CHAPTER I

Classicism and Tradition

1. The Classical and The Romantics an approach

As early as 1829 the two terms, *classic*and

1
‘romantic* were mentioned and discussed by Goethe
as opposites. And ever since the terms were raised to
the level of serious philosophical disquisitions by J.S.
2 3 4
Mill and Sainte - Beuve and later by Ruskin and Walter^
g
Pater they have occasioned so much controversy that
ultimately they have come to mean almost anything
between academic labels and battle-cries of literary
politics. The terms themselves are ambiguous and tend
to melt into each other whenever we try to relate them
exclusively to periods, persons or genres of art as

Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, original

German version, Gesprache mit Goethe, I and II,
1836 III 1848, Eng. tr. John Gxenford, I860,
Ev. ed., 1930; see entry of April 2, 1829,
pp. 304-306
2
Dissertations and Discussions. I, 1869, p, 233.
3 “Be la Tradition en Litt4r(atureH, 1858, Causerles
dujLundi, t. 15, Garnier ed. pp. 369-371.
4 Val d* Arno. Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art, 1873
ed., 1890, pp. 172-175.
5 Appreciations. "Post Script**, 1889.
 2

Mario Praz pointed out in The Romantic Agony . In the context

of art, however, the validity of t£e distinction between

classicism and romanticism,or between the classic and the

romantic, has been recognized and demonstrated on the ground

of certain fundamental Issues it involves such as those of

2 3
sociology , conscious or unconscious philosophical assumptions,
4
and moral and aesthetic attitudes . •

In the specifically aesthetic context the distinction

between the classic and the romantic implies two opposed ideals?

the ideal of order, clarity and coherence on the one hand, and

that of freedom, intensity, and vitality on the other. The

classic and the romantic have been described by Grierson as

5
•‘the systole and the diastole of the human heart in history".

The metaphor can be further elaborated and made to imply an

urge for concentration on the one hand and for expansion on

the other, both rooted in human psychology, representing what

6
P.E. More described as "the essential duality" of human nature. %

Applied to the aesthetic context from the psychological or the

physiological, the two terms represent the two extreme attitudes

e

1 Op. cit, p. 11.

^H.Grlerson, "Classic and Bomantic", The Background of English
Literature. 1925.
^A.Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.1926.Chaos.IH-V.
4 Irving Babbitt, New Laokoon,1910, Rousseau and Romanticism.
1919.passim: P.E. More, The Drift of Romanticism.1913.passim.
6 "Classic and Romantic", The Background of English Literature,
p. 287.
6 The Drift of Romanticism, pp. 247-249.
 3

that evolve inevitably.out of the tension between the flux pf w

sensibility and the rigid control of form. Classic art, thus,

is the result of concentration either on the basis of authority

or reason or nature or all three together whi].e, on the other

hand, romantic art emerges out of the instinctive urge to

emotional expansion, to the exploration of subjective experience

with the insights of ‘genius' or 'imagination1 as the sole and

absolute guide. Criticism, English criticism in particular,

with special orientation to one or the other of these two

categories of art, reflects the ideal to which it is affiliated,

accepting the consequent objectives, preoccupations and

«. > V > •
procedures. So, along with classic art and rom antic art, we
have‘classical criticism’and "romantic criticism’on the basis

of which the history of English criticism from the middle of

the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth is divided

into two broad, unequal segments? three hundred years of

classical criticism followed by a hundred years of romantic

diversion.

But just as there is no art that is cent per eejit

classic or romantic in intention and achievement answering .

to the ideal description of either, criticism also, whether

classical or romantic, is never unilinear in tendency or

monolithic in character. The dichotomy is intelligible only

when the two respective ideals as abstractions are concerned

but, in practice, whether in creative work or critical theorizing,

is mostly inoperative because of a dubious exclusiveness

 4

assumed or claimed by both* Thus* the terms 'classic' and

. • •
'romantic* as applied to entire periods are more likely to

confuse than to clarify. The term 'classical' which is meant

to cover, roughly, the three centuries of criticism from the

Renaissance to the end of the Augustan age, fails to explain

the difference between the art of the Elizabethan period and

that of the last forty years of *the seventeenth century and of

both from that of the age of Pope and Johnson* Then again, the

discrepancy between theory and practice of the same period such

as the Elizabethan, or between a particular genre such as the

Heroic Drama of the Restoration period and the general 'cult

of order' professed by contemporary criticism, makes the term*

shifting and unstable, if not positively misleading. The same:

can be said about the term 'romantic* in relation to the

nineteenth century theory and practice. Are Shelley and Matthew

Arnold both romantic and in equal measure? Is The Excursion

to be classed with Atalanta in Calvdon and what is common

between then ?

A better way to understand romantic criticism and

classical criticism and how they stand in relation to each

other and to the total complex of English Criticism as a

whole, is to go behind the facades of the terms and scrutinize

a common tension, inherent in both, between the Ideal overtly

accepted and the principle that is opposed to it. This would

amount to a study of "the will to : freedom" operating below

the surface as an undercurrent, with greater or less insistence^

throughout the so-called classical periods, and of a

 5

corresponding “will to order”, maintaining itself in diverge ^

forms throughout the romantic age. Such an interpretation

of the entire history of English criticism as reflecting the

interactions of two polarized tendencies to.’order* and

•freedom* will not only explain apparent contradictions

between formulations belonging to the same professed ideology,

•
or .the discrepancy between p rofession and practice of th e

same period but will also indicate the link which connects

English criticism, romantic1, as well as classical, with

the contemporary scene. This will provide an intelligible

background against which a contemporary, critic like T.S.

Eliot and his work can be set and profitably studied.

2 Formalism -Vs- Freedom : 1 Classicism * in a

Baroques age.

The movement known as the Renaissance started in

Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but developed

later into a European movement which sought to effect a break

with the scholastic and patristic traditions of the post- •

classical period and, under the leadership of such early .

*

humanists as Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, and Mirandola, to

evolve a complete ’philosophy of man’ on the newly rediscovered

culture of the classical age. The Italian humanist of that

age could have.said, as Prof. Mackall said more than four

centuries later, that civilization is “Greek in origin but

 6

Latin in substance". In spite o*f sectarian differences the

humanists had a common cultural programme for the re-organiza*»

tion of Western learning on the Classical mould. One important

facet of this was the speculation on poetry in the light of

Aristotle and, less directly, of Horace, Longinus and Plato,

fhe chief names in this context are those of Robortello,

Cinthio, Minturno, Scaliger, Ca*stelvetro and Vida who, along

with such later humanists as Colet, Erasmus, Vives, Sturm and .

Melancthon, laid the foundation of a new classicism for Europe.

This "new classicism" which had its origin in Italy was further

developed through modification and extension by such Dutch

theoreticians as Heinsius and Vossius and French classicists*

from Du Belley and Ronsard to Boileau and Voltaire. English

criticism from the time 9f the early Tudor Renaissance to the

end of the Augustan age is 'classicist8 in the sense that it is

the product of the cross-currents of influences from these

diverse sources which, in spite of divergences on subsidiary

issues, agreed in their common insistence on the ideal of

solidity, balance, decorum and centrality for poetry as an

'art of imitation'.

Literary criticism proper may be said to have begdn

in England in the seventies of the sixteenth century. The

•

earlier humanists like Wilson, Ascham, Cheke and others paved

the way for'the new learning' but they were all anticipations

"Literature", The Legacy of Rome, ed. C. Bailey, 1923;

p. 327. ,
 7

of Browning's Grammarian and considered grammar and rhetoric* . -

the gateway to culture. Their concern was pedagogical rather

than literary. Still, such handbook^ as Wilson's Arte of Bhetoric

and Ascham's Schoolmaster while dilating on the art of

eloquence, insisted on the classic virtue of discipline which

was primarily linquistic and, as the moral bias of the

•
patristic tradition survived under various disguises, ultimately

moral. Ascham's Schoolmaster (1570) is representative of this •

phase of the pedagogical preparation for literary criticism.

1
His treatment of 'imitation' is symptomatic. Ascham presents

'imitation' implying the emulation of the right kind of classical

authors as an aid to good writing and proper eloquence, and thus

prescribes for poetry, even before it arrived, the classical

principle of rigorous discipline imposed by authority. The

earliest critics who were truly literary such as George

Gascoigne and George Whetstone offer variations on the same

topic of discipline and propriety. Gascoigne, moreover,

introduces, with the appropriate note of warning, that spectre

which was to haunt the entire course of English classicisms

it was the a "shrewde fellow', 'poeticall licence'.'1' 2

Gascoigne's plea for purism and moderation recurs in the context

of dramatic probability in Whetstone',s Dedication to Promos

and Cassandra (1578) where he dwells at length on the absurdity

1 G. Gregory Smith, ed. Elizabethan Critical Essays. I, 1904,

pp. 5-8
2 Ibid, p. 53.

#
 8

and impropriety of the English stage, practically forestalling

Sidney on the same topic. Thus a classical view-point emerges

right from the beginning of literary* criticism in England. It

appeared first as a plea for sanity and decorum senctioned by

the authority of the ancients such as Horace (.Aristotle is

sparingly mentioned), Cicero, Plutarch, Quintilian and some of

the Renaissance Italian commenta'tors like Scaliger, Castelvetro

and others. ,

The attack if the Puritans on the stage and, in a

general way, on imaginative literature as a whole, of which

Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse (1579) was the most

representative, brought matters to a crisis. It compelled the

contemporary critics to reconsider the theoretical basis of

their nascent classicism and make necessary adjustments in

their ideas, though still with the support of ancient

authorities cited as canonical literature. The controversy

that arose out of Gosson's attack and lingered right upto

the end of the eighties bore at least two notable fruits,

Lodge's Defence of Poetry (1579) and the more famous Apologie

for Poetrie (c. 1583, printed in 1595) by Sidney, constituting

•
a vindication of imaginative literature which was, as Spingaln
remarked, "one of the major tasks" of Renaissance criticism..*^

Lodge's 'defence', however, was "as uncritical as Gosson's

2
attack", as Gregory Smith pointed out , but it has an

1 A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance,

1899, 3rd. imp., 1912, p. 3.
2 Op. cit. I, p. 63.
 9

historical importance as a prop* to Sidney’s more thorough .and

• • . #
closely argued "apology”.

•-
Sidney’s Anologie is not only the most eloquent

of the Elizabethan defences of poetry from Lod'ge to Harington

but is also significant as a restatement of the classical point

of view regarding the nature of poetry. But it is not, as J.W.H.

•
Atkins points out, a mere rehash of classical and Italian
1
doctrines . While reiterating the persistent idea running

through the whole of Elizabethan criticism that "English

literature must improve itself by attention to suitable models

and that the most absolute matters for consideration are

2
restraint and symmetry", Sidney concentrates upon the funda­

mental aesthetic issue involving the nature of poetry and

i
reveals certain facets in his ideas which indicate the

essential complexity of Elizabethan classical attitude.

Sidney defines poetry in the Orthodox classical

manner with a touch of Renaissance pedantry ass'

an arte of imitation* for so Aristotle termeth it in his

word Mimesis, that is to say, a representation, counter-
fetting, or figuring foorths to speake metaphorically, a .
a speaking picture with this end, to teach and delight.2
3
the description is eclectic, harnessing Aristotle and

Horace together. He is,-however, Aristotelian in his

X English Literary Criticism % the Renaissance, p. 137.

2 Gregory Smith, op. cit., I, p. XXXVIII.

3 Gregory Smith, ibid. I, p. 158.
 10

argument for the generalizing potfer of poetry

. • • •
Poesie dealeth with Katholou. that is to say, with universall ]_
consideration, and the history with Kathekaston. the particular*

The poet can give general, or universal truth because he can

transcend nature. Sidney makes a claim on behalf of the poet's

creative autonomy which has often been re-iterated in contemporary

and subsequent criticism but never surpassed in eloquences
•
Onely the Poet, disdayning to be tied to any such subiection,
lifted up with vigor of his owne inuention, doth growe in
effect another:nature, in making things either better than Nature
bringeth forth, or, quite a newe, formes such as never were in
Nature, as the Heroes. Demigods. Cyclops. Chimeras. Furies
and such likes so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not
inclosed within the narrow warrent of her gifts, but freely
ranging onely within the Zodiack of his own wit.*...Her
world is brasen, the Poet onely deliver a golden.

This inverted Platonism was anticipated four years earlier by

Lodge in his Defence of Poetry when he said that the "heavenly

3
furye commeth not by labor" but as a gift from above. Thus

inspiration granting latitude to the poet's inventive genius

is recognized and the earlier insistence on conformity to rules

and models is, to that Extent, relaxed or modified. "A poet",

Sidney continues, "no industrie can make, if his own genius

bee not carried vnto it s and therefore is it an old Proverbe,

A *
Orator fit. Poeta nascitur".~ This almost anticipates
Shakespear's %

... as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.1
5 2 3 4

1 Gregory Smith, op. cit., I, p. 167.

2 ibid, I, p. 166.
3 Ibid, I, pp. 71-72.
4 Ibid, I, p. 196.
5 A Midsummer Night's Dream. V, i.
 11

But Sidney is representative of .the classicism of the age in* . »

that he did not surrender to ’genius' o-r ’divine furore’. The

contrary pull towards order, symmetry, method and decorum

asserts itself in the passage that follows s •

Yet confesse I always that as the firtilest ground must be

manured, sfc must the highest flying wit have a Dedalus to
guide him. That Dedalus. they say, both in this and in other,
hath three wings to bear itself up into the ayre of due
commendations that is Arte, Imitation, and Exercise.
•

Later writers of the sixteenth century such as King

James VI in A Short Treatise on Verse (1584), William Webbe

in his more important A Discourse of English Poetrie (1886),

George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Sir "

John Harrington’s A Brief Apologie for Poetrie (Preface to the

translation of Orlando Furioso.l59i) are concerned less with

general principles than with specific problems of the craft

of poetry or, more generally, of good writing. Webbe and

Puttenham are representative in their concentration on ”arte”

rather than on Sidney’s’free-ranging wit’ or genius. The

later Elizabethan criticism persisted in its efforts to

entrench itself on a simplified system of practical rules.of

language and prosody, buttressed by citations from ancient •

<•

authorities, but its basic instability continued to be exposed

whenever it touched upon the question 9f ’invention’, implying

the freedom of the artist which creates in defiance not only

of authority but of nature as well.

Even Ben Jonson reflects this basic duality of the

1. Gregory'Smith, op. cit., I, p. 195

 12

age with regard to conformity to* classical prescriptions and

* . . *
an instinctive craving for independence. Jonson is so much of

a classicist that his Discoveries is# really a little anthology

of quotations from all the usual classical and Italian sources.

His impatience of whatever is loose, slip-shod or chaotic is

well-known.. ’’Order helps much to perspicuity, as confusion

1
hurts;” From the standpoint of this classic ’order’ he judges

Spenser and Shakespearei”Spenser in affecting the ancients,

2
writ no language”. On Shakespeare who was reputed not to have

revised a single line Jonson's remark is famous; "would he had

3
blotted a thousand". Yet in the laudat&ry poem affixed to the

Folio edition of 1623 of Shakespeare’s plays he addressed .

him as "the soul of the age, the applause, delight and wonder

of the stage” and gave that splendid tribute which has n&t

been surpassed by the idolatry of later ages; "He was not of

an age, but for all time.” Such an estimate of Shakespeare

shows that, in spite of his classical predilections, Ben Jonson

also, like Sidney and others before him, responded instinctively

to the claims of inventive genius. A poem, according to him

"is the worke of the Poet, the end and fruit of his labour and
4
studye'C But, at the same time, he reminds us that "Arts and

Precepts avail nothing, except nature be beneficiall and

5
ayding”. He is even more outspoken elsewhere; "For rules are
6
ever of lesse force and value than experiments”. About the

1 JJ3.Spingarn, ed. Critical--Assays of the Seventeenth Century. I,

p. 39.
2 Ibid, I, p. 34.
3 Ibid, I, p. 19. 1
4 2 Ibid,
3 I, p. 51.
5 Ibid, I, p. 33.
6 Ibid, I, loc* cit.
 23

legitimate liberty of the poet his

•
statement is equally • • *

emphatic* h'..

I am not of that opinion to conclude *a Poet's liberty within

the narrowe limits of laws which either the Grammarians
or Philosophers prescribe.^ .

Thus we notice an inner split in the theoretical

classicism of the Renaissance antf the Elizabethan period. In

consequence it failed to be a guiding light for the creative

urge of the period which took altogether a different route

from the one prescribed by theoreticians from Sidney to Ben

Jonson. This hiatus between theory and practice represents one

particular facet of the essential division of the Elizabethan

mind between formalism and freedom.

This division or, in modern psychological term, ambiva­

lence of the instincts of conformism and freedom has been

2
pointed out as the characteristic feature of the Baroque age

by Prof. Gilbert Highet in The Classical Tradition. The word

•baroque1, 2he3 explains, is derived from the Portuguese barroco

or the Spanish barocco. meaning "a large irregular pearl*1. “The

art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries**, he continues

in the same context, “during the period between the Renaissance

m

and the age of revolutions, is the baroque pearl." It is the

3
result of a “tension between ardent passion and firm, cool.contrc

1 Spingarn, op. cit., I, p. 33.

2 For alternative interpretations of the term see s
Rene Vfellek, "The concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,
JMG, V (1S46); also Helmut Hatzfeld,
‘‘The Baroque from the viewpoint of the Literary Historian*1,
JMC.XIV. 2 (1955).
3 Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition, p. 289.
 14

This tension is evident not only’in the creative product of the

* •. *

Elizabethan and Jacobean periods but is also implicit, as we

have seen, in theoretical ideas of the age* When we come to

review the age of Dryden, Pope and Dr. Johnson we find that the

tension still persists, only bringing new sets of terms into use.

The theoretical edifice that the so-called neo-classicists set

up remains, for all its apparent*thoroughness and solidity, as

much of a house divided as that of the preceding age.

Hobbes did the pioneering work for Bestoration criticisn

by supplying it with the kind of foundation that Descartes is

supposed to have given to French Slassicism. In his Answer to

Davenant's Preface to Gondibert Hobbes offers the first

sketch of a 'psychology of art' in popular terms in the light of

his empirical philosophy?

Time and education begets experience? Experience begets memory?

Memory begets Judgement and Fancy? Judgement begets strength
and structure and Fancy begets the ornaments of a poem.-*-

In this account of the creative process, presented with almost

Biblical simplicity, Hobbes's Fancy and Judgement, like Bacon's

2
'imagination', represent mental processes reorganizing the.
content of experience. This account is echoed by Dryden in •
3 *
his Epistle Dedicatory of the "Rival Ladies" (1664) and,
with certain modifications, in his Defence of an Essay of
4
Dramatic Poesy (1668)7 Elsewhere Dryden uses a different set

^ Spingarn, op. cit., II, p. 59.

2 Spingarn, op. cit., I, pp. 4-9.
3 W.P* Ker, ed. Essays of John Dryden. I,pp. 1 - 9. •
4 Ker, I, pp. 110 - 133.
 15

of terms historically much more importants wit, imagination „

and fancy. In his Preface to"Annus Mirabilis" (1667), Dryden

makes a distinction between ’wit writing’ and ’wit written’s

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be*, of wit;

and wit in the poet or Wit writing (if you will give me
leave to use a school - distinction), is no other than the
faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble
spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory,
till it springs the quarry it huAted after; or, without
metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species
or ideas of those things which it designs to represent. Wit
written is that which is well defined, the happy result of
thought or product of imagination.1

In the same context ’imagination* is used as synonymous with

invention with two ancillary faculties, ’fancy* and 'elocution’s

the first happiness of the poet's imagination is properly

invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy,
or the variation, deriving or moulding. <bf that thought, as
the judgement represents it proper to the subject; the third
is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought,
so found and varied, in apt, significant and sounding wordss
the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the
fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression.1 2

The creative process thus formulated by Hobbes and Dryden

constitutes the pivot of the critical thought of the age and

its very limitation is its advantage. Poetry is not 'the

divine furore' but ’wit written'; it is 'that which,well-

^ •
defined' and the process which yields this result is also

equally clear-cut. This conception of poetry indicates the

difference in outlook between the age of Sidney and that of

Dryden. It is the same difference that Rene Bray points out

between the age of Ronsard and that inaugurated by Malherbe

1 Ker, op. cit., I, p. 14.

2 Ibid, I, p. 15.
 16

and consolidated by Chapelain, Rapin, Le Bossu and Boileaus •• *

’•Pour Ronsard la poesie .est une sacerdoces pour le XVTIe
1
siecle, c*est une metier”.

At the centre of the critical speculation of the age

there always stands the ideal of centrality, economy and poise

such as one would associate with*one of Christopher Wren's

buildings. The empirical aesthetic of Hobbes was simple enough

to give philosophic support to a simple architectural notion

of the poetic art. Dryden himself uses the architectural

metaphor in describing Virgil's epic which represented for

2
him the 'classic ideal'. At the opposite pole is the bogey •

of the eccentric, the unbalanced, the disproportionate which

is to be condemned in theory and shunned in practice. Dryden

calls such products 'grotesque', the products of 'wild

imagination, things out of nature'. These are enemies of what

3
Dryden calls 'our poetical church and state'. The use of the

phrase 'poetical church and state' suggests the kind of

aesthetic consolidation, parallel to the political and

religious consolidation, urged in a poem like Absalom and #

Achitophel, that Dryden and mapy other critics of his time %

had always in mind. And this ideal is to be pursued, as

Davenant said in his Preface to Gondibert. with 'vigilance

and labour's
a wise poet, like a wise General will not shew strengths till
they are in exact government and order, which are not the
postures of chance, but proceed from vigilance and labour.*^

1 Rene Brav.La Formation de la Doctrine Classiaue en

France, p. 26.
2 "Dedication of the Aeneis" . Ker, op. eit., II, p. 154.
3 "Examen Foeticumy Ker. op. cit. II, p. 5.*
A Sninfarn. nn. nit.. TT. n . 25.
 17

Thus for seventeenth century critics a creed and a

*

programme were ready at hand and both were classical in the

sense that they prescribed concentration and rejected

eccentricity. They are reflected in the preoccupation of

almost all the notable critics of the age with certain patent

problems such as the character and distinction q>f forms (epic,

drama, etc.); the mixture of genfres and its justifiability

(i.e., tragi-comedy'or comic interludes in tragedies);

language and the question of its refinement and suitability to

specific forms; the right medium for particular literary

species (e.g., blank verse or rhyme for tragedy), besides the

usual questions which have bedevilled critical speculation of*

all ages such as the application of moral standards or the

criterion of probability and so on. Dryden's Essay on

Dramatic Poesy (1668) in which all the notable" critical issues

are raised and sifted from different points of view with a

remarkable openness of mind, is not only the fines!; critical

performance of the age but is also the most representative

in that it fulfils the responsibility of practical criticism

for facing the actualities of the contemporary situation apd,

if necessary, modifying theory to accommodate them. The fous

•
speakers of the dialogue, Crites, Eugenius, Lisideius and.

Neander (Dryden himself) really representthe contradictory

preferences and compulsions of the age from the clash of which

Dryden derives a guiding light for the contemporary artist and

critic. Crites holds the brief for ancient classical drama,

Lisideius for the neo-classical French, and Eugenius for the •

Eligabethan while Neander (Dryden) aligns himself with the
 18

national tradition of the Elizabethans :with certain reserva-

*

tions which are significant as they throw light on the nature

of the compromise to which the whole .dialogue ultimately

leads. Dryden approves of the 'liberty-

c-
taken by• his English

predecessors as in the case of the mixture of genres when

it contributes to vitality, variety and strength or rejects

or suggests modification to any element or tendency which is

likely to undermine the order or solidarity of art. He rejects#

blank verse in favour of rhyme as the latter, as a dramatic

medium, is a means to order and discipline. Milton in reject­

ing rhymed verse as ’’the invention of a barbarous age" in the

Preface to Paradise Lost (1668) showed his closer affiliation®

with the exuberant genius of Elizabethan practloners and with

the academic classicism of men like Harvey and Campion.

1
Dryden, while applauding the "variety and copiousness" of

Elizabethan art, prescribed a rigid adherence to rhyme as a

2
means to enforcing discipline .. Thus the dialogue amounts to

a plea for variety without sacrificing order and naturalness

— a plea which recurs in contemporary discussions on

language ever since Sprat in the History of the Royal Society

(1667) set the t-une by condemning all forms of linguistic

3
inflation and distortion.

This compromise is enforced by the practical need

of settling accounts with the English achievement of the

1 Ker, I, p. 70
2 Ibid, I, pp. 94 - 97; also pp. 8, 12.
3 Spingarn, op. cit., II, pp. 112 - 119.
 19

preceding ages, especially with those of Shakespeare and

Chaucer. Dryden described Chaucer as "a rough diamond" which

1
"must first be polished ere he shines". Yet Chaucer is the

"perpetual fountain of good sense", "the most wonderful

2 *

comprehensive nature". His over-all praise of the Canterbury

Tales is famous s'.n>Tis sufficient to say, according to the

proverb, that here is, God's plenty". Dryden's tribute to

Shakespeare is also as famous as it is significants

Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the
greater commendation; he was naturally learned; he needed not
the spectacle of books to read nature; he looked inwards and
found her there.... He is many times flat, insipid; his comic
wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into
bombast. But he is always great...1
4 2 3
•
The aesthetic or critical ideal of the age is, on the

whole, meant to ensure concentration and consolidation but the

critical mind of the age is all the time aware that a mere bias-

print of rules and recipes would not produce the desired

classic art. A recognition of genius as well as an impatience

of prescriptions of all kinds are almost ubiquitous in the

critical writings of the time. The tone varies from the

petulant outburst against all rules in Howard's Preface to

5 •
the Great Favourite to the sober but emphatic statement of
•
Davenant in his Preface to Gondibert % •

Whilst we imitate others, we can no more excel then he that

sailes by others Mapps can make new discovery.5 6

1 Ker, op. cit., II, p. 265.

2 Ibid, II, p. 257.
3 Ibid, II, p. 262.
4 Ibid, I, p. 81.
5 Spingarn, op. cit., II, p. 109.
6 Ibid,1. II, p. 7.
 20

The most representative statement on this issue, as or^

most others, comes fromJDryden. In his Defence of an Essay on

Dramatic Poesy he wrotes *

Fancy and Reason go hand in hand; the first cannot leave the
last behinds and though Fancy, when it sees the wide gulf,
would venture over, as the nimbler, yet it is withheld by
Reason, which will refuse to take the leap, when the distance
over it appears too large.1 2
•

This passage not only reveals the polarity at the very centre

of neo-classicism between the instinct for static order and

the urge to freedom and experiment but also suggests how,

ideally, they can be reconciled by the intervention and

control of reason. When reason keeps imagination and fancy

within the limits, curbing but not killing them, the result

is the classic norm of ordered simplicity and naturalness.

The term 'natural' as equivalent to 'probable' was made the

first article of faith by the so-called 'school of sense' in

the last phase of the seventeenth century of which Rymer was

p
the chief spokesman. His onslaught on Shakespeare is based

entirely on the conviction that drama must necessarily conform

to the rules of probability and that the leas.t deviation

would make it unnatural.

m
The term "nature" inevitably brings in Pope and
Dr. Johnson, the two defenders and representatives of

Augustan classicism. For Pope Nature comprehends everything

1 Ker, op, cit., I, p. 128.

2 Spingarn, op. cit., II, pp. 234 - 255.
 21

that a would-be practioner of the art of poetry might care to

• •

learn or accept as a guiding principles

First follow Nature, and your Judgement frame..

By her Just standard which is still the same.*1
#

Nature is identified not only the rules of the ancients but

also with ’true wit's

Those Buies of old discovered, not devis'd

Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd,
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed 2
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

This identification, apparently facile, leads to the simple

injunction s "Avoid extremes", comparable to Boileau's equally

3
pithy, "Aimez done la raison". But already in that early
•
resume of neo-classic doctrine of moderation we hear overtones

which indicate that Pop9 did not consider the art of poetry

a matter of observance of rules of thumb. It is particularly

evident when Pope mentions "those nameless graces which no

A
methods teach / And which a master-hand alone can reach".'"

Once again the question of genius and its prerogatives crops

up. It is more easily accommodated to 'nature' than to rules.

Shakespeare once again clinches the issue. In his Preface to

Shakespeare (1725) Pope wrote s

If ever any Author -deserved the name of Original, it was *„
Shakespeare. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately
from the fountains of Nature... To judge therefore of
Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules, is like trying a man by
the laws of one country, who acted under those of another.«
1 An Essay on Criticism, 1711. 2 Ibid, ~ Ibid,
3 L1 ART POE-TIQUE. 1674. Chant Premier.
5 D.Nichol Smith, ed.» Shakespeare Criticism (1623-1840)
pp .42,45.
 22

And later in the context*of Shakespeare's irregularity he

wrote s .

With all his faults, and with all the irregularity of his
Drama., one may look upon his works, in comparison of those
that are finished and regular, as upon an ancient majestick
piece of Gothick Architecture, compar'd with a neat Modern
building

Pope's theoretical defence of the natural and the

simple appears most paradoxically in the Preface to his-

Iliad and the Post-script to his Odyssey, the two transla­

tions which are supposed to represent the Augustan'poetic

diction' at its most artificial.

