by Karl Thomas Rees
Thomas Stearns Eliot, arguably the most influential poet of the first half of the twentieth century, is best known for his highly allusive and at times eclectic poems: The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Born and educated in the United States, Eliot moved to London in 1914 and lived there for the remainder of his life. Like so many expatriate writers and artists of the period, Eliot felt that America had nothing to offer the modern artist. As both his allusive style and his fascination with pure British culture (he assumed British citizenship and joined the Anglican church in 1927) attest to, Eliot felt America lacked a rich tradition upon which to found its art. His landmark 1920 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which served as the foundation of literary criticism for decades afterwards, outlines the importance of tradition in the creation of art. “No poet,” he argues, “has his complete meaning alone.” Instead, he insists that “the whole of the literature of Europe … has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” Because of this, Eliot felt that for the poet, the European tradition—the “mind of Europe”—was “more important than his own private mind” (1406).
T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is unique in that Eliot, as an American, insists that literature can find its greater purpose in the traditions of a land to which he, at least at the time of its writing, did not belong. In seeking a tradition rooted in the “mind of Europe,” he apparently rejects his own American roots, founded on the likes of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman. However, a survey of American thought both contemporary to and immediately preceding “Tradition and the Individual Talent” shows that Eliot’s essay is the inevitable product of the developing American tradition. Eliot’s preoccupation with the “mind of Europe” is the direct consequence of both his conscious attempt to escape a confused American tradition and his unconscious subjection to America’s “melting pot” of Western civilization. It is my intent to show, through nineteenth-century social commentaries and a selection of early twentieth-century articles from the magazine The Dial, the historical context behind “the mind of Europe.”
One can hardly consider coincidental Eliot’s failure to mention anything of an American tradition in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Critic Lee Oser notes chat “the American melting pot clearly threatened traditions chat Eliot … prized above all others” (56). For Eliot, Americanism represented the demise of pure culture and the art chat related it. In a 1928 preface to E. A. Mowrer’s This American World, for example, he labeled Americanism as a “malady” chat threatened to infect Europe (qtd. in Oser 55). Eliot is not the only critic to place Americanism in this context. Fear chat America, due to its lack of a solid tradition, could not support an art of lasting value was quite common co the era. James Oppenheim, whose 1920 essay “Poetry—Our First National Arc” possesses much of the same concern for tradition as “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” expresses concern chat “One might expect then that an American national art would be an impossibility” (238). Maxwell Bodenheim, writing a year earlier, rebukes those consciously seeking an American art, claiming that “American art will attain a national shading with the slow march of centuries” (544). The flight of the expatriates to Europe during this period evidences the reality of these fears.
America’s lack of a tradition must be understood in the context of earlier discussions concerning tradition and civilization, especially in relation to Europe. Benjamin Kidd, who in 1894 authored the book Social Evolution, relies heavily on the notion that Western civilization exists as “a single organic growth” (186). Characteristic to chis talk of Western civilization as an emerging organism is an overwhelming pride in its assumed superiority. In his preface, Kidd talks of the “immense part which the English-speaking peoples—if true to their own traditions—are not improbably destined to play in the immediate future of the world” (ix). One immediately notices Kidd’s emphasis on the condition that English-speaking people must keep their traditions. Obviously, the belief that a loss of tradition represents a loss of power precedes Eliot. Perhaps what is most unique about Kidd’s analysis of Western civilization, however, is his identification of a “motive force” moving it by means of a general “altruistic feeling” which Europe’s culture has developed (185). Kidd claims that each citizen of Western civilization is “unconsciously influenced by it … in every moment of [their] lives” (189). These same definitions of a “motive force” are behind the works of twentieth-century writers as well. Oppenheim argues that poetry becomes America’s first national art because of how easily it reveals the “unconscious of the poet.” This unconscious, in turn, reveals “something passed on to the poet through a long descent” (239). Oppenheim is essentially outlining a “common racial inheritance” (239) deeper than any individual European nation.
