Monro’s list of names) is very scattered, and the bad poetry is very compact.
I have avoided mentioning the Elder Poets, such as Mr. Bridges, or Mr.
Yeats, or Mr. Pound.24 One becomes old very quickly in these days.
What I propose to myself, in continuation of this tentative essay, is
to compare the use of the English language in contemporary English and
American verse, a comparison which will probably show a balance in
favour of London (or Dublin); and further to institute a comparison of En-
glish and American verse with French. There are pitfalls too in the question
of the Revival of Criticism in England; I should rightly have discussed the
revival of criticism in this letter, as it may be dead before I write again.25
Again, the Palladium has at this moment an excellent bill, including Marie
1 4 0
e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
Lloyd, Little Tich, George Mozart, and Ernie Lotinga;26 and that provokes
an important chapter on the Extinction of the Music Hall, the corruption
of the Theatre Public, and the incapacity of the British public to appreciate
Miss Ethel Levey.27 Next week the admirable Phoenix Society will perform
Volpone or the Fox and this requires a word on Shakesperian acting in En-
gland.28 All of these problems are integral to my plan, and I hope can be
included before the next visit of M. Diaghile¤’s Ballet.29 A small but varied
exhibition by Picasso is the most interesting event of London at this mo-
ment—but that lies outside of my province.30
t h e r o m a n t i c e ng l i s h m a n , t h e c o m i c s p i r i t , a n d t h e f u n c t i o n o f c r i t i c i s m 1
s i r t u n b e l l y c l u m s y , Sir Giles Overreach, Squire Western, and Sir Sampson Legend, who was lately so competently revived by Mr. Byford at
the Phoenix, are di¤erent contributions by distinguished mythmakers to
the chief myth which the Englishman has built about himself.2 The myth
that a man makes has transformations according as he sees himself as
hero or villain, as young or old, but it is essentially the same myth; Tom
Jones is not the same person, but he is the same myth, as Squire West-
ern; Midshipman Easy is part of the same myth; Falsta¤ is elevated above
the myth to dwell on Olympus, more than a national character.3 Tenny-
son’s broad-shouldered genial Englishman is a cousin of Tunbelly Clumsy;
and Mr. Chesterton, when he drinks a glass of beer (if he does drink beer),
and Mr. Squire, when he plays a game of cricket (if he does play cricket),
contribute their little bit.4 This myth has seldom been opposed or emu-
lated; Byron, a great mythmaker, did, it is true, set up the Giaour, a myth
for the whole of Europe.5 But in our time, barren of myths—when in
France there is no successor to the honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien,
and René, and the dandy, but only a deliberate school of mythopoeic ni-
hilism—in our time the English myth is pitiably diminished.6 There is
that degenerate descendent, the modern John Bull, the John Bull who
usually alternates with Britannia in the cartoons of Punch, a John Bull
1 4 1
1 4 2
e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
composed of Podsnap and Bottomley.7 And John Bull becomes less and
less a force, even in a purely political role.
The theatre, naturally the best platform for the myth, a¤ords in our
time singularly little relief. What a poor showing, the military and nautical
V.C.’s, the Spy, the Girl who sank the Submarine!8 The Englishman with
a craving for the ideal (there are, we believe, a good many) famishes in
the stalls of the modern theatre. The exotic spectacle, the sunshine of Chu
Chin Chow, is an opiate rather than a food.9 Man desires to see himself
on the stage, more admirable, more forceful, more villainous, more comical,
more despicable—and more much else—than he actually is. He has only
the opportunity of seeing himself, sometimes, a little better dressed. The
romantic Englishman is in a bad way.
It is only perhaps in the music hall, and sometimes in the cinema,
that we have an opportunity for partial realization. Charlie Chaplin is not
English, or American, but a universal figure, feeding the idealism of
hungry millions in Czecho-Slovakia and Peru. But the English comedian
supplies in part, and unconsciously, the defect: Little Tich, Robey, Nellie
Wallace, Marie Lloyd, Mozart, Lupino Lane, George Graves, Robert Hale,
and others, provide fragments of a possible English myth.10 They e¤ect
the Comic Purgation. The romantic Englishman, feeling in himself the
possibility of being as funny as these people, is purged of unsatisfied de-
sire, transcends himself, and unconsciously lives the myth, seeing life in
the light of imagination. What is sometimes called “vulgarity” is there-
fore one thing that has not been vulgarised.
