BOOKS OF THE DAY
Modest Proposal
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. By T. S. Eliot. (Faber and Faber. 10s. 6d.)
ONE cannot help feeling somewhat presumptuous in reviewing a book of Mr. Eliot's ; it is only right that a certain piety should enter into one's attitude to a writer to whom we all owe so much gratitude and respect. Not that this implies agreement with his opinions ; one of the most curious aspects of Mr. Eliot's literary career is that he has influenced most those who agree with him least. He com- mands the veneration and affection of thousands to whom his beliefs appear at best paradoxical and at worst pernicious ; in return, he is officially crowned by those to whom his poetry seems unintel- ligible and perverse. I am not sure that Mr. Eliot may not derive some pleasure from this situation ; always profoundly serious, he is also more than a little sly, and even in his most forthright utterances remains a master of the conditional mood.
And this is most of all because he is a master of words, patiently explaining their meaning and significance, their interrelations, their historical context, their associations, the conditions under which they are relevant ; for him words are signs of the progress or decay of a universe, and for that reason he handles them with care and respect and, always, with reservations which in him are the truest marks of his genius. In this book he remains the same as we have come to know him, with so much pleasure, over so many years ; still profoundly concerned with the spiritual issues of our time, still attacking our prejudices in the most restrained of prose, still con- vinced that religion, while it enjoins us to despair, also offers us our only hope, still strong in the faith that in gathering darkness light can be found in the definition of a word. Whatever one may think of these beliefs, the strongest impression he makes is that he himself, by his writings and what he reveals, is one of the most active and powerful factors in the situation on which he comments. One cannot wholly feel that the Age of Reason is dead while Mr. Russell continues to analyse the human mind; one cannot quite despair of the unity of European culture while r. Eliot still lives and writes. I would advise anyone reading this book to begin with the appendix, which contains the text of three short broadcast talks to Germany delivered in 1946 ; nothing, to my mind, could offer a better illustra- tion and example of that European community of culture which Mr. Eliot is so anxious to preserve.
In this book Mr. Eliot is concerned to discuss the conditions on which that culture depends. Discuss is here the operative word. For one feels throughout that Mr. Eliot does not hope to reach a conclusion. He wishes merely to put forward certain tentative sug- gestions, which may require modification here or there, which one may accept or reject, but which Mr. Eliot asks us gravely and politely at least to consider seriously. Yet behind the urbanity, the modesty, the mere good manners of Mr. Eliot's exposition, one cannot mistake the force and significance of what he has to say, or
ignore that It constitutes a fundamental attack on most of our assumptions on the subject of culture.
Mr. Eliot does not quite reach for his revolver. Rather he employs, primly, some instrument like a needle or a bodkin, of his own manufacture, with which he pricks a number of balloons so gently
that one hardly hears the explosions: He reminds us that culture is not the possession of a class or a group, but of a whole society ;
and yet that its preservation may depend on the continuance of a class system, and that a " classless society " may be precisely a society in which culture has ceased to exist. He suggests, or rather asserts, that culture and religion have a common root, and that if one decays the other may die too. At least, he maintains that culture is dependent on religion. I am not sure whether the proposition is meant to be reversible. It might be more interesting if it were. He reminds us also that culture is not homogeneous, like bread ; it is much more like a Christmas cake, with stratifications, almond paste, icing and what not. It includes, and should include if it is to maintain itself in a state of health, sub-cultures, subsidiary cultures, localised forms, and its density and content may vary with different strata of society. Like the subconscious, and for the same reasons, nine- tenths of it is below water. And these various modes of culture mutually repel and attract one another, and indeed the process of attraction and repulsion may be precisely what enriches, vivifies and fertilises. At least, Mr. Eliot suggests, so delicate, complex and beautiful a structure may not be susceptible to control and direction, unless exercised by the most skilled and loving hands. Plants, flowers, historical growths cannot be manipulated to choice ; unless, of course, one accepts the heresy, of Lysenko. And lastly Mr. Eliot tells us that perhaps culture cannot be transmitted by artificial means, and that for this purpose all the efforts of our educationalists, U.N.E.S.C.O., British Councils and what not, however admirable in their way, may be of less value than so decayed an institution as the family. It may even be that culture is not assimilable by each and all in the same degree, that it is not desirable it should be, and it may be destroyed in becoming so.
There is nothing revolutionary or even original in such views ; I am sure Mr. Eliot would hate them to be thought so. And yet they contradict all our popular assumptions on the subject of culture, and are monstrously heretical according to the principles which underlie our system of education. One is grateful that, as such, they should be stated as modestly and persuasively as they are here, for at least they may induce some people to believe that a radical reconsideration of values is required. Mr. Eliot does not hope for more. " My enquiry . . . has been directed on the meaning of the word culture ; so that everyone should at least pause to examine what this word means to him, and what it means to him in each particular context before using it. Even this modest aspiration might, if realised, have consequences in the policy and conduct of our ' cultural' enterprises."
Perhaps one example may show how essential this reconsideration is. An ancient college of the University of Oxford recently abolished the admirable institution of dining in Hall, substituting for it a cafeteria system, on the ground that undergraduates should live as much as possible under the same conditions as they were likely to meet before and after they came to Oxford. If one seriously con- siders the assumptions which underlie such a change, and the reasons given for it, one will realise how imperative it is that our official guardians of culture should be persuaded to think again.
GORONWY REES.
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