Charles-Louis Philippe and T. S. Eliot

Abstract

W HEN IN I932 T. S. Eliot furnished a preface to CharlesLouis Philippe's Bubu de Montparnasse in translation, he stated that he had first read the novel after he came to Paris in i9io.' That is to say, at the period when he was being introduced by Alain Fournier to Crime and Punishment, which helped shape Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he became acquainted also with the work of the French naturalistic writer whom in the same preface he was to compare with Dickens and to credit with having an intense pity for the humble and oppressed, a pity still more akin to that of Dickens' Russian disciple Dostoievski. And, like Dostoievski, Philippe exerted upon Eliot's poetry a conspicuous influence in I9IO and I9II. Bubu de Montparnasse stands in the same relation to Eliot's third Prelude and to Rhapsody on a Windy Night as Crime and Punishment to Prufrock.2 The first two Preludes were composed at Harvard in I909 or I9IO and hence could owe nothing to Philippe. The third, written at Paris in i9ii, and the fourth, written upon Eliot's return to Cambridge in the same year, as well as the Rhapsody, also dating from I9II, reflect a studious contact with Philippe's sensibility. Into each of these-into the fourth Prelude from Marie Donadicu, a superior novel which is unfortunately not so well known in this country-there passed much of the gloom and exhaustion that one finds in Philippe's stories of the Paris underworld. Eliot himself (after confirming my original supposition that in the third of the Preludes he was drawing upon Bubu de Montparnasse) has kindly suggested that he may have taken something from the other book.3 His hint has been invaluable to the precise determination of his debt, which I have since