LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

 ‘VISIONS AND REVISIONS’: A CRITICAL AGE FOR CRITICISM?

‘Criticism’, Eliot used to say, ‘is as inevitable as breathing’. We often talk about the literature we read, like Molière's prose-speaking character, even before we have become aware of or decided on a particular critical line that we should like to follow. How far is such informal talk from a real criticism of the work? What is in fact the meaning, the use, the status of literary criticism?

The question has been debated in Europe for a long time now. It has originated hundreds of (apparently) different approaches. In the 1970s, for instance, Eliot's belief that the poem existed ‘somewhere between the writer and the reader’ (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) came back to life in the work of the French critic Georges Poulet. The latter coined a wide range of formulas to explain the relationship between works and their readers, between reader and author. Eliot was well-known and somewhat disliked for his conviction that reading and writing were both a ‘sacrifice’ of personality, a kind of giving in. Here is Georges Poulet, in 1971 (The Critical Consciousness), inventing picturesque phrases for the same reader's surrender. Reading a book, he states, is ‘a way of stepping aside’, allowing innumerable alien words, images, ideas and the alien principle which breeds and houses them to step in and take your place. When we read, our self is ‘sequestered’, he says, ‘dispossessed’, ‘replaced’, turned into a witness, dominated, ‘ruled’, ‘transferred’, even ‘expropriated’ by the writer's words. In Eliot's phrasing,

 ‘you don't really criticize any author to whom you have never surrendered yourself’.

(Letter to Stephen Spender, May 9, 1935)

The critical consciousness is seen by Georges Poulet as a chain of mental windows opening into one another. The reader must, at a first stage, open unconditionally in front of the author. He must follow the work without ‘mental reserve’, without the wish to defend the independence of his own appraisal, with full ‘adhesion’. He must ‘lend’ himself to a stranger, someone outside himself, who suddenly settles inside his brain, feeding on the reader's innermost life. Poulet's reader is at this stage a character haunted by creation, temporarily inhabited by it.

In its turn, the book itself must open just as wide. Valéry used to say,

‘A man has genius if he manages to make me feel I have some of it too’.

Poulet speculates on how much the work is to depend upon the reader, in what way it can elicit the energy as well as the passivity, the active docility of a reader described by Valéry as ‘de bonne foi et de mauvaise volonté’. Poulet states that, before being read, the book is just another object, a heap of printed leaves, a lifeless realm. What differentiates a book from other material objects is the fact that it can only exist outside itself, in the reader's mind. A book is a gift, a privilege to pry into a foreign brain. The author's consciousness flings its gates wide open. A part of his personality, as Eliot puts it, is ‘extincted’ in the process of inviting the reader to step in and inhabit, enliven it for a while. Diderot used to say very picturesquely, ‘My thoughts are my whores’; which Poulet interprets as, My thoughts can be thought by everybody else.

Both reader and writer are thus half dispossessed, half identified, and rely, depend upon each other. As Poulet says,

The 'I' who thinks in my mind while I read a book is the

'I' who writes this book.

There is no question of the real biography of the author when, while we are reading, ‘the person who wrote reveals himself or herself inside us’. Poulet maintains that no biography will ever help the understanding of literature. On the contrary, it is rather the work that leads to and elucidates the author's real life. Here is the same idea, in Valéry's words:

‘If you know everything about me, you know no more than a fable’.

Such ideas have been current since the beginning of the 20th century. Out of them the attempts at ignoring the author in practical, structural, semantic, pragmatic and other kinds of criticism have arisen. Leavis for example wrote (How to Teach Reading) in 1932:

‘It should by continual insistence and varied exercise in analysis, be enforced that literature is made of words, and that everything worth saying in criticism of verse and prose can be related to judgments concerning particular arrangements of words on the page’.

On which Eliot curtly commented:

‘Leavisitism finds literature living and leaves it dead’.

(quoted by A.C. Ward, in 20th Century English Literature, 1901-1960)

Poulet, on the other hand, sees the critic as the owner of a consciousness ‘in amazement’. An intellect incredulously contemplating that interference area (the work) created by the disappearance of walls, of barriers between the reader's and the writer's minds. Poulet sees the work, this common area placed by Eliot ‘somewhere between the critic and the writer’, as a space of identification of the critic with the author. Other critics whom Poulet discusses have hovered over it. Some have missed it. Mentioning Jacques Rivière, Jean-Pierre Richard, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Starobinsky, Marcel Raymond, Jean Rousset, Poulet speaks in turn of a criticism of complicity, another one of lucidity, of sympathetic criticism. But he hastens to specify that coming too close or going out too far away from the work, surveying it either too much emotionally involved or too lucidly withdrawn, lands the critic into failure. His theory is that criticism, at its best, is supposed to strike a delicate balance between two hypostases, both undesirable if taken separately:

‘communion lacking intellectualization and intellectualization lacking communion’.

