The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920, 1921)

Summary

*Douglas Goldring.

"Modern Critical

Prose."

Chapbook 2, no. 8

(February 1920), 7–14.

[Review of Three Critical Essays

on Modern English Poetry

(by T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley,

and F. S. Flint) 1920]

Wars, perhaps inevitably, have a bad effect on the critical spirit. They make the necessary detachment difficult or impossible, play havoc with our standards of values, and leave us often with an after-taste of commercialism which it takes years to eradicate. After a war such as the one from which we have just emerged, nothing is more necessary than the restoration of criticism to its old prestige, and it is one of the hopeful signs of the times that attempts in this direction are beginning to be made.

[Discussion of various British critics]

Among the few younger critics who show an entirely disinterested love for their art, perhaps the most interesting figures are Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Aldous Huxley. Mr. Eliot has a scientific, analytical brain, and approaches his task with some of the detachment of the great surgeon who, knife in hand, advances towards the exposed flesh of the anesthetized “case.” He rarely makes a cut in the wrong place, he dissects with an unhurried precision, and remorselessly reveals the structure and the content of the book on which he “operates.” His learning is prodigious, and kept carefully under the counter until it is required. If some of the elusive essences of an author's heart and mind occasionally escape him, we have no right to object. Every critic has his limitations; Mr. Eliot fewer than most.