The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (87 page)

1–In his letter of 3 July.

2–John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945), Professor of English at Harvard University, 1918–39; author of
Convention and Revolt in Poetry
(1919), but now best known for his study of Coleridge’s sources,
The Road to Xanadu: a study in the ways of the imagination
(1927), which TSE would discuss in
TUPUC
(1933). He was formerly an English professor and Dean of Arts at Washington University, St Louis (1909–18), where he had become a family friend. In due course, Charlotte Eliot would consult him about publication possibilities for her long poem
Savonarola
. TSE wrote in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956): ‘Livingston Lowes was a fine scholar, a good teacher, a lovable man and a man to whom I for one have private reasons to feel very grateful’ (
OPP
, 108).

3–Conrad Aiken,
The Charnal Rose, Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems
(1918).

TS
Valerie Eliot

3 August 1920

Monk’s House, Rodmell,
near Lewes, Sussex.

Dear Eliot,

We have sold out the edition of your
Poems
. I wish we had printed more as we still get orders for them. After deducting copies for review &c we had 190 for sale and these have all gone now. There are still however one or two at the Chelsea Book Club on sale or return not accounted for. Since I sent you the 18/8 in April, we have sold 21 copies, and the receipts have been £1-19-4½. I enclose a cheque for 10/-which is your share. The total receipts from all sales have been £18-10-4, and the total expenditure £6-1-10; the net profits are therefore £12-8-6, of which your share has
been £3-2-6. I sent you a cheque for £1-13-10 last year, 18/8 last April, and now 10/-, total £3-2-6. I hope this is intelligible and correct.

Yours sincerely
Leonard Woolf

MS
BL

Wednesday [4 August 1920]

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Sydney,

I have not read Bridges (in the
London Mercury
) but I should hardly suppose that he was the man to do it.
¹
Sullivan in the
Athenaeum
has hardly said more than that Santayana was worth reading.
²
As for Pearsall Smith, I do not believe that any selections of specimens can give much of a philosopher. I have never liked Santayana myself, because I have always felt that his attitude was essentially feminine, and that his philosophy was a dressing up of himself rather than an interest in things. But still I think one ought to read
Reason in Common Sense
³
or one other volume. Athenaeum
things were exceptionally bad.>
⁴
He is not quite like anyone else. Anyway, I should like to know what you think of him.

Vivien has broken down rather badly – you may have observed last time we saw you that she was looking very ill – and has had to go to bed. She has been very run down lately and the damage was completed by a weekend
visit
,
⁵
which she did not feel at all fit for and which I ought to have prevented. I hope she will be able to come but I am not at all certain. She sends much love to Violet and says she so much liked her letter and wants to answer it.

I haven’t looked up the train, but it will be the earliest after one o’clock that I can get.

With love from both of us.

Yours ever
T. S. E.

1–Robert Bridges, ‘George Santayana’
, London Mercury
2: 10 (Aug. 1920), 409–19: a review of
Little Essays: Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana
, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith. Bridges said he found Santayana’s philosophy ‘very consonant with my own thought’.

2–See J.W. N. Sullivan, ‘The Reasonable Life’, A., 30 July 1920: ‘the wisest volume of essays that has appeared in our time’.

3–The first of five volumes by Santayana comprising
The Life of Reason
(1905–6).

4–Santayana wrote in A., 1919–20, a series of ‘Soliloquies from England’: collected in
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies
(1922).

5–They had visited Garsington with the Aldous Huxleys and the painter Mark Gertler.

MS
Huntington

Wednesday [4 August 1920]

18 Crawford Mansions

I am much disappointed that you can’t come.
¹
I wish we could have made arrangements sooner, and perhaps you would have come. Shall we see you before I go? I shall be here till the 14th. Do let me know when you get back to London. I wish you were going to stay this winter.

T.S.E.

1–Aiken was due to join TSE for a holiday in France.

Published 6 August 1920

Sir,

Mr Hannay doubts whether I have justified my distinction between the critic and the philosopher, and suspects that I am making a distinction between a kind of philosophical criticism of which I approve and another kind of which I disapprove. If I
have
made this distinction between kinds to  Mr Hannay’s satisfaction, and not merely shown that I like some critical writings and not others, then I ought to be content. The frontier cannot be clearly defined; at all events I trust that Mr Hannay would agree that Hegel’s
Philosophy of Art
adds very little to our enjoyment or understanding of art, though it fills a gap in Hegel’s philosophy.
²
I have in mind a rather celebrated passage towards the end of Taine’s
History of English Literature
(I have not the book by me) in which he compares Tennyson and Musset. Taine is a person for whom I have considerable respect, but this passage does not seem to me to be good as criticism; the comparative vision of French and English life does not seem to me to issue quite ingenuously out of an appreciation of the two poets;
³
I should say that Taine was here philosophizing rather than ‘developing his sensibility into a generalized structure.’

