In 1919, less than a year after the Great European War of 1914–18, Eliot invoked ‘the mind of Europe’ as a source of tradition, authority and order. That was in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, the essay which laid the foundation of his critical pre-eminence. He argued there, and in other essays which followed on from it, that the mind of Europe, by which he meant the yet to be defined European tradition, was much more important than any writer's own private mind. It was a mind, as he saw it, rich in generations of experience, with a firm hold on human values, and a wisdom which ‘leads towards, and is only completed by, the religious comprehension’. It stood for ‘the principle of unquestioned spiritual authority outside the individual’; that is, for Classicism in literature and Catholicism in religion. And it was the only sure source of intellectual authority and moral order.

How on earth could Eliot have maintained that view, in the Europe of 1919? And how could we begin to take it seriously now, in the Europe of the 1990s? When he wrote it Europe had been out of its mind for four years of anarchic barbarism, driven by nothing more enlightened than the passions of economic greed, nationalistic pride and self-aggrandisement, and the instinct for survival. What is more, the breakdown of Europe in 1914–18 had been the culmination of at least four centuries of disintegration into warring sects and states.