Only unconsciously, however, is the Englishman willing to accept his
own ideal. If he were aware that the fun of the comedian was more than
fun he would be unable to accept it; just as, in all probability, if the come-
dian were aware that his fun was more than fun he might be unable to
perform it. The audience do not realize that the performance of Little Tich
is a compliment, and a criticism, of themselves. Neither could they appre-
ciate the compliment, or swallow the criticism, implied by the unpleasant
persons whom Jonson put upon the stage.11 The character of the serious
stage, when he is not simply a dull ordinary person, is confected of abstract
qualities, as loyalty, greed, and so on, to which we are supposed to respond
with the proper abstract emotions. But the myth is not composed of abstract
qualities; it is a point of view, transmuted to importance; it is made by the
transformation of the actual by imaginative genius.
t h e r o m a n t i c e n g l i s h m a n
1 4 3
The modern dramatist, and probably the modern audience, is terrified
of the myth. The myth is imagination and it is also criticism, and the two
are one. The Seventeenth Century had its own machinery of virtues and
vices, as we have, but its drama is a criticism of humanity far more serious
than its conscious moral judgements. Volpone does not merely show that
wickedness is punished; it criticises humanity by intensifying wickedness.
How we are reassured about ourselves when we make the acquaintance
of such a person on the stage! I do not for a moment suggest that anyone
is a¤ected by Volpone or any of the colossal Seventeenth Century figures
as the newspapers say little boys are by cinema desperados. The myth is
degraded by the child who points a loaded revolver at another, or ties his
sister to a post, or rifles a sweet-shop; the Seventeenth Century populace
was not appreciably modified by its theatre; and a great theatre in our own
time would not transform the retired colonel from Maida Vale into a Miles
Gloriosus.12 The myth is based upon reality, but does not alter it. The mate-
rial was never very fine, or the Seventeenth Century men essentially supe-
rior to ourselves, more intelligent or more passionate. They were surrounded,
&nbs
p; indeed, by fewer prohibitions, freer than the millhand, or the petrified
product which the public school pours into our illimitable suburbs.
t h e l e s s o n o f b a u d e l a i r e 1
w i t h r e g a r d t o c e r t a i n intellectual activities across the Channel, which at the moment appear to take the place of poetry in the life of Paris,
some e¤ort ought to be made to arrive at an intelligent point of view on
this side. It is probable that this French performance is of value almost
exclusively for the local audience; I do not here assert that it has any value
at all, only that its pertinence, if it has any, is to a small public formida-
bly well instructed in its own literary history, erudite and stu¤ed with
tradition to the point of bursting. Undoubtedly the French man of letters
is much better read in French literature than the English man of letters
is in any literature; and the educated English poet of our day must be too
conscious, by his singularity in that respect, of what he knows, to form a
parallel to the Frenchman. If French culture is too uniform, monotonous,2
English culture, when it is found, is too freakish and odd. Dadaism is a
diagnosis of a disease of the French mind; whatever lesson we extract
from it will not be directly applicable in London.3
Whatever value there may be in Dada depends upon the extent to
which it is a moral criticism of French literature and French life. All first-
rate poetry is occupied with morality: this is the lesson of Baudelaire.4
More than any poet of his time, Baudelaire was aware of what most mat-
tered: the problem of good and evil. What gives the French Seventeenth
1 4 4
t h e l e s s o n o f b a u d e l a i r e
1 4 5
Century literature its solidity is the fact that it had its Morals, that it had
a coherent point of view. Romanticism endeavoured to form another
Morals—Rousseau, Byron, Goethe, Poe were moralists. But they have not
suªcient coherence; not only was the foundation of Rousseau rotten, his
structure was chaotic and inconsistent. Baudelaire, a deformed Dante
(somewhat after the intelligent Barbey d’Aurevilly’s phrase), aimed, with
more intellect plus intensity, and without much help from his predecessors, to arrive at a point of view toward good and evil.5
English poetry, all the while, either evaded the responsibility, or as-
sumed it with too little seriousness. The Englishman had too much fear,
or too much respect, for morality to dream that possibly or necessarily he
should be concerned with it, vom Haus aus, in poetry.6 This it is that makes some of the most distinguished English poets so trifling. Is anyone seriously interested in Milton’s view of good and evil? Tennyson decorated
the morality he found in vogue; Browning really approached the problem,
but with too little seriousness, with too much complacency; thus The Ring
and the Book just misses greatness—as the revised version of Hyperion
almost, or just, touches it.7 As for the verse of the present time, the lack
of curiosity in technical matters, of the academic poets of to-day (Georgian
et caetera) is only an indication of their lack of curiosity in moral matters.
