[An American-born English poet, critic, essayist, and dramatist, Eliot was one of the most influential writers in English of the first half of the twentieth century. His work and thought are characterized by experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. In the following essay, which originally appeared in The New Republic on 12 December 1928, Eliot critiques Benda's theories about the responsibility of intellectuals as presented in La trahison des clercs.]

M. Julien Benda is a critic who does not write often or too much. His Belpbhgor, which some of us recognized as an almost final statement of the attitude of contemporary society to art and the artist, was published in 1918 or 1919. La Trhison des Cleres is the first book of the same type that M. Benda has written since Belpbhgor, it represents some years of meditation and study; we expected a book of the same importance. We are not disappointed. And just as Belphdgor, although based upon an examination of French society alone, applied to the relation of society to the arts in all Europe and America, so is La Trbison des Clercs of general application. It is, indeed, more general; for M. Benda now draws his illustrations from England, Germany, Italy and America, as well as from France. In these illustrations I do not think that he has been altogether fair; and as he has cited William James and Kipling, we are entitled to cross-examine him on his examination.

M. Benda's thesis may be divided into two parts, upon which we may find that we give separate verdicts. The first part is a general criticism of the political passions of the present time. The second part is a scrutiny of the culpability of certain noted men of letters, and implies a rule of life which M. Benda would lay down for men of letters of our time. In the first general diagnosis, I am inclined to yield complete assent; in the second part, he does not seem to me to have carried his analysis of individuals far enough; and the ideal that he holds up to contemporary men of letters seems to me to be infected with romance. But he puts a problem which confronts every man of letters; the same problem which Mr. Wyndham Lewis has solved for himself in his own way by writing his recent books: the problem of the scope and direction which the activities of the artist and the man of letters should take today.

With the first part of M. Benda's thesis I cannot deal in this short paper. No one can disagree with his statement of the "modern consummation of political passions"; his classification of passions of race (e.g., the Nordic theory and the Latin theory), passions of nations (e.g., fascism) and passions of class (e.g., communism). I say that no one can disagree with the statement, which is made with all M. Benda's usual lucidity and concision; but the analysis could be carried much farther than M. Benda carries it. A new Remy de Gourmont could "dissociate" these ideas of Nationalism of Class, of Race into their local components; and there is also the Religious Idea (not discussed by M. Benda) to be dissociated (with special reference to an actual controversy in England) into components such as conviction, piety, prejudice and politics. Each of these subjects would take a chapter by itself. Let us merely accept M. Benda's general statement of the "perfection" of these passions in the modern world—in universality, in coherence, in homogeneity, in precision, in continuity and in condensation; and proceed to the question: what is the role of the man of letters; does he today involve himself in these passions, and if so, why; and what is his proper function?

M. Benda brings a grave accusation against the modern "man of letters," whom he calls the "clerc." The accusation is retrospective, for it applies to most of the nineteenth century. The "clerc, "instead of sticking to his business of pure thought or pure art, has descended into politics in the widest and sometimes the lowest sense. M. Benda's instances are mostly contemporary and mostly French. For the sake of completeness, no doubt, he has added a few foreigners, such as D'Annunzio, Kipling and William James. Among these three "clercs" I can see nothing in common. D'Annunzio is a brilliant prose artist of pseudo-decadence, who took up with Italian nationalism as a new excitement; Kipling (it seems to me) writes of the Empire because he was born in India instead of Sussex (and as Mr. Dobree has said, part of his interesting peculiarity is that he makes the deck of a P. and 0. liner seem as much British soil as Sussex or Shropshire); James is included merely because he voiced a rather silly enthusiasm for the American war with Spain. M. Benda is more exact with his own compatriots. Two of those whom he accuses are Barrés and Péguy. But one asks the question: has he carried his analysis far enough? I dislike both of these writers as much as M. Benda does. But the question is: are these writers dangerous because they have concerned themselves with practical and political matters, or rather because their attitude, both in art, speculative thought and practical thought, was wrong? Let us undertake to consider what are the causes of the inclination of men of letters—including poets, novelists and even painters (there is as yet no instance of a musician)—to occupy themselves with social theories: and second, to distinguish the artists or men of letters who excel in their proper sphere, but fail in their public occupation, from those who exhibit the same faults in their art as in their public activity, and finally from those who (if there are such) excel and are right in both.

