In effect, emotonally, Eliot wanted to ring the bell backwards.

Cheers,
Peter

Quoting "Rickard A. Parker" <[log in to unmask]>:

> 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
>