The view that Shakespeare was a liberalizing force in culture explains T. S. Eliot's essentially negative attitude towards him. Eliot attacked nineteenth-century ‘impressionistic criticism’ in The Sacred Wood. His target was Romantic and post-Romantic ideology. Singling out authors such as Swinburne and Symons, Eliot makes clear his hostility to the modernizing implications (individualistic, secular, liberal) of their criticism. The critical mode (or cultural malaise) represented by such writers he sums up in the word ‘sentimental’. But the ‘modern tendency’ Eliot favours – he is actually talking about a backlash against modernity – ‘is toward something which, for want of a better name, we may call classicism’: a commitment, ‘discernible even in art’, to ‘a higher and clearer conception of Reason, and a more severe and serene control of the emotions by Reason’. Eliot's anathematizing of the emotive literary criticism of the nineteenth century has a clear cultural and political agenda. The nineteenth century implied the twin pathologies of ‘[e]xaltation of the personal and individual ’ and ‘[e]mphasis upon feeling rather than thought’; and his antipathy to this civilizational phase is one of the distinctive features of his criticism. The following sentences convey a dry contempt for what he saw as the shallowness and philistine emptiness of that age: