It was hardly the "age of Eliot" when the poet and critic whom Russell Kirk calls "the greatest man of letters in his time" was alive and active. Shaw, Wells, and Hemingway, to pick examples at random, had much greater names. Nevertheless the title of Mr. Kirk’s book, Eliot and his Age (Random House, 463 pp. $12.50) has an ex post justification: the dominant literary and philosophical trends of the earlier Twentieth Century are manifestly dying, while Eliot’s "moral imagination," which penetrated to the heart of what Mr. Kirk calls "the Permanent Things," is bound to have more and more influence as time goes on.

T. S. Eliot was considered very much a contemporary symbol for a few brief years when his The Waste Land was taken to be the poetic counterpart of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The children of the "lost generation" accepted The Waste Land, with its vivid images of decay, as the definitive statement of a negative philosophy. It had been published in The Dial, which Professor Copeland of Harvard considered decadent. With lovely women stooping to automatic folly, with hollow men leaning witlessly together, and with people dancing around prickly pears instead of mulberry bushes, Eliot’s early poetry evoked a world without values. The contrast with the literature of the ages of belief was painful, even as Joyce’s "odyssey" in modern Dublin, when stacked up against the Homeric model, was painful. But pain was delight in those days; we reveled in our agnostic gloom.

If The Waste Land set the anarchic mood of the early Nineteen Twenties, when all the faiths were questioned, it can’t be said that Eliot dominated anything when, with the essays of For Lancelot Andrewes, he suddenly proclaimed himself in 1928 to be a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. The generation that had taken The Waste Land to be a full statement of an enduring despair felt that Eliot had lost touch with reality. The new faiths that were a-borning at the end of the Twenties and in the early Thirties were secular, the politics of the time accepted commissars but not kings. As for "classicism," how could the author of Prufrock and The Waste Land have any truck with such sterile categorizing? He had broken a mold, departed from tradition, and now here he was extolling tradition. Eliot’s friends in Bloomsbury were mystified, if not aghast.

Prophet or Anachronism?

As a magazine editor and essayist in the Thirties, Eliot was accepted as a prophet by a few and as an anachronism by the many. Most of his contemporaries in England had gone Left; the Spanish Republicans, manipulated more and more by the Communists, were all the rage. In America the young flocked to the New Deal and the pro let cult took over in the New York publishing companies. It was distinctly not the "age of Eliot."

Russell Kirk, who came of age as a writer in the Nineteen Fifties when the new conservative movement was just getting started in America, cannot really believe that Eliot’s magazine, The Criterion, was generally regarded in the pre-World War II period as a futile effort to put back the clock. But if Kirk can’t quite conjure up the anti-Eliot flavor of the Thirties, his very inability to credit the potency of the socialist and interventionist trends in politics and the power of agnosticism in the spiritual realm has enabled him to see Eliot clear. Kirk sees things in The Waste Land that we couldn’t see a generation ago. Eliot was always fascinated by Dante, and Eliot’s own career was destined to have a symbolism that might be summed up in Dantesque terms. The Waste Land and Prufrock were Eliot’s Inferno. He struggled out of his earthly hell through the purgatory of his Ash Wednesday. The Paradiso was to come later, when Eliot, defending the idea of a Christian society, found that he could believe in a religion based on revelation and authority.

Going deeply into Eliot’s contemporary journalism as well as into his poems, plays, and books of essays, Mr. Kirk turns Eliot into a Johnsonian figure of plain common sense. Eliot’s comments on the march of the dictators, his criticism of Britain’s conservatives for their failure to solve the problem of the social crisis at home and to arm the empire for the coming war against Hitler, have the true prophetic ring. They can stand reprinting as the contemporary observations of the Webbs, the Shavians, the Wellsians, and the writers of the Bloomsbury clique cannot. The wonder is that they had such little impact at the time.

Bulwark for Conservatism

But if the pre-World War II Eliot was a prophet without honor both in his native United States and in his adopted England, he is having his delayed effect. Kirk has managed to turn him into a mighty bulwark for Burkean conservatism. The inner order, as both Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk insist, must affirm cultural and religious continuity. The outer order, the achievement of a true commonwealth, will take care of itself if the inner order is based on what Mr. Kirk calls Right Reason and a faith that accepts both the morality and the mystical sense of an unseen ruler of the universe.

