What does Eliot mean when he says, "the more
perfect the artist, the more completely separate
in him will be the man who suffers and the
mind which creates"?
Answers
Answer:
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LITERARY critics are often dismayed by the success of biographies. It's hard to gain a hearing for criticism, but even in the worst of times you can publish a biography. The subject doesn't seem to matter much. Does anyone read Vita Sackville-West? But thousands of readers have bought Victoria Glendinning's biography of that lady, a fact hardly to be explained by assuming that these readers have been waiting for years to discover how intimate V. S.-W. was with Virginia Woolf.
The fact that critics find biographical interests dismaying is easily explained. It is still an article of a critic's faith that, as T. S. Eliot wrote 64 years ago, ''the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.'' Critics have taken Eliot's word on this matter and acted on the understanding that criticism is one thing and biography a diversion from the only thing that counts, the work, the words on the page. The American New Critics acted upon Eliot's authority, at least in part, when they enforced the principle - if not always the practice - that the reader's critical intelligence should concern itself with the form and structure of the text and not with the conditions - personal, social and historical - from which, however circuitously, it has issued.
Another complaint is sometimes heard, that a ''definitive'' biography devours the work it should merely elucidate. Hugh Kenner has thrown this stone at Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, that readers are encouraged to believe that Joyce's work exists chiefly to document Mr. Ellmann's life of Joyce. The question is, when you've read Mr. Ellmann's book, do you rush back to Joyce's fiction or do you feel that you've already been sufficiently there?
But I'm surprised that we don't hear nowadays, even from Marxists, a more pointed charge against biographies, that they give a misleading notion of history - they imply that Carlyle was right in saying that ''the history of the world is merely the biography of great men.'' Misleading, and extremely dangerous as an incitement to people to seek greatness on the thrilling promise of thereby changing the world. One of the scandals of modern literature, as in the otherwise diverse rhetorics of Yeats, Pound and Wyndham Lewis, is the assumption that history is the action of great men and its consequence in the minor lives of others. A biography of such a man is then construed as a chapter in the official history of the world.