Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK ELIOT JOHN CHAMBERLAIN anclHISAGE IT WAS HARDLY the "age of Eliot" when the poet and critic whom Russell Kirk calls "the greatest man of letters in his time" was alive and active. Shaw, Wells, and Hemingvvay, to pick examples at random, had much greater names. Nevertheless the title of Mr. Kirk's book, Eliot and his Age (Random House, 463 pp. $12.50) has an ex post justification: the dominant literary and philosophical trends of the earlier Twentieth Century are manifestly dying, while Eliot's "moral imagination," which pene trated to the heart of what Mr. Kirk calls "the Permanent Things," is bound to have more and more intIuence as time goes on. T. S. Eliot was considered very much a contemporary symbol for a few brief years when his The Waste Land was taken to be the poetic counterpart of James Joyce's Ulysses. The children of 700 the "lost generation" accepted The Wa.,ste Land, with its vivid images of decay, as the definitive state ment of a negative philosophy. It had been published in The Dial, which Professor Copeland of Har vard considered decadent. With lovely women stooping to auto matic folly, with hollow men lean ing witlessly together, and with people dancing around prickly pears instead of mulberry bushes, Eliot's early poetry evoked a world without values. The contrast with the literature of the ages of belief was painful, even as Joyce's "odys sey" in modern Dublin, when stacked up against the Homeric model, was painful. But pain was delight in ,those days; we reveled in our agnostic gloom.

If The Waste Land set the an archic mood of the early Nineteen Twenties, when all the faiths were questioned, it can't be said that 1972 ELIOT AND HIS AGE 701 Eliot dominated anything when, with the essays of For Lanc'elot Andrewes, he suddenly proclaimed himself in 1928, to be a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. The generation that had taken The Waste Land to be a full state ment of an enduring despair felt that Eliot had lost touch with reality. The new faiths that were aborning at the end of the Twen ties and in the early Thirties were secular, the politics of the time ac cepted commissars but not kings. As for "classicism," how could the author of Prufrock and The Waste Land have any truck with such sterile categorizing? He had broken a mold, departed from tra dition, and now here he was ex tolling tradition. Eliot's friends in Bloomsbury were mystified, if not aghast.

Prophet or Anachronism? As a magazine editor and essay ist in the Thirties, Eliot was ac cepted as a prophet by a few and as an anachronism by the many. Most of his contemporaries in England had gone Left; the Span ish Republicans, manipulated more and more by the Communists, were all the rage. In America the young flocked to the New Deal and the proletcult took over in the New York publishing companies. It was distinctly not the "age of Eliot." Russell Kirk, who came of age as a writer in the Nineteen Fifties when the new conservative move ment was just getting started in America, cannot really believe that Eliot's magazine, The .Criterion, was generally regarded in the pre World War II period as a futile effort to put back the clock. But if Kirk can't quite conjure up the anti-Eliot flavor of the Thirties, his very inability to credit the potency of the socialist and inter ventionist trends in politics and the power of agnosticism in the spiritual realm has enabled him to see Eliot clear. Kirk sees things in The Waste Land that we couldn't see a generation ago. Eliot was always fascinated by Dante, and Eliot's own career was des tined to have a symbolism that might be summed up in Dantesque terms. The Waste Land and Pru frock were Eliot's Inferno. He struggled out of his earthly hell through the purgatory of his Ash Wednesday. The Paradiso was to come later, when Eliot, defending the idea of a Christian society, found that he could believe in a religion based on revelation and authority.

Going deeply into Eliot's con. temporary journalism as well as into his poems, plays, and books of essays, Mr. Kirk turns Eliot into a J ohnsonian figure of plain com mon sense. Eliot's comments on 702 THE FREEMAN November the march of the dictators, his criticism of Britain's conserva tives for their failure to solve the problem of the social crisis at home and to arm the empire for the coming war against Hitler, have the true prophetic ring. They can stand reprinting as the con temporary observations of the Webbs, the Shavians, the Wells ians, and the wri ters of the Bloomsbury clique cannot. The wonder is that they had such little impact at the time. Bulwark for Conservatism But if the pre-World War II Eliot was a prophet without honor both in his native United States and in his adopted England, he is having his delayed effect. Kirk has managed to turn him into a mighty bulwark for Burkean conserva tism. The inner order, as both Ed ITlund Burke and Russell Kirk in sist, must· affirm cultural and reli giouscontinuity. The outer order, the achievement of a true com monwealth, will take care of itself if the inner order is based on what Mr. Kirk calls Right Reason and a f aith that accepts both the morality and the mystical sense of an unseen ruler of the universe.

