Read Online The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 by T. S. Eliot - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: T. S. Eliot
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Jerusalem’ ( Oeuvres poétiques complètes [1975], 437).
5–The Hungarian Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922) became in 1895 principal conductor of both the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Berlin Philarmonic. Götterdämmerung (‘The Twilight of the Gods’) is the last opera in Wagner’s tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelungs: TSE refers to the song of the Rheinmaidens in his notes to l. 266 of TWL.
6–Matthew Prichard (1865–1936), English aesthete who had become secretary to the Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1902. Henry Eliot had given TSE an introduction to him.
7– Translation : My dear friend, I have received your letter just as I am on the point of leaving Paris to go down for a fortnight to the Pyrenees. Everyone has already gone, apart from Fellows; and the house is filled with ephemeral visitors, almost all corresponding to the label ‘elderly American spinster’. No more need be said.
Paris has presented quite an interesting spectacle recently (14 July, Bastille Day). Together with the period around Shrove Tuesday, it is the true Parisian holiday, now that ‘the antique renewal of age-old feast-days no longer flowers on the ancient cobblestones of this hard century’. I even believe that it takes a more artistic form than Shrove Tuesday; nothing is out of key. Official illuminations, march-past, patriotic rosettes, the common folk dancing in the streets; appalling bands playing overpoweringly emotional waltzes; the atmosphere is warm, dusty and sweaty, under a blazing sky; a tricolour, State-commissioned atmosphere, and the populace enjoys itself up to the hilt. In the afternoon, the children take over, wretched urchins blowing tin trumpets; the evening is filled with an ever-mounting sensual excitement; sweat makes the girls’ hair stick to their temples; lottery wheels spin; a merry-go-round, attractively lit and alluring, also revolves, and with every jerk of the wooden horses, the whores brace their supple busts and a shapely leg can be glimpsed through the slit of a ‘fashionably split skirt’; a heavy, sensuous gust flows warmly by.
All this outward demonstration corresponds, without doubt, to the present dominant tendency among the Parisian populace. Not being a very elevated tendency, it is materialistic, but I would not call it coarse, since your average Parisian, even so, remains subtle, sceptical and refined; in time of danger, he will, I believe, know how to behave generously. There is reason to think that the Parisian working class is undergoing the same evolution as the aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Today, you constantly come across examples of the ‘educated, intelligent worker’; he no longer believes in the old stories dating from the past; many of them believe in science (!) but, what is more important, many have repressed their good inner impulses through a desire to think rationally. (No doubt, most of them remain nice people and decent fellows, intuitively and in spite of all this, but, logically, they are doomed by their system.) You can hear upper-class people remarking with a smile that ‘semi-culture, semi-science and semi-intellectualism will bring them no advantage’. But, my dear, good people, will complete intellectualism give you much more? While positivism (materialism poorly disguised) spreads downwards through society, an aspiration towards the Idea can be seen growing daily stronger among the Elite. The end of the nineteenth century is permeated by it, and it shows itself most markedly, no doubt, in modern poetry, then in music. It frequently takes the form of a return to Christianity, whether Catholic or Galilean and evangelical. What value is there in the innumerable and varied works showing this feature? What differences appear, indeed, as soon as you think of a few names! (Verlaine, Huysmans, Barrès, Francis Jammes, Péguy, Bourget, Claudel, Le Cardonnel, etc.). I deliberately quote them at random to show the sorting out
5–The Hungarian Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922) became in 1895 principal conductor of both the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Berlin Philarmonic. Götterdämmerung (‘The Twilight of the Gods’) is the last opera in Wagner’s tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelungs: TSE refers to the song of the Rheinmaidens in his notes to l. 266 of TWL.
6–Matthew Prichard (1865–1936), English aesthete who had become secretary to the Director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1902. Henry Eliot had given TSE an introduction to him.
7– Translation : My dear friend, I have received your letter just as I am on the point of leaving Paris to go down for a fortnight to the Pyrenees. Everyone has already gone, apart from Fellows; and the house is filled with ephemeral visitors, almost all corresponding to the label ‘elderly American spinster’. No more need be said.
Paris has presented quite an interesting spectacle recently (14 July, Bastille Day). Together with the period around Shrove Tuesday, it is the true Parisian holiday, now that ‘the antique renewal of age-old feast-days no longer flowers on the ancient cobblestones of this hard century’. I even believe that it takes a more artistic form than Shrove Tuesday; nothing is out of key. Official illuminations, march-past, patriotic rosettes, the common folk dancing in the streets; appalling bands playing overpoweringly emotional waltzes; the atmosphere is warm, dusty and sweaty, under a blazing sky; a tricolour, State-commissioned atmosphere, and the populace enjoys itself up to the hilt. In the afternoon, the children take over, wretched urchins blowing tin trumpets; the evening is filled with an ever-mounting sensual excitement; sweat makes the girls’ hair stick to their temples; lottery wheels spin; a merry-go-round, attractively lit and alluring, also revolves, and with every jerk of the wooden horses, the whores brace their supple busts and a shapely leg can be glimpsed through the slit of a ‘fashionably split skirt’; a heavy, sensuous gust flows warmly by.
All this outward demonstration corresponds, without doubt, to the present dominant tendency among the Parisian populace. Not being a very elevated tendency, it is materialistic, but I would not call it coarse, since your average Parisian, even so, remains subtle, sceptical and refined; in time of danger, he will, I believe, know how to behave generously. There is reason to think that the Parisian working class is undergoing the same evolution as the aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Today, you constantly come across examples of the ‘educated, intelligent worker’; he no longer believes in the old stories dating from the past; many of them believe in science (!) but, what is more important, many have repressed their good inner impulses through a desire to think rationally. (No doubt, most of them remain nice people and decent fellows, intuitively and in spite of all this, but, logically, they are doomed by their system.) You can hear upper-class people remarking with a smile that ‘semi-culture, semi-science and semi-intellectualism will bring them no advantage’. But, my dear, good people, will complete intellectualism give you much more? While positivism (materialism poorly disguised) spreads downwards through society, an aspiration towards the Idea can be seen growing daily stronger among the Elite. The end of the nineteenth century is permeated by it, and it shows itself most markedly, no doubt, in modern poetry, then in music. It frequently takes the form of a return to Christianity, whether Catholic or Galilean and evangelical. What value is there in the innumerable and varied works showing this feature? What differences appear, indeed, as soon as you think of a few names! (Verlaine, Huysmans, Barrès, Francis Jammes, Péguy, Bourget, Claudel, Le Cardonnel, etc.). I deliberately quote them at random to show the sorting out
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