This is the well-known dilemma of the critic who must do his job in his mind and his heart, as ‘the whole man’ (Eliot's words). It is also the line of Matthew Arnold's reasoning. It might prove interesting to compare what Arnold was obsessed with in the 19th century (he died the very same year that Eliot was born), when criticism seemed to be toddling emotionally, to the turn of mind of an exquisite intellectual toe-dancer like Valéry who, in the 20th century, reached what Poulet calls a stage of ‘hyper-consciousness’.

Arnold's attempts at defining and circumscribing criticism would not seem to go far at all to a critic like Valéry, whom the French prose-writer of Romanian origin Emil Cioran called a ‘galley-slave of nuances’ (‘un galérien de la nuance’). Arnold upheld that criticism must be a ‘free play of the mind’, ' ‘disinterested endeavour to learn, and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world’. Valéry, at the other pole of the process, strove to register (like Poulet later) the thought thinking itself, the critical consciousness contemplating itself instead of a work of art. Arnold saw the work as firmly rooted in the ground of everyday life. Every little event could find a place in his so-called literary criticism. Valéry turned this world upside down, and viewed criticism as rooted solely in the mind. For both of them, the work of art is of secondary importance in the critical effort. As Eliot once ironically remarked,

‘The drum is being beaten, but the procession does not advance’.

Arnold was concerned with what criticism could and should do, with its ‘function’, that of creating a ‘current of true and living ideas’, of preparing, of ‘beckoning’ towards what he called an age of creativity. In his words:

‘... to have the sense of creativity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and consciousness will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible.

Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that’.

As far as Eliot was concerned, Arnold’s submission of criticism to the work was not forgotten. With Valéry, as with most of the French critics who followed or reacted against him, it is an altogether different matter. Criticism tends to grow independent. It turns upon itself, calls itself creative, scientific. It plunges into a re-evaluation, a new philosophy of creation, of language, of communication, of signs, of society, of the conscious and the subconscious. It uses the novel or the poem as a mere spur to think away from it. It does not support, it rivals the work of art. This is the critical hubris, the critic's arrogance in the 1970s.

Arnold's love for the ‘free play of the mind’ bears part of the responsibility for paving the way towards a sentence like Valéry's:

‘In my opinion the only genuine philosophy lies not in the objects of our meditation but in the very act and process of our thought’.

(Poésie et Pensée Abstraite)

It is fascinating to watch the older, the newer, the no-longer-new criticism explain, define, button up and unbutton itself, close and open like a sensitive plant. The self-defining of this narcissistic criticism has progressively less and less in common with the piece of literature it starts from. More and more ‘methods’ are concocted, to be swiftly turned into what Valéry said they should never become: doctrines. To understand the statements of most such critics, the uninitiated must apply themselves to the study of their vocabulary as if it were a foreign, falsely friendly language.

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      Thus surrounded by chameleonic, fashionable or outmoded critical idioms, Eliot followed steadily in Arnold's footsteps. He looked left and right, only to ridicule the short-lived critical fashions (impressionism, structuralism, ‘leavisitism’ and other -isms of the same kind) with fierce irony. His is a criticism based on practical common sense. His opinions are characterised by a cunning, at times unambiguous courage of saying no to the narrow veneration of one critical method alone. He did not discourage innovators. He stole the grain of salt in every critical finding, and turned back to his own frame of mind, discarding the rest. An experimenter, a modernist in poetry, Eliot is definitely a postmodern in his explicit criticism.

In his  first book of criticism,  The Secred  Wood (1920), Eliot published the essay The Perfect Critic. He starts by acknowledging Coleridge and Arnold as notable forerunners in critical matters. The subsequent image of 20th century critics is depicted by thirty-two-year-old Eliot with grinningly assumed bewilderment. He discerns two directions in English criticism: verbalism and impressionism. Both are ridiculed in the two  parts of the essay.

