[In the following review of Kirk's Eliot and His Age, Scott-Moncrieff—a longtime friend of Kirk—favorably assesses the work's scholarly intent and accomplishment.]

Dr. Kirk might almost have called this notable tribute [Eliot and His Age] to the thought of T. S. Eliot “Eliot contra His Age”. He sees Eliot as standing in opposition to the general tide of literary thinking of his day with its gravitation towards political rather than moral effort and its tendency towards liberal in preference to conservative principle.

When Prufrock and The Waste Land first appeared they shocked those who considered themselves conservative but who were in fact often merely conventional in their judgments, and tightly bound by convention. It was the neoterists, the young in quest of revolution, who applauded and called for more. I remember when I was very young and was first taken to meet Eliot by my father's former student from New Zealand, whom we knew as Mr. George but who wrote under the name Robert Sencourt. I told Eliot that my friends commonly regarded him as a satirist, but I did not think he was, and I was gratified that Eliot smiled and nodded approvingly. It was not scorn at man's inadequacy with which Sweeney, Burbank, Bleistein, the Princess Volupine, Doris, Dusty, and Madame Sosostris moved Eliot. The kind of nihilistic despair, so often a temptation to indulgence for the intellectual young, could certainly find expression in the damp souls of housemaids sprouting at area steps, the girl easing consummation with the help of a gramophone record, and the older women tintinnabulating in highbrow talk, but this was to miss the compassion of Eliot's vision, a compassion the more profound in that it dispensed with any compromise dictated by sentimentality. His early poems were cathartic—they were never snide or contemptuous.

When Eliot followed his compassion to its logical fulfilment in religion, many of my own contemporaries, and those somewhat older than myself who had hailed him as their mentor, felt themselves positively betrayed. A minor poet I knew published verses in which he parodied Eliot with the lines “But our lot creeps into the Church / To keep our metaphysics warm.” This man had already, along with probably most of the London intellectuals, moved into the Communist camp, seeking escape from human frustration in an idealistic ideology that aspired to redeem society by economic and political sleight of hand. This curious disregard for the facts of the human agony has not of course disappeared from the intellectual scene, but, now more fully exemplified, it is harder to sustain dialectically than it was forty years ago.

To Dr. Kirk Eliot was “the principal champion of the moral imagination in the twentieth century”, and he goes on to define Burke's phrase as meaning “that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment—‘especially,’ as the dictionary has it, ‘the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and art.’ The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth. It was the gift and the obsession of Plato and Virgil and Dante.”

The primary distinction between conservatism and liberalism is seen in the liberal tendency to be obsessed with the need for change, while the conservative is constantly aware that the sum of civilized achievement is more valuable than any immediate change and must therefore always be safeguarded. Of course many who style themselves conservatives are unfortunately rather too concerned about retaining certain privileges belonging to the status quo, while there is always the danger of confusing mere conformism with conservatism. Dr. Kirk cites Sir Edmund Gosse, London's leading literateur when Eliot made his debut, as a prime example of conformism, in fact as the grand panjandrum of literary conformism of his day, to whom the young Eliot was entirely shocking. “Gosse's interest in literature for literature's sake—or perhaps for fashion's sake—would be swept away by Eliot's interest in literature for the sake of the moral imagination.”

Needless to say, since Gosse there has been a constant flow of new literary fashions, our literature being perhaps as dependent upon fashion as are our clothes, but Eliot did renew the standard against which these fashions could be measured and found wanting. Serious writers have always appreciated him. Dr. Kirk cites two writers as different as Wyndham Lewis to the Right and George Orwell to the Left who, while neither could share Eliot's acceptance of religion, nevertheless both expressed admiration for his wisdom, integrity, and clarity.

Actually Dr. Kirk considers that already with the publication of The Waste Land some of Eliot's younger admirers began to grow suspicious of his authenticity as a revolutionary, even though the poem contained so much that was in keeping with what they demanded of literature. Moreover, it is, in the best, poetic sense, an obscure poem. Dr. Kirk quotes three appreciative critics each putting a different interpretation upon the closing section of the first part of The Waste Land.

