Eliot's royalism is imtimately connected to Charles William's
idealistic, spiritualistic, mystical VISION OF BYZANTIUM.
See CM's TALIESSIN THROUGH LOGRES, THE REGION OF THE SUMMER STARS,
AND ARTHURIAN TORSO. Also see Dorothy SayersAutobiography about the
coonection of the three in a St. Anne's Society (memory weak here).

Cheers,
Peter


Quoting cr mittal <[log in to unmask]>:

> Rick,
>    
>   Wow!  Thanks for the excellent quotes -- very interesting and insightful 
>   on both counts: Eliot's fascination especially with French royalism as it 
>   contrasts with British monarchy; and Eliot's high esteem for Queen
>   Elizabeth. 
>    
>   Best regards.
>    
>   CR
>   
> 
> "Rickard A. Parker" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   Dear CR,
> 
>
 In your reply to my post you submitted the article "Long may the Queen
> keep hold of our hearts." As I read that, having recently read the
> Watson article cited in previous post, I was aware of Watson's
> distinction between royalism and monarchism. I pass on to you George
> Watson's opinion of Eliot and royalism:
> 
> Eliot's political convictions remained obstinately French, in some
> respects, long after he finally settled in England in 1914. In the
> preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) he was to call himself a
> "royalist in politics"; and royalism, as opposed to monarchism, is not
> a British sentiment. With rare exceptions the British believe and
> believed in an hereditary head of state, not in an hereditary
> executive. There is a world of difference between the House of Windsor
> and the Bourbons, and the difference is there. Where but in
> France--and above all in the France shattered to its conservative
> heart by the triumph of Dreyfus and his public rehabilitation in
> 1906--could Eliot have found the dogma of a restored monarchy imposing
> a new political order, with its clergy restored to its traditional
> duties of moral censorship? And all this linked in that place and time
> to a dazzling literary world in a city and a nation that boasted
> Barrès, Péguy, Bergson, Gide, Duhamel Durkheim, Claudel, Matisse, and
> Picasso? These are among the great names that Eliot excitedly drops in
> a Criterion article that breathes a heady nostalgia for lost youth. By
> then, it is true, his excitement had cooled: "I know that, like all
> other periods, this period does boil down." But he did not doubt that,
> in its atmosphere of polemical passion, he had been lucky to know
> it. It had made him.
> 
> You also quoted the "Elizabeth and Leicester" section of TWL with this
> preface:
> 
> > And, as this article mentions at one place, this reverence for the
> > institution of monarchy does not preclude an awareness of its
> > frailties so that it becomes an object of irreverent derision, as in
> > Eliot's The Waste Land:
> 
> I thought that I would pass along this higher Eliot opinion of Elizabeth.
> This is the second paragraph of Eliot's 1926 essay "Lancelot Andrewes:"
> 
> The Church of England is the creation not of the reign of Henry VIII
> or of the reign of Edward VI, but of the reign of Elizabeth. The via
> media which is the spirit of Anglicanism was the spirit of Elizabeth
> in all things; the last of the humble Welsh family of Tudor was the
> first and most complete incarnation of English policy. The taste or
> sensibility of Elizabeth, developed by her intuitive knowledge of the
> right policy for the hour and her ability to choose the right men to
> carry out that policy, determined the future of the English Church. In
> its persistence in finding a mean between Papacy and Presbytery the
> English Church under Elizabeth became something representative of the
> finest spirit of England of the time. It came to reflect not only the
> personality of Elizabeth herself, but the best community of her
> subjects of every rank. Other religious impulses, of varying degrees
> of spiritual value, were to assert themselves with greater vehemence
> during the next two reigns. But the Church at the end of the reign of
> Elizabeth, and as developed in certain directions under the next
> reign, was a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship. The same
> authority that made use of Gresham, and of Walsingham, and of Cecil,
> appointed Parker to the Archbishopric of Canterbury; the same
> authority was later to appoint, Whitgift to the same office.
> 
> Regards,
> Rick Parker
>   
> 
> 
> 			
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