Saito Junichi

齋藤 純一

English

Saito, Junichi

齋藤, 純一

KANAGAWA University Repository

Cultural Heritage in T. S. Eliot's CriterionJunichi SaitoIt has been generally admitted that Eliot's Criterion, in which his purposeswas to draw European culture closer together, turned out to be a failure despite hisstrenuous efforts. The Criterion was issued from 1922 to 1939 with the help ofEuropean intellectuals. It can be said that Eliot tried to restore the sense oftradition which had been lost in European countries. l Eliot seems to have had anintention to make all the literatures of Europe a common heritage through thepublication of The Criterion.In his view, the sharing of the living voice of European intellectuals mighthave contributed, even if only in a small way, to preserving the unity of Europeanculture that was on the brink of splitting into discrete fragments. Eliot discusses in"The Unity of European Culture" how he came to edit The Criterion:In starting this review, I had the aim of bringing together the best in newthinking and new writing in its time, from all the countries of Europe that hadanything to contribute to the common good. Of course it was designedprimarily for English readers, and therefore all foreign contributions had toappear in an English translation.... So my review was an ordinary Englishperiodical, only of international scope. I sought, therefore, first to find outwho were the best writers, unknown or little known outside of their owncountry, whose work deserved to be known more widely.2Eliot further points out the significance of a network of literary periodicals that103might be developed throughout Europe. The network would promote the liveexchange of ideas and friendship among European intellectuals.. . . the existence of such a network of independent reviews, at least one inevery capital of Europe, is necessary for the transmission of ideas-and tomake possible the circulation of ideas while they are still fresh. The editors ofsuch reviews, and if possible the more regular contributors, should be able toget to know each other personally, to visit each other, to entertain each other,and to exchange ideas in conversation. In any case such periodical, of course,there must be much that will be of interest only to readers of its own nationand language. But their co-operation should continually stimulate thatcirculation of influence of thought and sensibility, between nation and nationin Europe, which fertilises and renovates from abroad the literature of eachone of them. And through such co-operation, and the friendships betweenmen of letters which ensue from it, should emerge into public view thoseworks of literature which are not only of local, but of European significance.3In other words, we can say that the phantom Eliot is trying to drive away is thenarrow minded provincialism which hovered around in European countries. In asense, Europeans shared a sense of common heritage based on the biblical traditionand the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, however, they did not like theirindigenous cultures being blended with others. It can further be pointed out thatthe intellectuals in European countries put a high value on the pureness of theirindigenous cultures. It would not be too much to argue that it was European'syearning for pure national cultures that had led to the First World War, whichdestroyed their common cultural heritage.Eliot later discussed the effects of an insufficient common culturalbackground from a different viewpoint in The Idea ofa Christian Society(1939):You can not expect continuity and coherence in literature and the arts, unlessyou have a certain uniformity of culture, ... I observed in America, that witha very high level of intelligence among undergraduates, progress was impeded104.pJflE~ifU)(.Cultural Heritage in T. S. Eliot's Criterionby the fact that one could never assume that any two, unless they had been atthe same school under the influence of the same masters at the same moment,had studied the same subjects or read the same books, though the number ofsubjects in which they had been instructed was surprising. Even with asmaller amount of total information, it might have been better if they had readfewer, but the same books. In a negative liberal society you have noagreement as to there being any body of knowledge which any educatedperson should have acquired at any particular stage: the idea of wisdomdisappears, and you get sporadic and unrelated experimentation.4It might be said that the publication of the Criterion was an experiment to persuadethe intellectuals in Europe to create a common stock of knowledge as Europeans.Denis Donoghue discusses Eliot's aim in the Criterion in the following terms:Eliot's aim in the Criterion was to bring to bear upon the individual talent ofhis English readers and writers the force of tradition as manifested in 'themind of Europe': the whole enterprise was conceived as an attack upon nativeprovincialism. In August 1927 he welcomed 'the European Idea' and thediversity of its forms: it may include, he said, 'a meditation on the decay ofEuropean civilization by Paul Valery, or a philosophy of history such as that ofOswald Spengler'...5It would be safe to say that with the Criterion Eliot tried to do away with theinsularity of English intellectuals in favor of a broader sharing in a European senseof culture. This is indicated by the following passage:The first number of the Criterion will appear on October 15 as a quarterlyreview devoted to literature, the arts, and general ideas. The Criterion willnot be a literary or artistic miscellany; it will have more in common with thecritical quarterlies of a hundred years age. Its contents will consist for themost part of a small number of essays longer and more considered than inreviews which appear at shorter intervals. The Criterion aims also at the105maintenance of international standards. In the belief that the intellectual lifeof Europe, like its economic life, depends upon communication and exchange,the Criterion will present in translation writing of foreign men of letters,whose works should be better known in England....6Besides the aim of sharing a European sense of culture, Eliot stressed the idea ofthe autonomy of literature, which would be a fundamental principle for the review'sintellectual activities. In a sense, Eliot was seeking for some artistic representationof the realities of that time, while staying apart from political and social affairs. Inthe Criterion, then, we can find Eliot's idea of a literary review as an independentintellectual undertaking.A literary review should maintain the application, in literature, of principleswhich have their consequences also in politics and in private conduct; and itshould maintain them without tolerating any conclusion of the purposes ofpure literature with the purposes of politics or ethics.In the common mind all interests are confused, and each degraded by theconfusion. And where they are confused, they can not be related; in thecommon mind any specialized activity is conceived as something isolated fromlife, an odious