Ours is an unsettled age. No one is sure to what "class" of society he belongs; at no time has "class" been more uncertain, and yet at no time has the consciousness of "class" been greater. Everyone is now conscious of class, but no one is sure what class is; everyone is conscious of nationality and race (our very passports impress that upon us), but no one is sure who or which or what is what or which race, or whether race is divided north and south or east and west or horizontally, or whether any of us is anything but a mongrel, and we suspect that the more we know about race the more clearly we shall see that we are all merely mongrels. We are conscious of these questions as a man with indigestion is conscious of his stomach. It might almost be said that everybody is conscious of every question and no one knows any answers. This has been called an age of specialization, but it is very much the age of the amateur. Not long ago I attended, with some curiosity, a "religious convention"; I heard a popular novelist and a popular actor talk nonsense for half an hour each, and then I left. There is, in fact, very little respect for authority: by which I mean respect for the man who has special knowledge of some subject of which oneself is ignorant.

The causes are, of course, many; and I merely mention these things in order to point out that the meddling of men of letters in practical affairs, to which M. Benda objects, is only one phenomenon of a general confusion. The publicist who writes about everything on earth responds to the demand of a public which has a mild and transient interest in everything on earth. All this is perfectly commonplace, and I only mention it in order to point out that it is, in practice, extremely difficult to draw a line between the mere vulgarizer of knowledge and the "intellectual" of wide interests. It is furthermore fallacious to group all the intellectuals who may be accused of doing somebody else's business, or of pandering to popular political passions, into one category, as an examination of M. Benda's instances will show.

Today, it is enough to mention the Mommsens, the Treitschkes, the Ostwalds, the Brunetieres, the Barrés, the Lemaitres, the Péguys, the Maurras, the D'Annunzios and the Kiplings, to agree that the intellectuals [clercs] exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion: tendency towards action, craving for immediate results, indifference to everything but the end in view, contempt for argument, violence, hatreds and obsessions [idée fixe].

This classification seems to me rather summary. To take the historians first: it is quite true that certain German historians, and still more, certain philosophers of history, have exhibited a bias in favor of national passions. It is also true of several other historians, not all contemporary with ourselves. Sometimes, when an historian has exactly the same bias as ourselves, we have the optical illusion of no bias at all; to many people Gibbon or Mr. Lytton Strachey seems to possess the virtue of detachment, instead of the virtue of a pleasant bias. The judgment of any historian must depend both on the degree of his prejudice, and (I am afraid) upon our moral judgment of the prejudice itself. And the historians, I submit, are in a class by themselves.

Far different is the case of writers like Péguy and Barrés. If anyone has done more harm than Barrés, it is Péguy. What these two authors have in common is a gift for language, and a sensibility for the emotional values of words, completely unrestrained by either logic or common sense. Like Hugo and Swinburne, they had no gift whatever for thinking; but unlike those poets, they disguised their lyricism in a form which looks to many people like a form of thought. But the question about such writers as these is not whether they have abused their gifts by applying them to the wrong uses, but whether they had any right to exist at all. The faults of the political outbursts of Péguy and Barrés are the faults apparent in all of their work; and if they are pernicious in politics, they are still more pernicious in literature. These two writers, again, are in quite a different category from Kipling. To make this difference quite clear would require a separate essay on Kipling, so I can only say this much: there is, no doubt, a bit of political jingoism in Kipling, but it does not affect his best work. The imperialism which is in all of Kipling's work, and in the best of it, is not a political passion at all; it has no practical aim, but is merely the statement of a fact: and there is all the difference in the world between the vision of an Empire which exists, and the incitement to passion for an Empire in the future. On this point, M. Benda is perhaps no more unintelligent than any other Continental writer.

Another author of our time, whom M. Benda does not mention, is equally to the point, and cannot be classified with any of the preceding. It is Mr. Wells. Wells is nearer to Barrés and Péguy than to Kipling, but must be distinguished from them very sharply. For whereas, to my thinking, there is a hopeless confusion in Barrés and Péguy which was bound to vitiate everything they wrote, Wells has positive, self-contained gifts for one or two types of imaginative fiction which are peculiarly his own. His imagination is that of the Common Man raised to the highest power. But being that of the Common Man, and of the Common Man of our time, it does not know where to stop. Hence there is a sharp division. Mr. Wells has all of the Common Man's respect for facts and information, and his imagination depends upon facts. When he uses the facts for imaginative purposes he is superb; when he uses his imagination to expound facts, he is deplorable. He has the Common Man's habit of assuming that if you have enough facts, you can dispense with reasoning, for the reason is supposed to be in the facts, instead of in the human mind; he is the reverse of Mr. Belloc, who supposes that if you have reason behind you, you can do what you like with the facts. The expected happens; when Belloc deals with facts, he fits them into his reason; when Wells deals with facts, he hampers his magnificent imagination, and becomes the quite unconscious victim of his parish prejudices. What a pity that Belloc supposes himself to be an historian, and that Wells supposes himself to be a biologist!

