The Common Pursuit (35 page)

Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum.

Lawrence was not Shakespeare, but he had genius, and his genius manifests itself in an acquisitiveness that is a miraculous quickness of insight, apprehension and understanding. The 'information' that Mr Eliot doesn't deny him (*a lack not so much of information as . . .') is more than mere information; he had an amazing range and wealth of living knowledge. He knew well at least four languages besides his own, and it is characteristic of him

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that in reviewing Cunninghame Graham's Pedro de Valdivia he not only shows a wide general knowledge of the Spanish conquests, but, referring to the original Spanish particular instances of Cunninghame Graham's rendering, censures him for *the peculiar laziness or insensitiveness to language which is so great a vice in a translator'. What those qualified to judge think of Lawrence's dealings with painting I don't know, but he certainly shows an extremely wide and close acquaintance with it, deriving from an obviously intense interest. This appears notably, not only in the Introduction to these Paintings, but also in die Study of Thomas Hardy.

This long Study of Thomas Hardy, perhaps, represents the kind of thing that Mr Eliot has especially in mind when he charges Lawrence with 'an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking'. It is an early work, and hasn't much to do with Hardy. Lawrence frankly admits that he is using Hardy as an occasion and a means, and that his real purpose is to explore, refine and develop certain ideas and intuitions of his own. I found the study difficult to read through; it is diffuse and repetitive, and Lawrence has dealt with the same matters better elsewhere. Yet in the persistent integrity of this exploration the genius is manifest, and without this kind of work we couldn't have had the later ease, poise and economy, and die virtues in general that compel Mr Eliot to say:

As a criticism of the modern world, Fantasia of the Unconscious is a book to keep at hand and re-read.

If Lawrence's criticism is sound that seems to me to be because of the measure in which his criteria are sound, and because they and their application represent, if not what we 'ordinarily call dunking', an extraordinarily penetrating, persistent and vital kind of thinking. He says (p. 611):

What good is our intelligence to us, if we will not use it in the greatest issues? Nothing will excuse us from the responsibility of living; even death is no excuse. We have to live. So we may as well live fully. We are doomed to live. And therefore it is not the smallest use running into pis alien and trying to shirk the responsibility of living. We can't get out of it.

And therefore the only thing is to undertake the responsibility with good grace.

THE COMMON PURSUIT

It is Lawrence's greatness that he was in a position to say this; he was, in fact, intelligent as only the completely serious and disinterested can be. Those who plume themselves on being intelligent but find this notion of intelligence uncongenial will prefer Mr Wyndham Lewis—even a Wyndham Lewis who comes out for Hitler.

I was reminded of Mr Wyndham Lewis by this in Phoenix (p. 271):

have on him, but he retreats into the intellect to make his display. It is a question of maimer and manners. The effect is the same. It is the same exclamation: They stink! My God, they stink!

The Lawrence who thus places Wyndham Lewis seems to me the representative of health and sanity. Mr Eliot's reactions to Lawrence are, of course, at a different level from those referred to at the end of the last paragraph, the common petty reactions of the literary world, and the case that Mr Eliot argues does, at its most respectable, demand serious attention. But it is odd that he should, in pronouncing Lawrence Spiritually sick', be able at the same time to invoke Wyndham Lewis's 'brilliant exposure' and 'conclusive criticism' of any side of Lawrence.

I hadn't intended to end on this note. But my attention has just been drawn to Mr Eliot's essay in Revelation. He treats Lawrence there still more respectfully than in After Strange Gods, but can say:

For Babbitt was by nature an educated man, as well as a highly well-informed one; Lawrence, even had he acquired a great deal more knowledge and information than he ever came to possess, would always have remained uneducated. By being 'educated' I mean having such an apprehension of the contours of the map of what has been written in the past, as to see instinctively where everything belongs, and approximately where anything new is likely to belong; it means, furthermore, being able to allow for all the books one has not read and the things one does not understand—it means some understanding o£ one's own ignorance.

