A Tradition of Scrutiny

Anna Karenina and other Essays.
by F. R. Leavis.
Pantheon. 248 pp. $5.95.

The 1963 reprint of Scrutiny was equipped with an analytical index, which includes six columns of references to D.H. Lawrence, seven to Henry James, and seven to T.S. Eliot (“his academic reputation increases,” “M.C. Brad-brook's estimate of his value as a critic shown to be false by Dr. Leavis,” “puritanism detected in his work,” “Four Quartets the result of disequilibrium in Eliot's feelings,” “lack of sustained thought”). There is no entry for Tolstoy. For two decades the leading English critical review, reformer of English sensibility, Scrutiny apparently managed without mentioning Tolstoy, not to speak of Dostoevsky. Flaubert (“diffuseness,” “dullness,” “paucity of his contact with life,” “monotony,” “limitations,” “psychological barrenness”) is there, for obvious reasons. But a journal which always endorsed Lawrence's most uncompromising claims for the novel—“the highest form of human expression so far attained,” he called it, and “the one bright book of life”—saw no necessity to “place” Tolstoy, or to allow him any effect on the placing of others. Furthermore, the McKenzie-Allum Checklist of Dr. Leavis's writings from 1924 to 1964 suggests that the principal editor of Scrutiny had never devoted an essay to any writer who used a language other than English.

These facts are offered in partial explanation of something that American readers might otherwise miss. There would be no public astonishment if a comparably distinguished American critic announced an essay on Anna Karenina; but when The Cambridge Quarterly proclaimed that its first issue would contain Leavis on that work there was a buzz of excitement. And this testified not only to Leavis's great reputation, but to the truth that he is not an author of whom radical new departures are expected. For all his critical respect for Arnold, he is not himself exactly ondoyant et divers. He maintained over the years that as he saw the business of criticism it was best undertaken as an act of concentrated attention on the literature of one's own language, an opinion which his disciples on the whole have endorsed. But now, on the assurance of “those familiar with Tolstoy's use of the language,” he declares himself satisfied that Aylmer Maude's translation is safe, and proceeds to make, in the title essay, very positive judgments and evaluations of a foreign author.

Anna Karenina, he says, evinces “the highest kind of creativity—higher than James's.” The proof of this is conducted, characteristically, in terms of a refutation of certain remarks on Tolstoy made by earlier critics; the novelty lies in the fact that these critics are not academic straw-men, but Arnold, James, and Lawrence. In castigating the imperceptiveness of Lawrence on Anna Karenina, Leavis associates it with the nomadic, improvised life imposed on him by his marriage to Frieda; the disoriented didacticism of Lady Chatterley's Lover springs from the same root. More positively, there are just and intelligent discriminations, insights which perhaps earn the critic the right to call Tolstoy's book “the great novel of modern—of our—civilization.” And the work of relating it to the Leavis world of moral criticism is impressively done; the familiar, strongly idiomatic language and structure of the essay help to domesticate the exotic Tolstoy. But anyone looking at this simply as a critical essay, and not allowing for peculiar additional interests, might well be excused for wondering what the fuss was all about.

Well, Dr. Leavis, as the dust jacket says, is “England's most distinguished literary critic.” Although he has some American admirers and adherents, I have the impression that there are distinguished American literary critics who feel a little uncertain as to why this should be so. One reason, as I have hinted, is that one may have to supply a good deal by way of background to understand the values of any particular piece, to see what the critic is doing. Leavis has always been reluctant to talk explicitly about the philosophy, or even, in any abstract way, the method of his criticism. I remember W.K. Wimsatt saying, with some exasperation, about the D. H. Lawrence book, that for much of the time Leavis seemed simply to be copying out passages and pointing at them. And it was another Yale critic, René Wellek, who provoked Leavis into the fullest discussion of method and philosophy he has ever undertaken—negative and politely dismissive though it is—in the essay, “Literary Criticism and Philosophy” (The Common Pursuit).

