His next move, on 13 February, was to urge Emily to read René Basin’s life of Charles de Foucauld, the hermit shot dead in 1916 by Senussi insurgents at Tamanrasset in southern Algeria: ‘that was a real saint’–a ‘thrilling’ life. He was not keen on the lives of men who attained what they did without conflict. Such men fell short of sainthood because conflict was essential to the making of saints. When it came to novels, he fixed on the Russians, War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, where principles conflict with passions.
The saints whose lives the poet had explored in Murder in the Cathedral and now in Burnt Norton inspired in Eliot a need for ‘a really ascetic (and from an English point of view, quite useless) order’. Lady Ottoline found Eliot decidedly un-English in his strenuousness. When she mulled over his character in her journal, she took issue with his opposition to the humane form of sainthood. ‘Tom is an orthodox Churchman–not a Saint.–He is a man who is timid & needs the backing & Safety of the Church …’ She thought him alien to the ‘queer humanity of English people’, too rule-bound, too devoid of leniency and ‘good old English Compromise’ to be an Anglican.
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