The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946

The English Tradition: Address to the School of Sociology

Christendom, 10 (Dec 1940) 226-37

The first point that strikes me about my title is that there are not two English Situations, one Civil and one Religious, but that this is one situation, and that you cannot go very far into the Civil aspect without having to consider the Religious, and vice versa. ² The civil history of England, and its religious history, are the same with only a difference of emphasis and detail. In this civil-religious history I find three headings, which seem to subsume all that I have to say here: I may call them Local Organization, Church and State, and Church and Dissent. Under these three headings one can discuss the social-economic history, and the political history of England, and their bearing upon the problems of the present and the future.

From my earliest acquaintance with this country I have been struck by the impression that the natural habitat of the Englishman was the small rural community, that he only accepted the industrial town and the giant metropolis as an unpleasant necessity – and perhaps all the more because of this rural instinct was indifferent to the disorderly and unchecked development of that metropolis. Such a view may seem to you to contradict your own experience, especially those of you who belong to a younger generation than my own. But I saw the English situation against the background of the transatlantic world, of a society which has grown up in and around urban foci, and therefore my eye may have been more apt to observe traces of a way of living here which preceded industrialism. It is the difference between a country in which industrialism has been imposed upon another anciently established order, and one in which settlement and industrialization were contemporary. I notice the difference even between London and any of the largest American cities; for London has grown by the gradual expansion and agglomeration of a considerable number of villages, so that its districts still have some local centres and some local character, whereas any American city is a community which has spread from one point, over an area previously uninhabited. But England has never developed the large town with even that different urban instinct shown by the structure of Paris, or other European metropolises: there is something about England 138which remains stubbornly attached to the parochial. The classes which enriched themselves by trade, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were animated by the ambition to obtain a country estate and a coat of arms, retire from the City and become country gentry. Even now, I dare say that there are still to be found financiers and industrialists whose ambition for their offspring is not that they also should be financiers and industrialists but part of the “county”: even though a country estate now – if it is one that shows any appearance of prosperity – may be only a house and a park, a kind of façade bolstered up by stocks and shares. I am not defending the country gentleman for whom the country, agriculture and stockbreeding are nothing more than a hobby : I am only pointing out the anomaly that the most highly industrialized country in the world should be the one which has the least adapted itself and reconciled itself to its own industrialism.

Similarly, the English Church has a parochial system inherited with very little change from its pre-industrial age. Occasionally some reform, if you can call it that, like the composition of tithes (a problem which, in its importance for both the social and the religious life of the nation, has received only the most superficial treatment) comes to show that some change is taking place, though we do not know to what. ³ But we have yet to face the fact that the parochial system is one not designed for the kind of community in which the greater part of our population now live. For what is implied in the support of the clergy...