Tongue in his cheek, Eliot first expresses his animosity against the impressionistic critic, typified by Arthur Symons. The latter's book on French symbolism in literature was in fact a valuable introduction for Eliot to what he later called the indispensable preliminaries to finding out his peculiar manner, his original poetic voice. Impressionistic is a word always placed with mock respect between inverted commas, as if the word were too refined to have been devised by humble Eliot himself, as if Eliot felt a shyness in using it. The impressionistic critic is described as a ‘sensitive and cultivated mind’, well furnished with a variety of just and keen ‘impressions from all the arts and several languages’. His criticism, Eliot states, aims at creating impressions which must be shared by the reader. This is the weak point, which Eliot attacks violently. Symons is quoted, with statements like:

‘Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I think, of all Shakespeare's plays’.

Eliot's conclusion to those words is that, instead of producing an essay on a work of art, Symons sets about reenacting it. Everything that Symons does is blamed: retelling the plot, commenting on the characters' motives, using all the narrative threads stolen from the work, which any critic includes in his analysis, as a common language between him and the reader, and of which – by the way – Eliot's criticism is in bad need itself.

As far as the critic's impressions as a simple reader or, as Eliot puts it (rather ambiguously), his ‘pure feelings’ aroused by the work are concerned, Eliot does not object. It would be all right if this critic stopped short at the stage of feeling, of experiencing his impressions aroused by the work. But there would be no criticism written if the critic were to stop at the stage of reading. Eliot's anger is kindled by what follows. He claims that, in the process of putting pen to paper, the impressionistic critic forgets his position of a mere reader. He strives to take the place of the author, to use the piece of literature examined as a rough material, to reshape it into something else, to build his critical book by chopping, rearranging, killing the work he deals with. Eliot, true follower of Arnold, is unwilling to tolerate that the real creator should be belittled or ignored. Criticism, in his view on literature, is to play second fiddle.

Eliot's verdict is that the impressionistic critic suffers from a ‘mixed critical and creative reaction’:

‘... the reading sometimes fecundates his emotions to produce something new which is not criticism, but is not the expulsion, the ejection, the birth of creativeness’.

He is an incomplete artist, lacking an ‘adequate outlet for the creative impulse’, because of a ‘defect of vitality or an obscure obstruction which prevents nature to take its course’. After making public this shameful deficiency, Eliot withdraws with a final blow. Swinburne (poet and critic, like Eliot himself) was an able poet, therefore an able critic, Eliot decides. Symons was neither. And a conclusion is drawn, which announces Eliot's life-long favourite obsession:

‘... the artist is (...) oftenest to be depended upon as critic’.

Why? Because no critic who is a good poet or novelist himself will ever dream of belittling his creative gift. Because, in a good poet,

‘the circuit of impression and expression is complete’,

leaving thus room in the man for neuter critical statements, not vitiated by unfulfilled creative aspirations.

The sore point of the second direction of English criticism noticed by Eliot at the turn of the century, diagnosed by him as a ‘verbal disease’, is its vague, so-called scientific vocabulary. The disease, we might say, has not been cured yet. Here is Eliot's accusation:

‘... if a phrase like ‘the most highly organized form of intellectual activity' is the highest organisation of thought of which contemporary criticism, in a distinguished representative, is capable, then, we conclude, modern criticism is degenerate’.

It is true that the sentence relies upon a conditional, but this is only a grammatical strategy to make the remark more palatable. We feel that Eliot hardly entertained any doubt as to what he was saying, that his anger against the English criticism of his time was deep rooted.

If, at first, he questioned the creating energy of the impressionistic critic, causing him to tumble headlong into the work and lie there, now he touches upon the delicate question of style. He allowed little freedom to the creative impulse of the critic's sensibility, because, he said, it bred weak impressions, second-hand novelties, as long as the critic was not an artist as well. In point of style, Eliot's long-cherished mood is that of verbal insecurity. He is poignantly aware that words do not have clear-cut meanings, that they tend to become ‘indefinite emotions’. They disarmingly change their meanings with each generation (if not even oftener than that). ‘What they have lost’, Eliot wails, ‘is definite, and what they have gained is indefinite’. Language is no safe ground to tread on. The same as for Valéry, language is for Eliot a realm of quicksands. His essays abound in histories of words, etymologies, inventories of meanings for one and the same term. When he ceases probing his heart, Eliot delights in suspecting his words. This is in fact the suspense and charm of his prose. Nothing is with him ever certain.

