Frank
Raymond Leavis (July
14, 1895 - April
14, 1978) was
an influential British
literary
critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth
century. He taught and studied for nearly his entire life at Downing
College, Cambridge.
One
of the best-known of the New
Critics, Leavis elevated the reputations of some literary figures and
denigrated others. He was noted for his forceful personality and insightful
readings. He collaborated closely with his wife, Q.
D. Leavis, to the extent that it was difficult to distinguish their
contributions.
In
particular, the early reception of T.S.
Eliot and Ezra
Pound's poetry, and also the reading of Gerard
Manley Hopkins, were considerably enhanced by Leavis's proclamation of their
greatness. His dislike of John
Milton, on the other hand, had no great impact on Milton's popular esteem.
Leavis founded the journal Scrutiny,
which was an outlet for much of the best English criticism of its time, as well
as being a partisan vehicle for his school.
Leavis later republished a number of his Scrutiny articles in book form in order to promote what he termed the 'great tradition' of the English novel. Authors within this tradition were all characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens and D H Lawrence.
B) F. R. Leavis (The New Criterion The New Criterion home page)
The
last critic? The importance of F. R. Leavis by
Paul Dean
To
American readers the name F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) may signify little more
than half-remembered phrases and controversies —the Great Tradition, the Two
Cultures— now surely, it might be thought, relegated to literary history. In
England, Leavis’s influence has waned but his name still evokes strong
reactions, as the reviews of Ian MacKillop’s new biography show. [1]
Leavis is variously described as “neurotic,” “petty,” “authoritarian,”
“impossibly haughty,” exhibiting “suppressed hysteria” or “crazed
paranoia”; he is mocked as “the good doctor,” surrounded by “disciples,”
his life “claustrophobically book-based.” As for his critical achievements,
we hear from one writer that “he was often conspicuously wrong,” from
another that he made “often extraordinarily dumb judgements about fiction,
such as the absurd idea that Lady Chatterley is better than Women in
Love”—a valuation Leavis made in 1930 and withdrew in 1955 and again in
1961. Yet another reviewer refers to Dickens the Novelist (1970) as
Leavis’s “last major work,” although there were three books left to come,
all of them important. Of course, the reviewers all agree that the man they are
treating with such personal contempt, patronizing distortion, and simple
inaccuracy was fantasizing when he voiced the opinion that he was being
misrepresented, or that some people considered themselves his enemies, or that
the London literary establishment was out to get him. “They say I have
persecution mania,” he remarked once. “Comes of being persecuted, you know.”
An unimpeachable source.
Not that such viciousness
was rare during Leavis’s lifetime. Dr. MacKillop tells the story of the
meeting which was arranged, at Leavis’s request, to discuss the appointment of
someone of whom he disapproved to the lectureship established in his honor after
he had retired from full-time teaching at Cambridge. One of those turning up to
the meeting, John Newton, said that he wanted to call Leavis a liar. Someone
else said that this might kill Leavis: Newton replied, “Yes, but at least
he’d die in the truth.” I remember these (to me) shocking words whenever I
read of Leavis’s “vindictiveness.”
I
saw him only once, in 1972 when, persuaded to make the journey by a former pupil
who was a senior faculty member at my university in the north of England, he
came to give his lecture “Reading Out Poetry.” The lecture room was packed
to overflowing. At the appointed hour Leavis, then seventy-seven and looking it,
was ushered in, still wearing a shabby fawn raincoat over his jacket. After the
chairman’s introduction he took from his briefcase a dog-eared manuscript
which he began to read in a semi-audible monotone—a deliberate ploy, I later
discovered, to frustrate those who had come expecting a “performance” rather
than out of genuine interest in what he had to say. Nevertheless, there was
a performance at one point. In pursuit of his contention that to arrive at a
satisfactory reading-out of a great poem was in itself an act of interpretation,
challenging all one’s resources of intelligence and sensitivity, Leavis did
some reading-out with interpolated commentaries. Eventually he came to the last
speech of Othello. This prompted him to explain how he despised actors who
treated Shakespeare as providing them with an opportunity to display their “eloquence”;
and he mentioned with particular scorn Sir Laurence Olivier, whose performance
as Othello had reportedly been influenced by Leavis’s essay on the play. Then,
raising his head and raking the room with still-magnificent eyes, he jerked out
in increasingly forte bursts: “Olivier! That … old Etonian … golden-voiced
… NARCISSUS!” (Olivier was not of course an old Etonian—Leavis was
typecasting.) Since this was the only sentence everyone had been able to hear,
there was laughter and applause. Leavis subsided, resuming his former quiet
delivery. At the end of an hour he broke off with a weary gesture—“I must
end there, my voice has gone.” The chairman, somewhat nervously, invited
questions. There were none. How could there be?
