The quality which makes Mr. Eliot almost unique as a critic is the purity of his interest in literature as literature—as art autonomous and complete. Hence the power and penetration of his essays—the fullness of his point of view—the disciplined (and thus limited) fertility of his ideas. Personal taste has its influence but is not paramount. He may or may not suffer from a romantic morality; may adhere to the tory principle in politics, and the catholic regimen in religion—or be both whig and protestant: these connexions are private and cannot much prejudice his business as a critic. This separation of interests is accomplished not by an arbitrary divorce of forms but by an honest recognition of limits. Mr. Eliot's purity of interest has been the chief taint on his reputation as both critic and poet; the accusation of sterility is common, and his very lively, even agonised mind is sometimes described as without interest in human life; whereas the right indictment will be more technical, that his choice of limits has been a little imprudent, that his essential virtue has been pushed a little beyond the extreme verge of the appropriate. (pp. 292-93)

Mr. Eliot has chosen to be a critic, and because the profession is unpopular and scantily membered, has used much of his time in emphasizing the limits of his task and in setting up a handful of principles and definitions suitable to the control of his material…. Most of his principles are ideals of form…. Most of his definitions are of distinctions and contrasts of the modifications of form. The approach is invariably technical; I mean the matters touched on are always to some degree generalised characteristics of the work in hand. No overt attack is made on the "contents" of the work directly; the marvel and permanent value of the technical method is that, when prudently and fully applied, it results in a criticism which, if its implications are taken up, provides a real and often immaculate judgment on those "contents." (pp. 293-94)

Mr. Eliot's essays are never without point to present problems in style or feeling; which is always the mark of the good critic, that the past is alive as it bears on and exists in the present. This quality arises only from the critic whose angle is technical and whose material is the facts in the work under consideration as they are relevant to literature as such—and not the same facts or others contorted to the interests of psychology, philosophy, or general good will.

Mr. Eliot has made his choice as a literary critic out of what one supposes were the necessities of his mind, of any well ordered mind. Yet he is practically alone not only today but in the past. A fragment of Arnold, a little Coleridge, a little Dryden, and now and then Dr. Johnson; and of these perhaps only Dryden's interest was serene and whole. From the rest, as they are valuable in this connexion, we have less than fragments. Hence the occasional superstition that Mr. Eliot is essentially sterile, that he is out of touch with human life. (pp. 297-98)

But the general indictment while not found true has yet a taint of cause…. It is this, that just as Eliot attacks literature proper from a technical angle, so the frame of his theory is made as abstract as possible; and for the same reason—to make it more supple, to make it inherently imply more. Interest in and connexion with human life were thereby increased, granted, even, something of the purity of the abstractions themselves. (pp. 298-99)

Eliot is a classicist and [Tradition and the Individual Talent] is simply his own most abstract statement of the classical dogma. Recourse to dogma, when the dogma is critically held, is not the sign of an opinionated or sterile mind but of an active intelligence in need of a principle of control; it may be the sign of a realistic mind, a mind interested in its object without wishing to be lost in it. (p. 299)

[Eliot's] main principle is this: that art demands more from the artist than the artist, as an individual, exacts from his art. Precisely as the poem is not able to exist aside from its connexion with other poetry, so the poet must continually surrender himself [to something greater than his own emotions]. (p. 300)

Properly understood, [Eliot's] dogmas of an impersonal and traditional art, far from divorcing poetry and life, ought rather permanently to establish the only connexion possible between them;—to make both in a high sense more germane to the mind—which is not, after all, except diminutively and pejoratively, either poetry or life. (p. 301)

The difficulty with Mr. Eliot's ideas is that they have been put rather one-sidedly. We have on one side a rigid and exquisitely formulated doctrine of method. We have a thoroughly satisfactory conception of the artist as a responsible technician, and we are told what that technique should control. But the account is always on the technical aspect of the feelings and emotions of which art is made; very little is said directly as to standards for the judgment of these feelings and emotions…. But if the present examination of Mr. Eliot's dogmas bears up I think they will be found to have stated, though indirectly, a very satisfactory scheme of values. (p. 304)

[Mr. Eliot has] aligned his method of technical approach with the moral world. The effort in this direction has been more articulate since than previous to the publication of The Sacred Wood, but it was to be found even in that volume…. (p. 305)

[Eliot's attitude] attacks chiefly the facts about the contents of art in their most concrete terms. For Mr. Eliot this array of facts has evidently generalized itself, and has enabled him to perform judgment as to the moral value of [a work of art] …, and to determine, besides, for his private self, precisely what constitutes moral value in a work of art. (p. 309)

[In the arts, according to Eliot], moral values have nothing to do with the preoccupations of professional moralists, but concern, first, a technique of language, and, second, a technique of feelings which combine in a sensibility adequate to a view of life. (pp. 311-12)

[Most] great criticism occurs in the mind of the artist at the moment of creation;… hence the fact that there is almost no permanent judgment to be found in any criticism other than that embedded in works of art…. [If] the critic has a good eye for facts, has the insight to connect them, and the intellect to arrange them, the kind of judgment we desiderate will sometimes be implied … if not expressed. Something very like ideal law would then be articulate in the back of the mind; a kind of consensus of, and prophetic instinct for experience; so that if we could not make eternal judgments, still we should know what they would be like if they did appear.

Mr. Eliot is, on his own plane, very much such a critic; both as a practising poet and in his consideration of other poets. He has a very highly developed sense for the facts pertinent to his obligations…. His most remarkable criticism and his most trivial equally carry that mysterious weight of authority—which is really only the weight of intelligence…. The rarity of such a mind will be observed in the degree that the reader is familiar with English and American criticism. Mr. Eliot's labours in the restoration of interest in literature as opposed to the interest in opinion and psychology deserve all our gratitude; his work on the theory of literature requires all our collaboration; his criticism of individual poets makes some of us feel that criticism had hardly ever been consistently written before. (pp. 316-17)