PARTISAN REVIEW
137
as the repository of "T. S. Eliot's Ideas," rather than as what they were
meant to be : the serious, disinterested,
impersonal
criticisms of contem–
porary human problems by a devout Christian striving, in a time of
chaotic change, to relate the ephemeral to the eternal.
This recession of the prose Eliot into cultural history is very notice–
able in the studies by Mr. Margolis and Mr. Kojecky. As a result, they
are slightly depressing, though this is hardly the authors' fault. Both
books have an air of the academic thesis : we do not learn much of the
authors' own point of view, or what attracted them to the subject. But
of their kind they are both very good indeed, well written, well ar–
ranged, and perspicuous. Mr. Margolis tells the story of Eliot's intel–
lectual development during the twenties and thirties. First we see the
young author of
The Sacred Wood,
first and foremost the practitioner
focused on the problems of how poetry should be written in his time,
rebuking Matthew Arnold, his spiritual ancestor in so many respects,
for extraliterary excursions, moralizing, and indifference to technical
questions. From this phase we move to the Eliot of the early
Criterion,
preoccupied with "Europe" - which in practice meant the Parisian in–
tellectual world - as a corrective to the provinciality of London ; inter–
ested in Julien Benda of
Belphegor,
and in
T.
E. Hulme, first as poet
and then as guru ; engaged in a disagreement, which was to become
lifelong, and at once friendly and acerbic, with the Middleton Murry
of the
Adelphi.
We are given lucid guidance through Eliot's attempts to
establish a constitutive philosophy for the
Criterion,
more and more in–
fluenced by his admiration (always qualified but obviously very real)
for Charles Maurras, from whose mistakes - direct involvement in
politics, and plans to use the Church without believing in it - Eliot
seems to have derived lasting lessons. Thus we are brought to the fam–
ous declaration of "classicism," " royalism," and "Anglo-Catholicism"
in the preface to
For Lancelot Andrewes.
It seems to have been Eliot's
old mentor Irving Babbitt who prompted Eliot to make tf.J.at declara–
tion, and so we come by a natural transition to the extended debate
between Eliot and the disciples of Babbitt and his "Humanism." Then
we enter the political thirties, with Eliot's refusal to take either the
"red ticket" or the "blue ticket" in the debates of contemporary in–
tellectuals ; the growing somberness of his view of modern society; and
the estrangement from the leading minds of his time which received its
culminating expression in
After Strange Gods.
Mr. Margolis ends with
the outbreak of war in 1939 and the end of the
Criterion .
We leave the
creative Eliot still absorbed in the ambition, not realized to his satis–
faction in
The Rock
and
Murder in the Cathedral,
to restore drama
to its ancient religious origins, while the prose thinker was emerging,