I do not understand Mr Hannay’s request that I should quote an instance of ‘this generalization which is neither itself poetry nor discursive
reasoning.’ I find in Chambers (the only dictionary within reach) that ‘discursive’ means ‘desultory’, ‘rational’, or ‘proceeding regularly from premises to conclusion’. Surely I have not pretended that criticism should avoid ‘discursive reasoning’ in this last sense?

As to the question whether my article on ‘The Perfect Critic’ was itself philosophy or perfect criticism, I need only refer Mr Hannay to the
Principia Mathematica
⁴
Chap. II, especially p. 65 (The Theory of Types and the Cretan Liar: ‘Hence the statement of Epimenides does not fall within its own scope, and therefore no contradiction emerges’).

I am, Sir,
Your obliged obedient servant,
T. S. Eliot

1–This letter was written in response to a letter from A. H. Hannay (30 July), questioning TSE’s ‘The Perfect Critic’ (9 and 23 July).

2–G. W. F. Hegel,
The Philosophy of Fine Art
, trans. W. Hastie (1886).

3–The French critic and literary historian Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) wrote in
History of English Literature
: ‘The favourite poet of a nation, it seems, is he whose works a man, setting out on a journey, prefers to put in his pocket. Nowadays it would be Tennyson in England and Alfred de Musset in France. The two publics differ: so do their modes of life, their reading, their pleasures’ (Bk V, ch. vi).

4–BR and Alfred North Whitehead,
Principia Mathematica
(3 vols, 1910–13).

MS
Beinecke

9 August 1920

18 Crawford Mansions

My dear Van Wyck Brooks,

I remember you very much better than you think, when I was a Freshman at Harvard and you were a prominent man of letters there;
²
and later in New York at a certain French restaurant the name of which I think was
Petitpas
. I did not know that you were connected with the
Freeman
and I had not seen the paper until you sent it to me. It is the most interesting of the New York weeklies now, I should say; interesting enough, I should think, to be regarded unfavourably by the Police.

I have just finished a book, and am going abroad for a fortnight, tired and uninspired. I must explain that I write in the evenings and Sundays left me by a banking existence, and am always tempted to promise much more than I can perform. It’s very rare now that I
want
to review any book – unless it is some expensive scholarly work that I happen to covet. I wished last winter that I had had a chance to review Irving Babbitt’s book.
³
But I should probably write so seldom or so irregularly that it is no use indicating any ‘sort of books’. What I have always wanted to do for some American paper is to write occasional London letters.
⁴
I should like to do, of course, any books by a very small number of people in London (when they appear) whose work I admire. But of course they would have to be published in America before you would want to review them, I suppose?

If you ever see Max Perkins remember me to him.
⁵
You would do me a service if you gave me Tom Thomas’s
⁶
address. I suppose he still lives in Italy.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963), literary historian and critic; author of
TheOrdeal of Mark Twain
(1920); associate editor of the
Freeman
, a political and aesthetic magazine, 1920–4.

2–Brooks graduated in 1908, and his first book,
The Wine of the Puritans
, was the occasion of TSE’s first review for the
Harvard Advocate,
7 May 1909: Brooks had exposed, wrote TSE, ‘the reasons for the failure of American life (at present)’.

3–Irving Babbitt,
Rousseau and Romanticism
(1919). Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), Professor of French at Harvard, where TSE had taken his course on literary criticism in France. See TSE’s ‘The Humanism of Irving Babbitt’,
Forum
80: 1 (July 1928); reprinted in
SE.
TSE later wrote that Babbitt’s ‘ideas are permanently with one, as a measurement and test of one’s own’ (
Irving Babbitt: Man and Teacher
, 1941, 103–4).

4–In Oct. 1920 TSE would agree to write a monthly ‘London Letter’ for the
Dial
: his first piece came out in Apr. 1921.

5–Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947), future editor at Charles Scribner’s of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. 6–Thomas Head Thomas (1881–1963) taught art at Harvard after graduating in 1903, then moved to Europe where he wrote
French Portrait Engraving of the XVII and XVIII Centuries
(1910). A friend of HWE, he saw some of TSE’s poems in the
Harvard Advocate
and wrote (said TSE) ‘a most enthusiastic letter and cheered me up. And I wish I had his letters still. I was very grateful to him for giving me that encouragement’ (‘The Art of Poetry’).

TS
Houghton

[August? 1920]

List of Books, the property of Thomas Stearns Eliot
¹

Dearest Tom:  

This is a list of two boxes of books I packed. I do not know whether it includes all. I wish you would mark all you would like, and I will send them when I can. Are there others?

[in TSE’s hand:]  

Marked what I want! Some more in the box Shef sent last year. But there is also  

Century Dictionary §  

Certain French Books  

2 little Sanskrit books. §  §

There was a set of
La Nouvelle Revue Française.
I do
not
want them. I’d like any
family
photographs (Greenleaf etc) that I had, except any I gave away, to Ada, or others.