T. S. Eliot on Tradition, Orthodoxy, and Ancient Cheese

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

―“Tradition and the Individual Talent” [1]

“How can they whip cheese?”

―Death of a Salesman [2]

Speaking at a conference on “T. S. Eliot and the Literary Tradition” in Eliot’s centenary year (1988), the eminent critic Hugh Kenner discussed at some length A. L. Maycock’s Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, regretting the fact that it was long out of print. [3] Little Gidding, the site of a small Anglican religious community founded by Ferrar in 1620 as an experiment in the devotional life, was visited by poets George Herbert and Richard Crashaw, and on three occasions by King Charles, the last alone at night after the Royalist defeat at Nasby. It became the site of spiritual pilgrimage and so continues today. Eliot visited in 1936 and made it the locale of his last major poem, the fourth of Four Quartets. After Kenner’s lecture, I was pleased to inform him that the book had recently been reprinted. [4] Tongue-in-cheek, he ventured that Eliot’s interest in Little Gidding was likely stimulated by its proximity to Stilton, the market town of one of his favorite English cheeses.

Seemingly irreverent—in view of the community’s renown for fostering devout religious observance and prayer, and Eliot’s interest in its role in English history and religious tradition—Kenner’s jest was actually more in keeping with the conference theme than it might first seem. There “where prayer has been valid,” and where “on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel / History is now and England,” [5] Little Gidding represented for Eliot in literary and religious terms what England’s “Ancient Cheeses” (as he referred to them in a letter to the Times) represented in the cultural life of society. [6] In a letter to another paper, he said that Canadian Trappist monks, makers of a Port Salut, “like their cheese, are the product of ‘a settled civilisation of long standing,’” but he feared that “there is little demand for either.” [7]

A Living Tradition

In Eliot’s view, literary traditions can suffer the same fate as the culturing of cheeses, and effort may be needed to revive them. But whereas in the case of the latter, “nothing less is required than the formation of a Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses,” as he drolly wrote to the Times, revival of traditional literature—especially of poetry—will take a critical reappraisal of the concept of tradition itself.

His opening manifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), set forth his idea of what a viable literary tradition consists of. It would also prove to be an apologia for the kind of poetry he was writing: poetry that shocked readers in its apparent defiance of every rule of poetic tradition, yet that—once the dust began to settle (a process not yet completed in the century since “The Waste Land” appeared in 1922)—was found to be rooted in that tradition, and in its method a protracted exercise in reviving it.

First, however, he cleared the ground of all-too-common misuses of the word, according to which “traditional” is either a term of censure of a poet’s work or at best “vaguely approbative, with the implication . . . of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction.” (Little has changed: in a recent syndicated crossword, “Traditional” was the clue for “Old School.”) Indeed, Eliot insists,

If the only form of tradition, of handing down [Latin trādere, “to hand over”], consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. (3–4)

Awareness of a living tradition, he argues, is not evident in the poets of the generation prior to the Great War, whose “pleasing anthology pieces” were often sentimental, escapist, and static because unconnected to the poet’s greatest resource, the main current of European poetry. [8] This tradition, he insists, “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” It can be acquired only in a library by anyone aspiring to be a poet into adulthood. It involves what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” the perception of the existing monuments of literature as “an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. . . . [It is a] conformity between the old and the new.” This sense is not for the timid: it “compels” the poet, the individual talent,

to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. [9]

Consciousness of the presence of the past—“not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (11)—is what makes a writer traditional. Its corollary is the awareness that new works must be judged in relation to the standard exemplified in works of past writers, a measurement of the new by the old and vice-versa—not of better or worse, for “art never improves,” but of what “conforms,” what belongs, and what does not.

Willie Loman—the forlorn salesman of a past for whom and for which, he discovers, the present has little demand—senses that the whipped cheese his wife bought does not conform, that it portends the passing not only of the cheese he had naively assumed was a permanent product of a “settled civilisation” but (more ominously) of that civilization itself. The analogy of poet and peasant—for Willie is an urban hand-to-mouth peasant—wears thin at this point, for he is a consumer, not a maker of the cheese whose imminent demise he foresees, whereas a poet (Greek “maker”) is the creator of poems. Yet both function as discerning critics in their respective traditions; whether as creators or consumers, they employ the historical sense in the task of evaluation.