Dr. Johnson whose criticism is almost wholly preoccupfed

with the practical problem of judging particular cases, did,

however, in his occasional 'asides' formulate general principles

reducible more or less to the vindication of "the natural'1. 2 3

Shakespeare is ohce again the touchstone:

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just represen­
tations of general nature.... Shakespeare is above all writers,
at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the
poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners
and of life* .2

Johnson with a mind which was sound but limited, often

failed to appreciate or.even understand Shakespeare's style or

dramatic motives as is indicated by his objection to'the

avengers of guilt' 'peeping through a blanket' in Macbeth 3

1 D. Nichol Smith, ed., Shakespeare Criticism (1623-1840).

p. 50.
2 "Preface to Shakespeare"(1765^, Samuel Johnson on
Shakespeare, ed., W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., p.' 25.
3 The Rambler, no. 168; Oct. 26, 1751; Wimsatt, op. cit.,
p. 11.
 23

or by his preference for*a happy, ending for King Lear. Still ••

his defence of Shakespeare’s irregularities in the teeth of the
• 2
strictures of Dennis, Rymer and Voltaire , reveals his notion

of nature <?r the natural in clear light. His attacks on Milton

and the Metaphysicals, so different from each other, are

really inspired by the same insistence on naturalness violated,,

according to Johnson, in two different ways by Milton and -the'

Metaphysical poets. On Milton’s style Johnson’s remark is well-

known s

both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse

and pedantick principle. He was desirous to use English
words with a foreign idiom.3 .

The Metaphysicals "neither copied nature nor life"; and in

the work of these "men of learning", the "most heterogeneous

ideas are yoked by violence together".* This latter judgement

*

of which Donne is the target would hardly be considered

fair today but the point to be noted is that it is a vigorous

plea on behalf of naturalness of diction, sentiment and idea,

paradoxically anticipating the substance of Wordsworth’s

5
contention against "the inane phraseology" of the eighteenth

century poetic diction. - •

Thus throughout the entire baroque age we notice the

1 "King Lear", Wimsatt, ed. op. cit., pp. 97 - 98.

2 "Preface to Shakespeare" (1765), Wimsafct, ed. op. cit.,
pp. 28 - 31.
3 Lives of the Poets. I, pp. 131 - 132; W.G. ed.
4 Ibid. I Pp. 13, 14.
5 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).
 24

rigidity and simplicity of the accepted norm of classic

order constantly being broken in and extended to accommodate
the contrary instinct for freedom and variety. The classic
conscience was never at ease and at least one facet of this
lack of poise and confidence is reflected in the long-
protracted Battle of Books representing, in serio - comic
forms, an assessment of contemporary achievement measured
against the ancient. The battle raged in France and England
and, as in all battles, much more partisanship was involved
in it than genuine critical values or principles. But
whatever the banner which the French and English participants
may have fought common diffidence
about the solidity of contemporary achievement. At least so
far as the classic ideal is concerned the lack of confidence
is perfectly intelligible when we refer to the typical
products of the age : the Heroic tragedies of Dryden, the
comedies of Wycherley, Gullivers Travels. Tom Jones, and
Tristram Shandy. These works can scarcely be described as
models of order, unity and centrality, and when we pass on to
the pre-Romantics we notice a shift in emphasis not only ih
practice but also in theory underlying practice, already
foreshadowed by Burke’s On the Subline and the Beautiful
(1756) and Dennis's treatment of ’passion' and 'enthusiasm'
in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701).
 25

3 'Will to Order* *in an a&e of sensibility.

The transition frchm the eighteenth century to the

nineteenth involves a new aesthetic orientation* From the

Renaissance right up to the end of the Augustan age the basis

of the aesthetic assumption was that poetry is an imitation.

The romantic poets and critics asserted that it is an

expression. In Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads •

(1300), the first manifesto of this new aesthetic, the conception

of poetry as an expression of feelings is clearly presented

through the analogy of a welling spring : "Poetry is the

spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings s it takes its

origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity". Besides

•feeling' and 'emotion', romantic critics were to supply many

more words such as 'sentiment', 'passion','intuition' etc.,

of which poetry is supposed to be the artistic expression.

This shift from 'imitation' to 'expression', as the formula

of aesthetic function of poetry, has been described metaphori­

cally by Prof. M. H. Abrams as the passive■'mirror' imitating

external reality replaced by the active 'lamp' expressing

1
its own inner reality .

Since poetry is the expression of the poet's

individual 'feeling' or 'emotion' or 'self' it need acknowledge

no other authority than the poet's'genius*. Hence the romantic

poets and critics assert the autonomy of poetry by discarding

1 M. H# Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp. 1953,

Chaps. II — III. .
 26

• •
all the critical terms employed in the earlier classical

periods -with the sole exception of ‘mature* . 'Nature'

retains a place of honour in romantic terminology but its

meaning is changed. It no longer means, as it once did for

Dryden, Pope or Dr. Johnson, whatever is normal, reasonable

or probable. It now means the opposite of the artificial.

Nature, thus, became, in theory and practice,a sort of slogan

•
as well as a justification for freedom from all constraints,

aesthetic, social-political or moral. It Implied a programme

for unlimited expansion, for movement away from fixed centres

or beyond recognized frontiers in quest of the flux of •

individual experience. With the Romantics poetry became, in the

1
words of Jacques Riviere, "une sorte de tentative sur l'absolu".

The change in the aesthetic orientation was

consolidated by Coleridge who supplied the philosophic basis

for the new outlook. Hobbes's empiricism is replaced by

Kantian transcendentalism and the empirical interpretation

of the poetic process is replaced by Coleridge's theory of

Imagination and Fancy in Biogranhia Literaria (1817). This*

new interpretation of the nature of poetry and of the creative

process, based on transcendental philosophy^is of pivotal

importance for the nineteenth century. For Coleridge not

only supplies an adequate philosophical formulation of the

1 Nouvelles Etudes,p. 313

 27

•aesthetic of genius' hut also indicates its centre of

stability from -which neither theory nor practice could

afford to stray far without being confounded. The creative

process as enunciated by Coleridge is not regulated by

•rules' but by Law, the organic principle of growth which

of
shapes all forms/life. Imagination which fuses the welter

of perceptions into a unity is not lawless. "Put in action

by the will and understanding, and retained under their

irremissive, though gentle and unobtrusive control",

imagination "reveals itself in the balance and reconciliation

- 1
of opposite or discordant qualities". That reconciliation
i

takes place in and through language and is finally consummated

in the unity of a poem. Coleridge's definition of a poem is

to be noted s

A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to

works of‘science, by proposing for its immediate object
pleasure, not truth; and from all other species — (having
this object in common with it) —- it is discriminated by
proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is
compatible-'with a distinct gratification fr<jm each component
part.2

This concept of poetry as an organic unity which integrates the

parts into a single harmony of the whole is the master idea bf

understanding1 in"
Coleridge. .And the function assigned by Coleridge to 'will and/

the creative process clearly indicates that, for him, poetry is

not automatic or spontaneous or 'inspired1. Shakespeare is

1 BL, ed., Shawcross, II p. 12.

2 Ibid. II, p. 10; Coleridge's italics.
 28

cited as illustration. H® is : .

no mere child of nature;«no automaton of genius; no passive

vehicle of inspiration, possessed by .the spirit, not possess­
ing it.1 2

Thus for Coleridge art or poetry is more than expression s it

is ‘creation1 of which the hallmark is inviolable unity. It is

the product of a co-operation between the creative energy and

the intellect, While pointing out the difference in quality

between the poems of Shakespeare and his plays, he wrotes

In Shakespeare’s poems the creative power and the intellectual

energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Bach in its excess of
strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At
length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each
with its shield before the breast of the other. 2 «

The aesthetic of Coleridge contains the remedy to

the inherent anarchical tendencies of ‘expressionism’ although

it is not reflected clearly in his practical criticism, far

less in his creations. That is, probably, why he was either

misunderstood or ignored and his influence on his contempora­

ries and immediate successors was almost negligible. That he

made no impression on Wordsworth is proved by the latter’s

treatment of Imagination and Fancy in the Preface to Poem’s«

1815. For Shelley imagination was a moral concept rather thai^

an aesthetic one and his A Defence' of Poetry is an eloquent

panegyric to inspiration. Leigh Hunt in his essay, ’’What is

Poetry?” (1844) adopts many of Coleridge’s terms but his

treatment of imagination and fancy betrays that he missed the

1 EL, ed., Shawcross, II, p. 19

2 Ibid. II , p. 19.
 29

philosophical implication of Coleridge’s theory. Ruskin in

• . *• #
his Modern Painters (1843 - 1846) talks of three different
kinds of imagination, ' £he associative’ ’the penetrative’ and
1
’the contemplative', showing thereby how far he deviated from
Coleridge’s formulation of the Secondary Imagination as the'

sole creative principle. The nineteenth century criticism by­

passed Coleridge's aesthetic. •

Throughout the nineteenth century it is the cult of •

individual genius that prevailed. It made of poetry a kind

of 'magic'. The extreme instances are supplied by Blake and

Shelley among the early Romantics. Blake took the Platonic-

cum-Hebraic theory of inspiration so seriously that he

actually called himself "the secretary" while "the Authors

2
are in Eternity". Less prophetic variations of the idea are

the common stock-in-trade of all European apologists of

romantic genius or inspiration. But the idea finds the most

eloquent expression in Shelley's "A Defence of Poetrys

A man cannot say, ’I will compose poetry'. The greatest poet

even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading
coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
wakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from
within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes
as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures
are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.3
Carlyle makes the poet a Hero, a Prophet, a Superman, having
a god-like power of insight independent of reason and all

1 Modern Painters. Popular edition, 1906, II, pt. ii,

Chaps, i - iv.
2 Letter to Thomas Butt, 6 July, 1803. Blake's Complete
Poetry and Prose. Nonesuch ed., 1927, p. 1076.
3 English Critical Essays s XIX century, ed., 1. Jones;
p. 166
 30

discursive processes. The “seeing eye" of the Hero-poet does •• '

not require any other gu4.de and certainly cannot tolerate

any kind of restraint or limitation. The creative process is

an analogue of the Divine Creation s

Can the man say, Fiat Lux, let there be light, and out of
chhos make a world ? Precisely as there is light in himself,
will he accomplish this.1 .

Thus a cult of 'inspiration’ and 'genius' came to be tacitly

assumed as the norm in the nineteenth century aesthetic

speculation. By investing the individual sensibility of the

hero-poet with absolute sovereignty the nineteenth centuiy

raised anarchy itself to the status of the law. .

But in spite of this glorification of genius and

inspiration we can discern, right from the beginning of

the nineteenth century, an uneasy awareness of inadequacy.

