Guardians of the Humanist Legacy: The Classicism of T. S. Eliot’s “Criterion” Network and its Relevance to our Postmodern World, and: The International Reception of T. S. Eliot (review)

We received an unusually high degree of interest in The International Reception of T. S. Eliot. For this reason, we have decided to print two responses to this collection of essays.

In 1931, an advert for T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion boasted that this journal contained “the most complete record in existence of the intellectual life of Europe.” In the same year, Thomas MacGreevy suggested that Eliot had “turned his magazine into a kind of exchange for ideas between the second-raters of all Europe.”¹ By 1939, in his editorial “Last Words,” Eliot lamented: “The ‘European Mind,’ which one had mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view.”² Two recent studies revisit Eliot’s international connections and reception in ways which invite a reappraisal of his efforts on behalf of (what he referred to as) “the unity of European culture.”³

Despite the fact that commentators have characterized The Criterion’s cultural politics as reactionary and elitist, Jeroen Vanheste’s Guardians of the Humanist Legacy argues that Eliot and his Criterion collaborators were “guardians of a 2500 years old European legacy of reasonableness and universalism” (7). Vanheste’s book claims that the cosmopolitan European periodical networks of the 1920s exhibited a “group code” (2), which could be traced to a common cultural heritage descending from Periclean Athens and Republican Rome, through Italian Renaissance humanism, to William von Humbolt’s formulation of Bildung in nineteenth-century Germany. Vanheste is fair-minded enough to quote Nietzsche’s scathing remarks on Humboldt’s conception of Bildung as “a soft-hearted, good-natured, silver-gleaming idealism, with a weakness for noble poses and a noble tone of voice” (136). Yet he believes that The Criterion’s championing of Aristotelian practical reason (not to be confused with the narrower conception of scientific reason) lay at the heart of a defense and renewal of humanist standards that other interwar intellectuals—notably José Ortega y Gasset, Ernst Robert Curtius and Julien Benda—also aspired towards. There is some truth in this thesis, but there are also considerable difficulties. Eliot’s 1927 commitment to Anglo-Catholicism placed a strain on his collaboration with Curtius, who continued to uphold humanist principles in the threatening atmosphere of Nazi Germany. Moreover, Vanheste downplays the vehemence of the attacks Eliot published in The Criterion against supporters of Irving Babbitt’s American new humanism. He admits that the quarterly moved increasingly away from humanism during the 1930s, but it is questionable how much influence his “network” of European intellectuals had ever exerted on the contents of The Criterion—Ortega, for one, was never a contributor.

Ultimately, Vanheste’s book is less an intellectual history of European interwar periodical culture than an impassioned plea for educational reform in our “postmodern” age. The second part of this study makes a case for the continuing relevance of the European humanist legacy. Vanheste deplores the effects that several postwar movements—existentialism, structuralism, and deconstruction, for instance—have had on weakening the centrality of humanism to European university education. Unlike Adorno, he believes that humanist ideals transcend the horrors of Auschwitz. Vanheste champions the writings of Roger Scruton, George Steiner, Isaiah Berlin, Milan Kundera, and Allan Bloom as apostles of a postwar humanism. Again, these writers do not represent a concerted “network” of intellectuals—it is not clear how much ideological common ground Berlin and Bloom could have found—and Vanheste draws opportunistically upon their various writings to skewer a straw man of postmodernism. Vanheste’s seriousness is to be applauded, as well as his refusal to endorse the sometimes adolescent revelling in relativism exhibited by those who claim...