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
O keep the Dog far thence, that's friend to men,
Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!’

We can take one or another or reject them all—the poem still holds its inner meaning and the gloss we put upon it is immaterial, for it will be to some degree a subjective one reflecting our own experience although evoked by that of the poet: but the two are brought together by that “universal” experience which Eliot saw as built up by long cultural tradition—and which Jung relates also to myths arising from remotest human experience. I remember years ago finding myself exasperated by poets who wrote, for instance, about death, without seeming to have absorbed anything of the work of the great poets of the past on the same theme. Intrinsically it seemed to me there were true things written about death that had to become part of one's consciousness (unless one could really claim to be a “primitive”, and even then one probably derived much from folk tradition): blindingly new truths were not to be discovered, and the originality of such a poet as Eliot lay in revealing old truth (all truth must be old) with the freshness of vision that comes only from intensity of experience, coupled of course with a rare capacity for expressing it.

Later on in his book Dr. Kirk quotes some almost more diverse interpretations of Ash Wednesday, again made by appreciative critics and yet at points perfectly contradictory to one another. They are all interesting, although I am not sure that any of them exactly entered my mind at the time when I read and re-read Ash Wednesday for days on end because it offered an interpretation of a most critical phase of my own life, a life upon which it left a permanent mark. Stray lines still come back to me, their impact not deadened even though they have become part of my consciousness.

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?). …
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place. …
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

When it comes to Eliot's plays I differ from Dr. Kirk in finding The Family Reunion, despite its shortcomings and perhaps excepting Murder in the Cathedral, the most inspired. The three last plays seem to me to have been conceived quite deliberately as moralities, vehicles calculated to express the playwright's ideas in the currently acceptable form of the drawing-room drama—a perfectly legitimate aim, and in this no different from, if less cunning than, the plays of Bernard Shaw, which of course have the dramatic advantage of their author's mischievous irresponsibility. I once discussed this very problem with Eliot, and remember his remarking how often in rehearsal one found that a line one liked, expressing something one particularly wished to say, simply had to be cut, because in fact it did not belong to character or situation. It is plain that the more inspired a play, that is to say the more it is directly visualized in the human terms of drama, the less liable the playwright is to find himself intruding what, howsoever wise, is after all a kind of propaganda, at least an expression of the writer's own opinion as opposed to those opinions transmuted into the dialogue of his drama.

Greater in volume than his poetry and plays are Eliot's essays and reviews. These were largely concomitant to his editing of the quarterly The Criterion, in which he put forward, developed, and defined the ideas that are the principal concern of Dr. Kirk's study. Eliot's prose leaves no possible room for any ambiguity; he comes clearly down on the side of certain minority views, and while personally self-effacing he became increasingly a central figure in opposition to the general trend of thought of the time.

Surveying the scene, as one who grew up through that time, I believe it does seem that the majority trends, however tenable they may once have seemed, reveal themselves today as rather plainly inept. Yet they are still very much with us, no longer with the force of intellectual conviction but only with the momentum bequeathed by former conviction and now activating the small-change of popular opinion. Eliot, who was a man of considerable humor, might today find even more to smile about in the endless pontification, about education (which, as Dr. Kirk remarks, now largely takes a form more closely resembling indoctrination), about sociology and economics as the arbiters of all things; but, a compassionate man, knowing what such obliquity betokens, his smile would have been a wry one.

