How Many Children Had Dr. Leavis?

...but it is impossible not to respect him...

...But how impressive, despite minor lapses, are the two consecutive reviews, "Mr...

...It is more significant that Leavis and Scrutiny have strongly influenced British, and left a mark even on American, criticism...

...As for some of the critics who were great innovators —Friedrich Schlegel, or Novalis, or Coleridge—how many readers or writers can still read their criticism with both profit and pleasure...

...Smith's kind of catholicity—which is the kind fostered almost universally in the academic world...

...He was to be every inch a king, not so many inches on a ruler...

...Likewise, one must concede that the other Scrutineers were, with a few exceptions, only good second-raters, and that they display, in George Watson's phrase, an "in-group complacency" and imitativeness that are somewhat depressing, even if much of their criticism provides lively and by no means unrewarding reading...

...Innovation, in any case, seems more appropriate to art than to criticism...

...So I am left wondering how to approach this multifarious monument which can, after all these years and across a whole ocean, still elicit passionate partisanship...

...It is clear that, with such aims, one cannot wholly succeed...

...Thus the two most interesting reviews the reissue received hereabouts were Richard Poirier's not unqualified but overemotional defense in the New York Review of Books, and Harold Rosenberg's dazzling but excessive, often self-contradictory and wrongheaded, attack in the New Yorker...

...He was, however, a great confronter of esthetic with moral considerations and the two could always be seen fighting it out in his writings...

...There is The Great Tradition: The critic must effectuate the connection between past and present literature by identifying the ever-changing yet humanly ever-related moral and esthetic strivings of the best writers...

...There is The Common Pursuit (from a formulation of Eliot's about "the common pursuit of true judgment"): The critic must persuade as many people as possible to read and evaluate along with him, and help bring about, I presume, what the work of art, according to Rilke, urges us toward: a change in our lives...

...I suppose, mean the perfect teacher who reads most deeply and communicates fully—with the useful reminder that the ideal teacher remains forever a student, as the ideal critic remains forever a reader...

...The truculence with which the Scrutiny critics proclaimed themselves partisans of perfection...

...Had I but space enough and time to digest and discuss the work in full, I would still lack the competence to deal with what is, in effect, an encyclopedia—perhaps in the more limited, coterie sense of the 18thcentury Encyclopédie, but an encyclopedia for all that...

...Or Arnold...

...And these Leavis decidedly had...

...subjects for hot, unremitting scrutiny...

...A certain sense of the ruthlessness of the world as it confronts the underpriviligcd combines in him with dismay at the entropy of values that always besets an aging patrician, even if he is only a patrician of the intellect...

...They, of course, can discriminate, too: 'Mr...

...But is it fair to say, with Harold Rosenberg, that neither in "critical concepts," nor even in "combination of the ideas of others" did Leavis prove "to any great extent an innovator...

...Lastly, the critic must be an artist, composing his critique like a work of art, with the same joy in accuracy, intensity, wit, grace, rhythm, diction—in short, style and form—that a story, play or poem might be expected to have...

...Masefield has not Chaucer's witty touch nor his universality.' As one who thinks that Chaucer comes next to Shakespeare, I can only say that I find such a sentence fantastic, and damning to the kind of catholicity that made it possible...

...Indeed, it is the spectacle of this combat that makes his criticism exciting and inciting to join in the debate...

...It is true that in most of his critical disciplines and areas of investigation he was preceded by Eliot and I. A. Richards, and, in some measure, even by Empson, Graves and Pound...

...and an unmasker and rejecter of whatever was inferior in art—and thus in society...

...Yet, is "great innovation" the necessary stamp of critical achievement...

...For while literature was the chief concern, neither the other arts nor the sciences, exact or social, were neglected, and the Establishment and education were, above all...

...But nowhere, to my knowledge, does Leavis insist on the critic as artist, and, indeed, his own style, though generally serviceable, is usually prosaic, sometimes ponderous, and once in a while opaque...

...Again, Leavis admonishes Alan Pryce-Jones that criticism "is a collaborative exchange or commerce...

...The resultant stance, belligerent yet conscientious, intensely individualistic yet concerned with humanity, is an unusual and imposing synthesis...

...There is New Bearings in English Poetry: The critic must draw a map of contemporary literature and there "place" modern writers in relationship to one another—every kind of relationship, including relative merit...

...The complete Scrutiny, from its inception in 1932 to its demise in 1953, is now reissued by Cambridge University Press in 19 tightly-crammed volumes (7,435 pages) plus a 20th containing Leavis' "Retrospect" and an index...

...If Leavis can be classified in any way at all, it is as an aristocratic plebeian...

...Reviewed by JOHN SIMON Author, "Acid Test" Arnold Bennett once remarked about reviews of his books that he never read them, merely measured them...

...indeed, they could give America such utterly different yet, in their respective ways, valuable critics as Marius Bewley and Norman Podhoretz...

...independence even from friendships and one's own admirations: Eliot had been one of Leavis' gods, and when the god became stranger and stranger, Leavis was always able to attack that in him which he deplored without losing humility before that in him which he revered...

...To be sure, the moral concern could sometimes blind Leavis...

