A Note on the American Critic by T.S. Eliot

This gallery of critics is not intended to be in any sense complete. But / having dealt with three English writers of what may be called critical / prose, one's mind becomes conscious of the fact that they have something / in common, and, trying to perceive more clearly what this community is, / and suspecting that it is a national quality, one is impelled to / meditate upon the strongest contrast possible. Hence these comments upon / two American critics and one French critic, which would not take exactly / this form without the contrast at which I have hinted.

Mr. Paul More is the author of a number of volumes which he perhaps / hopes will break the record of mass established by the complete works of / Sainte-Beuve. The comparison with Sainte-Beuve is by no means trivial, / for Mr. More, and Professor Irving Babbitt also, are admirers of the / voluminous Frenchman. Not only are they admirers, but their admiration / is perhaps a clue both to much of their merit and to some of their / defects. In the first place, both of these writers have given much more / attention to French criticism, to the study of French standards of / writing and of thought, than any of the notable English critics since / Arnold; they are therefore much nearer to the European current, although / they exhibit faults which are definitely transatlantic and which / definitely keep them out of it. The French influence is traceable in / their devotion to ideas and their interest in problems of art and life / as problems which exist and can be handled apart from their relations to / the critic's private temperament. With Swinburne, the criticism of / Elizabethan literature has the interest of a passion, it has the / interest for us of any writing by an intellectual man who is genuinely / moved by certain poetry. Swinburne's intelligence is not defective, it / is impure.