It must be remembered, of course, that Kidd and his book are decidedly American in origin. So, also, it is important to note that the next author I will mention, Charles Morris, is decidedly American. His novel The Aryan Race, predating Kidd’s by about six years, may, in its name, stir up haunting images of Nazi fanaticism in the mind of the contemporary reader. Reading it in connection with Eliot also leads naturally to questions of anti-Semitism. Yet, the attitudes that Morris gives voice to, in their historical context, are rooted in the same concept of an unconscious European race that transcends nationality.
The notion of an Aryan race, according to Morris, relies less on historical fact than an “unconscious history” (2). Of this unconscious history, Morris says:
We are ignorant of the numbers of its people, the location
and extent of its territory, the period of its early development.
But we know much of its basal history,—that history which
has wrought itself deeply into the language, customs, beliefs,
and institutions of its modern descendants, and which crops
out everywhere through the soil of modern European
civilization. (3)
It would be presumptuous to remark that this conception parallels the conception of America. The importance of the Aryan, not American, tradition is manifest throughout the book, and Morris shows as much intrigue with this Aryan tradition as Eliot does with “the whole of the literature of Europe.” Of particular significance in relation to Eliot is Morris’s bold proclamation of the importance of the Aryan literary tradition, which is undoubtedly the mind of Europe that Eliot seeks: “so far as the intellectual value of literary work is concerned, the Aryans have gone almost infinitely beyond the remainder of mankind” (243). Even in Morris’s substantial cataloging of the literary traditions of the “remainder of mankind” (see 243-72), there is no mention of an American tradition.
It was this void of a motive force as well as the lack of impermanence that caused such anxiety concerning the American tradition. There were many who felt that the American tradition should remain the offspring of American colonialism. Eliot, certainly, found comfort in the Puritan tradition. Yet, the reality of American diversity precluded the predominance of a colonial tradition. Oppenheim says that it was the task of the American poets “to throw overboard those traditions” and then “to find an expression more native to ourselves” (240). In Bodenheim’s opinion, even the legacy of American forefathers and pioneers was suspect, offering only a “deceptive cohesion unsupported by any permanent, inner response in the individual” (544). If the very roots of the American nation could not support a tradition, then the question immediately became, what could? Nations such as France and Russia, contended Oppenheim, achieved their tradition through an “organic fusion” and “unconscious identity,” yet Americans existed merely as a collection of immigrants (238). Without what Bodenheim calls “esthetic ties or emotional undercurrents” (544) it would be impossible to find an American mode of expression. Certainly the chaos prevented Eliot from writing the same words about America as he did about Europe-that America had “a simultaneous existence and compose[d] a simultaneous order” (“Tradition” 1406).
Eastern European immigration, more than any other factor, was seen as the root of the chaos. In 1914, Wallace Rice summed up Professor Ross’s complaint that, as a result of immigration, “our national types of beauty must suffer” (339). Rice notes that many Americans esteemed America’s past for its “power of assimilation” (337), but Ross lamented the fact that modern immigration diluted the intellectual quality of America. “Europe [now] retains most of her brains,” he said, adding, “there is little sign of an intellectual element among the Magyars, Russians, South Slavs, Italians, Greeks, or Portuguese” (338-39). It is, of course, highly unlikely that Rice’s measurement of intellect was quantitative. Those nations he listed represented a different, and hence undesirable, tradition. In hopes of retaining some sense of stability in already established traditions, there was a general urgency, as Carl H. Grabo points out, to “Americanize the immigrant more effeciently” (539). In this vein, Winifred Kirkland asks “how so beautiful a thing as the spirit of America … is to be transmitted to the ignorant and downtrodden who seek our shores” (537). However, for Eliot and countless others who embarked on a quest to find permanence in tradition, no amount of Americanization would create the same genuine sense of tradition. Just as Eliot saw the European past being altered by the present (“Tradition” 1406), the tide of immigration permanently altered the course of the once colonial American tradition.