“Criticism,” Eliot says in “The Function of Criticism” (1923), “must always profess an end in view, . . . the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” [10] The tools available to poet-critic and critical reader are the same: comparison and contrast, and “a very highly developed sense of fact,” a qualification that develops slowly and whose “complete development means perhaps the very pinnacle of civilisation” (19). Eliot’s early criticism put these tools to work revolutionizing the literary scene and giving rise to what developed, particularly in America, into the “New Criticism,” a school whose founding was credited to him, somewhat to his embarrassment.

His practice of the aesthetic criticism he first advocated is best illustrated in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), in which he addressed “the problem of the integrity of poetry, with the repeated assertion that when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing.” [11] Thus his insistence that when we read, we first of all bring to bear a discerning grasp of the poetry of the living past—the “existing monuments”—and the “sense of fact” that pays close attention to the text, elucidating rather than interpreting it as a document of the author’s personality and biography, as his contemporary readers and critics tended to do.

An illustration of Eliot’s critical method applied to the culinary rather than the literary arts is found in his evaluation of an actual cheese. Kenner relates in whimsical detail an occasion when the poet-critic ordered Stilton for a dinner guest at the Garrick Club, prefacing the account with his admonition on the use of critical tools, written about the same time as the “Tradition” essay:

(“Analysis and comparison, methodically, with sensitiveness, intelligence, curiosity, intensity of passion, and infinite knowledge: all these are necessary to the great critic.”) With the side of his knife blade he commenced tapping the circumference of the cheese, rotating it, his head cocked in a listening posture. . . . He then tapped the inner walls of the crater. He then dug about with the point of his knife amid the fragments contained by the crater. He then said, “Rather past its prime. I am afraid I cannot recommend it.” [12]

The Stilton conformed to tradition but proved the victim of time, as all farm products may.

Poems too may suffer from uncritical reading or neglect, but, unlike spoiled foods, they can be rescued by reading such as Eliot urged. Some will be seen in new relations to the existing monuments; some unknown works will be welcomed as belonging. As with poems, so with cheese: “There cannot be too many kinds of cheese”—his letters mention eighteen—“and variety is as important with cheese as with anything else. . . . [P]art of the reason for living is the discovery of new cheeses.” [13]

An Extra-Human Measure

Eliot’s argument thus far is largely an aesthetic one. In “The Function of Criticism,” he says that the literature of the world, of Europe, of a country, is not to be seen as “a collection of the writings of individuals, but as ‘organic wholes,’ as systems in relation to which . . . individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance. There is accordingly something outside of the artist to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself” if he aspires to new creation. Literary tradition, we have seen, stands as the “something outside.” [14] But in this essay, he introduces a new note.

In a disputation with his lifelong literary-religious antagonist and friend John Middleton Murry on the subject of Classicism and Ro­­­manticism, Eliot responds to Murry’s attack on the former and upon the religion Eliot was then in the course of embracing. “Catholicism,” Murry says in derogation, “stands for the principle of unquestioned authority outside the individual; that is also the principle of Classicism in literature,” a description in which Eliot concurs. But writers, Murry goes on, “inherit no rules from their forebears; they inherit only this: a sense that in the last resort they must depend upon the inner voice. . . . The man who truly interrogates himself will ultimately hear the voice of God” (15–16).