I didn’t find the
lecture impressive. I had only been at university a year, and didn’t have the
intellectual equipment to make a qualified judgment on Leavis. Worse, I didn’t
know I wasn’t qualified, and mocked with the others. Only in reading him,
subsequently, have I come to realize how well he described himself, in that
lecture, when he characterized the good reader as
the
ideal executant musician, the one who, knowing it rests with him to re-create in
obedience to what lies in black print on the white sheet in front of him,
devotes all his trained intelligence, sensitiveness, intuition, and skill to
re-creating, reproducing faithfully what he divines his composer essentially
conceived. [2]
Dr.
MacKillop’s is not an authorized biography. Denied access to crucial papers,
he falls back too much on secondhand testimony, and his coverage of Leavis’s
life is patchy (for instance, there is no mention of the one visit Leavis and
his wife made to the United States, in 1966). Much of his material necessarily
consists of academic minutiae which could only be made gripping by a livelier
style than his. Moreover, when he comes to the indisputably painful episodes in
the lives of Leavis and his wife, Dr. MacKillop is compromised by a delicacy of
feeling perfectly proper to an ex-pupil (which he is) but not ideal in a
biographer. In the end, of course, the emphasis ought to be on what in fact
Leavis achieved as a literary critic: but even here MacKillop, like almost
everyone else, slights or ignores the books of the 1970s. His book is better
than nothing, and it expands valuably the perspectives of the collection of
essays edited by Denys Thompson, The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions
(1984). However, it makes no reference to some important biographical essays
published since then. It certainly does not represent a definitive account of
Leavis’s life and works.
Leavis was Cambridge born and bred. His father, a Victorian rationalist
and “centre of human power” (the son’s phrase), kept a piano shop opposite
the gates of Downing College, which was later to be Leavis’s center of
operations for so many years. After a year he joined the Friends’ Ambulance
Unit, in 1915, and was present at the Somme—an experience, rarely afterward
alluded to, which left an indelible memory. It’s not difficult to imagine how
monstrously unreal academic History must have seemed to him on his return to
Cambridge in 1919. He switched to English, then in its infancy as a degree
subject, and graduated with first-class Honours in 1921—an achievement all the
more astonishing when we know that his father died, following an accident, on
the morning of his last examination paper. Despite his good degree, Leavis was
not seen as a strong candidate for one of the scarce research fellowships. He
embarked on a Ph.D., then a distinctly lowly career move for an aspiring
academic. His thesis, on the relationship between literature and journalism in
the eighteenth century, was supervised by the flamboyant professor of English
(and ex–Fleet Street man) Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and examined by George
Saintsbury. It’s striking to think of these sturdy Victorian figures, born
respectively in 1863 and 1845, giving their blessing to Leavis’s work; but
then a case could be made for his being, in curious ways, closer to their world
than might first appear.
After receiving his doctorate in 1924, Leavis must have thought a move to
a lectureship would be swift; but circumstances went against him, and perhaps
not only those, for Quiller-Couch had written privately of his pupil’s
“Self-Sufficiency” as an ominous trait: “no good fortune would easily
equal his sense of his deserts.” He subsisted on free-lance teaching—“hand-to-mouth
disease” as I. A. Richards called it— for a number of colleges; one of his
pupils, Queenie Roth, became his wife in 1929. Dr. MacKillop cannot, for many
reasons, do full justice to the figure of Mrs. Leavis. She was a more
confidently ambitious person than her husband, and on the novel, in my view, a
greater critic than he. Her Ph.D. thesis, published in 1932 as Fiction and
the Reading Public, had been supervised by I. A. Richards, but relations
between them, already uneasy, broke down when he failed to support her after her
parents bitterly opposed her intention to marry outside the Jewish faith.
Despite a string of brilliant scholarly publications (now mostly gathered in
three volumes of her Collected Essays, published by Cambridge University
Press), she never attained an official university teaching post; instead she
continued free-lancing, as well as playing a major role in the editing of Scrutiny,
contributing officially and unofficially to her husband’s books, and bringing
up three children. Leavis was rather in awe of her; he described her as “the
embodiment of passionate will,” and once exclaimed, “They talk of the atom
bomb—there’s enough energy in my wife to blow Europe to pieces!” Certainly
she worked with amazing intensity, especially when one remembers that she was
for years gravely ill. Not all the biographical facts about Mrs. Leavis are
available, and speculation would be impertinent, but there is enough to warrant
the detection of a psychological pattern of rejection which became more
pronounced with time.
