Mr. Eliot, in his critical essays, is an undertaker rather than a critic. He comes to bury Hamlet not to praise him. He has an essay on “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he assures us that, “so far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” Now, there are several things about _Hamlet_ that call for explanation. But there is one thing that needs no explanation, and that is its “artistic failure.” One might as well set out to explain why the mid-Atlantic is shallow, why Mont Blanc is lower than Parliament Hill, why Cleopatra was unattractive, why roses have an offensive smell. It might be possible for a writer of paradoxes to amuse himself and us on any of these themes. But Mr. Eliot is no dealer in paradoxes. He is a serious censor of literature, who lives in the gloom of a basement, and cannot believe in the golden pomp of the sun outside. It might be unfair to say that what he is suffering from is literary atheism. He has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he worships them in the dark spirit of the sectarian, and his interest in them is theological rather than religious in kind. He is like the traditional Plymouth Brother whose belief in God is hardly so strong as his belief that there are “only a few of us”--perhaps “only one of us”--saved. We see the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference to “the few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal and Flaubert and James.” This expresses an attitude which is intolerable in a critic of literature, and should be left to the _précieuses ridicules_. Mr. Eliot, however, does not merely say that _Hamlet_ is an artistic failure and leave it at that. He goes on to explain what he means. He believes that: Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.