The Poetry of Civic Virtue: Eliot, Malraux, Auden by Nathan A. Scott, Jr.

Abstract

468 BOOK llEVIEWS The Poetry of Civic Virtue: Eliot, Malraux, Auden. By NATHAN A. ScoTT, JR. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976. xi + 160 pp. Index. $8.50. The organizing theme of Nathan Scott's new book he defines as " the virtues proper to the City." Both the concept of the City and that of its requisite virtues he takes from the thought of Charles Williams: " the City " refers not to a political unit in the usual sense, but to communitas as such, the shared spiritual life that Williams calls " Coinherence," and the virtues proper to it are those that constitute its necessary formative conditions, namely Substitution, Exchange, and Sacrifice, those qualities of character by which we "bear one another's burdens." Most modern literature, says Scott, is strangely silent about these qualities and the central human discipline that they compose. Rather it tends to express an attitude of despair regarding human fellowship on any level higher than that of collaboration for subsistence and to look upon the metropolis as "crushingly and absolutely against the human virtue." This has led, he says, to widespread rejection of the interhuman world in favor of the radical inwardness, the turn to Infinite Subjectivity, that is the subject of what Walter Strauss has called the Orphic theme in modern literature. Scott's own purpose is to offer some examples of exceptions to the general trend, exemplars of another style of imagination that takes the world of men to be a world of Coinherence. Those he chooses are T. S. Eliot, Andre Malraux, and W. H. Auden. His treatment of them in this regard, especially of the latter two, is deft and interesting. There are some problems, however, that emerge during the course of his discussion. These have to do in part with his interpretations of the authors and their works, but they are related more directly and importantly to matters of fundamental conception. The nature of these problems can be elucidated most effectively if we consider first the most successful chapter of the book, the one on Auden, and work backwards. Auden, says Scott, was resolutely opposed to all the manifestations of Orphic subjectivism in modern literature. The task of poetry is not the creation of new, alternative worlds in imagination, but witnessing to the truth of the objective world created by God. Nor should it foster apocalyptic dreams of escape from the tensions of historical existence, but should remind us that our home is not in a specious eternity but in" the ordinary, unexceptional world of our earthbound career," and that it is in this quotidian world that we must learn to " love one another or die." It is Auden's increasing understanding and affirmation of this principle in his later poetry that leads Scott to say that the major divide in Auden's career was not between the pre- and post-1940 verse, as so many have supposed, but between the poems up to and including The Age of' Anxiety (1947) and those beginning with and continuing from Nones (1951). In the later BOOK REVIEWS 469 phase, he says, Auden develops a new poetic personality that is no longer bullying, caustic, or imperious, but quiet, equable, and urbanely courteous, and a new, profoundly comic vision that asserts, in a spirit of praise and thanksgiving, our deep involvement in the things of earth. Auden has been frequently criticized for a withdrawal in his later phase into privacy and apoliticialism. Scott argues cogently that this interpretation requires revision, that what Auden was actually engaged in was a searching reconceptualization of what it is that constitutes the political dimension of human life. The major influence on Auden's thinking here was Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, of which he wrote a very thoughtful review in 1959. Arendt sees modern society as reversing the roles of what had been the household and the polis for the Greeks, so that the public realm, which had been the place where man had pursued not merely life, but the good life, has now become entirely dominated by concern with subsistence, while mutual participation in humane activity and the life of the spirit now takes place only in the private realm...