‘The Contemporary Novel’: an essay by T. S. ELIOT (Published in English for 1st Time)

The Times Literary Supplement ^ | 8/12/2015 | T.S. Eliot

[mojito]

In his little book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, published many years ago, Henry James has the following significant sentences:

“The charm [of Hawthorne’s slighter pieces of fiction] is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of man’s soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it.”

The interest of this passage lies in its double application: it is true of Hawthorne, it is as true or truer of James himself. “They are moral, and their interest is moral”; this is the truth about all of James’s long series of novels and stories; a series of novels and stories which fell, accordingly, exactly upon the generations least qualified to appreciate the “moral interest”. Note the term “deeper psychology”. James’s book on Hawthorne was published in 1879. “Psychology” had not then reached the meaning of to-day, or if it had the meaning had not reached Henry James. One could not use the phrase now without surrounding it with a whole commentary of exposition and defence. But one feels that it is right; and that our contemporary novelists, under the influence of the shallower psychology by which we are all now affected, have missed that deeper psychology which was the subject of Henry James’s study.

It is in trying to find some principle of unity among the bewildering diversity of forms and contents of the contemporary novel in England and America, that I am led back to Henry James.

[mojito]

This essay by Eliot was going to be published in the New Republic by Edmund Wilson in 1926, but due to some mishaps the English manuscript was lost and never published; a French version of the essay was in 1927.

[Dr. Sivana]

He really has it in for D.H. Lawrence:

When his characters make love – or perform Mr. Lawrence’s equivalent for love-making – and they do nothing else – they not only lose all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in order to make love-making tolerable; they seem to reascend the metamorphoses of evolution, passing backward beyond ape and fish to some hideous coition of protoplasm.

[mojito]

He doesn’t seem that keen on sex either.

[jobim]

Thank you for this! I have saved it to my files. Hawthorne, James, and Eliot in the same article, on FR no less, is a treasure. These masters of the writing craft have something important to say via some of the greatest prose and poetry ever written.

[Verginius Rufus]

Maybe his fear of eating peaches did that to him.

[mojito]

I think you may be on to something there.

[Buttons12]

Thank you for this! I have saved it to my files. Hawthorne, James, and Eliot in the same article, on FR no less, is a treasure

You read my mind!