This outline constitutes TSE’s earliest work on the essays that were to become Notes towards the Definition of Culture(1948). On 21 June 1941 TSE told Maurice Reckitt that Faber was “decidedly interested” in a collection of essays Reckitt had proposed (eventually titled Prospect for Christendom); he added, “I should very much like to be in it, and the topic you offer me is the right one, I think.” He warned Reckitt, however, that his summer was committed to his editorial work on A Choice of Kipling’s Verse( 6.210), and on 20 Aug he wrote: “I am afraid that it would be impossible for me to give the necessary time to elaborating an outline before October. I am very sorry about this but really the synopsis of a chapter takes almost as much time as writing the chapter and is really the hardest part of the work.” A letter of 13 Oct to Theodora Bosanquet indicates that TSE turned to this new project in mid-October.
TSE enclosed a copy of his outline with a letter to Mary Trevelyan postmarked 26 Nov 1941, although his extant letters to her, including the one dated 25 Nov, make no mention of it. The unsigned two-page typescript (Houghton: bMS Am 1691.2 [226]) is erroneously dated 28 Nov.
“Notes towards a Definition of Culture,” the paper TSE drafted for Reckitt in early 1942, draws significantly on the outline but does not follow its sequence closely. Ideas and language from the outline turn up in the many related pieces on “culture” written in the mid-1940s. These include “Cultural Forces in the Human Order,” the essay TSE finally gave Reckitt after withdrawing “Notes”; the latter was ultimately published in the New English Weekly(see 6.354, n.1). Some important correspondences between the outline and the essays to follow are identified below in the annotations, which do not, however, attempt to be exhaustive.
Why informal treatment desirable.
Prospects for culture not good, either in the old order or in any new one. We must try to keep our enquiry clear of political convictions, all of which are irrelevant. Our politics and economics are on the plane of planning, whereas culture is on the plane of growth. While we must assume that something can be done about culture, and there is a place for planning, the difference between politics and culture is something like that between planning in an engineering works and planning in agriculture. 1
What I mean by culture. No “culture” without a culture. 2 It is not something possessed by a privileged class, but on the other hand not something 197shared equally by all (mass culture). It must be something which a particular people shares altogether, before it can be developed by a small or specialised group. It includes the practice of the arts, and a society which knows how to use and enjoy the arts, and intuitive perception of good and bad on the part of many, and a more conscious discrimination on the part of a few. The life of the arts is therefore involved with the whole business of living, with manners and customs, and ultimately with religion.
Effects of modern society which are not politically curable. 3 The development of science has had an effect upon language. The languages of those peoples which have done most in science, notably English, German and French, tend to become the only languages in which scientific thinking can be carried on (e.g., English vs. Welsh). 4 Poetry the last stronghold of a language in its particularity: at the very best, there must be a good deal of waste involved in a man’s writing poetry in a language not native to him. But what is the future of the poetic languages (e.g., the Celtic). The pressure in the modern world to write in a language which will provide the maximum number of appreciative readers. The ideal of science is an abstract language of symbols – symptom, logical positivism...
