What is a Classic?
WHAT IS A CLASSIC?: A Lecture
In October of 1944, as Allied forces were battling on the Euro-
pean mainland and German rockets were falling on London,
Thomas Stearns Eliot, aged fifty-six, gave his presidential address
to the Virgil Society in London. In his lecture Eliot does not men-
tion wartime circumstances, save for a single reference—oblique,
understated, in his best British manner—to "accidents of the pres-
ent time" that had made it difficult to get access to the books he
needed to prepare the lecture. It is a way of reminding his auditors
that there is a perspective in which the war is only a hiccup, how-
ever massive, in the life of Europe.
The title of the lecture was "What Is a Classic?" and its aim was
to consolidate and reargue a case Eliot had long been advancing:
that the civilization of Western Europe is a single civilization, that
its descent is from Rome via the Church of Rome and the Holy
Roman Empire, and that its originary classic must therefore be the
epic of Rome, Virgil's Aeneid.1 Each time this case was reargued, it
was reargued by a man of greater public authority, a man who by
1944, as poet, dramatist, critic, publisher, and cultural commenta-
tor, could be said to dominate English letters. This man had tar-
geted London as the metropolis of the English-speaking world,
and with a diffidence concealing ruthless singleness of purpose
had made himself into the deliberately magisterial voice of that
metropolis. Now he was arguing for Virgil as the dominant voice
of metropolitan, imperial Rome, and Rome, furthermore, impe-
rial in transcendent ways that Virgil could not have been expected
to understand.
"What Is a Classic?" is not one of Eliot's best pieces of criti-
cism. The address de haut en bas, which in the 1920s he had used
to such great effect to impose his personal predilections on the
London world of letters, has become mannered. There is a tired-
ness to the prose, too. Nevertheless, the piece is never less than in-
telligent, and—once one begins to explore its background—more coherent than might appear at first reading. Furthermore, behind it is a clear awareness that the ending of World War II must bring with it a new cultural order, with new opportunities and new threats. What struck me when I reread Eliot's lecture in preparation for the present lecture, however, was the fact that nowhere does Eliot reflect on the fact of his own Americanness, or at least his American origins, and therefore on the somewhat odd angle at which he comes, honoring a European poet to a European audience.
I say "European," but of course even the Europeanness of
Eliot's British audience is an issue, as is the line of descent of En-
glish literature from the literature of Rome. For one of the writers
Eliot claims not to have been able to reread in preparation for his
lecture is Sainte-Beuve, who in his lectures on Virgil claimed Vir-
gil as "the poet of all Latinity," of France and Spain and Italy but
not of all Europe.2 So Eliot's project of claiming a line of descent
from Virgil has to start with claiming a fully European identity for
Virgil; and also with asserting for England a European identity that
has sometimes been begrudged it and that it has not always been
eager to embrace.3
Rather than follow in detail the moves Eliot makes to link
Virgil's Rome to the England of the 1940s, let me ask how and
why Eliot himself became English enough for the issue to matter
to him. 4
Why did Eliot "become" English at all? My sense is that at first
the motives were complex: partly Anglophilia, partly solidarity
with the English middle-class intelligentsia, partly as a protective
còn tiếp
Sẻ post trên New Tin Văn.
Bài của Calvino cùng đề tài có trên NYRB. Sẽ làm link. Cả hai bài Mít đều cần.
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