Letters to the Editor
[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitable length is that of one of our " News of the Week " paragraphs.—Ed. SPEC rATOR.]
MISS WEST, MR. ELIOT, AND MR. PARSONS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
was well aware when I was " hysterical " enough to contradict Miss West that I should provoke a wordy pro- testation in reply, though I had not, I confess, foreseen quite so lengthy a lucubration. It is not, however, out of any disrespect to Miss West, but from a regard for the editorial legend printed at the head of this page, that I send you my reply in tabular form.
I. It is plain that Miss West and I hold such fundamentally different views about Mr. Eliot that neither of us is likely to convert the other, least of all in public dispute. In fact I only referred to Miss West's .attack because there is a fashion- able tendency, in certain quarters, to decry Mr. Eliot, and the review of his Selected Essays seemed a suitable place in which to comment on it. Miss West provided an outstanding example.
2. Miss West says that I prove her case about Mr. Eliot by making statements which show how " organized pre- tentiousness is ousting every sound critical standard from the work of this school." Yet, in the very next sentence, Miss West remarks, " I leave on one side his preposterous statements as to the achievement of Mr. Eliot," and later accuses me of " discrediting my opponent without argument "
3. In her original article Miss West attacked Mr. Eliot for " refraining from any work likely to establish where authority lies." I suggested that this was a gross misstate- ment, and that Mr. Eliot, pre-eminently, had performed that function in respect of certain writers, namely, the metaphysical poets, Marvell and Dryden. Miss West, however, " cannot forbear " referring me to the " kindly assistants " of the London Library who will place in my hands Mr. Gosse's Donne, Mr. Birrell's Marvell and Professor Saintsbury's writ- ings on " Dryden," which should dispel my belief that it was necessary for Mr. Eliot to re-establish the virtues of these poets. I hope I am suitably grateful for this motherly advice. But I am unregenerate. For to begin with I made no statement about the " necessity " of Mr. Eliot's work in this field. I merely pointed it out in retort to Miss West's denial of its existence. Nor can I see that my claim for its value is invalidated by the existence of previous works on the same subject. This might be so if Messrs. Gosse, Birrell and Saintsbury had said all that could be said about the poets in question, or if Mr. Eliot had done nothing but repeat their remarks : but the first is unthinkable and the second untrue. I am presuming, of course, that Miss West is not one of the self-satisfied tribe to whom English literature is an open book which they have had by heart from an early age.
4. Miss West asks why I suspected her of not having read the essays of the Elizabethan dramatists, and what her remark about Mr. Eliot's industry therein can have to do with her own knowledge of Elizabethan drama. The answer is simple. The essays in question exhibit such an unevenness, not merely of industry, but of every quality, that only a critic who had failed entirely to appreciate their diversity would think of grouping them under a single head. The kindest explanation of such a failure on Miss West's part seemed to be that she had not troubled to re-read the essays in question, or that she knew little of Elizabethan drama. She may have been " too busy thinking."
5. Apropos of my remarks on the inadmissibility of her comparison between Mr. Eliot's and Mr. Aldous Huxley's essays on Baudelaire, Miss West accuses me of coming to the defence of Mr. Eliot's essay without having " paid it the compliment of remembering it." Oddly enough, however, I took the trouble to read both essays through immediately before sitting down to write. I have since re-read them carefully, and I still maintain that the comparison is peculiarly uninstructive. Miss West is quick to score a point by pinning down my generalized statement thas Mr. Eliot was writing about Baudelaire the poet, Mr. Huxley about the man, and quotes (though I think she has been the victim of a printer's error here) a sentence from Mr. Eliot's essay to the effect that
its purpose is to discuss Baudelaire's prose works. This is true. I should have said " Baudelaire the writer " rather than " Baudelaire the poet." But the admission does not alter the fact that Mr. Huxley and Mr. Eliot approach Baudelaire from such entirely different angles that no profitable comparison is possible.
6. Miss West says that she does not know why I use the word " impassioned " about her advocacy of Mr. Noel Coward as a didactic dramatist, " except that it is the habit of inexpert writers to scatter adjectives." I never accused her of scatter- ing adjectives. I called her remarks impassioned because her reference to Jeremiah and the author of Ecclesiastes, seemed to me an unnecessarily loud way of stating the fact that Mr. Coward is didactic—a fact which, incidentally, Mr. Eliot never denied.
7. Miss West concludes with a resort to prejudice by saying that I know " all the proper patter to use to impress the casual reader." If this is not discrediting your opponent without argument, I do not know what is. Actually it is the easiest and shoddiest way of doing it. Anybody can hold up another person's terminology to ridicule by taking a few words out of their context, putting them into inverted commas, and calling them " patter." But Miss West knows as well as I do that you cannot discuss a complex subject economically without a specialized vocabulary. I am only sorry that the suitability of the occasion and the length of this letter prevent me from doing more than assure Miss West that I have a very clear idea of the meaning of the words to which she takes exception.—
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