PERSONALITYについて : T.S. ELIOTとREMY DE GOURMONT

抄録

In a lecture delivered in 1961, "To Criticize the Critic," T. S. Eliot devides his own critical writing roughly into three periods, and says that the first one is of The Egoist, when the influence of Ezra Pound may be detected in references to Remy de Gourmont. And in his article, "Studies in Contemporary Criticism I," published in the Oct. 1918 number of that remarkable monthly, we find him expressing his idea of style and giving a footnote that says, 'All this matter of the cliche and the metaphor has been much more ably put in Remy de Gourmont's Probleme du style (1900). Eliot's idea of style revealed there and in his critical essays collected in The Sacred Wood (1920), such as "The Perfect Critic" and "Philip Massinger," is similar to Gourmont's in the book recommended and in his other critical essays about 1900. Remy de Gourmont Selected Writings translated and edited, with an introduction, by Glenn S. Burne (1966), author of Remy de Gourmont: His Ideas and Influence in England and America (1963) is a useful book for us to consider how Eliot owes to and differs from Gourmont. With this selection and The Sacred Wood in hand, we are allowed to make observations on the critical consciousness in both critics of the problem of personality, of which they are compelled to speak when dealing with the significance of originality in style. After the close reading of the two books as our main texts, we may say that the young critic has accepted from the elder one almost all his requisites to style and originality, and that he has developed them into his own impersonal theory of poetry manifested in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). We can suppose this development in him largely because of his great regard for 'feeling,' which we find in his thesis written in 1916, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, and his two articles in the Oct. 1916 number of The Monist. These philosophycal writings suggest that the word 'feeling' employed frequently in The Sacred Wood should have a meaning approximate, at times, to the one that the same word has in the philosophy of Bradley. But Eliot on 'feeling' and 'emotion' remains so close to Gourmont on 'sentiment' and 'sensation,' that he says in admiration, 'Of all modern critics, perhaps Remy de Gourmont had most of the general intelligence of Aristotle.' What Eliot means by 'the general intelligence' will be explained by the way he, with special regard to the problem of 'feeling,' holds in high estimation the standpoint of Aristotle in De Anima.