For years the Leavises watched as their contemporaries, and eventually
their juniors, blossomed in careers while they languished. Dr. MacKillop is
surprisingly reluctant to endorse Leavis’s belief that his progress was
blocked by enemies within the Faculty. How else are we to explain the facts:
that his appointment in 1932 was followed—in 1936—by only a part-time
university lectureship which was not made full-time until 1947, promotion to
Reader (the next grade below full Professor) coming in 1959 when he was three
years away from retirement? It was a ludicrously mean way in which to reward his
achievements. Not until retirement did honorary chairs, at Bristol and York,
come his way; he endured years of financial hardship, with damaging consequences
for his pension, on top of family problems (his wife’s ill health, the
breakdown and estrangement of one of their sons). In the face of all this he
worked unremittingly, never taking a sabbatical term or a proper holiday, and
publishing his last book at the age of eighty-one. Thereafter, until his death
two years later, he slowly declined into senility. Dr. MacKillop gives a
harrowing account of this sad period, during which Mrs. Leavis reported Leavis
as saying, “I am wretched. I am in despair.” He would often tell his pupils
that Blake died singing. He himself, alas, did not.
Why should a life which was, in many ways, so uneventful have been so
stormy? Leavis’s temperament, like his wife’s, was not an easy one, and not
well suited to the kind of academic life which flourishes in England. University
teachers, not only at Cambridge, often value good manners more than the
disinterested pursuit of the truth, and laugh (because of embarrassment and
deep-buried guilt) at people who “take it all too seriously.” No one took it
more seriously than Leavis. Unfailingly courteous and sympathetic, by all
accounts, to his pupils, he was not urbane, and saw no need to be polite to
colleagues whom he felt to be in error or worse. He was a tireless antagonist—“Eight
stone, fighting weight” he would say of himself proudly—and unbeatable in
discussion. He never simply won: he annihilated. His sense of professional
responsibility offended the Cambridge worship of “good form”; he wouldn’t
play the game, wouldn’t be hypocritical for the sake of getting on with
people. The inevitable accusations of paranoia combined with his and Mrs.
Leavis’s suspicion of former friends and colleagues; there were accusations of
betrayal and painful scenes from which no one emerged with credit. The
fascination of reviewers with these battles, however initially understandable,
becomes ultimately tedious. Who, at this distance of time, has the right to
adjudicate such disputes? What we know of the facts makes us certain that the
cost in personal terms for all concerned was ruinous. Is that not enough?
No estimate of Leavis’s criticism can ignore its origin in the classroom:
as Dr. MacKillop excellently says, “His teaching was a way of being a person”
(though little of the individuality of that teaching is conveyed in the
biography). The charges of narrowness often brought against him are
unsustainable: he wrote about far more authors than people realize (over thirty
in Revaluation alone), and had read far more authors than those about
whom he wrote— not just in English, either. As a teacher, however, he had
responsibilities toward students whose time was limited. Most undergraduates
would barely have time to read—really read, not just
skim-and-look-at-the-criticism—the major works of English literature, let
alone those “strangely neglected” minor figures. Almost all Leavis’s books
were worked out in classroom and lecture hall, a fact which must be borne in
mind when considering their self-imposed limitations and economies. One must add
that he despised colleagues who crammed students for the examinations, and that
he insisted on a far wider range of reading than was usual (“Cultivate
promiscuity” he would say picturesquely)—but he would not waste his pupils’
time on irrelevancies. Everything he himself had to say was fresh and firsthand.
An undergraduate noted of his lectures in 1928, “the fact that his arguments
are always founded on the works of the authors themselves makes them
unassailable on their own premises”—clearly this was both novel and
exasperating!
In the crudest terms for measuring a teacher’s success—examination
results—Leavis must be rated highly, though the consistently good performance
of his pupils led to jealousy and to the first whisperings about cliques and
disciples; in less definable but more important terms his influence reverberated
far beyond the specific texts to which he was addressing himself. His teaching
was a mode of life, of thought; something Dr. MacKillop hits off in saying that
he “allowed students to experience the pains of seriousness” (this appears
in the review-caricatures as joyless Puritanism). Profiting from the autonomy of
colleges within the Cambridge system, Leavis, secure at Downing, could defy his
critics and carry on teaching as he wished. That this did not always work to his
pupils’ advantage, in worldly terms, is undeniable; denied permanent posts at
Cambridge, they frequently went abroad. Yet it is absurd of Marius Bewley (who
applied Leavis’s ideas extensively to American literature) to complain, as Dr.
