108 I Criticism in the twentieth century
Eliot and the idea of tradition I 109
theorize: the metacritical seed of literary theory was sown, at any rate in the West, by
Eliot's famous essay.
F. H. Bradley-the historical sense
The immediate object of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is to define poetic value
and originality (although, as with much of Eliot's criticism, and as he acknowledged, its
motivation was the direction of his own poetic practice). But its ramifications are
extensive, in the fields of history, philosophy, epistemology, and cognition, as well as
aesthetic theory and artistic creativity. It sets out to reconcile 'tradition' and the 'indi-
vidual'. In the process, other antinomies are to be reconciled: the timeless and the
temporal, the past and the present, permanence and change, knowledge and experience,
the ideal and the real.
The emotional and philosophical origins of the essay are closely allied, as is evident
from the text that lies behind it, Eliot's doctoral thesis 'Experience and the Objects of
Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley', a personal and prolonged meditation on
Bradley's philosophy, which Eliot wrote as a philosophy graduate student at Harvard,
completed in England in 1916, but was prevented by war from submitting. 1 The thesis
reveals the preoccupations-even obsessions-which became the basis for Eliot's subse-
quent theoretical, critical, and poetic development. It wants both to validate immediate
experience and to reach beyond it; and, like much of his poetry up to and including The
Waste Land (1922), it is fascinated by solipsism. Eliot's biographer Peter Ackroyd de-
scribes well the appeal to Eliot of Bradley's book Appearance and Reality: 'to recognize the
limitations of ordinary knowledge and experience but yet to see that when they are
organized into a coherent whole they might vouchsafe glimpses of absolute truth-there
is balm here for one trapped in the world and yet seeking some other, invaded by
sensations and yet wishing to understand and to order them'. Immediate experience
gained through what Bradley calls 'finite centres' is incomplete, and even 'mad', but it is
all that is valid for the individual: 'All significant truths are private truths.' But the thesis
would somehow' break out of solipsism. As Ackroyd writes: 'The purpose is to reach
beyond the miasma of private experience and construct a world, or rather an interpret-
ation of the world, "as comprehensive and coherent as possible". And so it is that
throughout Eliot's work the idea of pattern or order becomes the informing principle.' 2
That idea informs 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', in terms of history, emotion, and
art. And this personal search for unity and order, in politics and society as well as in
literature, had its counterpart in the wider Modernist mind-set: the need for stability and
coherence in what many experienced as a disintegrating post-war world and collapsing
culture.
The essay's preoccupation with historical understanding likewise owes much to the
thesis on Bradley. The thesis argues that 'lived truths are partial and fragmentary', and so
T. s.
any understanding of experience has to be 'reinterpreted by every thinking mind and by
every civilization'. This epistemology is the basis for the essay's important concept of 'the
historical sense'. At any one time an individual can be aware of the world only as he
experiences it now, the Bradleyan 'finite centre'. But part of our experience of the world
is what we bring to it, our point of view. We know that there are and have been countless
other points of view, and the attempt to reconcile this knowledge with our private
experience results in the essay's virtuoso performance. The essay gives the sanctity of
the traditional to originality, and the excitement of originality to the traditional.
Tradition by this account is not what it is commonly taken to be, an accepted given,
something unconsciously handed down: 'It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you
must obtain it by great labour', a labour entailing. 'the historical sense', which
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense
compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the
whole of the literature of Europe . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous
order.
The past is thus not only a chronology to which the present is perpetually being added,
with us at the end of it; it is something which is forever altering from our present, ever-
changing perspective. It depends on us as much as we depend on it. Eliot's brilliant move
is to bring together these two perceptions of time; their conjunction is crucial to his idea
of tradition. The historical sense 'is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and
of the timeless and of the temporal together'. The essay thus brings together a syn-
chronic view of history, where the past is always with us, and a diachronic view, where
the past is passed. This argument means that every work of art is a new beginning, but
that it cannot be recognized as such, or be achieved, without the larger perspective of all
such new beginnings throughout history.
Thus it can be seen how Eliot's Bradleyan epistemology informs his idea of tradition: if
'lived truths', being 'partial', have to be constantly 'reinterpreted' and seen in the
context of other times, so do works of art. But in the process of reinterpretation the
very context changes:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. . .. The existing monuments form
an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really
new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order
to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered.
Critics and commentators are fond of pointing out the difficulties and illogicalities of
this argument. 'Monument' normally signifies something unchanging; but Eliot no
doubt wanted to retain the word's aura while altering its significance. The notion of
'completeness' does not sit well with the idea of an open and renewable tradition. And if
an 'order' is 'ideal', can it be subject to perpetual modification? But such difficulties at
least attest to the complexity of Eliot's aesthetic programme, involving as it does the
reconciliation of synchronic and diachronic perceptions of time.