Besides Coleridge's theoretical insistence on the voluntary

nature of the creative process in which'understanding'and

'will' have a significant part to play, and on the organic

unity of poetry?and Wordsworth's rather vague indication of

the poet's detachment in his well-known phase "emotion

recollected in tranquillity", there are also other symptons *

which clearly imply an urge towards order, balance, and

stability. Hellenism, f&r instance, in the early nineteenth
century represents a complex of aims and responses not all of

which were strictly aesthetic but, in one.respect, it may be

1 "The Hero as Poet", Qn Heroes and Hero-worship, 1841,

W.C., p. 136.
 31

taken as a symptom of an.urge for concentration. The-worship •. *

of the Elgin marbles of which the painter Haydon was'the

chief priest was not a.passing craze.' Wordsworth’s poems on

classical subjects such as "Laodomia” or ’Dion’ ? KeatS’s

mature concern for form and the sculptural surface of style

and, later, Landor's preoccupation with the formal concentra-

tion of verse are indications of a craving for the solidity

and poise of the classical art. In the later phase of the •

nineteenth century this craving assumes the familiar form of

imitation. Arnold’s Sohrub and Busturn and Herone and Swinburne’s

Atalanta in Calvdon are more than mere tributes to the

. * •
Homeric epos and the .Attic tragedy. They represent an attempt

to set limits to the emotional expansionism of the nineteenth

century by deliberately adopting classical moulds. Bridges

is, perhaps, the last of this tribe and his experiments with

Greek metre in his verse constitute a protest against the

growing aesthetic anarchy at the turn of the century.

A much more serious phenomenon was the recrudescence

of ’classicism’ itself with or without the name. Already in the

•

forties George Henry LeWes, a critic unduly neglected, developed

a classical viewpoint and was ventilating it in periodical

essays published in The Fortnightly Review. The Westminsters-

Review, etc.,1 and, specially, in his critical biography of

Goethe published in 1854. But alth9Ugh Lewes's criticism of

1 Sees ’’George Henry Lewes and the Classical Tradition” by

Morris Greenhunt in The Review of English Studies.
XXIV, April, 1948.
 32

romanticism was often incisive and is still found pertinent, *•

it is Matthew .Arnold who^ with his greater academic and

literary prestige, raised the issue to a plane of greater

prominence. Arnold's Preface to Poems. 1853 is an important

document as it voices a significant protest against the

romantic chaos :

What is not interesting, is that which does not add to our

knowledge of any kind; that which is vaguely conceived and
loosely drawn: a representation which is general, indeter­
minate, and faint, instead of being particular, precise and
firm.*

In quest of "the particular, precise, and firm" in poetry

Arnold goes back to the Aristotelian concept of 'action' *

as a gesture of protest against contemporary lyricism s

What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations

and at all times? They are actions; human actions; possessing
an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be
communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the poet.12 3

It is on this ground that Classical art is found to be

superior to the Komantie %

I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea. Childe Harold.

Jocelyn. The Excursion, leave the reader cold in comparison
with the effect produced upon him by the later books of the
Iliad, or by the Oresteia or by the episode of Dido.2

Permanent human feelings embodied in action is to be set off

by vigorous concentration on f9rm :

What distinguishes the artist from the mere amateur, says

Goethe, is the Arehitectonice in the highest sense; the

1 English Critical Essays s XIX century, ed. E* Jones,

p. 357.
2 Ibid., p. 359..
3 Ibid., p. 361.
 33

* i
power of execution, which creates, forms and constitutes.

Once again the ancient classical writers are held up as

models to he imitated and, this time, the watchword is

• sanity* s

let us study them. They can help to cure us- of what is, it
seems to me, the great vice of our intellect, manifesting
itself in our incredible vagarie£ in literature, in art,
in religion, in morals; namely, that it is fantastic and
wants sanity. Sanity —• that is the great virtue of the
ancient literatures the want of that is the great defect
of the modern, in spite of all its variety and power;**

Thus Arnold saw the malady and prescribed the antidote.

"The incredible vagaries in literature, in art, in religion,

in morals" which constitute the malady are the consequences

of what Arnold called "doing what one likes", an expressive

phrase which is used as a chapter-heading in Culture and

Anarchy (1869). In other words it is the anarchistic tendency

in all spheres of life to which the nineteenth century

apotheosis of individualism led. The remedy that Arnold

suggests is discipline, concentration and order. According

to Arnold's diagnosis there was at the centre of this chaos

a certain looseness of intellectual grip. About the Romantics

3
he said, that they "did not know enough". It is this lack of

grip that ultimately leads to the moral and aesthetic

disintegration. To criticism, therefore, Arnold assigns a

1 English Critical Essays: XIX, century, ed., E. Jones,

p. 367.
2 Advertisement to the second edition of Poems 3854.
op. cit., ed., E. Jones, p. 377.
3 »The Function of Criticism at the present time",
Essays in criticism I, Essays (Oxford ed.) p. 13.
 34

defensive function. It is meant to stem the tide of anarchy by.

assimilating and transmitting "the best that is known and

thought in the world”1 2and
3 4thereby asserting the intellectual

centrality which provides the necessary sustenance to

morals and aesthetics. .Arnold's moral insistence, evident in

2
his essays on Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron,is only

a facet of the same campaign against "doing as one likes".

.Arnold's work was supplemented by three critics,

all unduly neglected, E.S. Dallas, Leslie Stephen and Walter

Bagehot. Dallas in his early, immature but remarkable Poetics

(1852)and later in his Gay Science (1866) attempted, as he .

said in the preface to the latter book, "'to settle the first

principle of criticism, and show how alone it can be raised to

3
the dignity of a science". The contributions of Leslie

Stephen, even in this specialized field of literary criticism,

are more varied and durable. His studies on the eighteenth

century literature and society and the volumes of Hours in

the Library. Studies of a Biographer, and several volumes in

the English Men of Letters series represent, as Q.D. Leavis

4
points out,* the best tradition of Cambridge academic sobriety.

He tacitly assumed the .Augustan ideal of sense tempering ""

sensibility and continued with greater finesse Dr. Johnson's

1 "The Function of Criticism at the Present time",

op. cit., p. 21.
2 Essays in Criticism, II (1885).
3 Gay Science. I, preface, p. V.
4 "Leslie Stephen s Cambridge Critic -", Scrutiny. ,
VIII, no. 4.
 35

technique of using the biographical framework for the purpose*

of literary interpretation and judgment. Stephen, and less

brilliantly Walter Bagehot, achieve in their critical

performance, the kind of stability which Arnold.himself sought

in the wider context of contemporary culture.

The role of the periodicals from the early nineteenth

century to the end of the Victorian age throws another side-

•
light on the under-current of classical aspirations in the age

of sensibility. The onslaught made by the Edinburgh Review

and the Quarterly Review on the Romantic poets is sometimes

notoriously short-sighted, even perverse. But their judgments ,

are based, as R.G.Cox remarks, "firmly on the eighteenth

century principles of Reason, Truth and Nature, and although

there are hints of a gradual modification of this attitude, a

change which is more marked in the later Blackwood1s. it is

generally at the bar of Good Sense that the Romantics are

1
tried". Thus at the beginning of the Romantic era we find ths

popular journals offering a marked resistance to the principle

of emotional expansionism. In the later half of the nineteenth

century also the major journals reflect a distinct opinion

2 #
representing what R.G. Cox calls "the minority tradition" """

which, while differing in details, or even dissenting from

him in the matter of method and objective, offers a kind of

1 "The Great Reviews" (l), Scrutiny. VII, no. 1,

June 1937.
2 "Victorian Criticism of Poetry s the minority tradition", •
Scrutiny, XVIII, no. 1, June, 1951.
 36

ancillary support to .Arnold’s plea for consolidation and

centrality.

The last decade of the nineteenth century, however,

saw the triumph of impressionism, both in poetry and criticism.

Earlier, in the seventies, Pater supplied the sacred text on

which the new cult was based i

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this .

ecstasy, is success in life.....While all melts under our ,
feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any
contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon
to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the
senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours,
or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend...
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the
highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for
those moments’ sake.l •

This cult of ’’exquisite moments” was developed by

Oscar Wilde, with fresh stimulus drawn from Theophile Gautier

and J.K. Huysmann and some of the contemporary impressionistic

painters, into the doctrine of ”art for art's sake” (the

slogan itself was a borrowing from Gautier), an extremely

solipsistic aesthetic of anti-moralism and anti-naturalism in

the witty dialogues of his Intentions(1891). Arthur Symons,

•

another typical critic of the nineties in the line of Pater,

*2
used criticism as a mode of indulgence in private impressions."■

Even his Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which is

historically important for having stimulated young poets like

W.B.Yeats and T.S. Eliot, is, nevertheless, a period-piece as

1 "Conclusion", 1868, The Renaissance. 1873, ed., 1924,

pp. 150 - 151. •
2 See? ”0n Criticism” in Dramatis Personae (1923).
 37

criticism, concentrating »on thos§ aspects of symbolism which *

are covered by the term \decadent'. On the whole the book

served as another dose of exoticism stimulating the kind of

brittleness and preciosity that we find in the poems of Wilde,

Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons himself. This precio­

sity, added to the sickly bohemianism of artists and men of

letters of the so-called fin de siecle. made the slogan of "art

for art’s sake" a mere defiant gesture against all forms of

discipline and order. George Moore with his Impressions and

Opinions (1891) carries on this tradition of impressionism

and, with his later anthology, entitled Pure Poetry (1924),

serves as a link between the nineties and the- Bloomsbury

group which is represented, on “o-n e:. side, by the aesthetic

1 2
formalism of Clive Bell and Roger Fry . and, on another side,
3
by the delicate impressionism of Virginia Woolf. Shaw alone,

in his prolific writings on the stage and on music,held

4
fast to the "sanity of art" but his sanity itself was an

over-simplification, meaning Ibsenism in drama, Wagnerism in

music and impressionism in.,painting. Bridges was still at his

post,writing verses in classical metre and publishing

occasional papers right up to the thirties of the twentieth*

century, acting as a Cassandra voice, warning against innova­

tions of all kinds — a fading voice which failed to command

1 Art 1914.
2 Vision and Design. 1920.
3 The Common Readers, two series, 1925, 1932}
The Captain’s Death-Bed, 1950. •
4 The Sanity of .Art, 1895.
 38

attention. Thus the eentury closed with nothing more, on the

• %
credit side, than a few warnings against chaos and a few noble,

if sporadic, ventures, in theory as well as in practice, to

restore to poetry and criticism the sanity, poise and centrality

that the nineteenth century needed.

