T. S. ELIOT
misunderstood to mean only that which
is
sordid, only that which
the muckraker concerns
himself
with, while Eliot has
in
mind the
actuality of human emotion and human nobility as well.
Moreover, Eliot makes it clear that a sense of the actual is really
incomplete and warped without a sense of
the
past, that sense of
the past which, he says, is indispensable to "anyone who wants to con–
tinue to
be
a poet after his 25th year." But we must be careful not
to misunderstand Eliot's concern with a sense of the past as mere
nostalgia for the days when knighthood was in flower. It is the past
as actual, as an actual part of the present, which concerns Eliot. And
one must have a strong sense of actuality
in
order to know just what
of the past is alive in the present and what is merely a monument or
a souvenir. Without a sense of the past, one's sense of the actual is
likely to
be
confused with an obsessive pursuit of what is degraded,
or idiosyncratic, or transitory, or brand-new. This is the dead-end of
the naturalistic novelist who supposes that the slum is somehow more
real
than the library. Conversely, a sense of the actual enables one to
understand the past itself as something which was not by any means
Arcadian. Perhaps one can go
so
far as to say that one cannot have
much of a sense of the past without a sense of the actual or much
of a sense of the actual without a sense of the past. Thus, to use
an
example which can stand for much that is characteristic of Eliot,
if
one looks at a church, one does not really see very much of what
one is looking at
if
one does not have both a sense of the actual, a
sense of the past, and a sense of the past
as
actual in the present.
II
Let me turn now to a few instances of how Eliot uses the cri–
terion of actuality in his criticism. Blake is praised because one of his
poems
expresses "the naked observation" and another "the naked
insight" :
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the newborn infant'S ear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
In
the same essay, which was written in 1920, Blake is praised because
he possesses the peculiar honesty, which according to Eliot, is peculiar
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