Irving Babbitt, all one's divinations about whom have been confirmed by the reminiscences and memoirs of him that have appeared since his death! Babbitt, who was complacently deaf and

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blind to literature and art, and completely without understanding of his incapacity; who, being thus in sensibility undeveloped or dead, can hardly, without misplacing a stress, be called intelligent! Even as Mr Eliot quotes him and comments on him he appears as the born academic (is that what 'by nature an educated man* means ?), obtuse—Mr Eliot seems almost to bring out the word— obtuse in his dogged and argumentative erudition.

How can Mr Eliot thus repeatedly and deliberately give away his case by invoking such standards e It is an amazing thing that so distinguished a mind can so persistently discredit in this way a serious point of view.

MR ELIOT, MR WYNDHAM LEWIS AND LAWRENCE

FTER STRANGE GODS, like the last set of printed lectures, is clearly not a book the author would choose to have written, and one is tempted to pass it by with a glance at the circumstances of production. Yet the weaknesses, the embarrassing obviousness of which is partly to be explained by those circumstances, cannot, after all, be dismissed as having no significance. Mr Eliot is too distinguished, his preoccupations have too representative an importance, and the sub-title of the book, recalling as it does an old and notorious promise, invites us to consider their presentment here as embodying a certain maturity of reflection.

His themes are orthodoxy and tradition, and, as one would expect, he says some memorable doings. Tradition, for example, he describes admirably as 'the means by which the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present'. And when he describes 'the struggle of our time' as being 'to concentrate, not to dissipate; to renew our association with traditional wisdom; to re-establish a vital connexion between the individual and the race . . .', one again assents with pleasure. But when he goes on, 'the struggle, in a word, against Liberalism', it seems an odd summary.

Mr Eliot's stress in this book, of course, falls explicitly upon the religious needs of the age. And, with conscious inadequacy, holding on to what one is sure of, one agrees that 'to re-establish a vital connexion between the individual and the race' means reviving, in a civilization that more and more, at higher and lower levels, fosters the chauffeur-mentality, what it may be crude to call the religious sense—the sense that spoke in Lawrence when he said, 'Thank God I am not free, any more than a rooted tree is free'. It is the sense, perhaps it may be said, a perception of the need to cultivate which made Dr L A. Richards, in the book in which he speculates about a future in which we shall 'have learned enough about our minds to do with them what we will' and' the question " What sort of mind shall I choose to be ? " would turn

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into an experimental matter' (Practical Criticism, p. 347), invent his 'ritual for heightening sincerity' (ibid., p. 290)—that invention the crudities of which Mr Eliot is, if not excessively, perhaps unnecessarily severe upon in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

What would be the drift of Mr Eliot's comments on the present kind of fumbling inadequacy one knows well enough. The relevance of this, for instance, is plain: * when morals cease to be a matter of tradition and orthodoxy—that is, of the habits of the community formulated, corrected and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church—and when one man is to elaborate his own, then personality becomes a thing of alarming importance.' Mr Eliot has no need to talk hesitantly about the 'need for a religious sense*; he adheres to a religion, and can point to his Church and recite its dogmas.

Nevertheless, those of us who find no such approach to tradition and orthodoxy possible can only cultivate the sense of health we have. 'The number of people in possession of any criteria for distinguishing between good and evil', writes Mr Eliot, 'is very small'. As we watch his in use, we can only test them by reference to our own surest perceptions, our own most stable grounds of discrimination. When, for instance, he says that he is * applying moral principles' to literature, we cannot accept those principles as alternatives to the criteria we know. * What we can try to do', he says, 'is to develop a more critical spirit, or rather to apply to authors critical standards that are almost in desuetude/ The first phrase is strictly accurate: we could recover such standards only by the development— as the development—of a more critical spirit out of the capacity for discrimination that we have already. To put it another way: moral or religious criticism cannot be a substitute for literary criticism; it is only by being a literary critic that Mr Eliot can apply his recovered standards to literature. It is only by demonstrating convincingly that his application of moral principles leads to a more adequate criticism that he can effect the kind of persuasion that is his aim. In these lectures, if he demonstrates anything, it is the opposite: one can only report that the criticism seems painfully bad—disablingly inadequate, often irrelevant and sometimes disingenuous.