The cause Eliot finds for this verbal insecurity is the following:

‘When there is so much to be known, when, there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not’.

Paul Valéry had the same feeling when he imagined the human brain to be a grey mixture of confused words, sentences, pages, news and discoveries massed together, and when he warned us that, if we ever tried to take out one word alone and probe it too closely, tramp on it as if we were walking the plank, the word was bound to give way, to shed its meanings and plunge us into an abyss of confusion, of uncertainty. Eliot concludes, then, that the critic's style must by no means be dogmatic:

‘The dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who affirms a value, has left his labour incomplete. Such statements may often be justifiable as a saving of time; but in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse or better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the correct judgment for himself’.

A few things stand out clearly in this fragment. First, that criticism is in fact powerless. Its mission is to ‘elucidate’, not to judge. The word will be used by Eliot to the very last. At times, he tries to explain that by ‘elucidating’ a poem he means that the critic must provide preliminary, factual information: explain historical circumstances, various meanings of less currently used words, and so on. Most often, the word is safely left unexplained, the same as other enigmatic favourites of Eliot's, like ‘enjoyment’, ‘entertainment’, ‘pure feeling’, etc. Second, that the only person entitled to forming a judgment is the reader. The critic is thus driven out of that space of interference between the poet and his readers, which is the poem. As a common reader is indeed liable to form a judgement, but is quite unlikely to pass it in writing, the logical conclusion would be that Eliot does not look with exceeding benevolence upon the fruit of critical labour.

The end of the essay brings Eliot very close to Arnold. It deals with the ‘free intelligence’ of the good critic, who must not allow other emotions ‘except those immediately provoked by a work of art’ to peep from his essays. Against Coleridge's constant metaphysical interest, which jumped at any occasion for personal associations, Eliot warns:

‘Coleridge is apt to take leave of the data of criticism, and arouse the suspicion that he has been diverted into a metaphysical hare-and-hounds. His end does not always appear to be the return to the work of art with improved perception and intensified, because more conscious enjoyment; his centre of interest changes, his feelings are impure. In the derogatory sense he is more 'philosophic' than Aristotle. For everything that Aristotle says illuminates the literature which is the occasion for saying it; but Coleridge only now and then. It is one more instance of the pernicious effect of emotion’.

An unuttered obsession steals out of such final verdicts, namely that nothing and no one is allowed to trespass the area between writer and reader. We must over and over again ‘return to the work’. The criticism of the 1970s preaches the same creed, with the difference that it retraces its steps towards the author after having sown its wild oats elsewhere. Eliot never leaves the precincts of the work. His criticism is authorially authoritarian.

Last of all, after two types of criticism have been at length reprimanded, Eliot tentatively broaches upon what, in his view, literary criticism ought to be. He finds out that personal emotional involvement in the work, the same as its opposite, ‘theoretical scaffolding’ (a cold, intellectual, generalizing survey of the work), are both undesirable. The same as Georges Poulet, he tries to combine the two. He claims that criticism should be a ‘development of sensibility’ into a structure of generalizations. Later, in the 1960s, he explained that all the generalizations he had ever produced had been a device of intellectually defending his own emotional preferences. He tries thus to strike a fragile balance inside himself, to walk the rope between feeling and thinking. It is true that (in opposition to Valéry) he strives after a balanced, half personal, half impersonal, both emotional and meditative critical approach. Yet, to use one of Yeats' metaphors, with Eliot the critic, all ladders finally go down to the ‘rag and bone shop of the heart’.

It may be in many ways significant to point out that two imposing men of letters of this century – Paul Valéry and T.S. Eliot – were both poets, playwrights and essayists at the same time. Though very much concerned with the fate of literature, each on his line stopped short of becoming a literary critic proper. Valéry's literary appraisals circumambulate his one and only intellectual passion: forcing his mind to watch itself at work, spying a judgment before it has been uttered, while it is still a thought thinking itself out. Eliot's essays leave the same exhilarating yet awkward feeling that they de not come of age, that they were born at a critical time for criticism.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swinburne, Arnold were also both poets and critics. Only their critical approach was faster, less self-questioning. There was less self-examination in their judgment of a work. Theirs was a criticism that followed shortcuts. Eliot, on the contrary, developed a strategy of delays, of backward glances, of visions and revisions. His essays usually start by enumerating what they are not going to undertake: a list of denied directions, of possible impulses nipped in the bud. When the list of things Eliot is not going to say about one author or another has been exhausted, he pauses. He gasps for breath, and ends with a sigh and a warning. After so many mistaken interpretations (spotting other critics' errors is Eliot's most effective resource), there is only one hope left for literary criticism: to be undertaken (read: stifled) by the artists themselves.