Eliot no doubt heard in Murry’s profession of faith in the “inner voice” an echo of the Unitarianism in which he had been raised—“outside the Christian Fold,” as he put it—and from which he had drifted away, first toward Buddhism, then toward Anglo-Catholicism. Declaring himself deaf to the inner voice, Eliot says that those who support Classicism “believe that men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves,” something “which may provisionally be called truth” (15, 22). He later wrote,

The issue is really between those who . . . make man the measure of all things, and those who would find an extra-human measure. There are those who find this measure in a revealed religion, and those who . . . look for it without pretending to have found it. [15]

The Complication of Belief

Paramount among the literary monuments for which Eliot early developed deep admiration was the poetry of Dante, a devotion that raised the thorny question of the poet’s religious and philosophical beliefs. While Dante emerged for him as “the most universal of poets in the modern languages,” his reading of the Divine Comedy with a translation while he was a Harvard undergraduate was prominent among the influences leading him toward Christianity. Having begun by assigning “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” onward as required reading for poet, critic, and discerning reader, in “Dante” (1929) he wrestled with the fact that what Dante meant to him was not only a matter of aesthetics, important though that was. For the medieval philosophy Dante believed and made use of—particularly that of Aquinas—struck him as the truth, and Beatrice’s statement, “la sua voluntade è nostra pace” (“in his will is our peace,” Par. 3.85), seemed to him to be “literally true.” Acknowledging that his appreciation of Dante was enhanced by his sharing the beliefs of the poet, he also attempted (by invoking Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief”) to affirm the nonbeliever’s ability to understand and appreciate it too:

My point is that you cannot afford to ignore Dante’s philosophical and theological beliefs . . . but that on the other hand you are not called upon to believe them yourself. . . . For there is a difference . . . between philosophical belief and poetical assent. . . . If you can read poetry as poetry, you will “believe” in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his journey; that is, you suspend both belief and disbelief. [16]

The problem with this approach to the question of belief is that it resembles I. A. Richards’s psychological theory of value, which holds that—unlike science, whose statements are matters of truth or error—poetry consists of “pseudo-statements” and that questions of its truth or falsity are irrelevant, its sole purpose being the efficient organization of our conflicting interests by means of “provisional acceptances.” Eliot rejected Richards’s claim that in “The Waste Land” he effected “a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs,” and pilloried his claim that the poetry of pseudo-statements is, as Matthew Arnold before him had hoped, “capable of saving us.” This, Eliot maintained, is tantamount to saying that “the wall-paper will save us when the walls have crumbled.”

Yet, wary as he was of Richards’s “poetry of unbelief,” according to which “the difference between Good and Evil becomes . . . only the ‘difference between free and wasteful organization,’” [17] he insisted that “if you deny the theory that full poetic appreciation is possible without belief in what the poet believed, you deny the existence of ‘poetry’ as well as ‘criticism.’” Pushed to their extremes, he admits, both this theory and the contradictory view that “full understanding must identify itself with belief” are heretical. “Orthodoxy can only be found in such contradictions, though it must be remembered that a pair of contradictions may both be false, and that not all pairs of contradictions make up a truth.” [18]

Orthodoxy and a Dual Theory of Value

The general concept of orthodoxy Eliot advanced in “Dante” to come to grips with what he called “the complication of belief” was not invented for the purpose; in fact, it had been evolving in his thinking since he studied under Irving Babbitt at Harvard. Babbitt proposed a unipolar model of adherence to a central truth, centripetal movement toward which constitutes orthodoxy, and centrifugal movement from which is heresy. In Eliot’s model, truth is elliptical, having two poles with plausible but contradictory ideas, propositions, or allegiances held in necessary tension. Either of them taken too far becomes heretical. Thus, for example, Classicism and Romanticism may coexist, each checking the other’s tendencies to excess in a productive balance. But far from being Eliot’s invention, the model is one of ancient theological standing.

In its church councils, Western Christianity dealt with heresies concerning the natures of Christ, affirming that he is both God and man, with a divine nature and a human nature, each distinct yet unified. This affirmation has constituted christological orthodoxy for centuries and surely underlies Eliot’s concept, which he employed in various contexts in addition to literary criticism—religion, history, politics, and social theory. Broadly speaking, we might say that for Eliot, “orthodoxy” was a neutral term for the formal structure of thought about any topic; “tradition”—secular, religious, or in some combination—his term for substantive content under scrutiny.