In the opening decades#of the twentieth century

criticism was practically at its lowest ebb. In the academic

spheres the nineteenth century tradition was prolonged with *

minor adjustments in terminology as in the writings of Bradley,

Saintsbury, Baleigh, Quiller-Couch and others. Outside the

academic circle Edwardian and Georgian criticism openly

became a branch of journalism. It developed the fine art of

evading fundamental literary issues and of using books and

authors as pretexts for lay sermons of all sorts. A typical

book of the period is G*K« Chesterton’s Heretics. In the

essays on Shaw, Kipling, Wells and others included in that

book Chesterton’s role is that of a 'liberal inquisitor'

hourlding out 'heretics' rather than that of a critic. The whole

book turns out to be a sermon against what the author calls

the Negative Spirit. This is not even superficial criticism;

it is a substitute for criticism. This failure of the critic

and of criticism explains the stagnation of the Edwardian and

Georgian periods.

The spell was broken by a healthy storm raised by

the Imagist and Vorticist movements. The sponsors were among

the most advanced radicals of the time such as Ezra Pound *

and Wyndhsm Lewis. The immediate target of the movements was

 39

the amateurish facility o.f Georgian verse but they developed"

into an emphatic reassertion of the need of seriousness.

• 7
discipline and concentration. The moving spirit of Imagism

was Ezra Pound until he dropped it and joined a,’schism' of

the imagist group which really continued the same movement

under a different name, that of 'Vorticism', sponsored by

Wyndham Lewis. The major theoretical tenets of the movement

can be culled from the writings of Ezra Pound. The following

excerpts present the central doctrines

An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional

complex in an instant of time...
It is better to present one Image in a life time than to
produce voluminous works....1 #

'Vorticism' is identical with 'imagism' except in name,for here

also the image is all in all. A concrete image is, as,Pound

defined it in Vorticist terms,"the' form, or the Vortex, from

which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly
2
rushing". Imagism and Vorticism, thus, stood for concentra­

tion and order and the programme formulated by Pound involves

a wholesale spring - cleaning of all that was dull, dead or

repetitive in technique, form and language.

T.E. Hulrae gave a fresh turn to the movement by

re-introducing the two old, familiar terms into theoretical

discussions, viz., romanticism and classicism. In an important

1 "A Few Don't's", Poetry. I, 6 (March 1913); reprinted,

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 4.
2 'Vorticism' , Fortnightly Review. Sept. 1, 1914. .
 40

essay entitled "Romanticism and Classicism" in Speculations «

he draws a distinction bgtween the attitudes of romanticism

and classicism on^'the basis of man’s attitude to life : "To

the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like
1
a bucket". Classicism is the bucket which is limited and

wall defined whereas romanticism is undefined, unmeasured like

the depth of a well. The classical poet, he continues in the

same context, "never forgets his finiteness ... He may jump, •

but he always returns back".Unlike the romantic poet "he never

2
flies away into circumambient gas". What is wrong with roman­
ticism is its inherent tendency to formlessness and chaoss it.r
3 *
is "like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table".
4
A classical poem, by contrast, should be "all dry and hard"*
and it is to be achieved in a language distinguished by its

vitality and precision. The true language of poetry is one

which defines "the exact curve" of sensibility? it is "a com­

promise for a language of intuition which would hand over

5
sensation bodily". T.E. Hulme’s prescriptions for the

classical poetry, but for minor shifts in emphases, amount to

a rephrasing of Ben Jonson’s classicism.

•

This is the background against which T.S.Eliot as

a critic made his debut in the second decade of the present

century. It is a background of persistent tension between

1 Speculations, ed., Herbert Read, 1924, p. 117.

2 Ibid., p. 120.
3 Ibid., p. 118.
4 Ibid., p. 126.
5 Ibid., p. 134.
formalism and freedom, between order and licence. By “classical
* • *

tradition", therefore, we should mean those continuous efforts

of the critical mind from the time of Sidney to that of T.E.

Hulme, to impose 'order* on the art of poetry aqd to evolve

criticism itself as an ordering instrument or function. T. S.

Eliot's critical writings are to be related to this tradition

for he appears, by his own profession, under the banner of

'classicism' with 'order' as his motto. For over four decades

in numerous essays, papers, lectures and book-reviews, he

tackled the problems of poetry and criticism and established a

specific point of view which he himself described as 'classical'.

4L. Tradition and the Three Dimensions of 'Order'.

Shall I at least set my lands in order ?

—■ The Waste Land.

In 1928 in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes

Eliot announced his credo i

•

The general point of view may be described as classicist in

literature, royalist in politics and anglo-Catholic in
religion.

The three terms had unsavoury associations for his readers

and critics in 1928. ‘Classicism’ might imply the revivalist

fad of a fastidious man of letters; 'royalism' might mean, in

1
the words of Harold Laski, "his horror of the common man" ;

1 Faith. Reason and Civilization. 1944,

p. 105.
 42 t

and his anglo-Catholicism the mos*t up-to-date stunt of a

• . *
trans-atlantie writer of fashion. And all three together, as
Eliot himself said in After Strange Gods (1934), might mean
"a dramatic posture'^of withdrawal or even, as Laski reiterates

in Faith. Reason and Civilization (1944), a reactionary

counter-attack on progress and culture.

In After Strange Gods Eliot modestly cautions us

about the possible (and actual) misinterpretations of the •

three terms and, at the same time, indicates the right

approach to them %

That there are connexions (between the three terms) for me, I,,
of course, admit, but these illuminate my own mind rather than
the external world.2

According to Eliot's own admission, therefore, the three terms

have not been thrown together casually. They are linked by

some common principle which is not apparent on the surface and

has been left unspecified by Eliot. An investigation into this

connection, therefore, will not only throw light on the term

'classicism' as used by Eliot but will also provide a point

of departure for a general assessment of his critical position.

The first step towards a definition of Eliot's 'classicism'#

will be to probe into those two terms, 'royalism' and'anglo-

Catholicism,'to which it is tacked and, by analysing the ideals

embodied by them, to bring out the common basis for all three.

1 ASG, p. 28.
2 Ibid., loc. cit.v.
 43 I

This would require a brie,f review of Eliot's political and

theological ideals against the background of contemporary

history.

The background of Eliot's political and theological

ideas is the European 'waste land' between the wars. What

Spengler described as the 'decline' of the West was a common

awareness of decay, disorder and collapse in the modern

industrial S9ciety ravaged by the war and its aftermath. It

was partly foreseen in the early phase of industrialism by

Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin and Morris in the last lap

of the nineteenth century. But what was a nightmare to them

was, in the twenties of the present century, a stark and

dismal reality. According to Spengler's Cyclic theory of his­

torical morphology s

the 19th and 20th centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest

point of an ascending straight line of world-history, are in
reality a stage of life which may be observed in every culture
that has ripened to its limit. 1

The causes that brought about this decline are numerous and

complex with roots going far back in the past and about these
•
there is no end of controversies or investigations. But the
•
result was simple, staring all sensitive Europeans in the face.

It was a moral anarchy which, like a gangrene at the centre

of life, was gradually spreading into all spheres of activities,

institutions and organizations. Hermann Hesse described it with

1
The Decline of the West. German edition in 2 VolsMunich,
1918 - 1922, Eng. tr., 1926 - 28; one-volume ed.,
1959, p. 39.
impressive eloquence in a passage which Eliot quoted in his
• • f
notes to The Waste Land i

.Already half Europe, at any rate half eastern Europe, is on

the road to chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is
reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken
hymn such as Dmitri Karamazoff sang. The insulted citizen
laughs that song to scorn, the saint and the seer hear it
with tears.

Eliot's sociological and theological writings, both

collected and uncollected, make a corpus that has its signifi­

cance against this background which called for defensive slogans

for the 'recovery1 of the West. They constitute one among

innumerable attempts at diagnosing and suggesting remedies for

the contemporary predicament of what Reinhold Niehbur called,

in the title of one of his books, "the moral man in an immoral

society". Eliot’s own reflections on these issues touch at

various points with those of historians like Christopher

Dawson and Theodora Haecker, philosophers like .Albert

i
Schwetzer, Martin Buber, Nicholas Berdayev, and Max Scheler,
A

theologians like Jacques Maritain, H.R. Niehbur, V.A.Demant

and Maurice B. Reckitt, journalists and lay preachers like

•
A.R# Orage, Charles Williams and the later Middleton Murry,

and economists and social anthropologists like R.H. Tawney,

Karl Mannheim and Pitrim Sorokin. Among political theorists

his affiliations are with 'Christian politicians' like Burke

and Coleridge and the contemporary group of 'Christian

sociologists’ of whom Reckitt and Demant are representatives.

1 In Sight of Chaos. Eng. tr. Stephen Hudson*,

Switzerland, 1923, p. 46.
 45 i

Eliot's various speculations may be reduced to three

• *
major propositions : (l) a central affirmation of a religious

faith sustained by a Church which Eliot describes as Catholic;

(2) a tentative formulation of a social-political pattern of

communal life which Eliot calls ‘the idea of a Christian

society;'and (3) a definition of culture that stems out of

the first two.

Irving Babbitt saids

The worst difficulties bf the present time arise .... even

less from lack of vision than from sham vision. Otherwise
stated, what is disquieting about the time is not so much its
open and avowed meterialism as what it takes to be its
spirituality. #

Eliot is substantially in agreement with this analysis of the

contemporary situation by his former teacher, Irving Babbitt.