On the other hand, the poets who consider themselves most opposed to
Georgianism, and who know a little French, are mostly such as could
imagine the Last Judgement only as a lavish display of Bengal lights, Ro-
man candles, catherine-wheels, and inflammable fire-balloons.8 Vous, hypo-
crite lecteur . . .9
a n d r e w m a r v e l l 1
t h e t e r c e n t e n a r y o f t h e former member for Hull deserves not
only the celebration proposed by that favoured borough, but a little serious
reflection upon his writing.2 That is an act of piety, which is very di¤erent
from the resurrection of a deceased reputation. Marvell has stood high
for some years; his best poems are not very many, and not only must be
well known, from the Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse, but must also have been enjoyed by numerous readers.3 His grave needs
neither rose nor rue nor laurel; there is no imaginary justice to be done;
we may think about him, if there be need for thinking, for our own benefit,
not his. To bring the poet back to life—the great, the perennial, task of
criticism—is in this case to squeeze the drops of the essence of two or
three poems; even confining ourselves to these, we may find some pre-
cious liquor unknown to the present age. Not to determine rank, but to
isolate this quality, is the critical labour. The fact that of all Marvell’s verse,
which is itself not a great quantity, the really valuable part consists of a
very few poems indicates that the unknown quality of which we speak is
probably a literary rather than a personal quality; or, more truly, that it is
a quality of a civilization, of a traditional habit of life. A poet like Donne,
or like Baudelaire or Laforgue, may almost be considered the inventor of
an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals.4 Donne is diªcult to analyse:
what appears at one time a curious personal point of view may at another
1 4 6
a n d r e w m a r v e l l
1 4 7
time appear rather the precise concentration of a kind of feeling di¤used
in the air about him. Donne and his shroud, the shroud and his motive
for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not the same thing. The seven-
teenth century sometimes seems for more than a moment to gather up
and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind which (from
the same point of view) the later centuries seem to have been partly en-
gaged in repudiating. But Donne would have been an individual at any
time and place; Marvell’s best verse is the product of European, that is to
say Latin, culture.
Out of that high style developed from Marlowe through Jonson (for
Shakespeare does not lend himself to these genealogies) the seventeenth
century separated two qualities: wit and magniloquence.5 Neither is as
simple or as apprehensible as its name seems to imply, and the two are
not in practice antithetical; both are conscious and cultivated, and the
mind which cultivates one may cultivate the other. The actual poetry, of
Marvell, of Cowley, of Milton and of others, is a blend in varying propor-
tions.6 And we must be on guard not to employ the terms with too wide
a comprehension; for like the other fluid terms with which literary criticism
deals, the meaning alters with the age, and for precision we must rely to
some degree upon the literacy and good taste of the reader. The wit of the
Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden,
the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or
of Swift, the great master of disgust.7 What is meant is something which
is a common quality to the songs in Comus and Cowley’s Anacreontics
and Marvell’s “Horatian Ode.”8 It is more than a technical accomplishment,
or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is, what we have designated
tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace.
You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth; you cannot find
more tha
n an echo of it in Landor; still less in Tennyson or Browning; and
among contemporaries Mr. Yeats is an Irishman and Mr. Hardy is a modern
Englishman—that is to say, Mr. Hardy is without it and Mr. Yeats is outside
of the tradition altogether.9 On the other hand, as it certainly exists in La-
fontaine, there is a large part of it in Gautier.10 And of the magniloquence,
the deliberate exploitation of the possibilities of magnificence in language
which Milton used and abused, there is also use and even abuse in the
poetry of Baudelaire.
Wit is not a quality that we are accustomed to associate with “Puritan”
1 4 8
e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
literature, with Milton or with Marvell. But if so, we are at fault partly in
our conception of wit and partly in our generalizations about the Puritans.
And if the wit of Dryden or of Pope is not the only kind of wit in the lan-
guage, the rest is not merely a little merriment or a little levity or a little
impropriety or a little epigram. And, on the other hand, the sense in which
a man like Marvell is a “Puritan” is restricted. The persons who opposed
Charles I and the persons who supported the Commonwealth were not
all of the flock of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-land Busy or the United Grand Junction
Ebenezer Temperance Association.11 Many of them were gentlemen of
the time who merely believed, with considerable show of reason, that gov-
ernment by a Parliament of gentlemen was better than government by a
Stuart; though they were, to that extent, Liberal Practitioners, they could
hardly foresee the tea-meeting and the Dissidence of Dissent. Being men
of education and culture, even of travel, some of them were exposed to
that spirit of the age which was coming to be the French spirit of the age.
This spirit, curiously enough, was quite opposed to the tendencies latent
or the forces active in Puritanism; the contest does great damage to the
poetry of Milton; Marvell, an active servant of the public, but a lukewarm
partisan, and a poet on a smaller scale, is far less injured by it. His line
on the statue of Charles II, “It is such a King as no chisel can mend,” may
be set o¤ against his criticism of the Great Rebellion: “Men . . . ought and