The Function of Criticism is considered to be one of the most important critical documents of

T.S. Eliot. Do you agree? Give a reasoned answer.

Originally published in Eliot’s own literary review, ‘The Function of Criticism’, provides a logical
commentary on what Eliot sees to be the purpose of criticism. In the opening lines, Eliot
carefully distinguishes between critical process and creative process. He then writes against the
critic J. Middleton Murry, who was a flag-bearer of Romanticism and on the other hand, Eliot
advocated for Classicism.
Earlier in the essay, to establish the basic principle that criticism, in a literary context, entails
“the elucidation of works of art and the correction of tastes,” Eliot had referred to the 19th-
century English poet and critic Matthew Arnold. In 1851, in the landmark essay “The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time,” a title that inspired Eliot intentionally, Arnold had hoped to give
English literary criticism a more authentic intellectual pedigree. Eliot begins the essay by
referring to certain views he had expressed in his earlier essay, Tradition and Individual Talent,
because they are relevant to the present essay. In the earlier essay, he had pointed out that
there is an intimate relation between the present and the past in the world of literature. The
entire literature of Europe from Homer down to the present day forms a single literary
tradition, and it is in relation to this tradition that individual writers and individual works of art
have their significance. This is so because the past is not dead, but lives on in the present. The
past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
Eliot’s views on criticism derive from his views on art and tradition as given above. He defines
criticism as, “the commentation and exposition of works of art by means of written words’“.
Criticism can never be an autotelic activity, because criticism is always about something. Art, as
critics like Matthew Arnold point out, may have some other ends, e.g., moral, religious, cultural,
but art need not be aware of these ends, rather it performs its function better by being
indifferent to such ends. But criticism always has one and only one definite end, and that end is,
“elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.”
Since the end of criticism is clear and well defined, it should be easy to determine whether a
critic has performed his function well or not. However, this is not such an easy taste. The
difficulty arises from the fact that critics, instead of trying to discipline their personal prejudices
and whims and composing their differences with as many of their fellow critics as possible and
co-operating in the common pursuit of true judgment, express extreme views and vehemently
assert their individually, i.e. the ways in which they differ from others. This is so because they
owe their livelihood to such differences and oddities. The result is criticism has become like a
Sunday Park full of orators competing with each other to attract as large and audience as
possible. Such critics are a worthless lot of no value and significance.
In the second part of the essay, Eliot digresses into a consideration of Middleton Murry’s views
on classicism and Romanticism. While there are critics who hold that classicism and
romanticism are the same thing, Murry takes a definite position, and makes a clear distinction
between the two, and says that one cannot be a classic and a romantic at one and the same
time. In this respect, Eliot praises Murry, but he does not agree with him when he makes the
issue a national and racial issue, and says that the genius of the French is classic and that of the
English is romantic. Murry further relates Catholicism in religion with classicism in literature, for
both believe in tradition, in discipline, in obedience to an objective authority outside the
individual. On the contrary, romanticism and Protestantism, and social liberalism, are related,
for they have full faith in the ‘inner voice’, in the individual, and obey no outside authority. They
care for no rules and traditions. But Eliot does not agree with these views. In his opinion, the
difference between classicism and romanticism is, the difference between the complete and
the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and the chaotic. To him the concept
of the inner voice sounds remarkably like doing, what one likes. It is a sign of indiscipline
leading to vanity, fear and lust. Neither does he agree with the view that the English as a nation
are romantics and so ‘humorous’ and ‘non-conformists’, while the French are ‘naturally’
classical.
Eliot next proceeds to consider the qualifications of a critic. The foremost quality which an
ideal critic must have is a highly developed sense of fact. The sense of fact is a rare gift. It is not
frequently met with, and it is very slow to develop. The value of a practitioner’s criticism—say
that of a poet on his own art, ‘workshop criticism’ as Eliot elsewhere calls it—lies in the fact
that he is dealing with facts which he understands, and so can also help us to understand them.
Eliot’s own criticism is such workshop criticism, and Eliot is all praises for such critics and their
criticism. True interpretation is no interpretation at all; it is merely putting the reader in
possession of the facts which he might have missed otherwise. The true critic himself knows the
facts about a work of art—its conditions, its settings, its genesis—and puts them before his
readers in a simple and easy manner. Thus it is clear that by ‘facts’ Eliot means the various
technical aspects of a work of art. Comparison and analysis are the chief tools of a critic. These
are the tools of the critic, and he must use them with care and intelligence. Comparison and
analysis can be possible only when the critic knows the facts about the works which are to be
compared and analysed. He must know the facts about the work of art—technical elements like
its structure, content and theme—and not waste his time in such irrelevant fact-hunting as the
inquiry into the number of times giraffes are mentioned in the English novel. However, the
method of comparison and analysis, even when used unjudiciously, is preferable to
‘interpretation’ in the conventional sense.