And it has, more generally, to be said that since the religious

preoccupation has become insistent in them Mr Eliot's critical writings have been notable for showing less discipline of thought and emotion, less purity of interest, less power of sustained devotion and less courage than before. All this must be so obvious to those who read him (except to the conventional and academic who, having reviled him, now acclaim him) that there is no need to illustrate—the only difficulties in doing so would be to select and to stop. Mr Eliot himself can hardly be happy when he contemplates his recent references to, say, Arnold and Professor Housman, and his references in the present book to Hopkins and Meredith.

These comments one makes, in all humility, as essential to the issue; they are to enforce the point of saying that it is not as a substitute or an alternative that what Mr Eliot nowadays offers us could recommend itself, but only as a completion, and this it is far from seeming. One may at any rate venture that health— even religious health—demands a more active concern for other things than formal religion than Mr Eliot now shows or encourages. Indeed, it seems reasonable to restate in terms of Mr Eliot's situation his expressions of fear regarding Lawrence, fear that Lawrence's work 'will appeal not to what remains of health in them [" the sick and debile and confused "], but to their sickness.'

There is hardly any need to be more explicit: it must be plain why for those preoccupied with orthodoxy, order and traditional forms, Lawrence should be especially a test. I do not—need it be said 2—mean a 'test' in the sense that one knows beforehand what the 'right' reaction is (it will certainly not be acceptance). What one demands is a truly critical attitude—a serious attempt to discriminate and evaluate after an honest and complete exposure to Lawrence. Mr Eliot has in the past made me indignant by endorsing, of all things, Mr Middleton Murry's Son of Woman while at die same time admitting to a very imperfect acquaintance with Lawrence's work. After Strange Gods exhibits something much more like a critical attitude; there has obviously been a serious attempt to understand in spite of antipathy.

It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics, in the context in which I use the term, that they have an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more, but

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less acutely aware of anything. So far as we are able to redress the balance, efiect the compensation, ourselves, we may find such authors of the greatest value.

This is not explicitly said of Lawrence; but it suggests fairly Mr Eliot's implied estimate of him: he is spoken of with respect, as (what he obviously is) 'a very much greater genius' than Hardy, and there is *a very great deal to be learned' from him. We are decidedly far away from the imagined * frightful consequences* of Lawrence the don at Cambridge, * rotten and rotting others'. It would, indeed, have been ungracious to recall this unhappy past if Mr Eliot's attitude now had been consistently or in general effect critical, to be agreed or disagreed with. But it is not; its main significance still lies in its being so largely and revealingly uncritical—and so equivocally so.

The first [aspect of Lawrence] is the ridiculous: his lack of sense of humour, a certain snobbery, a lack not so much of information as of the critical faculties which education should give, an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking. Of this side of Lawrence, the brilliant exposure by Wyndham Lewis in Paleface, is by far die most conclusive criticism that has been made.

The charge of snobbery (repeated elsewhere in this book and accompanied by a most unfortunate tone) may be passed by; what damage it does is so obviously not to the object. But why, one asks, this invocation of Mr Wyndham Lewis ? With all his undeniable talent, is he qualified to * expose' any side of Lawrence ? No one who can read will acclaim Lawrence as a philosopher, but 'incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking'—does not this apply far more to Mr Wyndham Lewis than to Lawrence ? Mr Lewis stands, in a paradoxically high-pitched and excited way, for common sense; he offers us, at the common-sense level, perceptions of an uncommon intensity, and he is capable of making 'brilliant' connexions. But 'what we ordinarily call thinking' is just what he is incapable of—consider for instance the list of names brought together under the 'Time-philosophy' in Time and Western Man. His pamphleteering volumes are not books; their air of sustained and ordered argument is a kind of bluff, as the reader who, having contrived to read one through, can bring himself to attempt a summary of it discovers. If, on the other hand,