MacKillop records, that Leavis should have thought more about the consequences
of his actions on students who “have expended years, energy, and money, to
study with him, and enlarge his reputation.” If that was their aim, they
should have reconsidered the propriety of their motives. Conversely, no real
teacher imagines that the goal of his work is an enhanced reputation—as if
that mattered! Leavis is the only great critic who has earned his living as a
teacher: and we are all his pupils.
Leavis’s writing will not fit into neat classifications, but four broad
phases can be distinguished. In the first—the period of his early pamphlets
and of New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation
(1936)—he was mainly preoccupied with rewriting, under Eliot’s influence,
the history of English poetry from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries,
and with sketching his view of the nature and purpose of university education.
In the second he turned his attention to the novel, probably at his wife’s
instigation; this is the period of The Great Tradition (1948) and D.
H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). From the time of his lecture Two Cultures:
The Significance of C. P. Snow (1962) Leavis sought a more eclectic
treatment of literary, educational, and social issues; the central focus
remained literature but the perspective from which he commented was enlarged, so
that English Literature in Our Time and the University (1969) is quite
different from Education and the University (1943), just as Dickens
the Novelist (1970, with Q. D. Leavis) is quite different from the book on
Lawrence. This phase of Leavis’s work, the “higher pamphleteering” as he
called it, reaches its apogee in Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism,
Compassion, and Social Hope (1972). The fourth and final phase is in many
ways the most interesting of all. It consists of two books, The Living
Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought (1975), and Thought,
Words, and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976), to both of which Nor
Shall My Sword acts as a curtain-raiser. Here Leavis branches out into areas
of thought which must be described— despite his resistance to the term—as
philosophical. Such a grouping of his books leaves out of account, of course,
the collections of essays The Common Pursuit (1952) and “Anna
Karenina” and Other Essays (1967) as well as much of his writing in Scrutiny
and some posthumously published material (Dr. MacKillop gives a full list). I
shall try to say something briefly about each phase in turn.
Leavis was much struck by Eliot’s early critical works The Sacred
Wood and Homage to John Dryden, as well as by Eliot’s poetry, and
he hailed Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, in a review, as containing
“more of the history of English poetry” than in any other book he knew.
Empson’s own poetry, too, was unusually impressive. (Yet later, as Dr.
MacKillop reports, he would say, “If you want a character study of Empson, go
to Iago.”) Revaluation and New Bearings accepted Eliot’s
catchphrase “dissociation of sensibility” as corresponding to something real
in social and literary history during the seventeenth century: and they
reflected, although in a less intense and pyrotechnic fashion, Empson’s
insistence on analysis as the route to understanding. The nineteenth century was
seen as a diversion from the genuine in poetic language (Leavis would later
argue that poetry in this period is to be found in the novel rather than in the
formal verse); Eliot and Pound had rediscovered the strengths of
seventeenth-century poetry—its complex fusion of tones, its wit which was not
joke-making but the detached yet engaged play of cultivated minds over the
widest range of human experience, its subordination of metric to the cadences of
the speaking voice—and had managed to apply it in poems which, far from being
pastiche, were unmistakably modern in their idiom and preoccupations. Victorian
dream-worlds had been ousted by Metaphysical nervous strength. This view
entailed a reconsideration of the “mellifluous” tradition coming down from
Spenser through Milton to Tennyson. Those poets were not (as is often said)
simply dismissed, nor was their classicism written off. Many early English
teachers at Cambridge were classicists by training, and assumed that the
evaluative criteria they were in the habit of applying to Greek and Latin verse
could be transferred to English verse: Leavis maintained that this would lead to
little beyond “aesthetic” (a word he detested) appreciation which absolved
the aesthete from critical thinking. Milton comes alive, for instance, when he
is close to Shakespeare in part of Comus, in ways which are absent from
his attempts to imitate Latin verse in English; a comparable alertness to
Shakespeare’s language would benefit Milton’s critics too, Leavis hints.
Read without a priori assumptions these books can still teach us,
not only about the specific passages and poets they discuss, but more broadly
about what it is to have one’s own grasped history of English literature—
not something mugged up from text books but an indwelt possession. How to
achieve this was also Leavis’s concern in his educational writings of this
period, How to Teach Reading (1932), a response to Ezra Pound’s How
to Read which elicited from Pound a characteristic riposte (“balls and
shit”), and Education and the University. Despite the widespread
assumption that Leavis had no sense of history or was nostalgic or sentimental
about it—that he was a “refugee in a never-never-land of the past” in J.
