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for modern man and seems to be moved, like his followers and sup–
porters, by only one: Original Sin (Miss Nott is so retrograde as to ask,
sincerely, What is it?). She notes the
ufin-de-siecle
frivolity" of Eliot's
remark about how "immense a relief" is "the possibility of damna–
tion ... in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress
reform"-yet who actually lives in this "world"? To those who do not
believe in Sin it would appear that most people live from day to day,
not with the works of Susan B. Anthony or the days of Miss Bloomer,
but with the struggle to survive and to enhance their survival with some
modicum of pleasure, beauty, and significance.
Miss Nott is interested in the fact that Eliot rejects Arnold's moral–
religious works as "unreadable" but without refuting them. Arnold,
who still had the spirit of free inquiry, was ready, however imperfectly,
to write about religion to the extent that he understood it, and in
God
and the Bible
and
Literature and Dogma
he talked not about the
mysteries but about "what we
can
know, the developing body of moral
experience." In merely declaring Arnold "unreadable," Eliot, in effect,
took up the propagandist notion of truth which is inevitable for propon–
ents of what Miss Nott calls "metaphysical or dogmatic philosophical
structures which live only in words." For if what Arnold said was true
as an analysis of experience it is still true, and claims in its behalf do
not have "to be made annually in order to preserve its validity," al–
though claims in behalf of "hypostatical truth" do. These intellectual
faults are all the more regrettable in a writer who as poet and critic
has distinguished himself among moderns, indeed among writers of all
time, as pre-eminent by his sense of fact.
Some of Miss Nott's best pages have to do with the famous dissocia–
tion of consciousness or sensibility which Mr. Eliot tells us happened
in the seventeenth century, when, to the general detriment of poetry, a
split occurred between thought and feeling. Miss Nott agrees that, in
poetry, the split occurred and that Mr. Eliot and the modern tendency
of poetry have done much to repair the damage. Eliot is not perfectly
clear as to what caused the split; presumably that "liberalism" with
which, as he said in
After Strange Gods,
Western society began to be
"wormeaten" in the seventeenth century. Mr. Willey in
Th e Seventeenth
Century Background
blames science. C. S. Lewis apparently blames the
Devil. Miss Nott blames the recurring hypostasis of language which re–
sults from the "fear of meaning." She points out that "dissociation"
is not something limited to the seventeenth century or to Miltonic
verse but that it inheres in the paradoxical condition of man, in whom
the opposition of thought and feeling becomes exacerbated to the ex-