In 1923, Eliot wrote the essay entitled The Function of Criticism. He tries there to push the analysis of his own critical effort as far as he can. The same as with Valéry, his critical theories, the definitions and laws he gives for criticism spring from self-examination. The difference lies in the fact that Valéry tiptoes towards his ‘intellect’, while Eliot professes to dive into his ‘emotions’. Fact is that, in spite of Eliot's insistence that the critic is to concentrate on the work and nothing but the work, his criticism (the same as Valéry's) starts with the contemplation of himself in a mirror, under a microscope and stops there. We learn more about Eliot the poet in Eliot's criticism, than about the other writers he deals with. His criticism, like that of numerous critics that followed him, feeds upon itself. To use one of Valéry's images, it resembles a serpent which continually devours its own tail, and, while we watch it coiling, swallowing itself, we cannot help wondering whether it will ever manage to bite off its own head.

In 1923, the function of criticism seems to Eliot to be a ‘problem of order’. Literature itself seems to him to be an ‘organic whole’, in which, as we learn from another essay (Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919), past, present and future works enter into complex reciprocal relations, modifying one another in all directions. Eliot thus alights upon his spectacular idea that a work written today can change in our minds the status of an older work, and that we must also have an eye open to such backward modifications coming from the future. Criticism is defined ‘in this place’ (Eliot dislikes final statements) as the ‘commentation and exposition of works of art by means of written words’.

The aim of this assumption is to underline that criticism is not an ‘autotelic activity’. Its end is ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’.

Both qualifications are vague. Eliot often tries to dispel their dimness by sketching the histories of the words implied, by comparing his utterances to those of Arnold or more recent critics, or by providing concrete examples. Few of these attempts are successful. The reason of this failure lies in Eliot's inability to look upon another author with what he calls an ‘impersonal’ eye. In fact, when at his best, he reduces everything to himself. He is unable to filter, to ‘comment’ on a work of art without trying, in the process, to size his gift against the respective author's. This may be one of the reasons why he systematically avoids dealing with the subject matter of novels or poems. He seems to be saving that for an implicit comparison with his own poems and plays, a comparison which the reader is tacitly invited to follow in his mind. In support of this hidden intention we may remember here that Eliot always maintained that a practitioner's criticism can only be understood in relation to his other works (poetry or prose).

It is a delicate question to ask how transparent a critic can become in the process of filtering, of sifting through himself a work of art. How he must handle his personality so as not to substitute himself to the author, yet to preserve his personal idiom. It partly springs from Arnold's, then Eliot's own insistence that the critic is expected to play second fiddle to the author. Georges Poulet is of another opinion. He says:

‘No criticism can possibly exist without a first stage at which the critic's intelligence steals inside the intelligence he examines and temporarily settles there ...’

This identification, so much praised by Eliot too, is however seen by Poulet as the mere beginning of the critical act. The essence of the critical labour, as seen by Poulet, comes later, when the critic becomes aware of his own thoughts as distinct from those of the artist. Then, the critic withdraws from the work saying:

‘... my thoughts never fully identify with their object. My intelligence is on this side, not that one. It advances on its own: it sets the pace’.

The literary critic's independence from the author analysed is even nowadays the most delicate area in matters of criticism. It is quite often mentioned, though hardly ever enlarged upon by Eliot. He talks about the need in the critic for independence of judgement, for ‘impersonality’, justness and freedom. Yet, he manages to avert our attention from the liberties the critic might take with the author. Here is an example:

‘... we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences. Here, one would suppose, was a place for quiet, co-operative labour. The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks – tares to which we are all subject – and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When we find that quite the contrary prevails, we begin to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and extremity of his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling oddities of his own with which he contrives  to season the opinions which men already hold, and which out of vanity they prefer to maintain. We are tempted to expel the lot’.