Another case which M. Benda does not mention, very different from that of Wells, is that of Shaw. Shaw has this in common with Péguy, that some of his faults must be referred to his masters—though it be as reprehensible to choose a bad master as to be a bad master. Péguy owes much to the philosophy of Bergson, which he translated into his own muddy rhetoric; the philosophy of Bergson after all is at least a philosophy; but what can be said for a disciple of the amateur crankiness of Samuel Butler? I cannot go thoroughly into the case of Shaw, but would only point out that here is the case of a kind of trahison not discussed by M. Benda: Shaw, the master of a lucid and witty dialogue prose hardly equalled since Congreve, and of a certain power of observation, squandering these gifts in the service of worn-out, home-made theories, as in the lamentable Methusaleh.

Here then, in England alone, we have at least three instances of clercs who might incur M. Benda's displeasure: Kipling, Wells and Shaw, and no two of them in the same category, or doing the same thing for the same reasons. I do not say that there are not the same social circumstances behind them all to account for them all, but merely that you cannot pass the same judgment on any two of them as individuals. In France there is perhaps more uniformity, but great differences appear there too. The great weakness of Benda's argument is that you cannot pass directly from the criticism of an age to the criticism of the individuals who represent that age. It breaks down further when you recognize that for practical purposes there is not much difference between a clerc who excites popular passions himself, and a clerc who does so by his influence upon others. Bergson, one would say, fulfilled Benda's requirements for the pure philosopher; for, apart from one pardonable outburst in 1914, when, as I remember, he identified France with Life, and Germany with Machinery, he has written nothing but pure philosophy. Yet half of the most excitable authors of our time, in France at least, have been Bergsonians. Péguy himself is a conspicuous example; and Péguy is also the remarkable example of a writer who managed to influence many people, largely because he had so confused a mind that there was room for everything in it somehow. He was a nationalist, a Dreyfusist, a republican who went into rhapsodies over Napoleon's tomb, a Socialist and a Catholic of a rather doubtful sort. The influence of Bergson again, as well as that of Péguy and the ecstatic Leon Bloy, is strong upon the leader of the Catholic rationalists, M. Jacques Maritain. I have a warm personal admiration for M. Maritain, as much for his saintly character as for his intelligence; but I have never seen a more romantic classicist, or a Thomist whose methods of thought were less like those of Aquinas. His occasional intemperance of language, and his occasional sentiment, hardly qualify him for the philosophical crown which M. Benda is waiting to bestow upon some-one.

And on the other hand, it is doubtful whether M. Benda himself deserves it. He holds up to the artist, to the critic, to the philosopher, an ideal of detachment from passions of class, race, nation and party, which, even though he does not clearly distinguish passion from interest, looks very admirable. But it implies a complete severance of the speculative from the practical which is itself impossible, and leads, in M. Benda's implications, to an isolation which may be itself a romantic excess. I must avoid entering upon any question which would require a definition of those terrible terms romanticism and classicism; but that is unnecessary, for we are concerned only with what is called romanticism. It is apparent, I mean, that when anyone nowadays attacks anything on the ground that it is romanticism, he is always himself in danger of falling into an opposite extreme which is also and equally romantic. M. Benda attacks Maurras and the "neo-classicists," for instance, on the ground that their neoclassicism is itself a phase of romanticism. I think he is right, though the charge does not seem to me to be nearly so deadly as he seems to suppose. What he does not see is that his own brand of classicism is just as romantic as anyone else's.

The only moral to be drawn, therefore, is that you cannot lay down any hard and fast rule of what interests the clerc, the intellectual, should or should not have. All you can have is a standard of intellect, reason and critical ability which is applicable to the whole of a writer's work. If there is a right relation of emotion to thought in practical affairs, so there is in speculation and art too. A good poem, for instance, is not an outburst of pure feeling, but is the result of a more than common power of controlling and manipulating feelings: the

faults which made D'Annunzio, for instance, rather a deplorable politician made him a second-rate artist. The surest way, perhaps, of judging the work of an author who ventures into a new field, whether it be that of political controversy or some other, is to trace if we can the growth of his interests and their relations among each other. A man may be led, by the connections of things themselves, far from his starting point, just as Sainte-Beuve, as literary critic, was led to study the whole of social life. Where there is no vital connection, the man may be a brilliant virtuoso, but is probably nothing more. Even within one sphere of business, as in a novel or a play, the vital connection may be absent; and if it is absent, the novel or poem or play will not endure.