...Though the individual contributor to the journal did not claim to be a universal expert, even if his versatility was often considerable, the corporate—almost corporeal— image of Scrutiny did assert itself as magister omni sciendi...

...Certainly, it is needful to establish what Leavis stands for and what his achievement has been...

...Arnold, as Leavis himself has shown, was probably the first English critic to discuss Homer, and thus the classics, in predominantly literary terms...

...And it should be added that if Leavis and the main Scrutineers may have succumbed to one of the occupational hazards of criticism and become fanatics, they at least resisted the other and uglier one and never became poseurs...

...Criticism makes its influence felt through sensitivity, perceptivity, stimulation and the begetting of intellectual children...

...Thus his belittling review of Yeats' Last Poems, where he carps, among other things, about an "absence of positives" and is carried away into misquoting and so diminishing one of Yeats' most beautiful lines, is indefensible...

...it is also clear that, with such standards, any failure incurred will be a noble one...

...Out of this comes that dedicatedly unpopular but compelling bearing which we find, for example, in this paragraph from a review of Grierson and Smith's A Critical History of English Poetry: "Discrimination is life, indiscrimination is death: I offer this as obviously a very suitable maxim for a university school of English, and it seems to me very plain that a critical habit tending to carry severity even towards 'narrowness' constitutes, for the student, a more healthy climate than Sir Herbert Grierson's and Dr...

...There is Revaluation: The critic must reexamine past literature in terms of his personal and up-to-date sensibility, and so reaffirm or demolish received ideas or reputations...

...in other words, an enterprise, a journey undertaken together...

...It may, in the last analysis, be hard to love Leavis, or even to like him...

...Leavis, however, espouses only two of these principles...

...But such innovation we get from Leavis: He rediscovered the greatness of George Eliot and Nostromo and has been the staunchest champion of D. H. Lawrence...

...their very status of anti-academic academicians—all these were calculated to make them enemies on both sides of the fence, on both sides of all fences...

...I put 'narrowness' in inverted commas because I know it is the word that Sir Herbert and his collaborator have ready for me...

...The critic, further, must be a teacher, who supplies information, explication, appreciation or repudiation (if possible, without dogmatism), and jogs the reader's thinking in useful directions...

...In what way was Sainte-Beuve a great innovator...

...What he wrote about Matthew Arnold can as fittingly be applied to Leavis himself: "Though we can imagine a better Arnold, one who should have had his virtues and less disability, the systematic thinker's preoccupation with consistency and precision could in any case hardly have gone with those virtues —the peculiar sensitive mobility of intelligence, the constantly fresh concern for delicate apprehension of actualities, the lack of interest in merely theoretical conclusions and results...

...This, if I may obtrude my own views here, should be threefold...

...The critic, he informs René Wellek, should be "the complete reader: the ideal critic is the ideal reader...

...Or Hazlitt...

...a higher score is rare in the history of criticism, and it is not, in any case, on this kind of batting average that ultimate critical reputation rests...

...His main critical tenets can be conveniently deduced from the titles of some of his books...

...He was not a "close reader" in the sense of the New Criticism, but he could, on occasion, show his skill in minute analysis, as in "Reality and Sincerity," in which he offers a subtle explication of a poem by Thomas Hardy...

...their internal solidarity and lip-smacking defiance of prevalent notions, scholarly or critical...

...If you are capable of saying such things you are not (I put it as inoffensively as I can) capable of conveying a due sense of the greatness of Chaucer...

...Still, there remains the fact that, in spite of some signal blind spots, a good many of Leavis' judgments have asserted themselves, or seem likely to do so...

...repeated ad nauseam...

...it was he who, as Rosenberg did not fail to notice, conceived of literary criticism as a cultural, social and ultimately political force, but political in a nonpartisan sense...

...Another virtue of Leavis' exhibited in these reviews is absolute independence from academic, political or religious ideologies...

...Eliot and Lawrence" and "Pound in His Letters," in which moral and esthetic criteria admirably adjust to each other, and in which a tone of exhilarating earnestness is bolstered by a gruff humor whose very grimness contributes to the high seriousness of the writing...

...These aims must, of course, be supplemented by a methodology...

...One is put off by finding not only the opinions but also certain dictums and catchwords of the Master (like "desiderate" or "vicious"—for poor or faulty—or that Bradleyan folly turned into an anti-pedantic tag, "How many children had Lady Macbeth...

...Sainte-Beuve, let us say, introduced the biographical approach to criticism and rediscovered Ronsard...

...The critic must be a traveling companion, who, working out his own reactions, problems and insights, encourages the reader to think along with him, in sympathy though not necessarily in agreement...

...the temerity with which they attacked foe and, when it seemed necessary, friend...

...After all this, it must be admitted that Leavis suffered from a progressive hardening of the critical arteries, the advanced stage of which can be unedifyingly witnessed in the thrashing shrillness, the defensive arrogance of his "Retrospect" in volume 20...

...That would...

...Scrutiny, the quarterly which F. R. Leavis and his gallant band of colleagues and disciples published for two decades at Cambridge, was a reaction not only to the kind of criticism that Bennett scorned, but also to the kind of writing he practiced...

...The Scrutineers took criticism seriously: The critic was to be a protector and promoter of the best in literature—and thus in life...