T. S. Eliot and the Essay

Conclusion—Faring Forward, Exploring Still: Participation Instead of Puritan’s Progress

123 = Conclusion Faring Forward, Exploring Still Participation Instead of Puritan’s Progress And still they call Old Possum ascetic, spiritual, and disembodied—puritan. One of the most recent is Peter McCullough in his introduction to the first full annotated edition of Lancelot Andrewes’ writings. The edition is impressive, undoubtedly valuable, the commentary on Andrewes much better than that briefly offered on Eliot, who may have rescued the Divine from relative oblivion. McCullough refers naturally to the essay on Andrewes in Eliot’s 1928 collection titled For Lancelot Andrewes and thinks Eliot here “say[s] more about himself” (xlvi) than about his subject, which, if true, would severely compromise Eliot’s efforts. McCullough claims, in fact, that “in Lancelot Andrewes [Eliot] thought he had found an author who had achieved” the desired escape from personality . “But Andrewes was decidedly not the disembodied, atemporal, contemplative mind of Eliot’s vision” (xlvi). Andrewes’ editor then proceeds to his own tired caricature of Eliot, based in all-too-familiar allegations that stem from a sense of Old Possum as a puritan: In his quest to praise Andrewes as passionless and “pure” . . . Eliot also visited upon Andrewes scholarship what at best could be called the mixed blessing, at worst the curse, of comparison with John Donne. Eliot’s “Lancelot Andrewes” is in fact a double portrait: of the impersonal, “pure” Andrewes all in white, and the self-advertising, “impure” Donne painted in lurid blacks and reds. Very close to the surface of Eliot’s characterization of Donne is the critic’s palpable fear of sex. Donne is “the sorcerer of emotional orgy” whose “experience was not perfectly controlled,” who “lacked spiritual discipline,” who reminds Eliot of the decadence of Huysmans , and who “is dangerous” for those who read him for “indulgence of 124 T. S. Eliot and the Essay their sensibilities.” . . . But to escape from this Donne (“We emphasize,” he admitted, “this aspect to the point of the grotesque” . . .), Eliot created an Andrewes that was just as much a caricature. (xlvii) The caricature is of Eliot, not Eliot’s of Bishop Andrewes. It is true that Eliot calls his great mentor “pure” and Donne “impure” in talking about “motives,” rhetorical strategies, and the use of personality (compare his description of “pure” and “impure” in The Sacred Wood). What interests Eliot in Andrewes’ prose is what interests him in Donne’s verse, and that of other “Metaphysicals ,” and that is their capacity for “association” whereby “intellect and sensibility were in harmony” (Selected Essays 345). Eliot almost always works by means of comparison (and analysis), and so here, in comparison, he proceeds from the insight thus revealed to his principal observation: “Donne is a ‘personality ’ in a sense in which Andrewes is not: his sermons, one feels, are a ‘means of self-expression’. He is constantly finding an object which shall be adequate to his feelings; Andrewes is wholly absorbed in the object and therefore responds with the adequate emotion” (351). Eliot distinguishes, centrally , critically, between authors engaged in self-expression and those, far fewer in number, “wholly absorbed in the object.” Accordingly, he writes that Donne “is dangerous only for those who find in his sermons an indulgence of their sensibility, or for those who, fascinated by ‘personality’ in the romantic sense of the word—for those who find in ‘personality’ an ultimate value—forget that in the spiritual hierarchy there are places higher than that of Donne” (352). Eliot by no means intends to represent—or caricature—Donne as bad, or Andrewes as all good for that matter. Remember his praise of Donne in “The Metaphysical Poets” when compared with Tennyson. Eliot is writing about differences and is not engaging in self-defense: “Of the two men, it may be said that Andrewes is the more mediaeval, because he is the more pure,1 and because his bond was with the Church, with tradition.” Donne, that is to say, is “much less the mystic; he is primarily interested in man” (Selected Essays 352). Crucial—to risk repeating myself—are the points of comparison and judgment: the way in which Eliot refuses to simplify, and reduce, by treating Andrewes “purely” by himself. Truth to tell, Eliot found much of interest and value in Bishop Andrewes because of the great preacher’s impurity, I mean beyond Andrewes’ rather well-known personal weaknesses, missteps, faults, and failings. What drew Eliot not just to Bishop Andrewes but also to the Metaphysical poets, and indeed the Jacobean and Caroline periods...