Kirk is against what he calls Demon Ideology; human nature, as he sees it, must revolt against the effort to force life into patterns that come from the brain of a Hegel, a Marx, or even an Adam Smith. Society has an organic continuity that includes many logical inconsistencies, and Kirk is willing to accept the organic as against the dictates of individual rationality and private judgment. As a practical matter, I can see why the organic must be defended against those who would abolish inconsistencies by invoking force; a sane commonwealth must move slowly when it comes to abolishing anything that has become dignified by tradition. If we don’t move slowly, we end up killing each other. But the Burkean position necessitates a willingness to accept some fuzziness at the edges that makes critical discourse unsatisfactory.

I wish I could be sure I knew what Kirk means when he speaks of Right Reason. He leaves me groping fuzzily for definition. If reason can be wrong, isn’t it a sign that it is unreasonable in the first place? Again, Kirk speaks of the "higher reason," which transcends "neat constructions." If Kirk, emulating Eliot, is merely saying that there are things we must take on faith (life is rooted in mystery), I can follow him. But I don’t know what he gains by the hypostasis that is implied by the use of such terms as Right Reason, the Higher Reason, the Permanent Things, and Demon Ideology. They demand what might become whole libraries of qualification, and so they become thought-stoppers instead of thought-liberators.

In general, however, Kirk is plain enough. The Burkean tradition, which he exemplifies, cannot be reconciled with Five-Year Plans, or with centralized controls and dictated prices. T. S. Eliot’s Burkean common sense implies a general defense of the free market, which makes Kirk’s latest book relevant for readers of an economic journal. Incidentally, the book, which is not a biography, contains enough biographical material to satisfy those who are curious about one of our great exiles. In all, it is a most distinguished work.

THE IDEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION by Louis J. Halle (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1972) 174 pp., $6.95

Reviewed by Edmund A. Opitz

This compact book is divided into thirty-nine short, pithy chapters; the style is terse, sometimes aphoristic. It reads like good conversation. A dedicated totalitarian might not get the message, but these pages will surely help the earnest student of society trace the "Gadarene progress" of the nations from 1789 to 1984. The political disasters of this period proceed inexorably from a wrong assessment of human nature and the human condition, and no improvement is possible except as individual persons reorder their own priorities.

It is an observed fact that people differ, one from the other, in their beliefs, their interests, their talents. A free society, such as the nation contemplated by the authors of The Federalist, seeks to accommodate this diversity, and to profit from it. Most modern nations, however, are under the sway of an ideology which contends that state power should be used to impose uniformity on the masses; those who differ, those who dissent from the ideology are reprogrammed or liquidated. In whose minds were conceived the notion that human nature is to be made over? What books argued that this is the task of politics? What is the origin of the modern outlook which persuades so many to perpetrate, or endure, or acquiesce in the monstrous evils of the Twentieth Century?

The author touches upon the straightforward authoritarianism of Hobbes, devotes a couple of pages to Hegel, but dwells at length on the contributions of Rousseau and Marx to the moulding of the ideological imagination. There is more to Rousseau than Halle allows, but ideas were launched which turn man into a sick animal and then offer a cure that compounds the disease. The type of man who has emerged in ever increasing numbers since the French Revolution is less concerned with people and things than with his own feelings about people and things; he’s forever fingering his pulse, calculating his responses, examining his motives, and as a result he feels estranged from his fellows. He needs the warmth of the herd to heal the hurt of alienation, and thus is driven to submerge his individuality and escape personal responsibility in the Marxist state, whose claims on him are total.

But the claims are fraudulent; rulers and ruled alike are but fallible men and the ideas which keep them in their respective places are phony. We are men and not gods, and should conduct our lives accordingly. "It seems to me," Halle writes, "that the primary concern of any individual who feels he has a light to live by must be to live by that light himself; it must be with the constant improvement of his own standards; it must be with the level to which he is able to raise himself."