T. S. Eliot Circa 1930: The Recovery of the Permanent Things

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I What we must not mistake here is the role passion has played in establishing chaos as the measure of our human pre- dicament, lest despair consume us. Nei- ther passion lost, as to the hollow men, nor passion perverted, as by Conrad’s Kurtz, is sufficient justification for reject- ing passion, however, as if passion were now or ever and always falsely spent in the world’s, and humanity’s, destruction simply because it is passion. That is the restoring lesson of the Cross, toward which Eliot increasingly tends in his po- etry as he sees his world increasingly given to chaos. It is also the lesson gradu- ally and gropingly and even grudgingly sought in this last quarter of our century, though such struggling pilgrims as we encounter them appear often as confused or more confused intellectually than Shelley in his murky Platonism. And so Eliot’s arresting epigraph to “The Hollow Men”: “Mr. Kurtz-he dead.” It sets a present action, or rather inac- tion, in relation to Kurtz’s violently mis- spent passion, making the loss of ordi- nate passion more poignant and stirring. The arrest of spirit lamented in the poem becomes intolerable as we read it. But insofar as one experiences through the poem a growing recognition that such an arrest of spirit is intolerable, the reader is less likely to escape into a merely violent action of his own, namely, a rejection of the hollow man because judged as existing where all the indicators read absolute zero. A response of despair is insufficient to the poem, though its voice reflects deep despair. The reader’s sur- render here would but be his own at- tempt to escape his own dilemma of frus- trated desire. The solution does not lie in such a great refusal as this. For it would be a great refusal, in that the reader is himself deeply at risk at a spiritual level. The solution is rather a recovery of intellect to its proper office through a reflec- tion that comes to understand just what is always at risk in passion: the person- the specific, discrete existence named John or Mary, Paul or Magdeline. In that recovery lies a recovery of the implica- tion of realityitself, whether in the reader or in the poet. And it is a recovery made possible in some degree through the poem itself, through this imitation of possible actions by persons relative to their becoming out of sheer being. It is this possibilityin poetryitself that Eliot has come to recognize, witnessed by “Ash-Wednesday’’ and remarked in his Harvard lectures thereafter. For po- etry may have the virtue of returning us to reality itself. And so long as the matur- ingwhich is reflected in that turning is an openness to existences, that openness makes the person less vulnerable to despair, even as it will dictate restraint in the tendency to absolute judgment of rejection out of despair. One holds a Shelley with intellectual caution, lest one’s own finite intellect judge unjustly out of illusion rather than through a maturing vision of the truth of the thing judged. In a truthful judgment not only the limits of the judging intellect are honored, but also the limits of being in the thing judged are therefore more clearly perceived. It will not follow, of course, that such openness to things means an abandon- ment of judgment out of fear of unjustness to things. Judgment is discrimination, measured by the reality of the things judged. After all, poems are not paint- ings; art is not life. And more insistently demanding upon intellect, if one be critic or poet, all poems are not great poems anymore than all poets are equal in their particularizing gifts. The desirable openness to things as existences indepen- dent of intellect makes it not only possible to, but also obligatory upon, that intellect to discover and credit by intellectual judgment likeness in unlike things, unlikeness in like things. It is through such judgment of thing among things that one comes to recognize and accept Modern Age 219
the hierarchy, the order, in existing things. In the growing capacity for distinction among existent things out of an intellectual openness to being, intellect will neither confuse stones with trees, nor trees with their resident owls, nor owls (or whales) with persons. Nor will one confuse a particular person with another particular ~erson.~ One need not demonstrate how far removed we now are from makingsuch discriminatingjudgments, required of intellect by piety toward the complexity of creation itself. From evening news to learned academic argument, sentimentality replaces the proper offices of judgment so that proper discrimination may be avoided. The warm glow of feelings in place of thought casts a twilight spell on the chaos steadily encroaching upon consciousness. Not, of course, that the openness of intellect to the orders of being, governed by the necessities of discrimination among beings, may deny to any particular thing the virtues peculiar to it and it alone as the thing it is. The destruction by intellectual indiscrimination lies precisely here: in a judgment absolving particular things of their limits, resulting in what is in truth sacrilege against the holiness of particular things. It is such violation that we practice, for instance, when we announce as a principle of political order that anyone can be president, or that a person can be whatever he wants to be, the confusing message permeating social and political thought in our time, to the despairing confusions among our young persons. For a maturity of discrimination is the process of life itself to rational spirit, to person becoming person out of discrete gifts. And it leads to a truth not to be denied except at great cost to the person each is: things, by the very fact of their existing at all, are not equal in their actualities, however much we pretend otherwise. It is an immature capacity for discrimination in Eliot at fifteen that led to his excessive infatuation with Shelley, which in retrospect he sees as suitable enough to the conditions of his early encounter. It is that same limiting circumstance that made him as a child not respond fully to Shakespeare. For, as he says, the “per- ception ofwhy Shakespeare, or Dante, or Sophokles holds the place he has [in our literary tradition] is something which comes only very slowly in the course of living.” And, we add, it is a growth in a tradition of the blood more or less sus- taining one toward a capacity to per- ceive and understand the why. In the course of living, one grows toward a belief or disbelief which is neither pre- cipitately arbitrary nor absolute. Again, in a scholastic perspective, one comes more and more into the actualities of one’s personhood, within the limits of the potential given one: one’s specific being as person, that complex particu- larity wherein one is and becomes. Having come to this realization through “Ash-Wednesday,’’ Eliot does not condemn himself for the earlier infatuation, any more than he repudiates some of that earlier criticism with which he has come to disagree very radically. For that criticism has been in part the means whereby he has come to his personhood. Even so, he would likely rebuke us were we not at least to caution any forty-year- old poet or critic who clings to the infatu- ations of his intellectual youth. If there is such a creature as the popular “dirty old man” of sexual forwardness, there is also that creature warranting caricature, the froward intellectual: atrophied through neglect of mature discriminations and pretending to an intellectual virility through empty enthusiasms collected from youth. It is he who will prove the bane of humanistic recovery in the acad- emy for this decade. We would seem, by this point of our consideration of Eliot, to have reached a dilemma in his position. That is, we would seem to have merely substituted one 220 Spring 1995
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T. S. Eliot Circa 1930: The Recovery of the Permanent Things

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