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This is no doubt in part a general difference between the English and the American practitioner. American critics are, simply, much more deeply concerned with questions of what and how than English; though the gap is narrowing, though we know and respect one another better, the difference still declares itself. I myself am occasionally called an amateur by American colleagues, who do not mean to be offensive and find nothing curious in the application of such a word to someone whose professional life is devoted to criticism. On the other hand, there are American books which are obviously in some senses highly professional, but which are so obsessed with problems of self-justification and procedure that what I regard as the true professional task is quite overlooked. Thus, I think, the description “amateur” becomes an honorable badge to wear, since at least it implies love, and the series of acts of the mind and personality by which one first submits to, then possesses, and finally expounds, a work of art, is—whatever else you say about it—a kind of loving. Of course love has its sexology and mystery its theology, beautiful disciplines both, in their places. But if it is English to do so, Leavis is English in treating them as of secondary importance. His purpose is to enter “into possession of the given poem . . . in its concrete fulness.” That, at any rate, is the first step. What follows certainly has philosophical implications; but the social and educational implications happen to interest Leavis more. I suppose that there is implied a confidence, which I happen to share, that in the very long run a man can understand his own relation to the humanity and civility of the culture in which he is placed by intelligently eliciting his attitudes to the received masterpieces of its tradition. If he finds it necessary to disagree with conventional valuations it will follow that in some measure he also rejects the culture which upholds them. This is certainly true of Leavis.

That is why Leavis, no more than Arnold or Johnson, is to be thought of as exclusively a literary critic, though that is all he claims for himself. Literature has a central place in his moral universe, and so literary criticism is the central humanistic discipline. More even than criticism which treats literature as fodder for research, he detests the kind which makes it a matter of taste and fashion—“as if,” said Wordsworth, “it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac, or Sherry.” One finds him brooding over some scholarly book that has taught him something but which seems to him to miss the essential points—like William York Tindall's book on Bunyan—disposing of the new information and at the same time lamenting the seventeen-and-sixpence he paid for it. Or one listens to the constantly renewed attacks on the London literary establishment. This is by no means the hazy abstraction to Leavis that it is to me, but an organization which confronts him with unrelenting enmity, “immensely resourceful and quite unscrupulous . . . a comprehensive system . . . one that commands . . . all the organs and channels of suggestion, inculcation, and influence.” This powerful organization would have killed Scrutiny if it could; failing that, it silently stole Scrutiny's ideas, and lives in a condition of unacknowledged “parasitic indebtedness.”

If one adds to these two themes—hatred for mindless scholarship and for London—one other, the assertion of Lawrence's centrality, one has a rough idea of what most people first think of when they think of Leavis. Their second thoughts may include reflections on the “dislodgment” of Milton, the war against Eliot and his friends, the campaign against C. P. Snow. And, trying to bind all these disparate activities together, they may then remember that Leavis is an educationalist, that he has spent his life as a teacher in Cambridge, and that Scrutiny was his projection of what the English School there ought to have been and never was.

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So we are a little closer to understanding why Leavis can never be given his true value from the printed page alone. Much, it is true, may be learned from his Education and the University (1943) and from the articles in Scrutiny, by him and by his wife Q. D. Leavis, on the academic history and ethos of Cambridge. More may be inferred from the careers of his disciples, from his choice of enemies, and from his more intelligent commentators (for example, Ian Gregor, The Dublin Review, 1952). But the heat of loyalty, the dust of controversy, the deformities of the public imagination, all prevent our seeing clearly the critic who worked, reserved and austere, in Cambridge. Even in academic-journalistic close-up he looks somehow unreal, witness the admiring portrait of George Steiner:

No ceremony. Only a don, spare of voice and stature, but flame-like in his pale intensity, leaving a lectern in a grey Cambridge hall and brushing out of the door with a step characteristically sinuous, lithe, and unheeding.

Yet when Dr. Leavis quits Mill Lane for the last time, an era will have ended in the history of English sensibility. No less, perhaps, than that of Wittgenstein or R. H. Tawney, who like himself have sharply altered the inward cadence of intelligence, Leavis's retirement, the cessation of his teaching, marks an intricate, controversial chapter in the record of consciousness.

Of this, one might say that the affected grandeur of the tone devalues the sense; but Mr. Steiner's excuse for such rhetoric is precisely the difficulty of conveying Leavis's authority to a reader. If his prose seems angular, graceless, remember that his step is sinuous. The comparison with Wittgenstein works better in terms of devotedness, their own to their work, and their disciples to them, than to sensibility. The cadence is, obscurely, an inward cadence. Leavis's influence is entirely unlike Tawney's, which was more closely related to matters of immediate public importance. Steiner tries to show us the mysterious teacher, and fails.

How, we ask, did Leavis cultivate, and teach to his pupils as indispensable to their central discipline, so many idiosyncracies and apparent contradictions? There is the hieratical terminology and style—a manner of discussion, intense and emphasizing the concrete, yet dependent on a bundle of vague and arbitrary critical terms; the tone, despising elegance, yet in its contorted wheelings round the key words, mysteriously Jamesian. There is the admirable concern for personality and its fulfillment, a delicacy toward other personalities; but there is also a terrible acrimony in controversy, and unwillingness to believe that an opponent can be in good faith. There is the book New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) which did so much to clear the path for modern poetry in England; but there is the almost complete lack of sympathy for, or interest in, any poetry written since then. All these mysteries and contradictions are explained and resolved in the teaching. It must be so.

