From the Academy

A young author with talent, Mr. Thomas Howard, has published a book with an epigraph from Eliot’s “Little Gidding” as its title: An Antique Drum (reviewed in NR, Nov. 18). His subtitle is The World as Image. To Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Mr. Howard makes his acknowledgements; and he takes up his cudgel in defense of the “Old Myth”—that is, the truths of the moral imagination—against the “New Myth” of shallow modernity. Thomas Howard is not ashamed or afraid to follow an antique drum.

Actually, in the lines of “Little Gidding” to which Mr. Howard refers, Eliot is not marching with fife and drum ecclesiastic: “We cannot restore old policies/Or follow an antique drum.” Yet also it is Eliot who reminds us, in one of his essays, that “there are no lost causes, because there are no gained causes.” And elsewhere in “Little Gidding” we encounter the lines graven on Eliot’s stone in Westminster Abbey: “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire/Beyond the language of the living.” Believing that to be true, and following Eliot’s own antique drum, recently I made my way to English places that are the settings for three of Eliot’s Four Quartets.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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A young author with talent, Mr. Thomas Howard, has published a book with an epigraph from Eliot’s “Little Gidding” as its title: An Antique Drum (reviewed in NR, Nov. 18). His subtitle is The World as Image. To Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Mr. Howard makes his acknowledgements; and he takes up his cudgel in defense of the “Old Myth”—that is, the truths of the moral imagination—against the “New Myth” of shallow modernity. Thomas Howard is not ashamed or afraid to follow an antique drum.

Actually, in the lines of “Little Gidding” to which Mr. Howard refers, Eliot is not marching with fife and drum ecclesiastic: “We cannot restore old policies/Or follow an antique drum.” Yet also it is Eliot who reminds us, in one of his essays, that “there are no lost causes, because there are no gained causes.” And elsewhere in “Little Gidding” we encounter the lines graven on Eliot’s stone in Westminster Abbey: “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire/Beyond the language of the living.” Believing that to be true, and following Eliot’s own antique drum, recently I made my way to English places that are the settings for three of Eliot’s Four Quartets.