H. Plumb’s sneering phrase—it is plain from his “Sketch for an ‘English
School’” in Education and the University that his historical sense
was both cultivated and extraordinarily delicate. It is true that he had no time
for “literary history” as “background” (and showed in controversies with
F. W. Bateson and W. W. Robson how vacuous “historical scholarship” was when
it was made to substitute for criticism), but he emphatically believed that a
literary critic should be educated about history. What he asserted was that,
while literary texts could never stand by themselves, context-free (so that the
common assimilation of Leavis to the New Critics in America is a bizarre mistake),
yet there were criteria of relevance to be observed, and in the end the
critic’s judgment, however well-informed by other considerations, was a
literary one. However, he wanted English departments to act as
“liaison-centres” for the humanities in universities, providing in the texts
a focus in which specialists could meet, contributing from their different
perspectives. Tireless in campaigning for this ideal to be put into practice, he
nonetheless sensed, as a realist, that he fought a losing battle. As early as
1970 he warned against
the
more and more matter-of-course view that a university is so much plant that
should be kept in full production all year round, its staff made to earn
their salaries, and its management governed by strict cost-efficiency recom-
mendations.
Twenty-five
years ago this might have seemed melodramatic: now it is sober fact. That is how
a modern university is run, in Britain and America. Leavis knew, as we do, that
in such an establishment no education can take place.
Before leaving this first group of Leavis’s writings I ought to stress
how much Eliot’s practice, as well as his criticism, mattered to Leavis. He
had early given offense to the Cambridge establishment in his first published
article, “T. S. Eliot—a Reply to the Condescending” (1929). “The
Condescending” was F. L. Lucas, a don at King’s College who had reviewed For
Lancelot Andrewes as “a pleasant little volume written by a man who is
evidently fond of reading …”! Leavis saw that Eliot’s concept of tradition
and of the dynamic relationship between the poetry of the past and of the
present—his idea of literature as an order, an organic whole—offered
the solution to the problem of establishing a critical judgment as more than
merely personal, a problem Leavis wrestled with all his life. His discussions of
Eliot in New Bearings and Education and the University, which take
in the poetry up to the first three of the Quartets, are more approving
than his later re-assessments, and his personal contacts with Eliot were never
easy (he believed himself to be the “other” of the vision in Little
Gidding). Eliot was the figure against whom, and in opposition to whom,
Leavis was always defining himself. He would have reacted with mixed feelings to
this appraisal appearing in a magazine called The New Criterion.
On the first page of The Great Tradition Leavis remarked wryly
that “the view … will be … attributed to me that, except Jane Austen,
George Eliot, James, and Conrad, there are no novelists in English worth reading.”
He was right. What he actually said was that, given the quantity of novels
available, a reader needs some sense of where the highest achievements lie if
what is valuable in the rest is to be identified. To suggest the distinctive
nature of the great in prose fiction, Leavis coined the phrase “the novel as
dramatic poem”— dramatic because it gives a direct presentment of its themes,
and poem because, in the nineteenth century, the essentially poetic uses of
English are found elsewhere than in formal verse. Image and symbol, Leavis shows,
are structuring devices in the novel too, and prose rhythm (understood as a
flexible instrument) can be as intense a means of control as meter. Leavis’s
analyses of George Eliot, James, Conrad, Lawrence, and, later, Dickens—together
with shorter pieces on Bunyan, Twain, Tolstoy, and Forster—constitute a
genuinely original achievement. Henry James was the only notable precursor, and
his preoccupation with technique restricted his perspective. Leavis, together
with his wife, made the case for the great novelists’ being concerned, not (or
not only) with offering a “realistic” depiction of society, but also,
through that depiction, with making a critique, a diagnostic analysis, of it.
Thus Lawrence and Dickens descend from Blake in their exposure of the impersonal
mechanisms with which modern “civilization” blights the spiritual health of
the individual; thus James, like Jane Austen, has the wit to make of social
comedy a vehicle for enquiring into individual integrity; thus Twain raises a
local dialect to the status of poetry, and through the persona of the uneducated
states the potential of any sensitive being for fineness of soul.
In 1962 Leavis achieved his most spectacular, and unwelcome, bout of
publicity in his lecture on C. P. Snow—a reply to Snow’s own lecture of
1959, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which had deplored
the ignorance of science shown by “literary intellectuals,” dubbed
“Luddites” and accused of willfully obstructing technological, and therefore
social, progress:
They
still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of “culture,”
as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the
natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As
though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual
depth, complexity, and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective
work of the mind of man.