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Scrupulosity of conscience; mistrust of outsiders; severity of doctrine; acrimony in polemic; dependence on a leader's charisma: these are marks of a religious sect. To say this is not to call Leavis “puritan,” an expression which in any case he would hardly repudiate, arguing for himself as for Bunyan and Lawrence a true life-accepting ethical puritanism. Nor is it to call him authoritarian. One must believe that teaching, for him, is a process involving two or more responsible persons; that all critical inquiry is free, not aimed at a conclusion acceptable to predetermined doctrine. Yet it has usually ended in the total acceptance, by disciples, of doctrines such as The Line of Wit, The Great Tradition, Lawrence as the central modern genius, etc. There is a sense in which this rigid institutionalization of the teaching must reflect the narrow force of the obstruction. It might be objected that, as Leavis says, Bunyan could belong to something as narrow as the Particular Open Communion of Baptists without forfeiting his place as a great writer in an authentic culture; so Leavis himself is to be judged not by his doctrine but by a much larger and vaguer criterion, intelligence, life-acceptance. But the disciples are doctrinaire. There are some key topics upon which Leavisites speak with one voice, and there are others upon which they do not speak at all until licensed to do so. In fact, the best of the disciples have either apostasized, been excommunicated, or fallen silent. As a compensation there is a limited ecumenical arrangement with some good Catholic critics, who profess a limited and critical adherence. And there are one or two young men who do accept the program, in the sense that they develop the original implications as to the sociological and historical frontiers of English, the radical inferences as to cultural history, and to the idea of a university. Meanwhile, the Scrutiny tradition remains strong in some high schools.

But evidently something went wrong. Dr. Leavis would say that in so far as it did, he can thank his London enemies. But that is not altogether true, I think. When the reissue appeared in 1963 I wrote an article in the New Statesman, speaking of my own gratitude to Scrutiny but adding that the myth of relentless and cunning opposition had corrupted the original health and vigor of the genuine minority position from which Scrutiny began, so that energy was converted into rancor and criticism into shrill complaint; with more of the same. Two senior ex-associates of Dr. Leavis, communicating with me privately, endorsed this view. I was also congratulated upon my daring. I had not imagined that I was being brave, but this reaction does testify to the awe in which Dr. Leavis and his journal are held. Anyway, I think I was right. It is true enough that in the early days the London literary world, and much of the academic world, resisted Scrutiny. But the bitterness of the complaints, the immodest tone of the conventicle, as I called it, have surely done much to frustrate its promise and limit its achievement. The good Puritan things—fearless radicalism in ideas, a fruitful connection of the life and the work, concern for social justice and intelligence—were dimmed by the bad Puritan things—doctrinal intransigence, contemptuous dismissal of the profane, immoderate polemic. Which is why the general reader associates Leavisites more with angry provincial certainties than with the sinuous steps of diverse, undulating intelligence.

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That is why one argues that the narrowness as well as the power of the school stems from the classroom. Great teachers must take some of the blame for what pupils make of their logia. Mr. Steiner offers a well-selected list of Dr. Leavis's critical terms: “discrimination, centrality, poise, responsibility, tactics, enforcement, realization, presentment, vitalizing, performance, assent, robustness.” We must imagine these bones taking on flesh in tutorials. They derive their force from repeated use, not from any merit of their own as critical terms. That is why Wellek asked Leavis what he was doing. Leavis replied that he knew he was “making assumptions,” but that the examination of such assumptions in terms acceptable to Wellek was not his business as a literary critic. However, he offers “some elementary observations” on his procedure. It involves, he said, not abstraction, which is a philosopher's work, but the realization of “a complex experience.” This implies an act of evaluation, which in turn implies comparisons; the work must be “placed” in relation to others, in “an organization of similarly ‘placed’ things.” Thus the criteria for “placing”—the realizing of a work in terms of its life—are directly related to one's view of the whole map of literature, how one thing lies in regard to another, and so to one's realization of the whole culture. It is in this way, evidently, that untrammeled judgments, arrived at in free discussion, eventually lead to dogma. Of course, what the outside world mostly sees is the formulated doctrine, not the pedagogical process which makes it possible; just as it hears not the patient tone of disinterested critical inquiry, but the angry assurance of polemical and doctrinal assertion.

