In thinking recently about 'Little Gidding', I have found that
my sense of Eliot's ideological position has shifted. I used to
see the Quartets as rather straightforwardly 'reactionary'--
peddling an unconvincing version of Christian mysticism
useful to political conservatism because it revived, and
conferred new intellectual kudos on, the Victorian notion
that since the poor had just as much chance of heaven as the
better-off they really had nothing to complain about. (See
'East Coker III', where the (vacant' lives of the ruling classes
are inveighed against.) Patriotism and 'national unity'
preclude 'class war'. But I now appreciate that Eliot was not
trying to express such an ideology, and that the softening of
his attitude towards human experience in the last two
Quartets suggests that like others on the thinking Right, he
was touched by the spirit of 'people's war' which moved him
to the sentimentality of 'Little Gidding's' first and fifth
sections.

He had 'mellowed', and George Orwell, I think, put his
finger on one effect of this. In an article published late in
1942, and dealing with only three of the Quartets, he said
that he knew a good deal of Eliot's early poetry by heart,
without having ever sat down to learn it, whereas the
Quartets, read and re-read, left little in his memory. Eliot's
early poems

. . . were not hopeful, but neither were they depressed or
depressing. If one wants to deal in antitheses, one might say that
the later poems express a melancholy faith and the earlier ones a
glowing despair. They were based on the dilemma of modern
man, who despairs of life and does not want to be dead, and on
top of this they expressed the horror of an over-civilised
intellectual confronted with the ugliness and spiritual emptiness
of the machine age. ²⁸

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