GENIUS RECOGNISED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 448, 23 January 1948, Page 8

GENIUS RECOGNISED

I. S. Eliot and the Order of Merit

S. ELIOT is now a member . of the British Order of Merit. The most exclusive company in the world, in respect to achievement in action and thought, receives one who by general consent has been the most ‘important new poet working in English and the most potent influence in poetry during the last generation, To realise the full significance of this honour it is necessary to understand first just what the Order of Merit is. There are various ways of recognising literary worth. Macaulay and Tennyson were raised to the peerage. Many writers have been knighted. Others have been made Companions of Honour, a_ distinction created 30 years ago. The latest Companion is Victoria Sackville-West, and we may attribute her admission as much to her long poem The Land as to her novels. But above everything is the Order of Merit. Had Macaulay and Tennyson lived in the 20th Century, they would certainly have been given this honour, and probably-nothing would have been said about a peerage.

A British statesman once remarked of the highest and most prized British order of chivalry, The Garter, that there was "no damned nonsense of merit" about it. The only thing that counts for the Order of Merit is merit. The Order was founded in 1902 (with a maximum of 24 members), and the story is that it arose from the wish of King Edward VII. to do something for G. F.’ Watts, the veteran painter, and Watts’s refusal to take a title. However that may be, it was a very happy idea to create a real aristocracy of genius and high talent, and guard its door. The standard set at the outset has been carefully maintained. Now and then some scientist or scholar is appointed of whom even the educated public knows little or nothing. That is to say, popular recognition is not an essential. T. S. Eliot enters a company which, in the field of letters, has included Thomas Hardy, George Mere~dith, John Masefield, John Galsworthy, James Bryce, James Frazer, and G. M. Trevelyan, ELIoT’s personal history as well as his achievements give this honour a special interest. Thomas Stearns Eliot,

t believe, is the first person born and; bred American to enter the Order, He was born in Missouri 59 years ago of a family well known in New England for its public service and intellectual pursuits, It was natural that Harvard should be his University. He specialised in philosophy. Study in Paris followed; then more work at Harvard, including a lectureship in philosophy; then a travel. ling fellowship, which took hirtn to Germany and Oxford. In England he taught, wrote, edited magazines, worked in a bank, and became a director of the publishing house of Faber and Faber, When, in 1932, he went back to Harvard for a year as Professor of Poetry, he had been away from his country for 18 years. One thinks of that novelist of two worlds, Henry James, and the resemblance is closer than might be supposed. Eliot greatly admires Henry James. During the first World War, at the close of his life, Henry James became a British subject as a gesture of gratitude and affection. Eliot took this step in 1927 as, in the words of a biographer, "a result of his growing interest in the English Church and State." Meanwhile The Waste Land and other poems had appeared. Bonamy Dobree, & critic of recognised standing, has said that 1922, the year of The Waste Land, will prove as important in the history of the development of English poetry as 1798 when Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. Eliot intro duced something like a revolution into English poetry, but neither in social life, politics, nor literature, was he a revolutionist. He was, and is, a tradition. alist. He goes back to the English mystics of the 17th Century, but he brought a new kind of imagination and technique to the writing of poétry, or extended old techniques. In particu. lar he demanded for a poet the right to explore any situation and use any terms. "No part of life should be bar« red from poetry." This was the development of an old principle. Hence some of Eliot’s lines best known to the public describe "commonplace" things in "com. monplace" language. "The winter evening settles down with smell of steaks in passage-ways." When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand And puts a recordgon the gramophone. But with this went imagination of a high order, deep subtlety, a new employment of words, and lyrical beauty, backed by a scholar’s erudition. Eliot was a difficult poet. He demanded knowledge and intellectual co-operation from the reader. He was highly allusive. He himself furnishes explanatory notes to The Waste Land. It is significant that the quotation-dedication in front of The Waste Land*is in three non-English languages-Latin, Greek and Italian. To a considerable extent Eliot was a coterie poet, and he gave an impetus to coterie writing. His disciples tended to think of poetry as something for a circle smaller and more select than the restricted public to which poetry normally appeals. ' YOUNG poets were influenced by Eliot for two reason. They responded to his principle that a poet should write about anything in any way he chose. This fitted in with the trend towards lack of restaint. And much of Eliot’s poetry was a penetrating satire of a society that, in his view, had lost its

spiritual bearings. "The canker of our industrial civilisation has never been indicated with a more fastidious and disgusted finger," says a critic. "We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men," wrote Eliot. The impressed didn’t stop to reflect that there had been hollow and stuffed men in every age. They were certain that there were a lot of them now, more hollow and more stuffed than ever before. Eliot’s note chimed with the jangling music of a disillusioned post-war world, and to this younger school Eliot became the high priest of exposure and revolt. His influence extended through the Englishspeaking world. It has been very noticeable in New Zealand. Many of his followers went to the Left in politics (if they were not there already), where Eliot did not go. In some of them the spring of the new poetry ended in flats of despair and defeatism, a condition all too characteristic of the years between the ‘wars. :

Reading’ Eliot in those days, it was possible to regard him as a man of deep scholarship but limited sympathies, This did him serious ifjustice. The most startling proof of the breadth of his interests was his volume on Rudyard Kipling, issued a few years ago. No writer of recent times had been so. deeply despised by the young intelli. gentsia as Kipling the vulgar-minded Imperialist. Even to Kipling’s admirers it must have seemed that Eliot would be the last man to find anything good in him, but in this selection of Kipling’s verses with a critical introduction Eliot was able to say quite a lot in Kipling’s favour. There mifst have been some swoonings in Bloomsbury. This brings me to the point that Eliot has a reputation as a critic equal to that as a poet. One writer says Eliot has written the first full revaluation of poetry since Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism published in 1865, Bonamy Dobree thinks Eliot’s literary criticism the most important since Coleridge. Readers interested may be referred in particular to Eliot’s volume The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. But in his own art Eliot has not stood still. To quote still another critic, he has moved from the "fastidious pessimism of The Waste Land towards his own variety of chastened Christian hope." Twenty years ago he described himself as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.". To the later period belong Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, the two most notable attempts in our time to revive the use of verse on the stage. Both these plays have been staged in this country. Eliot does not exclude social action, but sees

in a spiritual awakening the only hope for the world. Humanism by itself is not enough. Only religion will save mankind. If the Eliot of to-day has lost many of his old following, he may have

won a new public,

Liberal