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It will now be clear that the general interest in the Tolstoy essay has less to do with criticism than with doctrine: the party line, people say, has changed. A truth about human life has been certificated, as having found a “compelling constatation,” in a book which Lawrence, the master of compelling constatations, misunderstood. The remainder of this collection serves primarily to exhibit the Russian novel in its new milieu. There is one piece of historic importance, the essay “Towards Standards of Criticism,” which was written in 1933 as an introduction to a selection from the files of the defunct review, The Calendar of Modern Letters. This journal, which has strong claims to be thought the best of its kind in this century, was simply too intelligent and uncompromising to survive; and Scrutiny was an attempt to continue its tradition, with the political commitment to the Left which its editors explicitly proclaimed in the final number. The introduction Leavis wrote is not only a very fine thing in its own right, but a sort of manifesto for Scrutiny:

Where there is a “living literature of the time” [he is quoting the valedictory editorial] there is also a “contemporary sensibility,” and it is always the business of criticism (whatever it may appear to be doing immediately) to define—that is, help to form—and organize this, and to make conscious the standards implicit in it. (This “contemporary,” of course . . . includes the past or as much of it as there is any access to.)

This is the program of Scrutiny; and the manner of its chief editor and contributor is, at its toughest, described by the epithet he chooses to describe “the characteristic fault” of the Calendar: “corrugation—excessive difficulty.” But it is an excellent thing to have this essay available.

So too the essay on “Johnson as Critic,” first published in 1944; it is one of the pieces one would need to discuss in detail if one needed to show a skeptic that Leavis's reputation is well-founded. Its praise of Johnson—“the vigor that comes from a powerful mind and a profoundly serious nature, and the weight that seems to be a matter of bringing to bear at every point the ordered experience of a lifetime”—uses the language we should borrow to praise Leavis. The intelligent charity which considers Johnson's limitations as the defects of his qualities we might also imitate. Unhappily, when Leavis is set against a writer (when the values of the sect are threatened) there is no charity toward limitations. This book contains yet another violent attack on Eliot, in a review of On Poets and Poetry first published ten years ago in this journal.¹ Again the decisiveness of Eliot's creative and critical achievement is acknowledged, but the effect of this is diminished by an insistence on his “specious cogency,” and by an attack on the doctine of impersonality which, one cannot help thinking, is motivated largely by Eliot's failure to commend Lawrence. Here there is minute analysis vitiated by misunderstanding; can Dr. Leavis really have thought that Eliot's “impersonality” was intended to absolve the artist “from the need to have lived”? The piece turns into another attack on the “dominant literary-social milieu” of London, which of course distorted Eliot's judgment.

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A brief word on the other essays. There is an introduction to The Pilgrim's Progress which expands the discriminatory observations on Puritanism already adumbrated in an essay printed in The Common Pursuit. Earlier notice of Adam Bede is similarly expanded in a similar introduction. There are essays on James, one, on What Maisie Knew, celebrated for a disputed low valuation of The Turn of the Screw. There are two recent Conrad essays to augment The Great Tradition, on The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line. The latter affords a curious instance of the teaching process as it goes on in Dr. Leavis himself. He is refuting some remarks on the book, made by Tom Hopkinson:

[The Shadow Line] is central to [Conrad's] genius, and it might have been written to facilitate the refutation of such an account. Having made this last suggestion I withdraw it—or withdraw that way of making the point.

But on the next page the withdrawn suggestion is advanced once more and not withdrawn again. All this—the advancement of the argument by means of reproving Mr. Hopkinson, the tentative yet bold proposition, withdrawn and not withdrawn—is perhaps a mimesis of the famous tutorial process; it also helps to explain why Leavis's criticism is so tortuous in exposition. There is always anger, sarcasm, quarreling.

The Conrad pieces were lectures, and, as Yeats remarked, out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric. Leavis seems to me to be more often just and trenchant in reviews. One rejoices to concur with his strictures on the recent edition of Lawrence's letters, and with his contempt for the testimony at the Lady Chatterley trial. In short, this collection, though very far from his best, contains the kind of evidence print can give of the cogency and integrity of Leavis. It also annotates his sense of the venality of his opponents, his sense of injured merit. A new reader may conjecture, behind these essays, a remarkable man. Perhaps he may see why a not very extraordinary essay on Anna Karenina caused such a stir; he may even be able to guess what George Steiner meant when he talked about a change in the inward cadence of consciousness. If so he might well propose, as a rather urgent desideratum, an intelligent, nonpartisan critical study of Dr. Leavis himself.