear in the poem illus–
trates a new view of consciousness, the depths of consciousness and
the unconscious mind.
The protagonist of
The Waste Land
stands on the banks of the
Thames and quotes the Upanishads, and this very quotation, the
command to "give, sympathize, and control," makes possible a com–
prehensive insight into the difficulty of his life in the present. But
this emphasis upon one poem of Eliot's may be misleading. What
is true of much of his poetry
is
also true of his criticism. When the
critic writes of tradition and the individual talent, when he deClares