Gradually, his thinking about tradition was modified by this structure. Under the influence of his friend Paul Elmer More’s insistence on a moral critique of literature, and in reaction to Richards’s purely psychological theory of value, Eliot began to see that a strictly aesthetic model of tradition was potentially heretical, and that it must be balanced by a moral theory of value, one which in his mind must be rooted in sound theology. [19] In a climate of secularism, the aesthetic model, pushed as far as Arnold and Richards had, results in a substitute for religion, a religion of art. On the other hand, a moral theory severed from traditional literary norms, in an age also characterized by a retreat from theology, results in pietistical religious moralism that scorns innovation, is scandalized by exploration of the dark side of human experience, and condemns whatever does not conform to conventional morality, making a travesty of literary taste.

In the lectures published as After Strange Gods (1934), he used the bipolar criterion of orthodoxy in approbation of the creedal theology (and of the church espousing it) that held to the mystery of the dual natures of Christ—this in the face of liberalism’s abandonment of it. In the words of William Palmer, a conservative theologian Eliot quotes, liberals “were eager to eliminate from the Prayer-book the belief in the Scriptures, the Creeds, the Atonement, the worship of Christ.” They would, he said, “reduce the Articles [of Religion] to a deistic formulary. . . . Christianity, as it had existed for eighteen centuries, was unrepresented in this turmoil.” [20] For resisting liberal heresy, conservative theology merits Eliot’s designation of “orthodox”; and although this antithesis undergirds his critique of modern literature, he cautions that confusion will occur if terms like “orthodoxy” and “heresy” are taken to be synonymous in all fields of discourse: “You cannot treat on the same footing the maintenance of religious and literary principles.” [21] Eliot’s model of orthodoxy requires that discourses be kept distinct in order that there might be a relationship between them. Blurring the distinction results, among other heresies, in the religion of art championed by Arnold and Richards.

Reading in an Age of Secularization

Implicit in the doctrines Palmer censured liberalism for abolishing is that of the fall, to modernity’s repudiation of which Eliot traces the superficiality of modern literature, in that with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in fiction today . . . tend to become less and less real. It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending upon spiritual sanctions . . . that men and women come nearest to being real. If you do away with this struggle . . . you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous. (45–46)

Eliot cites D. H. Lawrence’s story “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” as evidence of an “alarming strain of cruelty in modern literature,” and finds in the relations of his characters

an absence of any moral or social sense. . . . [T]he characters themselves, who are supposed to be recognisably human beings, betray no respect for, or even awareness of, moral obligations, and seem to be unfurnished with even the most commonplace kind of conscience. (39–40)

Finding Lawrence “an almost perfect example of the heretic,” he offers James Joyce’s story “The Dead” as exemplifying “orthodoxy of sensibility and . . . the sense of tradition” in its portrayal of the human qualities suppressed by Lawrence (40–41). At the end of After Strange Gods, Eliot cites the dangers for writers and readers of modern literature, among them the thirst for novelty:

In an age of unsettled beliefs and enfeebled tradition the man of letters, the poet, and the novelist, are in a situation dangerous for themselves and for their readers. . . . Tradition by itself is not enough; it must be perpetually criticised and brought up to date under the supervision of what I call orthodoxy. . . . Where there is no external test of the validity of a writer’s work, we fail to distinguish between the truth of his view of life and the personality which makes it plausible; so that in our reading, we may be simply yielding ourselves to one seductive personality after another. (67–68)

Holding literary works to critical standards—“an extra-human measure”— “might help to render them safer and more profitable for us” by mitigating the enticements of novelty and personality.

“Religion and Literature” (1935) begins where After Strange Gods ended, with an even more emphatic statement of Eliot’s convictions on the reader’s need of solid religious criteria:

Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. [22]

He hastens to add that only literary criteria can determine the genuineness and greatness of literature, be it religious or secular. But in an age dominated by secularization, when Christianity is regarded as “an anachronism,” we must bring to bear a dual critique of what we read. This secularization is most evident in the novel, which, because we cannot help but be influenced by the author’s attitude toward the behavior of his characters, is of special concern: “The author . . . is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings . . . and we are affected . . . whether we intend to be or not” (348). Lest we fall captive to any author, we must use critical tools of comparison and contrast in our “wide and increasingly discriminating reading” (349).

