[It is] disconcerting for the ardent student of Eliot to find, in [After Strange Gods], no indication of a richer spiritual life as the result of his conversion [to Anglo-Catholicism]…. After Strange Gods, which announces itself as "A Primer of Modern Heresy", far from showing any enrichment of Mr. Eliot's life, indicates on the contrary an increasingly fastidious (perhaps it would be more accurate to say pernickety) disapproval of men, manners, and ideas. I would not for a moment suggest that there are not things in the modern world that ought rightly to be disapproved of; however, it is profoundly indicative of the peculiarities of Mr. Eliot's temper that he has found in Christianity a convenient platform from which to indulge his favorite pastime of deploring (to use a favorite word of his), instead of a river of life from which to irrigate and fructify his waste land. Distasteful as such an obvious line of explanation is to an admirer of Eliot, one finds difficulty in escaping the conclusion that he has inherited from his New England ancestry and background so strong a habit of disapproving that he can make no greater progress in Christianity than to advance from witch-hunting to heresy-hunting. (pp. 366-67)
Mr. Eliot's literary perceptions, which read accurately into the meanings of the authors he deals with, are extraordinarily acute, and their acuteness is sharpened by his ethical sensitivity…. Mr. Eliot, who is as richly cosmopolitan in his learning as Babbitt or Pound, has a genuinely traditional way of feeling about literature: his erudition and his sensitive reading have given him a European background, a European tradition, the lack of which has made possible the many and various heresies of the modern world which he rightly deplores. The heresies which are uttered in the name of self-expression, nationalism, romanticism, science, and society, would be impossible, if a unified "way of feeling" based upon the past experience of the race had a more lively existence. We are sadly in need of traditional men, in Mr. Eliot's sense…. Mr. Eliot demonstrates, in his own literary criticism, the advantages of a traditional literary culture as a safeguard against erratic and half-formed ideas.
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