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Charles Maurras and Eliot's “New Life”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

James Torrens
James Torrens*
Affiliation:
University of Santa Clara, California
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Abstract

In the late 1920's, when T. S. Eliot was haunted by Dante's Vita nuova and by the Earthly Paradise cantos of the “Purgatorio,” he was also very much under the influence of Charles Maurras, the French monarchist and anti-Romantic. He found in Maurras the “criterion” he was searching for—a sense of “order” that would save the poetic sensibility from mere emotional self-indulgence. In 1928, Eliot himself translated an old essay on criticism by Maurras which argued that readiness for impression must be matched by a capacity for selection. Eliot had Maurras very much in mind when he sat down to write his own essay on Dante, and, by a special dedication, he tied the essay very tightly to Maurras, whose treatise on Dante he knew. “Ash Wednesday,” too, with its interplay between the yearning, regretting sensibility, and the expiatory frame that controls it, is a mirror of both Eliot's Dante essay and the esthetics of Maurras. In the long run, however, the tutelage of Dante began to move Eliot away from Maurras.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , March 1974 , pp. 312 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 321 “L'Esthétique des trois traditions,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, Jan. 1913, pp. 11–12. Thibaudet observes that Maurras, when nonpolemical, is more effective : “Son action a été plus profonde lä où elle était moins tapageuse,” p. 12.

Note 2 in page 321 Horace Gregory: “The present selection of essays . . . reaches a climax in the magnificent essay on Dante” (New York Evening Post, 15 Sept. 1932). The Observer (anon.): The “most valuable” of the selections is Eliot's “long and patient essay on Dante” (25 Sept. 1932). G. K.'s Weekly: “To my mind this ['masterly paper' on Dante] is the best section of the book, because in it Mr. Eliot gets down to brass tacks, with clear thinking and direct statement” (24 Sept. 1932).

Note 3 in page 321 Review of Selected Essays by T. S. Eliot, The Daily Telegraph, 30 Sept. 1932. Was Eliot consciously echoing West several years later when he claimed that Milton had “done damage to the English language from which it has not wholly recovered” (“Milton i”)?

Note 4 in page 321 See also the pages (175–81) devoted to Maurras by Herbert Howarth in Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965). Paul Elmer More wrote to Austin Warren in 1929: “Some time between The Waste Land and For Lancelot Andrewes he underwent a kind of conversion, due largely I believe to the influence of Maurras and the Action Française” (quoted in Arthur Hazard Dakin, Paul Elmer More, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960, p. 269).

Note 5 in page 321 Eliot revealed this in a letter about Maurras to Aspects de la France, 25 April 1948.

Note 6 in page 321 In a recent essay, “G. K. Chesterton's Non-Fictional Prose,” W. H. Auden discusses Chesterton's reputation as an anti-Semite. He lays heavy blame “on the pernicious influence . . . exerted by the Action Française Movement” not only upon the generation of G. K. and Belloc but also “upon the succeeding generation of Eliot and Pound” (Prose, I, Spring 1970, 18).

Note 7 in page 322 Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 14.

Note 8 in page 322 Eliot's review appears in The New Statesman, 1 (24 June 1916), 284. The English translation of Dante in this passage is from The Temple Classics, which Eliot used in the 1929 essay on Dante and which he claims to have used in his college years when he was picking his way through the Italian version of the Commedia.

Note 9 in page 322 Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (New York: Ungar, 1965), p. 33.

Note 10 in page 322 We Have Been Friends Together, trans. Julie Kernan (New York: Longmans, Green, 1942), pp. 74, 76, 84.

Note 11 in page 322 Quoted by Jean de Fabrègues, Charles Mourras et son Action Française (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1966), p. 171. “Barbarism begins when the sensate animal, preferring itself to the rational animal, presumes to determine its way by itself.”

Note 12 in page 322 “Romanticism is born at the point where sensibility usurps the function which is foreign to it and, not content to feel or to furnish the soul with that warmth of life which is necessary to it, undertakes to impose its own direction on the soul” (Maurras translated from de Fabrègues, p. 168).

Note 13 in page 322 The words are from an essay of Valéry's, “La Crise de l'esprit,” which Massis acknowledges as the impulse behind his own rousing and strident “Defense of the West” published by Eliot in The Criterion, 4 (April 1926), 225.

Note 14 in page 322 “A Commentary,” The Criterion, 4 (Jan. 1926), 5.

Note 15 in page 322 The Monthly Criterion, 6 (Jan. 1928), 11–12. The second installment of the essay is in the April 1928 issue.