Kirk is against what he calls Demon Ideology; human nature, as he sees it, must revolt against the effort to force life into pat terns that come from the brain of a Hegel, a Marx, or even an Adam Smith. Society has an organic con tinuity that includes many logical inconsistencies, and Kirk is willing to accept the organic as against the dictates of individual ration ality and private judgment. As a practical matter, I can see why the organic must be defended against those who would abolish inconsis tencies by invoking force; a sane commonwealth must move slowly when it comes to abolishing any thing that has become dignified by tradition. If we don't move slowly, we end up killing each other. But the Burkean position necessitates a willingness to accept some fuzziness at the edges that makes critical discourse unsatis factory. I wish I could be sure I knew what Kirk means when he speaks of Right Reason. He leaves me groping fuzzily for definition. If reason can be wrong, isn't it a sign that it is unreasonable in the first place? Again, Kirk speaks of the "higher reason," which trans cends "neat constructions." If Kirk, emulating Eliot, is merely saying that there are things we must take on faith (life is rooted in myste~y), I can follow him. But I don't know what he gains by the hypostasis that is implied· by the use of such terms as Right Reason, the Higher Reason, the Permanent Things, and Demon Ideology. They 1972 ELIOT AND HIS AGE 703 demand what might become whole libraries of qualification, and so they become thought-stoppers in stead of thought-liberators.

In general, however, Kirk is plain enough. The Burkean tradi tion, which he exemplifies, cannot be reconciled with Fi ve-Year Plans, or with centralized controls and dictated prices. T. S. Eliot's Burkean common sense implies a general defense of the free mar ket, which makes Kirk's latest book relevant for readers of an economic journal. Incidentally, the book, which is not a biography, contains enough biographical ma terial to satisfy those who are curious about one of our great exiles. In all, it is a most distin guished work. ~ THE IDEOLOGICAL IMAGINA TION by Louis J. Halle (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1972) 174 pp., $6.95 Reviewer: Edmund A. Opitz THIS COMPACT book is divided into thirty-nine short, pithy chapters; the style is terse, sometimes aphor istic. It reads like good conversa tion. A dedicated totalitarian might not get the message, but these pages will surely help the earnest student of society trace the "Gadarene progress" of the na tions from 1789 to 1984. The poli tical disasters of this period proceed inexorably from a wrong assessment of human nature and the human condition, and no im provement is possible except as in dividual persons reorder their own priorities.

It is an observed fact that peo ple differ, one from the other, in their beliefs, their interests, their talents. A free society, such as the nation contemplated by the au thors of The Federalist, seeks to accommodate this diversity, and to profit from it. Most modern na tions, however, are under the sway of an ideology which contends that state power should be used to im pose uniformity on the masses; those who differ, those who dis sent from the ideology are repro gramed or liquidated. In whose minds were conceived the notion that human nature is to be made over? What books argued that this is the task of politics? What is the origin of the modern outlook which persuades so many to per petrate, or endure, or acquiesce in the monstrous evils of the Twen tieth Century? The author touches .upon the straightforward authoritarianism of Hobbes, devotes a couple of pages to Hegel, but dwells at length on the contributions of Rousseau and Marx to the mould ing of the ideological imagination.

There is more to Rousseau than Halle allows, but ideas were 704 THE FREEMAN November launched which turn man into a sick animal and then offer a cure that compounds the disease. The type of man who has emerged in ever increasing numbers since the French Revolution is less con cerned with people and things than with his own feelings about people and things; he's forever fingering his pulse, calculating his responses, examining his motives, and as a result he feels estranged from his fellows. He needs the warmth of the herd to heal the hurt of alienation, and thus is driven to submerge his individu ality and escape personal responsibility in the Marxist state, whose claims on him are total. But the claims are fraudulent; rulers and ruled alike are but falli ble men and the ideas which keep them in their respective places are phony. Weare men and not gods, and should conduct our lives ac cordingly. "It seems to me," Halle writes, "that the primary 'concern of any individual who feels he has a light to live by must be to live by that light himself; it must be with the constant improvement of his own standards; it must be with the level to which he is able to raise himself." I) HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-aN-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 22, NO. 12 • DECEMBER 1972 Back to BasicsFable of the Berry Pickers W. A. Paton 707 An expert recurs to basic principles for light on some of today's complex problems.