This is especially true of what we call reading for pleasure, because it can have “the easiest and most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists . . . requires to be scrutinized most closely,” because, although some prominent individual writers can be beneficial, “contemporary literature as a whole tends to be degrading.” The reader at home among the monuments of tradition, exposed to “the influence of diverse and contradictory personalities,” is immune to seductions of literary fashion, whereas the reader who knows only the literature of the present is “hopelessly exposed to the influence of his own time” (350–52).

Eliot concludes “Religion and Literature” by challenging readers to take responsibility for what they read and how they respond:

It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like. . . . What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested. . . . We shall certainly continue to read the best of its kind, of what our time provides; but we must tirelessly criticize it according to our own principles, and not merely according to the principles admitted by the writers and by the critics who discuss it in the public press. (353–54)

“What we ought to like.” Eliot’s phrase may prompt an unintended echo, “What we ought not to like,” and perhaps the specter of censorship. But Eliot was a vigorous opponent of any official censorship and defended the publication of works such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

As for knowing what we ought and ought not to like, he would no doubt suggest a nutritional analogy: some foods are simply better for one’s health and longevity than others, and more delectable, as those who enjoy them know from experience—not only one’s own, but also that of one’s forebears, handed down in the cuisine of a settled culture. No food guru’s crash diet will do; no magic-bullet cure but leads the perplexed astray.

To us as readers, Eliot offers no checklist, no CliffsNotes on tradition and orthodoxy. What he would require of us is the labor of encountering the tradition one monument at a time, a labor that becomes its own reward as we acquire a taste for literary greatness. The goal is not vast erudition but the ongoing education of our taste. Also, as Christians, we must keep our theological powder dry, ready for employment in assessing the moral qualities of what we read. A lifelong reading list—from Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare to James Joyce—is a moral engagement commensurate with the other dimensions of our spiritual lives. These precepts attest to the importance Eliot attaches to our reading and the discipline required for beneficial encounters with modern literature.

“All Shall Be Well”

The rhetorical tone of Eliot’s argument summarized here is necessarily rather solemn. In his search for a critical standpoint adequate to the literary and cultural crisis of modernity, he may seem to have paid little attention to the enjoyment provided by the best of our time and of other times. But we should recall that, having once defined poetry as “a superior amusement,” Eliot typically emphasized the pleasures of reading in his analyses of particular works, an aspect of his criticism beyond the scope of this essay.

Our focus has been on his decades-long pursuit of a theory that claims for modern literature a place among the ideal order of existing monuments and provides both critics and readers a basis for “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” The pursuit was necessitated by what he (and other postwar writers) saw as the decay of a civilization that rejected its traditions—the decay at which Willy Loman, in his humble but perceptive way, took alarm upon discovering the ersatz whipped cheese. When Eliot lamented the possible demise of the great English cheeses, it was because, as a poet and reader of poetry, he saw them as symbolic of threatened cultural and artistic traditions that must be defended if the pleasures they afford are to survive.

Having had the good fortune to “partake” (Eliot’s word) of such cheeses—including a Stilton in prime condition—at an Eliot exhibit at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, I can say there is reason for hope. Having joined other pilgrims for worship in the Ferrars’ secluded chapel, I believe as did Eliot when despite the terrors of the Blitz encountered on his nightly fire patrol, he ended “Little Gidding” with words of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich.

All shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well. [23]

David Huisman (PhD, University of Michigan) is professor emeritus of English at Grand Valley State University. He served as secretary of the T. S. Eliot Society and has presented his slide show “‘If You Came this Way’: Landscapes of the Heart in Four Quartets” at Eliot conferences and at Little Gidding. His current project is an examination of a neglected passage in “The Waste Land.”