Note 16 in page 322 Beatrice is “the poem's flesh and blood, its matter and burning life, whatever vibrates strongly and warmly in its voice.” This and the following quotations are taken from the 1920 edition (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale), pp. 27–39.

Note 17 in page 322 “She will return to ease the agitation and the trouble into which his feeling has flung him.”

Note 18 in page 322 “To see her and to contemplate her will amount to knowledge and full comprehension. ‘Beatrice gazed on high, and I gazed on her.‘ ”

Note 19 in page 322 In his brilliant essay “T. S. Eliot and Dante,” Mario Praz has fully recorded Eliot's indebtedness to The Spirit of Romance and to Pound's table talk about Dante for the lines from Dante that keep appearing in his poetry and the passages that turn up in the 1929 essay. Many of the critical convictions that Eliot fervidly expresses in this essay derive in part from Pound—that foreign language quotations not yet understood have a mysterious impact, that Dante and Shakespeare share preeminence, that Dante is “master,” that by the “clear visual images” of their allegory the medie-vals had learned to separate themselves from emotions and achieve an “objective imagination.”

But Eliot had no real interest in the esthetics of beauty, the readiness for breathless admiration, that was Pound's bread and butter. And Eliot's fascination with the expiatory theology of the Purgatorio did not touch Pound at all, who had no love for “the incommodities of ascetic yoga.” In fact, Pound felt he could leave the doctrine of the Commedia entirely aside. Pound held to a contemplative vitalism, which is poles apart from Eliot's interest in the moral drama of Dante.

Note 20 in page 322 “The Social Function of Poetry,” in Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Wooster Stallman (New York: Ronald Press, 1949), p. 107.

Note 21 in page 322 “London Letter,” The Dial, 71 (Aug. 1921), 216–17.

Note 22 in page 322 The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), pp. 18, 40. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, too, abounds in treatments of organized sensibility, esp. in the Introductory Lecture (see pp. 18–19) and its appended Note “On the Development of Taste in Poetry.”

Note 23 in page 322 “Dante incarnates and gives life to abstract ideas because he loves or hates them intensely; he is the most passionate and the most decided of poets ; never has a man, shaken to his depths, been able to find his repose in the luminous heaven of a more pure reason” (Le Conseil de Dante, pp. 49, 8, 24).

Eliot shows very little interest in any view of Dante as a man full of vital energy, whether the Garibaldian Dante of Croce (“a robust will, a heart that has experienced much, an intellect sure of itself,” The Poetry of Dante, trans. Douglas Ainslie, p. 254), or the hero-artist of Pound imposing form on the flux of impressions. Pound calls the Commedia “the tremendous lyric of the subjective Dante” (The Spirit of Romance, p. 153).

Note 24 in page 322 Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (New York: Farrar, 1964), p. 115.

Note 25 in page 322 “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1932), p. 117.

Note 26 in page 322 The New Life, trans. William Anderson (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), p. 1.

Note 27 in page 322 The New Poetic (London: Hutchinson Univ. Library, 1964), p. 144.

Note 28 in page 322 “The Cleft Eliot” (originally called “Mr. Eliot's Return”) appeared as a review of Eliot's Selected Essays in The Saturday Review of Literature. 9 (12 Nov. 1932), 235.

Note 29 in page 322 “From Poe to Valéry,” in To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, 1965), p. 38. More wrote of Eliot to Austin Warren, 11 Aug. 1929: “He seems to cherish the theory—very heretical in my eyes—that ethics and esthetics are to be kept rigorously separate. I remember that last summer, after reading his Andrewes with his prefatial program of classicism, royalism (the divine right of kings!), and Anglo-Catholicism, I asked him whether, when he returned to verse, he would write the same sort of stuff that he once called poetry, or whether he had seen a new light. His answer was: T am absolutely unconverted.'” This is quoted in Dakin, Paul Elmer More, p. 269.

Note 30 in page 322 Poetry and Morality: Studies on the Criticism of Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), p. 152. Buckley's two chapters on Eliot are almost the perfect counterpoise to C. K. Stead. Stead fully explores the free play of “sensibility” in Eliot; Buckley concentrates on his impulse toward order.

Note 31 in page 322 This is translated from “Deux attitudes mystiques: Dante et Donne” (Roseau d'Or, 14, 1927, 158) which, though an unauthorized version of one of Eliot's unpublished Clark Lectures, is quite recognizable as genuine Eliot, at least in substance.