task or a pastime of mandarins. To maintain the autonomy, andthe disinterestedness, of every human activity, and to perceive it in relation toevery other, require a considerable discipline. It is the function of a literaryreview to maintain the autonomy and disinterestedness of literature, and atthe same time to exhibit the relation of literature-not to 'life', as somethingcontrasted to literature, but to all the other activities, which, together withliterature, are the components of life.'Eliot's purpose to maintain a cultural order within the autonomy of a literary reviewseems to have been successful in the earlier days of the Criterion. It can besupposed that Eliot had an ideal to restore what was lost through the First WorldWar,s that is to say, a European sense of tradition.Peter Ackroyd discusses why the Criterion did not finally come to represent106.fijf?'e~~)(.Cultural Heritage in T. S. Eliot's Criterionthe common European identity.. . . it seems always to have been Eliot's fate to espouse causes just at the pointwhen they are about to disappear or to disintegrate. His notion of a Europeanintellectual and cultural order, for example, was being asserted at a time whenpolitical events began to destroy the illusion of a common European identity.And so although his early contributors had come from the European traditionwhich preceded the Great War, by the early Thirties he had come to rely moreand more upon British contributors. The expression of his own opinions hadalso become more predictable, with an aloofness from the contemporarypolitical debate only matched by his constant call for spiritual and ethicalprinciples to be introduced into that debate. As he said in a radio broadcast in1946, the Criterion in later years 'tended to reflect a particular point of viewrather than to illustrate a variety of views on that plane'. In its literarydirection, also, the Criterion had lost its momentum. The magazine hadstarted publication at a time when the work of Lewis, Joyce, Pound and Eliothimself was actively challenging the old standards and values of Englishliterature culture. But it seemed, a generation later, that even the writerswhom Eliot chose to publish-like W. H. Auden, George Barker or VernonWatkins-had reverted to a more insular if not parochial tradition. All theambitions and aspirations which had animated the Criterion in its first yearshad either been abandoned or destroyed. His own feeling of staleness as aneditor had much to do with his disenchantment at the kind of culture withwhich he now had to dea1.9It is true that the concept of "art for art's sake" began to decline from the Thirtiesbecause of economic depression and the approaching fear of war. Many Europeanintellectuals came to turn their attention to finding some political or economicrecipe which could save ordinary people from the depths of chaos. This can beillustrated by Ackroyd's passage below.From the mid-Twenties to the late Thirties, in fact, his contributions to the107Criterion were less conceived with literary of critical matters than with ananalysis of the various claims of humanism, fascism and communism.Although he was not to announce until the issue of October 1933 that heapproached public affairs as a 'moralist' rather than as an 'artist', there is nodoubt that the original literary direction of the periodical was now of lessimportance to him than what he described as the 'problems of contemporarycivilization',10One might say that in the end the philosophy of "genuine art for art's sake" couldnot stand apart from social events. Then, would it be fair to conclude that Eliot'seditorship of the Criterion was a failure?There is no doubt that Eliot was able to develop an outstanding humannetwork through his editorship of the review. The fact that he first began to edit itto bring together the best possible knowledge of his British and Europeancontemporaries would have been of significance in itself for him as an Englishintellectual. This can be gathered from Ackroyd's remark:... at least in part he achieved his purpose of 'bringing together the best innew thinking and new writing in its time' and that, as he confessed in aninterview, editing it had been 'one of the most important and rewarding' of allhis activities. llIt may be that Eliot was able to demonstrate an ideal type of healthy culturethrough the distribution of the review. l :! It can certainly be argued that he warnedhis contemporaries that European society, based as it was on a sense of tradition,would perish if Europeans turned away from their Christian past; Eliot would havewished the people of his day to have a systematic way of viewing the threats ofcorruption in Western civilization. He discusses this in his "Last Words" in theCriterion.For this immediate future, perhaps for a long way ahead, the continuity ofculture may have to be maintained by a very small number of people indeed-108~Jf~~jjjjJt.Cultural Heritage in T. S. Eliot's Criterionand these not necessarily the best equipped with worldly advantages. It willnot be the large organs of opinion, or the old periodicals; it must be the smalland obscure papers and reviews, those which hardly are read by anyone buttheir own contributors, that will keep critical through alive, and encourageauthors of original talent. I wish that a periodical could be sold like admissionto a theatre, at a varying scale of prices; for just as the majority of the morecritical and appreciative part of the public is often to be found in the cheaperseats, so I suspect that the price at which The Criterion has had to bepublished in prohibitive to most of the readers who are qualified to appreciatewhat is good in it, and to criticise what is faulty.13Although the publication of the Criterion came to an end because of theapproaching war, the best part of the common spiritual heritage, that is to say, thepower to see things objectively and critically, may have remained alive through thefriendships among the best of Europe's intellectuals. The exchange of opinions andviews among this intellectual elite would have struck Eliot as an achievement ofinestimable value.Notes1 Loretta Lucido Johnson, T. S. Eliot's "Criterion": 1922-1939 (Michigan:University Microfilms International, 1980), pA9.2 T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York and London: Harcourt Brace &Company), pp.192-193.3 Ibid., pp.l93-194.4 Ibid., pp.32-33.5 David Newton-De Molina, ed., The Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot (London:The Athlone Ress, 1977), pp.22-23.6 Times Literary Supplement, No.1074 (August 17, 1922), p.525. quoted in LorettaLucido Johnson's T. S. Eliot's "Criterion": 1922-1939, pp.50-51.7 Molina, op.cit., p.21.8 Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (Hamish Hamilton, 1984), pp.248-249.9 Johnson, op.cit., pA8.10910 Ackroyd, op.cit., p.170.11 Ibid., p.248.12 Ibid., p.250.13 The Criterion Qanuary, 1939), p.274.110

<研究論文>Cultural Heritage in T. S. Eliot's Criterion

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<研究論文>Cultural Heritage in T. S. Eliot\u27s Criterion

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