Probably no writer of our time has said more things about the art of literature which are at once new and incontrovertible than Mr. T. S. Eliot has said. He has written very little. His criticism is contained in "The Sacred Wood," a small book, and in "Homage to John Dryden," a still smaller one. With every subject he has attempted he has only made a beginning, said a few pregnant or subversive words, and stopped. His criticisms of Dante, Blake, Swinburne, and Dryden have the appearance of footnotes. The series of essays in "The Sacred Wood" on the problems of criticism end with a remarkable economy of generalization. Even in essays which are more full, in those on Ben Jonson and Marvell, Mr. Eliot seems to be filling in the few strokes needed to complete a portrait rather than drawing an original one himself.

This impression of incompleteness is largely misleading. It is only when one tries to discover what essential aspect of Jonson's talent has been left untreated in Mr. Eliot's essay that one realizes how nearly complete it is. His prose is deceptive because in it he exercises continuously the faculty, rare in our time, of always saying more than he appears to say. In his essays he seems most of the time to be concerned with minor points, but he is in reality concerned always with essential ones. His critical method consists in pressing a small lever and thereby lifting an unsuspectedly heavy weight. His essays are full of observations which do not appear important, but turn out to be those on which a really just generalization would be based. Accordingly his criticisms continuously grow in interest: they are among the few written in our time to which one can go back and find something which one perusal, or two, did not yield. In one way Mr. Eliot is the most complete critic of our time. What he does choose to say he says most unassailably. He rarely sets down an opinion without being conscious of all that has already been said in favor of or against it, and his final pronunciation is not only something new, of the same solidity, the same order, as what has been said already; it is at once a summing up and a revaluation. No one writing today has a stronger sense of tradition. He has written profoundly of it in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent," saying not merely that we are judged by tradition but that we also modify it; that by adding one new work of art to those which constitute tradition we do something which is enough to change, however slightly, its character; and that thus tradition is a thing which is forever being worked out anew and recreated by the free activity of the artist.

Admirable and profound words—yet why is it that in spite of them Mr. Eliot always appears to us to underestimate the free character of tradition …? The influence of tradition on Mr. Eliot's criticism is not to make it uniformly bold and comprehensive but more generally to make it too cautious. He often draws back where a genuinely classical writer, a writer in the full stream of tradition, knowing the dangers, seeing the raised eyebrows of all the past and hearing the warnings of the present, would have gone on. Mr. Eliot feels answerable to tradition for every judgment he makes; but this accepted responsibility, while it gives his criticism weight, sometimes makes it rashly timid. Thus, if his enthusiasms are never wild, his understatements sometimes are…. It is as easy to lose one's sense of proportion through excessive caution as to lose it through excessive rashness. In these instances Mr. Eliot's caution becomes mechanical, and functions where it is not needed and has no meaning.

But if his criticism is sometimes weighed down by his sense of tradition, it is also enriched and enlightened by it. His great gift as a critic is that of seizing the artistic source and justification of a convention, the necessity in a poem of elements which may appear artificial, the real virtue of a school, the essential law of a work of art. He makes every work live while he considers it, for he sees its articulations, the necessity for them, and their living functioning. Thus, though at times he may appear to be concerned with craftsmanship alone he is in reality concerned with the organic structure, trying to discover whether it is a living body or merely an agglomeration of dead parts. He does not show a writer's "qualities," therefore, but the principles of his art. The reward of this difficult and concentrated way of approach is that in Mr. Eliot's criticism the work of art, stripped of all incidentals, shines with its own essential light, and that in an immediate way the artistic problem is brought before us. In penetration, knowledge, intuitive apprehension of the inner laws of a poem Mr. Eliot deserves to be ranked with the chief English critics. (p. 162)