Vulgar, Sentimental, and Liberal Criticism F. J. Furnivall and T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare and Chaucer.

So T. S. Eliot, attacking nineteenth-century ‘‘impressionistic criticism’’ in The Sacred Wood.2 Eliot’s target is a style of post-Romantic commentary, and the writers he singles out, such as Swinburne and Arthur Symons, make clear his hostility to what he takes, reasonably, as the modernizing implications of that criticism: individualism, secularism, liberalism. For Eliot, this critical mode (or cultural malaise) is summed up in the word ‘‘sentimental’’—and contrasted unfavorably, in a prose both arch and ruthless, with a mind-set he designates ‘‘classicism.’’ This ‘‘modern tendency,’’ he writes—really a backlash against modernity—‘‘is toward something which, for want of a better name, we may call classicism’’: a commitment, ‘‘discernible even