No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter.
Such at least is the judgement arrived at by T. It is a question of the objective necessity with which the conditions of the age impinge and bear upon the artist, demanding to be addressed. His mission, for this is the archetypal portrait, the narcissistic fantasy perhaps, of the artist as virile superman. The culture is out of joint, blest is he who is called upon in art to set things right. An art of reparation for the pervasive dismembering of bodies, of psyches, of cities, of devastated lands.
For if the age they lived in had achieved its proper balance and formal unity, as any self-assuming classical age might do and should do, the role of the artist would not go beyond the purveyance of a pleasing appearance or incidental embellishment: a role comparable to that of a virtuoso stage actor or a concert pianist whose task is the presentation of a meaning already achieved, consummate. The end of art, apparently, is thus the accomplishment of the classical, and the classical is to be understood as the paradigm of supreme and breathless form, in lieu of the devastated clutter of broken images and fragments not even to be shored against our ruins.
As if the end of art were the antithetical overcoming of life, a state of final accomplishment aspired to in vain, in the unsettled and unclassical world of the demotic. Fiat ars, pereat mundus. Style will always be a question of metaphysics and of politics. As poet and as critic, Eliot would play a crucial role in the establishment of the ideal type of high modernism. Within such a framework, the qualification of the contemporary condition of formlessness can only be by way of the antithetical charting of earlier forms, classical and Christian.
Such an art is inevitably Burkean and backward-looking, in danger of infatuation with the image of an ideally imagined past. If our definition of high modernism is formulated according to the poetic and cultural criticism of Eliot, is D. Lawrence to be numbered in the ranks of the modernists? Neither in terms of the sense of the past which it supposes, nor the actual working and reworking of language which it authorises. Lawrence and T.
