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Gerontion and the Meaning of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Education, Henry Adams describes with characteristic metaphoric violence his feelings about history. Trained to think that history had an ultimate meaning, that in the sequence of events there was some corresponding sequence of cause and effect, Adams discovers at the end of his researches that there is no understandable pattern; the best that Adams can tell us is that history is force: “and thus it happens that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958
References
1 It was F. O. Matthiessen who first suggested that Adams' ideas and his very words were influences on Eliot's thinking. In The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (2nd ed., New York, 1947), Matthiessen points out that Eliot reviewed The Education for the Athenaeum (23 May 1919), and that Gerontion contains verbal echoes from The Education. Others have amplified Matthiessen's findings and pointed out further echoes and sources. Grover Smith, Jr. has worked out an excellent reading of Gerontion which recognizes the importance of Adams' theory of history. Smith's book, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago, 1956), appeared after my article was written.
2 All quotations from Gerontion are from Eliot's Collected Poems 1909–1935 (New York, 1936).
3 “Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Historié fiir das Leben,” Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Nietzsches Werke, i (Leipzig, 1903), 339.
4 The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. W. C. Ford (Boston and New York, 1930), ii, 110–111.
5 “The Myth and the Power House,” Partisan Rev., xx, vi (Nov.–Dec. 1953), 643.