A PEINE MA PISTE
thirty-one contributors there are no women, while half of Rajan's British
contributors are women, I can make nothing.
A
little surprisingly, the best introduction to Eliot is still Edmund
Wilson's, from
Axel's Castle;
and perhaps the most brilliant essays in the
book-those that should be read next-are Schwartz's on Eliot as cul–
ture-hero and C. L. Barber's on the substance and failure of
The
Family Reunion.
It is interesting, and casts a hard light on our criticism,
that none of the contributors felt the need to compare him at length
to Wallace Stevens (whose verse also exhibits French Symbolist and
Elizabethan derivation) nor even to Yeats; the most judicious compara–
tive study I know of his criticism-to Arnold's-is one not listed here,
by M.
L.
S. Loring in the
Sewanee
(Autumn, 1935). With reservations
already made, and two others to come, Mr. Eliot's work is fairly dis–
played, and there is even a comic piece, not uninteresting, T. H. Thomp–
son's pursuit of Sweeney, while both Ransom and Spender are witty
on occasion, Ransom gently, Spender (this was in the thirties) rather
irritably. I think these two studies are more damaging, their wit aside,
than the elaborate demonstrations by Yvor Winters and D. S. Savage.
That is, all four men score off Eliot in certain ways, but only the first
pair can be said to survive for the reader to enjoy their gains.
Frontal assaults upon a character so formidable are bad strategy.
Mr. Winters is formidable himself, but he makes scarcely a breach.
It was not thus that Eliot set to work on Milton; he just nudged, until
finally Mr. Leavis (who can take a hint), under the real impression that
it was all over, was able to announce that "The dislodgement of Milton
was accomplished with remarkably little fuss." Of course this is not one
of the happiest aspects of Mr. Eliot's criticism. There is something in–
evasibly amusing about the passage at the end of his British Academy
lecture where, after reaching earlier in the lecture unprecedented heights
of humility, with kindly arrogance he permits young poets again to
read Milton. At the same time, the whole episode displays his excep–
tional power, and even where he looks most unguarded he has invisible
seriousness in reserve. Thus when he suggested a comparison between
Paradise Lost and-Finnegans Wake,
a leader in the
Times Literary
Supplement,
predictably, mocked it as a move to retain his old following.
But this was Eliot inveterate and serious, the same critic who recom–
mended Stendhal once as the best introduction to
Troilus and Criseyde,
and still the best living critic by far, as his magnificent essay on Kipling
sharply shows. I think myself that a good deal of what has been taken
literally in his criticism can be qualified as polemical, and that there are
broad misproportions to be righted, but time will be required for the
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