Eliot also shares Babitt's diagnosis of the failure of contem­

porary culture as due to the sham spirituality of all forms of

liberalism based on compromises and confusions. The modern world

2
is "worm-eaten" as Eliot said in After Strange Gods, not so

much by atheism or materialism as by Liberalism itself which,

by its inherent tendency to expansion, obscures valid, even

essential distinctions and, thus, ultimately leads to the .

surrender of what Babbitt calls the 'veto power' of the

ethical conscience. In this context Eliot distinguishes

between 'the liberal', 'the radical' and 'the orthodox*

3
outlooks, implying a fundamental choice "between'Christian,

r
1 Democracy and Leadership. 1924, pp. 16-17.
2 -ASG. p. 13.
3 SAM. p. 167.
 46 «

. 1
non-Christian and anti-ctiristian orders." Eliot’s own outlook
* • ^
is professedly orthodox and his contentions are not against
ft.

what he calls ’radical’ or ’anti-Christian' views because, as

2 .

he explains in .After Strange Gods , .none is possible in the

absence of a common basis of shared assumptions, but against

’liberal’ or 'non-Christian' views which at least profess a

belief in certain spiritual values.

The basic assumption of Eliot’s sociological and

religious writings is orthodoxy which has been defined by

W..A. Curtius as the "fidelity" of a community to "its work-

3
ing creed". According to this orthodox interpretation

religion itself is defined by Eliot as "the whole way of life

A
of a people".* The point of view is elaborated elsewhere

as follows s

We ... feel convinced, however darkly, that our spiritual

faith should give us some guidance in temporal matters;
that if it does not, the fault is our own; that morality
rests upon religious sanction, and that social organization
of the world rests upon moral sanction; that we can judge
temporal values in the light of eternal values.5

Eliot's position is further clarified in the following Criterion

commentary s

The real issue is between the secularists — whatever political

or moral philosophy they support “-'and anti-secularists :
between those who believe only in values realizable in time

1 "Catholicism and International Order", EAM, p. 123.

2 ASG. p. 12.
3 ’Orthodoxy", Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. IX,
p. 572.
4 Notes, p. 31; Eliot's italics.
5 M|, pp. 113 - 114.
 47 i

and on earth, and those .who beliave also in values realized .•

only out of time.1 2 3 4

Babbitt's own 'humanism', according to Eliot, is in i

the no-man1s-land between secularism and anti-secularism.

Between God and nature Babbitt holds up the ethical conscience

of man as the third term guaranteeing standard and discipline

without the aid of religious dogma. 'The veto power' of man's

higher will saves him from being either 'the puppet of God'
2
or 'the puppet of nature' . Eliot had to attack this view

precisely because it implies with dangerous persuasiveness

that humanism is not only an alternative to religion but can

3
also be a substitute. From Eliot's specific point of view the

chief deficiency of Babbitt's humanism lies in his acceptance*

of an ethical doctrine of self-control as a dogma in itselfs

This doctrine runs throughout his work, and sometimes appears

as the inner check. It appears as an alternative to both
political and religious anarchy... But Mr. Babbitt seems to
think also that the 'outer' restraints of an orthodox
religion, as they weaken, can be supplied by the inner
restraint of the individual over himself.... And if you
distinguish so sharply between 'outer* and 'inner' checks as
Mr. Babbitt does, then there is nothing left for the indivi­
dual to check himself by but his own private notions and his
judgment, which is precarious.""*

Thus because humanism, as Eliot argues in the passage cited,*

cannot live in the no-man's-land and must necessarily lapse into

naturalism, Eliot rejects the third term leaving only God

1 "Commentary, " Criterion, Oct., 1936.

2 Democracy and Leadership, pp. 5, 21.
3 "The Humanism of Irving Babbitt", SE, p. 472.
4 SE, pp. 475 - 476.
 l
48

and natures * * *•

There is no avoiding the'dileinmas you must be either a natura­

list or a super-naturalist.1 2

Ethical values, according to Eliot, are sbabilized

only when they are broadbased on religious dogma. That

presupposes the acceptance of a Ghurch which will impose a

clear-cut discipline on the individual in relation to the

a
group, the community, the society or state to which he belongs

and, finally, to other communities in other countries. The

function of what Eliot calls the Catholic Church is to impose

and maintain discipline, harmony and order. Eliot's criticism #

of the Church in "Thoughts after Lambeth" is that it does nbt

impose its authority and discipline vigorously enough s

2
"Spiritual guidance should be imperative." Eliot however

does not prescribe a kind of theocratic regimentation. What

he means is that by virtue of authority vested in the Church

it will provide the 'orthodoxy' upon which the whole fabric

of social life and its values and institutions will rest.

Eliot neither evades nor over-simplifies the complexity of

•

the problems that crop up around the innumerable sects and

•

local loyalties, even apart from the major schisms between

Catholic and Protestant factions. Eliot wants, neither the

disestablishment of sects nor their complete amalgamation.

1 "Second Thoughts on Humanism", SE, , p. 485.

2 SE , p. 375.
 49 l

The Church should be both local and universal precisely

• f

because it represents the ideal of continuity and balance ,

coordinating the parish and the Christendom. It is an ideal

of organic unity s

But within that unity there should be an endless conflict

between ideas — for it is only by the struggle against
constantly appearing false ideas that the truth is enlarged
and clarified, and in the conflict with heresy that orthodoxy
is developed to meet the needs of the time5 an endless effort
also ©n the. part of each region to shape its Christianity
to suit itself, an effort which should neither be wholly
suppressed nor left wholly unchecked .■*•

She function of the Church being integration the control

which is to be maintained should be neither too rigid nor too

relaxed s

The danger of freedom is deliquescence; the danger of strict

order is petrifaction.2

Elsewhere Eliot defines the two extremes representing two

pitfalls as “absolutism or impossible theocracy" on the one

hand and the dubious hybrid called "Christian socialism" on

3
the other. And the kind of integration which Eliot points

out as essential can be performed only by a Church that has

its routs going deep into the history of the nation?since .

religion,of which it is the institutional embodiment,has

been defined as "the way of life of a people". This eixplains

Eliot’s affiliation with the Catholic wing of the Anglican

Church. This point has been clarified in a passage in

1 Notes, p. 82.
2 Ibid., p. 81.
3 "Catholicism and International Order", EAM, p. 118.
"Thoughts after Lambeth*' s ,
Whether established or disestablished, the Church of England
can never be reduced to the condition of a sect, unless by
some irrational act of suicide; even in the sense in which,
with all due respect, the Roman Church is in England a sect.
It is easier for the Church of England to be Catholic than
for the Church of Rome in England to be English; and if the
Church of England was mutilated by separation from Rome,
the Church of Rome was mutilated by separation from England.
If England is ever to be in any appreciable degree converted ^
to Christianity it can only be through the Church of England”.

On the basis of such an assumption Eliot has elabo­

rated a tentative concept of a social-political pattern. It is

neither an ideology nor a utopia. It is what Eliot calls an

•idea', a 'norm'. The'smallest unit is s

•

a small and mostly self-contained group attached to the soil

and having its interests centred in a particular place, with
a kind of unity which may be designed but which also has to grow
through generations.2

Such a group is related to other groups and all the groups

make up the total pattern which integrates and harmonizes

a multitude of interests, functions and classes. This pattern'

which maintains social and political hierarchies on the basis

of functions and responsibilities and not merely of privileges,

implies continuity, growth and order. The positive conviction

of Eliot, implicit in it, is, <?n the political side, more than

a party programme. It is a philosophy which is s

not merely even the conscious formulation of the ideal aims

of a people, but the subtratum of collective temperament, ways
of behaviour and unconscious values which provide the material
for the formulation. What we are seeking is not a programme
 i
51

• i
for a party, but a wav of life for a people.
• * «

In a later lecture Eliot.connects this philosophy -with that

2
of Burke and Coleridge. The 'royalism* of Eliot's 'credo'

is, therefore, to be identified with eonservatis'm — not

'the temperate conservatism', as he warns, in the preface to

For Lancelot Andrewes. bf those who vote for the Conservative

Party —but the philosophic conservatism as enunciated by

Burke, specially in his Reflections on the French Revolution

(1790) and, later, by Coleridge.*^ According to Burke's

formulation the state is an organism in which the individual,

the social classes, the organs of political power, property

and the Church, each secure in its own place and functioning

in mutual dependence and co-operation, are integrated and

hermonized. It is a growth which maintains continuity through

a process of adaptation and expansion and is not a manufacture

according to the blue print of a political theory. The English

constitution since the Magna Charta, argues Burke, reflects

this organic nature of the state by asserting "our liberties,

as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers,

and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially

belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference

whatever to any other more general or prior right,

1 ICS, p. 18; my emphasis.

2 The Literature of Politics. 1955, pp. 12 - 16.
3 »ihe Idea of the State", On the Constitution of the Church
and State. 1830; chap. ii. pp. 25 - 37; also"The States­
man's Manual (18-.16) and A Lav Sermon (1817), passim.; both
reprinted in Political Tracts of Wordsworth. Coleridge
and Shelley, ed. R.J. White, 1953.
By this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great
1
a diversity of its partsBurke, however, does not recommend

the preservation of something static or deads

A state without the means of some change is without the means

of conservation. Without such means it might even risk the
loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the
most religiously to preserve.1
2 3 4

Change in this context is growth which does not violate the

principle of conservation s

I would not exclude alteration neither; hut even when I

changed, it should he to preserve.2

The state grows like a plant and 11 to inoculate any scion

4
alien to the nature of the original plant” is to disrupt its

growth hy artificial interference. That is the way to destroy

it. This is also Eliot's basic assumption in his formulation

of the 'idea of a Christian society' as an organic growth

based on and determined hy religious sanctions. Burke may be

said to have anticipated Eliot when he wrote s

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and

appetite he placed somewhere, and the less of it there is
within, the more there must he without. It is ordained in
the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate
minds cannot he free.5

Eliot's third proposition is a definition of'culture'

which stems out of the first two. Culture is, as Eliot

1 Reflections on the French Revolution. Ev., p. 31.

2 Ibid., p. 19.
3 Ibid., p. 243.
4 Ibid., p. 29.
5 "Letter to a member of the National Council",
ibid., p. 282.
 I
53

•1
describes it, "that which makes life worth living". It is,
I • •

therefore, "not the sum of several activities, but a way of

2
life." Culture is not a personal affair. It is rooted in the

communal life of a whole people and is defined by Eliot as

3
"an incarnation of its religion". Eliot's preoccupation with

culture is reminiscent of that of one of his famous nineteenth

century predecessors, Matthew Arnbld. Both face the same

dilemma of Culture and / or Anarchy but their approaches

are different. While Arnold's approach to the problem is

4
individualistic Eliot's orientation, as D.S. Savage points

out, is towards the communal and the impersonal. Eliot himself

comments on this difference i

Arnold is concerned primarily with the individual and the

'perfection' at which he should aim. It is true that in
his famous classification of 'Barbarians, Philistines,
Populace he concerns himself with a critique of classes, but
his criticism is confined to an indictment of these classes
for their shortcomings, and does not proceed to consider what
should be the proper function or 'perfection' of each class.
The effect, therefore, is to exhort the individual who x^/ould
attain the peculiar kind of 'perfection' which Arnold calls
'culture', to rise superior to the limitations of any5class,
rather than to realise its highest attainable ideals.