Leavis’s
reply was so scathing that the publishers were advised it contained libelous
statements. They sent the text to Snow who, to his eternal credit, insisted that
it “must be printed exactly as it stood.” When it appeared, Leavis was
magisterially rebuked for rudeness by George Steiner and Lionel Trilling, and
even had to suffer a would-be lethal put-down from Edith Sitwell—“Dr. Leavis
only hates Charles because he is famous and writes good English!” The outrage
centered on Leavis’s dismissal of Snow’s claims to be taken seriously as a
novelist—which he was right in saying are non-existent. What was ignored was
his wider contention that Snow was naïve to lament the “divide” between
what he perceived as two cultures when, in fact, “there is only one culture,”
of which science is a part as much as literature. Dr. MacKillop makes a useful
distinction between the language of science and discourse about
science: “The discourses of and about literature need not be inherently alien
to the discourse of individuals; discourse about science need not be alien
either; but the discourse of science certainly is.” Leavis was not
setting himself up as an enemy of scientific research; how could he, knowing he
had no training which would give him the right to comment? What he said was that
science, like every other branch of intellectual activity, is an enquiry by the
human mind, not by some impersonal (“collective” to use Snow’s word)
entity external to, or absolved from, human procedures and responsibilities. Nor
did Leavis expect that literary critics could meet scientists on their own terms.
He did expect a critic to be able to address intelligently the human
consequences of scientific discovery; and he could point to Blake and, again,
Dickens as creative writers who had done so.
Puzzlingly, Leavis did not cite the essay on Snow by the physical chemist
and philosopher Michael Polanyi, which he must have known. Here is authoritative
support from a qualified scientist:
If
I yet agree that there is a gap, and a dangerous gap, between science and the
rest of our culture, it is not such deficiencies as the ignorance of
thermodynamics shown by literary people, mentioned by Charles Snow, that I have
in mind. Even mature scientists know little more than the names of most branches
of science. This is inherent in the division of labour on which the progress of
modern science is based, and which is likewise indispensable to the advancement
of all our modern culture. … To do away with the specialization of knowledge
would be to produce a race of quiz winners and destroy our culture in favour of
a universal dilettantism. … The mechanistic explanation of the universe is a
meaningless ideal. … The prediction of all atomic positions in the universe
would not answer any question of interest to anybody.
From
1962 onward much of Leavis’s effort went into applying this perception which
he shared with Polanyi, that what is threatened in a world dominated by
technology (and the world of the 1960s was barely affected by it compared to
ours) is the belief in the irreducibility of the individual human being. As
Leavis says:
Science
is obviously of great importance to mankind; it’s of great cultural importance.
But to say that is to make a value-judgement—a human judgement of value. The
criteria of judgements of value and importance are determined by a sense of
human nature and human need, and can’t be arrived at by science itself; they
aren’t, and can’t be, a product of scientific method, or anything like it.
They are an expression of human responsibility.
So, when
assured by an ingenuous philosophy don that “a computer can write a poem,”
Leavis replied that that was something he knew to be impossible. So it is,
and the “analogy” between the human brain and the computer (which depends
upon the mistaken equation of “brain” with “mind”) is one of the most
insidiously misleading examples of modern sophistry.
Dr. MacKillop is right to stress that, ultimately, Leavis and Snow were
engaged in “a conflict over history.” I mentioned earlier that Leavis is
often derided for being nostalgic or sentimental about a past “organic
society” to which he allegedly wanted everyone to return. As a former History
scholar, and survivor of the Somme, Leavis is the last person in danger of
glamorizing the past. Snow equated history with progress: Leavis knew that it
was more complex than that. He could point to literature as evidence that a
seismic change in society and social relations had occurred, beginning in the
mid-seventeenth century, accelerated by the industrial revolution, and making (literally)
a quantum leap in our own time; but when he did so it was not to hanker after
old certainties but to assert the irrevocableness of what had gone.
We
can’t restore the general day-to-day creativity that has vanished; we shall
have no successor to Dickens. But we have Dickens, and we have the
English literature that (a profoundly significant truth) Dickens himself had,
and more—for there is the later development that includes Lawrence. There is
English literature—so very much more than an aggregation or succession of
individual works and authors. It reveals for the contemplation it challenges—in
its organic interrelatedness reveals incomparably—the nature of a cultural
continuity, being such a continuity itself.
(We see
here that, however scathing he may have been about Eliot’s “Tradition and
the Individual Talent,” Leavis did owe it a debt.)
In his final trilogy of books, Nor Shall My Sword, The Living
Principle, and Thought, Words, and Creativity, Leavis, astonishingly
for a man in his eighties, broke new ground, taking up a long-gone discussion
with René Wellek. In his classic essay “Literary Criticism and Philosophy”
(1937, reprinted in The Common Pursuit) Leavis had addressed Wellek’s
objection that he did not make explicit the theoretical bases of his criticism.