Eliot even goes farther than that. He fiercely ridicules the ‘inner voice’ upon which Middleton Murry suggests that the good critic ought to depend for guidance. As a more desirable alternative, Eliot advances the need for ‘common principles’ and the ‘search for perfection’. In short, the supremacy of the work of art. When he reaches Matthew Arnold, he manages to submit criticism to creation in another subtle way:

‘Matthew Arnold distinguishes far too bluntly, it seems to me, between the two activities: he overlooks the capital importance of criticism in the work of creation itself. Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour, the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism ...’

He goes on to explain that ‘you cannot fuse creation with criticism as you can fuse criticism with creation’, because ‘criticism, by definition, is about something or other than itself’. So far, so good. But he promptly concludes: criticism can never be considered creative and the critic is not a creator of literature. In his opinion,

‘The critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the labour of the artist’.

Eliot's infatuation with what he calls the criticism of practitioners prevented him from falling into the critical hubris of the 1970s. It preserved him from replacing criticism of a work by criticism of another piece of criticism. It was a theoretical limitation with felicitous practical advantages. Eliot had no patience with soaring philosophical generalizations, but possessed what he felt any critic ought to possess:

‘a very highly developed sense of fact’.

He prided himself on ‘dealing with facts’, such as conditions of composition, genesis, to setting of a work. A critic like Poulet might feel humiliated when tasting the sour meal Eliot cooked for those who ventured to interpose between author and the common reader:

‘There is a large part of critical writing which consists in 'interpreting' an author, a work (...) It is difficult to confirm the 'interpretation' by external evidence. To anyone who is skilled in fact on this level there will be evidence enough. But who is to prove his own skill? And for every success in this type of writing there are thousands of impostures. Instead of insight, you get a fiction. Your test is to apply it again and again to the original, with your view of the original to guide you. But there is no one to guarantee your competence, and once again we find ourselves in a dilemma’.

Other critical devices are ridiculed as well. Comparison and analysis, for instance, (‘the chief tools of the critic’, Eliot states) are to be handled with utmost care, we are warned. The grim joke which follows this warning discourages us from using them altogether, as a matter of fact:

‘Comparison and analysis need only the cadavers on the table; but interpretation is always producing parts of the body from its pockets, and fixing them in place’.

The subterfuge of facts cannot fail to remind us of Dickens' obtuse teacher in Hard Times. Especially when Eliot presses his point by declaring that ‘facts cannot corrupt taste’. That this danger only comes from those who ‘supply opinion’. The accusation is made in earnest, and it is unfair. So is his subsequent view of Coleridge:

‘... what is Coleridge's Hamlet: is it an honest inquiry as far as the data permit, or is it an attempt to present Coleridge in an attractive costume?’

In his striving to stifle the critic as a rival of the author, Eliot goes as far as to approve of criticism being replaced by ‘scholarship, even in its humblest forms’. His essay The Function of Criticism ends before it has actually begun. That is, it ends by denying literary criticism most of the functions that it might claim.

In the Introduction to The Sacred Wood, Eliot judges that

‘a moderate number of persons have been engaged in what is called 'critical' writing, but no conclusion is any more solidly established than it was in 1865’.

What is worse, he remarks, ever since Arnold's time critics have constantly been ‘tempted outside criticism’. It proves a lot more difficult for Eliot to state what criticism ought to be, than to surround it by forbidding signs. He manages to stutter that criticism is a ‘department of thought’ (Introduction to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1932). That it is expected to provide a ‘reason for reading’ (Imperfect Critics, 1920). If the critic volunteers to go farther than that, Eliot checks his enthusiasm. He conjures up a devouring dragon called The Frontiers of Criticism, and he lets it loose to leap at whomever proceeds on a critical journey. This is Eliot's secret weapon, and it bears many other names too. In The Age of Dryden, 1932, he speaks of ‘borderlines’ and ‘extremes’ of criticism. Talking about how far criticism can go, Eliot has little generosity to spare. His avarice turns into liberality, however, as soon as he feels called upon to specify the roads that are forbidden to it. His resourcefulness in finding more and more no-entry streets for critics is remarkable:

‘Criticism of poetry moves between two extremes. On the one hand the critic may busy himself so much with the implications of a poem, or of one poet's work – implications moral, social, religious or other – that the poetry becomes hardly more than a text for discourse (...)

