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can speak of it with authority. Shelley found no consolation at Mont
Blanc, but "an awful scene, / Where Power
in
likeness of the Arve comes
down / From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne." The banality of
Georgian nature has less to do with an inability
to
best the precursors
than with the place of nature in the ideology of a bourgeois society.
The sentimental vision of nature drained it of its awful power
to
undermine the va lidity of the worlds that had been shaped from it,
allowing society
to
establish for poetry a safe area for recreation while
the real business of creating monetary value out of coal and iron
progressed.
Eliot, on the other hand, did not believe that "Keats, or Shelley, or
Wordsworth, or Tennyson can be incriminated in the production of
the Georgian Anthology." For him Georgian inspiration "is not the
shattered Keats but the solid and eternal Podsnap himself. This party
represents, in fact, the insurgent middle-class." Eliot's aristocratic
mask rises up in horror before this insurgency of "Regular Hours,
Regular Wages, Regular Pensions, and Regular Ideas." The middle
class is the Order of Things produced by nineteenth-century civiliza–
tion. Eliot had read his Henry Adams, and knew that in an en tropic
universe every accomplishment of order came at the cost of leaving
behind a land of waste, amidst which were to be found the broken
images of real cultural force. With the Georgians, culture became a
parody of itself, a farce of historical repetition. Against this leveling of
human energy the modernists, particularly Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and
Eliot, directed their mock-professorial fury. Casting his g lance down at
the universities, journalism, criticism, at the "General Reading Pub–
lic," Eliot spoke his pithy judgment: "there is no culture here." The
failure of the Georgians is the failure of Eliot's favorite category of the
damned: the neutrals, the middle class of souls, the fence sitters
between good and evil whom Dante scourged and who form the crowd
of
The Waste Land.
It is the creeping entropy of the Georgians, their
limbo of indifference, that brings on Eliot's wrath. (Of course Eliot's
Georgians are at this point as much a fabulation as Perkins's, but to a
different purpose.)
If
the Georgians indeed modeled themselves after
the romantics, it was only through a misreading which defused the
threat romantic poetry could pose to the settled sensibility of the
middle class. The posture of aristocracy one finds in so much of "high
modernism" is a counter-misreading, an attempt to establish a new
authorized canon to attack the mediocrity of the declining West.
The political questions arising out of modern poetry, questions
about the distribution of economic and intellectual power, can be