His answer was simple: he couldn’t; he wasn’t a philosopher, and his
premises were found only as his work exemplified them. But he added, “There is,
I hope, a chance that I may in this way have advanced the theory, even if I
haven’t done the theorising”; and in Education and the University he
had been rash enough to call Burnt Norton “the equivalent in poetry of
a philosophical work” doing “by strictly poetical means the business of an
epistemological and metaphysical inquiry.” He can’t have been satisfied with
the equivocal nature of this comment, and in the 1970s found himself confronted
by trendy dons recommending Wittgenstein to literary students, and by an
apparent merger between literary criticism and linguistics (the first British
flirtation with structuralism). Leavis, whose uneasy relationship with
Wittgenstein is recorded in one of his finest essays, sought for something which
would be of genuine use at the undergraduate level in equipping students
philosophically—for he couldn’t believe Wittgenstein would be
profitable—and found Michael Polanyi’s essays Knowing and Being,
edited by Marjorie Grene, which, with Polanyi’s major treatise Personal
Knowledge and Grene’s own book The Knower and the Known, became
essential reference points to him. They helped him to his final verdict on
Eliot, the hundred-page commentary on Four Quartets in The Living
Principle, and to his final statement of why Eliot was a lesser writer than
Lawrence.
Grene and Polanyi mounted an attack upon Cartesian dualism. My mind, they
insisted, is the mind of my body, and my body is the body of my mind. I as a
person am my-mind-and-my-body, all five words receiving equal stress. All being,
therefore, is indwelling—both in the body, tacitly, and focally through
it to the external world (“external” faute de mieux—since my
experience of the world must be interiorized before it is truly mine).
“Life” exists, consequently, only in individual lives, and can’t be
aggregated, quantified, or reduced to statistics in Gradgrind fashion. All
thinking is done by individual minds, but also collaboratively (not
collectively) in the human world; and language—also the collaborative creation
of human minds—is the medium of all thought. In Polanyi’s words,
“An exact mathematical theory means nothing unless we recognize an inexact
non-mathematical knowledge on which it bears and a person whose judgement
upholds this bearing.”
This chimed in with problems Leavis had been pondering for years, notably
the nature of judgment. “A judgement is personal, or it is nothing”: but it
also aspires to be more than personal, to have [3]
probative force, albeit in a non-scientific way. Where did judgment stand,
epistemologically? Where, indeed, did literature stand? Already, in his reply to
Snow, Leavis had begun to speak of “the Third Realm”—
that
which is neither merely private and personal nor public in the sense that it can
be brought into the laboratory or pointed to. You cannot point to the poem; it
is “there” only in the re-creative response of individual minds to the black
marks on the page. But—a necessary faith—it is something in which minds can
meet.
Critical discussion becomes a paradigm of this re-creation, collaborative
and creative: and English literature as an organic whole, like the individual
works which compose it,
can
have its life only in the living present, in the creative response of
individuals, who collaboratively renew and perpetuate what they participate
in—a cultural community or consciousness.
Text,
body of texts, the university department teaching them—all, analogically, are
inhabitants of the Third Realm, “to which all that makes us human belongs.”
In his last two books Leavis presented creative works, those of Eliot and
Lawrence above all, as, heuristically, achievements of “thought,” of a
non-mathematical, anti-philosophical kind (that is, not opposed, but antithetical,
to philosophy). [4]
Lawrence’s is the greater triumph because, unlike Eliot, he accepted the
spirit of anti-Cartesianism, living in and through the body. Eliot’s
conception of Christianity led him to fear and, in crucial ways, deny the body,
setting the spirit over and against it; his paradoxical— and
self-contradicting—denial of the value of “merely” human creativity stems
from the same feelings. When he writes in The Dry Salvages, “The hint
half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation,” he hardly knows what
he is affirming: for if the Incarnation means anything it means that physical
matter is redeemed, or at least redeemable. It was Lawrence, not Eliot, however,
who saw this most clearly.
Leavis consistently denied that he was contributing to philosophy, but it
is hard to see how this last stage of his work falls outside that category—without
at any time ceasing to be literary criticism. His discomfort with Wittgenstein,
and his professional dislike of seeming to slight the specialist skills of a
fellow-academic in another discipline, may have made him excessively cautious.
Then, too, one wonders if he in some sense saw Wittgenstein as the equivalent in
philosophy of himself in criticism. The teaching of both was overheard monologue
in effect, and some of Wittgenstein’s personal traits as evoked by Leavis (his
“disinterested regardlessness,” for instance, which could manifest itself as
“a disconcerting lack of consideration,” or his innocence which was often
mistaken for cruelty) sound almost autobiographical. Wittgenstein wrote in Culture
and Value:
A
teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is
teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his
pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not
natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level,
so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the
classroom.
