THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Conrad (including collaboration on the novels The Inheritors of 1901 and Romance of 1903). The Fifth Queen, his
decoratively ornate trilogy of historical novels about Catherine Howard, the unhappy wife of Henry VIII, appeared
between 1907 and 1908. In the latter year he founded the English Review, a pioneer journal which published new
work by established writers such as Hardy, James, Bennett, and Wells, and which also boldly printed poems by
Lawrence for the first time. Ford’s own series of polemical essays on the state of the novel (later republished as The
Critical Attitude in 1911) also appeared in its pages. These essays contrast what Ford sees as the ‘temperamentally
British novel’, a ‘loose, amorphous, genial and easy-going thing’ which had been almost casually evolved by Fielding,
Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, with the tighter, more self consciously artful form developed in France. Ford
praises both James and Conrad for their ‘great attention to their Art’ and it is as a development of their techniques
that his own fictional masterpiece, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion of 1915, can best be appreciated. Although
the first part of the story (provisionally entitled ‘The Saddest Story’ appeared in Blast in June 1914, its fascination
with Conradian shifts in time and perceptions of betrayal and its Jamesian concern with the subtleties of overlapping
relationships and emotions mark it as essentially pre-Modernist in technique. At times, however, its ambiguous
American relater, John Dowell, reveals a knowing awareness of the arbitrary nature of his narration before attempting
to console himself ‘with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the
way a person telling a story would tell them’. The Good Soldier doubtless seemed an appropriate title for a novel
which finally appeared in wartime. Ford’s exploration behind the disciplined and gentlemanly façade of his title
character was to a limited extent continued in his post-war tetralogy Parade’s End. The four novels, Some Do Not ...
(1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928), are concerned with the
gradual break-up of the traditional squirearchical values of Christopher Tietjens, an unhappy lover, a largely
unsuccessful soldier, and a rootless, passive, and neurotic survivor after 1918. The very fact of Tietjens’s post-war
career as a restorer of antiques suggests the extent to which he is still trying to make sense of a battered old world
which is now essentially fragmented.
Eliot, Firbank, and the Sitwells
‘When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land’, T. S. Eliot noted in 1931, ‘some of the more approving critics said
that I had expressed the „disillusionment of a generation”, which is nonsense.’ ‘I may’, he continued, ‘have expressed
for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.’ T(homas) S(tearns)
Eliot (1888-1965) the most important and influential English poet of his own and of the two subsequent generations,
did not write The Waste Land (1922) as an Englishman. He was, like his friend and
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early mentor Ezra Pound (‘il miglior fabbro’, ‘the better craftsman’, of the dedication to The Waste Land), an
American resident in London. Unlike Pound, he had studied and found employment in England and in 1927 he took
out British citizenship and was received into the Church of England. It was as the devout Anglo-Catholic author of
the essay Thoughts After Lambeth (a reflection on the resolutions of the 1930 Lambeth Conference of Anglican
Bishops) that Eliot proclaimed the ‘nonsense’ of the belief that his major poem had expressed the disillusionment of a
generation.
If the body of Eliot’s work can be claimed as much for ‘English’ as for ‘American’ literature it is because of the
distinctively cisatlantic pointing that marks it (in his essay on William Blake, for example, he addresses his ‘fellow’
English readers). Although much of his topography, vocabulary, and awareness of public history and culture are self
consciously British, Eliot’s literary roots were cosmopolitan. As a student at Harvard between 1906 and 1914 he had
become acquainted with an eclectic range of philosophical, historical, and literary scholarship. In Paris in 1911 he
attended lectures by Henri Bergson, practised French conversation with Henri Alain-Fournier, and encountered the
monarchist Catholic journalism of Charles Maurras. At Harvard in 1908 he had been sufficiently fired by Arthur
Symons’s account of recent French poetry in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) to send off to Paris for the
poems of Jules Laforgue (1860-87). Through Laforgue he had discovered the attractions of a reticent, ironic, clever,
and referential poetry, a poetry often cast in the form of free-verse dramatic monologues in which a wry persona
expresses himself rather than acts out the private emotions of his creator. The influence of the brittle Laforgue, though
crucial in moulding Eliot’s early style, was transient; that of Baudelaire and Dante proved more lasting and more
haunting. In Baudelaire’s poetry he recognized what he described in 1930 as an elevation of ‘imagery of the sordid
life of a great metropolis ... to the first intensity’, an elevation which ‘created a mode of release and expression for
other men’. Baudelaire remained for him the great inventor of a modern poetry because his verse and language
seemed ‘the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced’. In Dante, by contrast, he found a