It is easy to recognize a confused sense of tradition as a primary motive in Eliot’s rejection of the American tradition. It is intriguing, however, to discover that Eliot’s attempt to define himself within an all-encompassing European tradition was largely an American concern. First, however, it is important to note that immigration created the framework for a largely unconscious, multicultural movement in America. This multiculturalism, of course, hardly qualifies as multiculturalism in its contemporary sense. It did, however, make possible for the first time the idea of a comprehensive and unified “mind of Europe.”
In his 1919 article ”Americanizing the Immigrant,” Grabo presents the ideas of Reverend Enrico C. Sartorio. Recognizing that Americanizing young Italians by teaching them only English alienates them from their home life, Sartorio proposes that they be taught in Italian, with the intent of helping them “realize that they are connected by blood with a race of glorious traditions.” Furthermore, Grabo offers the words of English immigrant Horace J. Bridges. Bridges advocates keeping alive Italian and German art, “not for the sake of the Old World, but as elements contributory to the American culture.” It is Bridges’s hope that America can produce “a new type of national character … by the cross-fertilization” of its European members (qtd. in Grabo 540).
In suggesting that America arrive at its art through a synthesis of all its European cultures, Bridges captures the essence of an argument supported by many other critics. In Kirkland’s essay, “Americanization and Walt Whitman,” she introduces the poet as a potential source of dialogue between the immigrant and America. Oppenheim also sees Whitman as a solution, claiming chat Americans find their first national art in Whitman. He explains that Whitman gave America “something universal … in the broadest sense-something equally the property of every race …. We are all this universal masked by Americanism …. Walt was Dutch, yet Carl Sandburg, who is Swedish, can prance his soul out to the same tunes and get a national expression with only a slightly different tinge” (240). The implication is that America makes possible the realization of commonalities historically inconceivable throughout Europe. America, essentially, creates the “mind of Europe,” and does so through poetry. Oppenheimer relates that poetry can “allow that mystic depth which is common to all men” (240), and he illustrates the potential of American poetry, by virtue of its multicultural influences, to penetrate to the roots of Western civilization. Eliot himself agrees chat the American tradition is rooted in the whole of Europe and has thus made possible the Americanized conception of the “mind of Europe.” In the aforementioned 1928 preface, Eliot explains:
[Mowrer] inquires into the origin, as well as the nature, of
Americanism; traces it back to Europe; and finds chat what
are supposed to be specifically American qualities and vices,
are merely the European qualities and vices given in a new
growth in a different soil. … Americanization, in shore,
would probably happen anyway; America itself has merely
accelerated the process. (Qtd in Oser 55)
In trying to escape Americanization and the void of the American tradition, the “mind of Europe” chat Eliot seeks results from the same events that supposedly render America devoid of any obvious tradition. When Eliot speaks, then, of the “mind of Europe” as “a mind which changes … which abandons nothing en route” (1406), it must be remembered that this mind exists because of the greatest change of all—the emergence of a multicultural America chat, because it cannot find its roots in one tradition, must therefore search for a common mode of expression in the unconscious whole of Europe. Ironically, in trying to escape from the void of the American tradition, Eliot embraces what may indeed be the only understanding of a tradition possible in a land of immigrants.
Bibliography
Bodenheim, Maxwell. “American Art?” The Dial 31 May 1919: 544. Reprint New York: Kraus. Vol. 66.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2. 3rd ed. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. 1405-10. Vol. 66.
Grabo, Carl H. “Americanizing the Immigrants.” The Dial 31 May 1919: 539-41. Reprint New York: Kraus, 1966. Vol. 66.
Kidd, Benjamin. Social Evolution. 2nd. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1894.
Kirkland, Winifred. “Americanization and Walt Whitman.” The Dial 31 May 1919: 537-39. Reprint New York: Kraus, 1966. Vol. 66.
Morris, Charles. The Aryan Race. Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Company, 1888.
Oppenheim, James. “Poetry-Our First National Art.” The Dial Feb 1920: 238-42. Reprint New York: Kraus, 1966. Vol. 66.
Oser, Lee. T. S. Eliot and American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998.
Rice, Wallace. “Immigrants, Past and Present.” The Dial 1 Nov. 1914: 337-39. Reprint New York: Kraus, 1966. Vol. 5 7.