For Eliot culture is a complex growth which co-

ordinates the contributions of the individual, the group and

the whole society. The cultures of the individual, the group

and of the whole society are integrated organically and cannot

be isolated from each other so that, as Eliot says, "our

1 Notes, p. 27.
2 Ibid., p. 41.
3 Ibid., p. 33.
4 The Personal Principle, 1944, pp. 107 - 109.
5 Notes, p. 22.
notion of ‘perfection’ must take all three senses of culture
1 ^ # *

into account at once". A national culture, therefore, is ”a

constellation of cultures, the constituents of which, benefit-

2
mg each other, benefit the whole.” The constellation

includes ’group cultures’ involving classes and ‘regional

cultures' connected with local customs and religious rites

and beliefs. Cultures that are peripheral are neither to be

eliminated nor to be completely absorbed. Their disappearance,

3
either way, is a danger; it will impoverish and distort the

total cultural pattern. The integration as visualized by Eliot

will involve some degree of antagonism or irritation among

the constituents but that will be a healthy sign showing their

essential unity (not identity) in spite of their differences.

About satellite cultures that are ousted, or are in constant

danger of being ousted, Eliot's prescription is not one of

simple restoration or revival :

What is wanted is hot to restore a vanished or to revive a

vanishing culture under modern conditions which make it
impossible, but to grow a contemporary culture from old
roots 1. -2 3

That is what Eliot means by cultural integration of \tfhich the

two important facets ares(l) unity in diversity and (2)

continuity through change and adaptation. It constitutes, as

Eliot said, ”a ^iety towards the dead, however obscure, and a

1 Notes.,p.24
2 Ibid., p. 58.
3 Ibid., loc. cit.
- Ibid., p. 53; my emphasis.
 55
t

solicitude for the unborn, howeve#r remote". In this context-; #

classes are shown to be functional not simply because their

contributions diversify the content of 'national culture'

but specially because they help the maintenance and trans­

mission of culture. Eliot recommends, a sort of cultural aristo-

2
cracy comparable to Coleridge's 'Clerisy'. It is however

different from Karl Mannheim's'elite' which ultimately

amounts to the ruling minority. Eliot's cultural aristocracy *

implies an ordered hierarchy within the total pattern s *'

What I have advanced is not a 'defence of aristocracy'....

Bather it is a plea on behalf of a form of society in which
an aristocracy should have a peculiar and essential function,
as peculiar and essential as the function of any other part *
of society. What is important is a structure of society in
which there will be, from 'top* to 'bottom', a continuous
gradation of cultural levels % it is important to remember
that we should not consider the upper levels as possessing
more culture than the lower, but as representing a more A
conscious culture and a greater specialisation of culture.*

Applying the same principle of integration, Eliot goes on to

show how a national culture can be assimilated into a larger

cultural pattern, that of Europe. The national cultures of

different countries are integrated, through attraction and

repulsion, into what Eliot calls "the spiritual organism" erf

Europe as opposed to its"political organisation."

s •

Thus the common principle at which Eliot darkly

hinted clearly emerges. We note that the three terms,' religion',

1 Notes, p. 44.
2 On the Constitution of the Church and the State. 18305
ed., H.N. Coleridge, 4th edn., pp. 53 - 54.
3 Man and Society. 1948, p. 89 ff.
4 Notes, p. 485 Eliot's italics.
5 Ibid., pp. 119, 121.
 r
56

'politics* and 'culture' #are given definitions that are m m

identical : "a way of life for the people". That indicates

their commpn roots in the life of the race as it has evhlved

through centuries of changes and adjustments. The formula

for the precise nature of the continuity, growth and adapta­

tion implicit in the three terms as explained by Eliot is

supplied by his concept of 'tradition* which Eliot first

elaborated in the context of literature but,later, in After

Strange Gods, extended its implications to cover the whole

area of communal life.

Tradition, as expounded by Eliot, is to be distin­

guished from what is known as 'traditionalism* or simply as

'convention*. These latter terms, familiarly used in literary

and.non-literary contexts, implies conformism and can become,

both in literature and life, a dead, mechanical habit of

clinging to manners, modes and forms that, with the change of

circumstances, have ceased to be meaningful or vital. They also

imply a kind of continuity and a kind of order but, as

Livingstone Lowes -has shown in Convention and Revolt in Poetry

(1919) in the specifically literary context, the one amounts

•
to repetition while the other is only a form of rigor mortis.

Eliot defines tradition as'the historical sense' which "involves

a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its
presence.""*' It is not to be confused with the archaeological

or antiquarian attitude which concentrates on the past in

1 SW, p. 49.
 57

isolation from the present. The historical sense is the

• • m

’’sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the

* 1
timeless and the temporal together.” It is the simultaneous

awareness of the past and the present, maintaining the

continuity of whatever is vital/*the past,and carrying it on

to the future. Tradition, thus, is the principle of continuity

and organic integration which makes the present and the future

naturally grow out of the past. In an early hook-review

Eliot indicated the function of tradition is literature :

We suppose not merely a corpus of writings in one language

hut writings and writers between whom there is a tradition;
and writers who are not merely connected by tradition in time,
but who are related so as to be in the light of eternity
contemporaneous, from a qertain point of view, cells in one
body, Chaucer and Hardy. *

This ordering and regulative function of tradition is present

ed more elaborately in ’’Tradition and Individual Talent” :

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,

which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really
new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete
before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if
ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions,
values of each work of art toward the whole is readjusted;
and this is conformity between the old and the new.d

Tradition is that principle of integration ’’which abandons •

4
nothing en route ” imposing and maintaining a simultaneous

and perpetually adjusted order in which the oldest and the

1 SW, p. 49.
2 Athenaeum. Aug. 1, 1919.
3 SW, p. 50.
4 Ibid., p. 51.
 58

newest works of art have their respective places and signifi-

• *

cance. It is due to the function of this tradition that the

t

past is "altered by the present as much as the present is

directed by the past."1 2 3 4

In a re-statement on the issue of tradition in After

Strange Gods Eliot asserts that tradition is to be associated

neither with any kind of sentimental or nostalgic attitude to

the past nor with the familiar variety of static complacency

2
which prefers the immobile to any kind of novelty or change.

Tradition does not preclude novelties or changes but controls

and regulates them by relating them to the "ideal order". Nor

is tradition to be confined to literature alone. It is opera­

tive in the wider field of social life and religious

conviction :

Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance

of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to
take their living form in the course of the formation of a
tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those
habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant,
religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger.^

It requires therefore to be constantly scrutinized and sifted

for "in even the very best living tradition there is always

a mixture of good and bad". Our concern is only with what is

vital in tradition s
the sound tree will put forth new leaves and the dry tree
should be put to the axe. -

1 SW, p. 50.
2 ASG, pp. 18 - IS.
3 Ibid., p. 18.
4 Ibid., pp. 18, 19.
 59

In After Strange^Gods Eliot mentions both tradition

and orthodoxy more or less as complementary to each other s

a tradition is rather a way of feeling and acting which

characterises a group throughout generations; and that it must
largely be, or that many of its elements in it must be
unconscious; whereas the maintenance of orthodoxy is a matter
which calls for the exercise of all our conscious intelligence.
The two will therefore considerably complement each other.3-

This distinction between unconscious tradition and conscious

orthodoxy complicates the issue a little and, at least, partly •

justifies Quiller - Couch's petulant remark on Eliot's sleight

of hand shuffling-
religion into politics, politics into literature, tradition
into dogma, to and fro, until the reader .... can scarcely .
tell out of what category the card (so to speak) is being
dealt.1
2 3

But the distinction is not as confusing as Quiller-Couch

might lead one to believe. When Eliot says that orthodoxy

which as a conscious acceptance of a form of belief "may be

upheld by one man against the world" while tradition is "of

the blood, so to speak, rather than of the brain" and is, thus,

"the means by which the vitality of the past enriches the

3
life of the present," he clearly indicates that tradition is

the ordering and integrating principle and orthodoxy is one

of the results it leads to.

Thus tradition is the common basis of religion,

politics and culture, as Eliot understands and interprets them.

1 ASG. p. 29.
2 "Tradition and Orthodoxy", The Poet as Citizen, p. 61.
3 ASG. p. 30.
 60

They can be described as *'traditional' in the sense that - *

their continuity, order and integrity are sustained by "the

way of life of a people" which is nothing but Eliot's

•tradition' without the name. Religion, politics*and culture,

therefore, constitute the three dimensions of a living order

which is governed and sustained by tradition.

The ideal of 'classicism' which is always based on

the concept of order acquires a special significance in Eliot's

credo by being presented as an aspect of his preoccupation

with culture. It implies much more than a literary sect, or

school or clique and, as an ideal, it is affiliated with and, *

to some extent, characterised by issues of wider bearings. It

is one particular aspect of Eliot's total orientation towards

communal life to which the concept of tradition provides the

necessary clue. The cryptic formula of "classicism, royalism

and anglo-Catholieism" constitutes, as John Hayward remarked,

"the triple affirmation of a single belief — the belief in

1
the value of tradition." The true significance of Eliot's

Classicism' can be understood only in the light of his concept

of tradition and the over-all critical position of Eliot in t

relation to the background of English criticism, presented

earlier, can be defined and made explicit only in terms of

these two concepts which are of central importance in his

critical theory and practice.

1. T.S. Eliot s Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward, .

Introduction, p. 11.