After Strange Gods by T. S. Eliot

First published: 1933

Type of work: Critical and cultural essay

Critical Evaluation:

In 1919, T. S. Eliot published a short essay titled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which he attempted to correct a popular notion of tradition which would oppose that term to individuality and originality. Eliot argues that a contemporary writer must neither slavishly imitate the past nor imagine that he, as an individual, can be independent of the past. Making use of the philosopher William James’s ideas, Eliot explains that tradition affects what an individual can do and that what is newly added to that tradition in some small way changes the entire order, from the beginnings to the present. In AFTER STRANGE GODS, Eliot develops and further defines the line of thought begun in the earlier essay, and he goes on specifically to identify the errors which an inordinate and finally misguided reliance on sheer individuality produces.

Eliot perceived that the equating of tradition merely with what we commonly call the traditional not only falsifies the true meaning of tradition in its profoundest sense, but also leads to an exaggerated and dangerous valuation of the individual, of originality and newness. An individual writer who revolts against tradition is forced to emphasize what in himself is most inimicable to that tradition as he conceives it. He will, or has, emphasized passion for its own sake, or as the sole evidence of vitality; he will attempt to concoct his own mythos, his own world-view, and be led, as Yeats was, into abstraction and solipsism. Eliot is aware, though he plays down the fact, that modern writers, including himself, have been driven to fashion a new world-view because the authority of the old Christian-humanist tradition failed during the nineteenth century, at least. His view is that the true Christian tradition, embodied in art and literature as well as in theology and morality, has changed but has not failed.

His argument is complex and challenging; indeed, it is a frontal attack against many of the greatest literary geniuses of this century. Eliot does not question their genius, only some of the ends that genius has been led to. He attacks the notion that tradition is merely those customs, attitudes, or books which, by virtue of having been accepted in the past are therefore to be revered as unchanging standards of taste and behavior in the present. Such a naive notion of tradition, or orthodoxy, makes rigid the authority of the past and makes of it a static criterion of excellence against which the living revolt as from the dead.

Rebelling against a false notion, the modern individualist is led to exploit his differences from others. Eliot would agree, up to a point, with Pound’s injunction to “make it new,” but he warns against newness for its own sake, which then is merely novelty or device or, worse, dangerous self-aggrandizement. Eliot argues that the tradition is not static, but dynamic; a writer, he says, cannot merely mimic what has already been done well, nor can he ignore what has been done. Tradition is the past always reinterpreted, reborn, in the present. It is, finally, our culture, and that culture is and remains essentially Christian in metaphysics and morality. A writer can express his originality, his individuality within it, but he cannot escape it or make up his own tradition. One might well counter by asserting that even in terms of Christianity the tradition has many mansions, that the Church stands for only an aspect of our culture. In AFTER STRANGE GODS, Eliot is, in fact, willing to have the Church act as final arbiter in all matters of morals and speculation. Many will find this view narrow; but it is a stern narrowness which has behind it great weight, whether it appears quite democratic or not.

In fact, Eliot abhors what is usually meant by democracy, seeing it as a half truth fostered by Rationalism and Liberalism and inspired by the leveling tendencies of rebellious and uncultivated Protestantism. To Eliot, D. H. Lawrence was crippled by his childhood immersion in a particularly enthusiastic, uncritical Protestantism, which provided Lawrence’s mother with no standards with which to judge husband or sons. The result is that, to Eliot, Lawrence cannot portray human relationships in terms of any even ordinary social morality. Eliot believes in Original Sin. That is why an Inner Light, which was Lawrence’s guide, may as well be the deception of the devil as a true intuition of goodness. So, inadvertently, the modern genius who goes it alone may end by playing devil’s advocate. Eliot sees Lawrence as a false, fatal leader, Pound as a blind servant of the very mercantile, middle-class society he so deplored. Even Irving Babbitt, as apparently cosmopolitan as Pound, revealed in his over-insistance on reason the narrowness of his conception of orthodoxy and tradition. Yeats grew beyond his earlier attempts to fashion a new tradition. Of Pound’s scathing portrait of Hell, peopled by types drawn from modern life, all those given over to “money-lust,” Eliot comments that Ezra Pound’s Hell offers few terrors for the modern mind because it is for other people, not the beholder. It is so because Pound has no real conception of Hell, because he has no idea of sin, because he has no notion of any tradition other than the Protestant middle-class traditionalism which fostered him and against which he inveighs. Eliot’s is a searching criticism.

To know oneself truly is to know one’s origins. This is having the historical sense which views the temporal and the timeless together. Tradition, as Eliot defines it in AFTER STRANGE GODS, is the sum of all actions, beliefs, and customs that men have acquired by living together in a common society. These two notions combine to produce Eliot’s conception of culture. We use our minds, trained in the historical sense, to preserve from the past all that is worth preserving and making this heritage, so far as we are able, the basis of the sort of society we desire. What this attempt finally requires, says Eliot, is a fundamental unity of religious background. He opposes the abstract sense of political or national community to this religiously oriented sense of people and place. Orthodoxy, as Eliot means the term, is not only Church authority, but also the conscious use of intelligence to foster and preserve the culture described above. Heresy, of which the individualistic authors already mentioned are guilty, is a denial of the very basis of such a culture, such a society.

Heresy is threatening to tradition and order. Without orthodoxy, there is likely to be no very clear conception of tradition. Without a sense of tradition, views of extreme individualism are probable. Every writer is likely, therefore, to regard himself as a messiah. Because there are many messiahs, the public will finally come to accept all and believe seriously in none. Without power to discriminate, the public accumulates merely “experiences.” When one idea is as good as any other, there is no idea at all and people live blindly, at the mercy of their feelings and of the public manipulators. We are left not with a community, a culture, but with an abstraction: the State.

In Eliot’s view, the flight from orthodoxy leads through extreme individuality to a final loss of individuality, of the true and real distinctions among men, as well as their cultural unanimity. Modern man is left lonely in an empty-witted crowd. He has democracy but no equality; education, and no enlightenment; money and no satisfaction; great writers, perhaps, but no one to read them.

Bibliography

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Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet, T. S. Eliot. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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