At a time when a classless society seemed an ideal that no one must presume to question, Eliot did question it. He was not concerned to preserve privilege, but simply argued that efforts to impose a classless society were likely to achieve only a more rigid set-up—perhaps with privilege firmly held by a tyrannical political bureaucracy. Eliot suggested that a number of separate loyalties actually helped society to flexibility and tolerance. A man could be loyal at once to his profession, his region, his family connections, and his class. At a time when the idea of world-government, however woolly, wildly impractical, and even authoritarian the form in which it was to develop, was considered the only respectable long-term aspiration, Eliot stressed the value of regionalism. He considered that the too-rapid and enforced unification of Germany and Italy directly contributed to the aggrandizement that eventually found expression in Nazism and Fascism. Fascism was execrated by the intellectuals of the 'thirties as the evil alternative to enlightened Communism; Eliot saw them as intrinsically the same thing. He questioned whether democracy itself, which had become an absolute religion, as though it were the sole guarantee of equity and justice, especially amongst those who had never given the concept serious thought, might not, “badly led, smug, and sacrificing everything to creature-comforts, fall before some hard new domination”. In the teeth of the egalitarian craze Eliot insisted, “A real democracy is always a restricted democracy, and can only flourish with some limitation by hereditary rights and responsibilities.”

What Eliot said becomes increasingly hard to deny: in contrast how vapidly does the Marxist jingo of Louis MacNeice read now where he condemned Eliot for lacking the revolutionary zeal of MacNeice's own generation. Even before his death a few years ago MacNeice had much modified his enthusiasm: today, faced with things like the witch hunts conducted by the servile Union of Soviet Writers, he would have found it hard to defend Communism-in-action even as an improvement upon Czarism. Professor David Daiches, an academic critic with a keen nose for fashion, sneered at Eliot's religion as being “a personal compensation”: one wonders whether today he would presume to describe the religion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the same terms.

Dr. Kirk, however, quotes a devastating reply to Professor Daiches written at the time by Edwin Muir. Muir, an exact contemporary of Eliot, had had a very different background, going from a happy childhood in the peasant world of the Orkney Islands to the grim poverty of the Glasgow slums, and able only slowly to develop his gifts as a poet. For him, too, personal integrity and a native charity led back to Christianity. He could understand and fully respect Eliot's conversion, although Muir himself never accepted any formal Church membership. Yet Muir's description of Rome at the end of his autobiography (which Professor Barry Ulanov has called the greatest autobiography of this century) is as fine a tribute as any to the ethos of the Eternal City.

Muir had much in common with Eliot, for all the difference of their backgrounds. They were both stimulating companions with fine minds (although quiet and gentle in manner), true poets, generous to others, men who had gained in spirit by their patience with difficult wives—I refer here of course to Eliot's first marriage. I remember them, as it were, in the same breath, and along with them I remember a third man—known also to Dr. Kirk—the late J. M. Reid, a brilliant historian and political writer, although hardly known outside his native Scotland. I do not think Eliot and Reid ever had the opportunity to get to know each other personally, but I do know that Eliot was an enthusiast for Reid's writings in the paper The New Alliance, that some of us kept appearing every other month throughout the dark years of 1939-1945. Eliot with his belief in the importance of regionalism had always been sympathetic to the movement for increased Scottish autonomy, and Reid's ideas of what politics should be about were similar to his own as expressed in many Criterion editorials; “Politique,” Eliot wrote in 1930, “means more than prosperity and comfort, if it is even to mean that. It means the social aspect of the Good Life.”

Dr. Kirk puts us all in his debt for assembling in a book at once detailed and immensely readable the creed of a man whose thought becomes only more relevant as the years pass. Eliot's conservatism certainly extends today from the conservation of civilized culture to the conservation of the ecology that sustains our very life. Such conservation has already been stigmatized by spokesmen for British Socialism with their most virulent abuse as a “middle-class cause”, since their belief still lies in politique as primarily the provider of “prosperity and comfort”. Yet every aspect of the Good Life demands a nobler concept: men will never relinquish greedy pursuit of material things until they put a higher value on things of the spirit, something that demands sacrifice of self and a cherishing of precious things that have been handed down to us. As Edwin Muir put it in the closing words of his autobiography, words that Eliot would have endorsed utterly, “what I am most aware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath, but also—and this is a point of faith—from the Source of the mystery itself, by the means which religious people call Grace.”