He is, I
suspect, thinking of himself here; at times, reading the passage, I think of
Leavis too. In the nature of things, Leavis’s experiences, like his judgments,
couldn’t be lived through by anyone else; and although there are distinguished
pupils of his in many walks of academic life—the art historian Michael
Baxandall, or the philosopher and musicologist Michael Tanner—he cannot really
be said to have left any successors. His life’s work was “what was done, not
to be done again.”
Why, in conclusion, does Leavis matter? I propose the following theses,
baldly stated: (1) He changed the way we read—poetry especially, but also the
novel—not by pontificating about hermeneutics but by leaving an array of
brilliant readings of particular works, readings which are not hermetic
“practical criticism” exercises (a term he disliked—“practical criticism
is criticism in practice”). No critic before Leavis had paid such close
attention to words and their connections with ideas. (Perhaps Coleridge comes
closest, but his brilliance was undisciplined.); (2) He provides a shining
example of the way a mind can teach itself to develop. He emancipated himself
from the influence of Eliot and, after fifty years, furnished the drastic
limiting critique which “placed” his former mentor, in the process doing
innovative work on the nature of thought and language; (3) He virtually invented
(in conjunction with Mrs. Leavis) the criticism of the novel and the subject of
cultural studies; (4) In his debates with the Marxists in the 1930s and with
Snow and others in the 1960s, he vindicated the autonomy and dignity of
literature as an activity of humanity which gives a vital context to all
thinking, including the scientific and mathematical; (5) His conception of the
university—the boldest since Newman’s— although now rendered unrealizable
by the degeneration of universities into business corporations, stands as a
reminder of what higher education could be, and a rebuke to the reality; (6) In
keeping Scrutiny going for twenty years, he made possible the publication
of major work on English literature from Chaucer to the present day, plus French
and German literature, philosophy, sociology, music, history, education, and
politics; (7) His conception of the Third Realm, and his use of Grene and
Polanyi, enabled him to make original and fruitful connections between literary
criticism and philosophy, and contributed to the anti-Cartesian reassertion of
the integrity of the individual human being; (8) All these are general points.
They take no account of his work on individual authors: Arnold, Blake, Coleridge,
George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Hardy, Hopkins, James, Johnson, Lawrence, Marvell,
Milton, Pope, Twain, and Wordsworth, to name the most obvious.
For what other critic this century can equal claims be made? To those who
deny that Leavis matters, or that his importance is historical merely, all one
can do is point to the evidence and ask the question.
In a sense, however, he has a historical importance, hinted at in
my title—he is “the last critic,” the last to have a coherent
understanding of what literature and criticism were, the last to have the
intellectual equipment to fulfill the critic’s function. If he was the product
of a particular historical moment, which has now passed with him, his greatness
in meeting its challenges seems only more marked now: and if criticism as he
understood it has ceased to exist, so much the worse for criticism—and
literature. What is written by most university teachers of “English” now
answers to no conception of criticism that Leavis would recognize: and those
teachers’ pupils are their successors. The future for the causes that Leavis
gave his life to is unfathomably dark. When I listened to him in 1972, I was
already aware that my own university teachers were, on the whole, a mediocre
bunch; but I had no inkling of what now seems to me absolutely certain: that,
however poorly served it was, my generation was the last which had the privilege
of receiving an education at university at all.
Notes:
Go
to the top of the document.
1.
F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism,
by Ian MacKillop; Allen Lane/The Penguin Press (London), 476 pages, £25. As yet
this book is not scheduled for publication in the United States. Go
back to the text.
2.
The lecture may be found in a posthumously published volume by Leavis, Valuation
in Criticism and Other Essays, edited by G. Singh (Cambridge University
Press, 1986). This also contains the first essays Leavis contributed to The
Cambridge Review at the start of his career. Go
back to the text.
3.
“Memories of Wittgenstein” (1973), reprinted in The Critic as
Anti-Philosopher, edited by G. Singh (University of Georgia Press, 1983). Go
back to the text.
4.
Some commentators have sought to make connections between Leavis’s
Third Realm and Karl Popper’s World 3, as expounded in Popper’s Objective
Knowledge (Clarendon Press, 1972)—indeed Popper himself endorses this
position. Leavis however denied any influence, and reflection will show that the
apparent similarities are superficial. Go
back to the text.
From
The New Criterion Vol. 14, No. 5, January 1996
©1996
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