Or  if you stick too closely to the 'poetry' and adopt no attitude towards what the poet has to say, you will tend to evacuate it of all significance. And furthermore there is a philosophic borderline, which you must not transgress too far or too often, if you wish to preserve your standing as a critic, and are not prepared to present yourself as a philosopher, metaphysician, sociologist, or psychologist instead. Johnson, in these respects, is a type of critical integrity. Within his limitations, he is one of the greatest critics; and he is a great critic partly because he keeps within his limitations’.

When dealing with other critics than himself, Eliot is therefore a careful observer of frontiers: of poetry, of criticism, of consciousness, of art ... . Other critics' words must go first through the Customs of Eliot's mind. His own frontier, on the other hand, is pretty elastic. However far he goes, his allowed borderline will always be one step ahead. He will never find himself in danger of illegally crossing it unawares. The other critics are all outlaws. Each step they take is trespassing beyond the bounds. A critical essay might even be entitled Eliot and the Outlaws, since he so constantly has in mind frontiers to be guarded against trespassers. Eliot has trained his sight for spying outlawry in criticism. Whenever he is around, criticism meets us in the guise of a gate bearing the notice ‘No trespassing’.

Besides the multiple interdictions that Eliot heaps on the shoulders of most critics he examines, he has one more confusing mental habit. A habit which makes us feel he contributed to bringing about the suspicion that we live in an uncertain, critical age for criticism. His indecision as to how far criticism can go is accompanied by a professed unsteadiness of his judgments, by his passion for revisions. He makes a point of usually specifying the year of composition for each of his essays. He protests against his opinions being quoted as if they were atemporal. He is keenly aware that the passage of time changes both the creator and his creation. As a matter of fact, Eliot the critic seems to have experienced three distinct ages: apprenticeship by identification with another author, which later turns into the critic's own egotistic vision of the same author, and is followed by an endless line of self-revisions. Most prefaces to his books of criticism illustrate one of these ages. Here is a fragment from the Preface to the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood:

‘I discovered that what had happened in my own mind, in eight years, was not so much a change or reversal of opinions, as an expansion or development of interests. There are, it is true, faults of style which I regret; and especially I detect frequently a stiffness and an assumption of pontifical solemnity which may be tiresome to many readers ...’

During the same year, we learn from his Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes:

‘The reader may be puzzled to know why I selected these articles and in this order. I wished to indicate certain lines of development, and to dissociate myself from certain conclusions which have been drawn from my volume of essays, The Sacred Wood’.

Eliot is extremely sensitive to what may become dated in a critical approach. He delights in bringing his views up to date, in the same way that an adolescent earnestly watches the stages of his growing up. Reconsidering statements like,

‘Crashaw is, I believe, a much greater poet than he is usually supposed to be’         

(A Note on Richard Crashaw, in For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928)

abound in his essays. When there is no outside utterance at hand to be reconsidered, Eliot feeds on his own previous opinions, which reminds us of his lines in Prufrock:

‘In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse’.

Here is a significant reconsideration of himself, in 1964 (Preface to the 1964 edition of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism):

‘It is said that Yeats had more than enough of  The Lake Isle of  Innisfree as his anthology piece. In my youth La Figlia Che Piange was favoured as the most innocuous of my poems, but in later years I have been more fairly represented (though I should be glad to hear no more of a bang and a whimper). But with my essays I have not been so fortunate. Just as any student of contemporary literature, putting pen to paper about my criticism, is certain to pass an examination on it if he alludes to the 'dissociation of sensibility' and the 'objective correlative', so every anthologist wishing to include a sample of my essays will choose Tradition and the Individual Talent – perhaps the most juvenile and certainly the first to appear in print.

(...) My earliest critical essays, dating from a period when I was somewhat under the influence of Ezra Pound's enthusiasm for Remy de Gourmond, came to seem to me the product of immaturity ...’

The essay After Strange Gods, 1934, opens in the same way. It announces that some statements in Tradition and the Individual Talent have become unsatisfactory, and Eliot is on the point of reformulating them. The Preface to his dissertation on Bradley (Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley), published in 1964, fifty years after it had been written, reveals that seventy-six-years-old Eliot no longer understands or cares for the ‘academic philosophizing’, or even the terminology of that long essay.

The essay which gives Eliot's self-revising the status of a critical method is To Criticize the Critic, 1961, written four years before the poet's death. It summarizes Eliot's evolution as a commentator of literature. He begins:

‘Of what use, or uses, is literary criticism, is a question worth asking again and again, even if we find no answer satisfactory. Criticism may be, what F.H. Bradley said of methaphysics, 'the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct'.’

He explains that he means to examine his own criticism with a view to stimulating other critics ‘to make similar confessions’, namely to admit publicly

‘all those changes of attitude, taste, interest, and belief which the years bring to pass’.

A critic must teach himself how to grow old. Eliot suggests thus a new task for criticism: that of keeping up with the ages of the critic, the task of constantly revising itself.

Several types of critics are described: the professional critic (also called the Super-Reviewer), the critic with gusto, the academic and the theoretical critic. At last, Eliot comes to his own group:

‘And finally we come to the critic whose criticism may be said to be a by-product of his creative activity. Particularly, the critic who is also a poet. Shall we say, the poet who has written some literary criticism?’

Stealthily and unerringly, in only three apparently innocent sentences, criticism has been kicked to the back row. Poetry has emerged to the front. Eliot includes here Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Dryden, Racine, Matthew Arnold and himself. In 1961, re-reading his own essays dating as far back as 1920, Eliot speaks of them with unassuming, affectionate irony:

‘There are, to be sure, statements with which I no longer agree; there are views which I maintain with less firmness of conviction than when I first expressed them, or which I maintain only with important reservations; there are statements the meaning of which I no longer understand. There may be areas in which my knowledge has increased; there are areas in which my knowledge has evaporated. (...) And there are some matters in which I have simply lost interest, so that, if asked whether I still hold the same belief, I could only say 'I don't know' or 'I don't care'. There are errors of judgment, and, what I regret more, there are errors of tone: the occasional note of arrogance, of vehemence of cocksureness or rudeness, the braggadocio of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind hid typewriter. Yet I must acknowledge my relationship to the man who made those statements, and in spite of all these exceptions, I continue to identify myself with the author’.

Eliot pleads in favour of a new kind of coherence and consistency in a critic's activity: the unity of personality. This unity of the critic's self survives small changes or serious reversals of opinion, such as those to be found in Eliot's two essays on Milton (1936, 1947). Hunting for contradictory statements in Eliot's work is a fairly easy job, indeed. Yet, it turns out to be utterly unrewarding, since one smiling paragraph like the one above is enough to bewilder nagging hair-splitters. Defending the critic's privilege to revise himself, Eliot welcomes contradictions. He looks on them with the benevolent eye of a man who was born in the age of relativity, and who keeps training his mind in such a way as to tolerate (or at least seem to do so) all ideas on earth.

Eliot attacks the image of the critic who feels that from the very first day of his career he has sketched the outline of his whole subsequent criticism, and the only thing left for him to do during the rest of his life will be to conform to it. He expresses his anger at seeing phrases of his youth quoted with no date attached to them, with no reminder to the reader of

‘the distance of time that separates the author when he wrote it from the author as he is today’.

He even turns against the ‘quotable sentences’, which every critic dreams of coining, and for which Eliot himself had a remarkable gift. He feels that such memorable statements, which the readers remember long after the writer has outgrown them, ‘dog’ their author in an uncomfortable, even unfair way. They make him feel awkward about ever changing his views and contradicting his previous utterances.

One such formula, which he produced in 1928 without suspecting its future embarrassing fame, is a sentence from the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes. He states there that he is a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. Thirty years later, he realizes that the term classicism and romanticism have lost their meaning for him, and that, if he were to state his beliefs again, his words would be totally different. Eliot ends his ‘exercise in self-examination’ with a sentence which best defines his critical approach:

‘... I hope that what I have said today may suggest reasons why, as the critic grows older, his critical writings may be less fired by enthusiasm, but informed by wider interest and, one hopes, by greater wisdom and humility’.

Can his attitude really be called humility? To spot and denounce your own errors before (or even if) anyone else has had time to use them against you, is a gymnastics that Eliot loved to practise. He hated to be in the wrong. His tone in his essays coaxes the reader into agreeing, approving, smiling sympathetically, without reserve. Eliot did his best to avoid drowning in an age when literary criticism sinned by belittling the creator and magnifying, closely examining and diagnosing itself, instead. Eliot himself sins by excess of pride in the opposite direction. The critic in him is blindfolded by the poet. The author is almighty. If he happens to make errors, the only one allowed to punish, to revise them must be the same author himself. This is the Eliotian variant of the critical hubris: the intimation that whatever he states is just a link in the chain of a hundred visions and revisions which a minute will reverse.