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PARTISAN REVIEW
Sacred Wood
is finer criticism than Symons could aspire to . Yet the
resemblance is there, and not without importance; only it was Eliot
who had the more powerful and permanent effect on taste. It was
from him and not from Symons that we learned for ourselves the
mutual relevance of all these disparate interests, from him that we
learned how to read Middleton much as we should read Dante, seek–
ing out, responding to, and discoursing upon, the "bewildering
minute" of poetry, yet seeing literature not as a collection of such
moments but as a mappable whole, as a tradition, as a canon , in a
difficult sense that was far beyond anything Bennett, cracking open
his
Juvenal,
could have conceived.
Although he was twenty years Bennett's junior, Eliot lived in
the same literary world. For all his philosophical learning, he set
up not as a don but as a publisher, editor, and poet. He consulted
Bennett about "Sweeney Agonistes," but there can have been little
sympathy between them, the entrepreneur and the conservative
avant-gardiste,
and there are hostile portraits of Bennett in the work of
Eliot's intimates, Pound and Wyndham Lewis, to say nothing of the
frontal assault of another friend, Virginia Woolf. Yet they both
came, by their different routes, out of the bookman's world of the
turn of the century, they are alike in rejecting schismatic modern–
ism. In postwar Surope it was not unreasonable to believe that the
past might perish. The moment of Eliot's earliest and perhaps most
influential criticism is also the moment of Dada, a modernism intent
on the annihilation of the past; but Eliot, committed to his own ver–
sion of the modern, rejected Dada as part of a foreign nihilism, "a
diagnosis," he wrote, "of a disease of the French mind." "Whatever
lesson we extract from it will not be directly applicable to London ."
It is the sort of thing the English literary man always says when
threatened with more French nonsense; we hear it today, most often
from people who have given too little thought to the matter in hand.
Not so Eliot; that the destruction of the past was not a cause that
ought to have the support of an Anglo-American man of letters was a
sound position then, as it still is . So the sponsor of tradition, in
however refined a sense (for, as Harry Levin once remarked, Eliot
was the first to use the word to mean not something that was handed
to you, but something you had with great labor to find) , maintained
that the modern man of letters, like his predecessors, had obligations
to the past more profound and difficult than Bennett, rejoicing over
Philaster,
could have dreamed of.
So much for the first of the alterations I have mentioned, the
