The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  Christian: Did you hear no talk of neighbour Pliable?

  Faithful: Yes, Christian, I heard that he followed you till he came at the Slough of Despond, where, as some said, he fell in; but he would not be known to have so done; but I am sure he was soundly bedabbled with that kind of dirt.

  Christian: And what said the neighbours to him?

  Faithful: He hath, since his going back, been had greatly in derision, and that among all sorts of people; some do mock and despise him; and scarce will any set him on work. He is now seven times worse than if he had never gone out of the city.

  Christian: But why should they be so set against him, since they also despise the way that he forsook ?

  Faithful: Oh, they say, hang him, he is a turncoat! he was not true to his profession. 1 think God has stirred up even his enemies to hiss at him, and make him a proverb, because he hath forsaken the way.

  Christian: Had you no talk with him before you came out?

  Faithful: I met him once in the streets, but he leered away on the other side, as one ashamed of what he had done; so I spoke not to him.

  Christian: Well, at my first setting out, I had hopes of that man; but now I fear he will perish in the over-throw of the city; for it is happened to him according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire.

  The relation of this to the consummate art of the By-Ends passage is plain; we have the idiomatic life that runs to saw and proverb, and runs also to what is closely akin to these, the kind

  1 Sec, e.g., two books discussed below (see p. 204). John Bunyan: Maker of Myths, by Jack Lindsay, and/o/w Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher, by William York Tindall.

  2 See page 207 below.

  of pungently characterizing epitome represented by 'turncoat' (which, with a capital letter, might have appeared in By-Ends' list of his kindred). The vitality here is not merely one of raciness; an art of civilized living is implicit, with its habits and standards of serious moral valuation.

  This then is what the literary critic has to deduce from his reading. If he finds that others, interested primarily in social reform and social history, do not seem properly impressed by such evidence, he can, by way of bringing home to them in how full a sense there is, behind the literature, a social culture and an art of living, call attention to Cecil Sharp's introduction to English Folk-Songsfrom the Southern Appalachians. Hearing that the English folk-song still persisted in the remoter valleys of those mountains Sharp, during the war of 1914, went over to investigate, and brought back a fabulous haul. More than that, he discovered that the tradition of song and dance (and a reminder is in place at this point of the singing and dancing with which the pilgrims punctuate their progress in the second part of Bunyan's Calvinistic allegory) had persisted so vigorously because the whole context to which folk-song and folk-dance belong was there too: he discovered, in fact, a civilization or 'way of life' (in our democratic parlance) that was truly an art of social living.

  The mountaineers were descended from settlers who had left this country in the eighteenth century*

  The region is from its inaccessibility a very secluded one . . . the inhabitants have for a hundred years or more been completely isolated and shut off from all traffic with the rest of the world. Their speech is English, not American, and, from the number of expressions they use that have long been obsolete elsewhere, and the old-fashioned way in which they pronounce many of their words, it is clear that they are talking the language of a past day. They are a leisurely, cheery people in their quiet way, in whom the social instinct is very highly developed ... They know their Bible intimately and subscribe to an austere creed, charged with Calvinism and the unrelenting doctrines of determinism or fatalism... They have an easy unaffected bearing and the unselfconscious manners of the well-bred ... A few of those we met were able to read and write, but the majority were illiterate. They are however good talkers, using an abundant vocabulary racily and picturesquely.

  That the illiterate may nevertheless reach a high level of culture will surprise only those who imagine that education and cultivation are convertible terms. The reason, I take it, why these mountain people, albeit unlettered, have acquired so many of the essentials of culture, is partly to be attributed to the large amount of leisure they enjoy, without which, of course, no cultural development is possible, but chiefly to the fact that they have one and all entered at birth into the full enjoyment of their racial inheritance. Their language, wisdom, manners and the many graces of life that are theirs, are merely racial attributes which have been gradually acquired and accumulated in past centuries and handed down generation by generation, each generation adding its quota to what it received .. ,

  . . . Of the supreme value of an inherited tradition, even when un-enforced by any formal school education, our mountain community in the Southern Highlands is an outstanding example.

  Correlation of Cecil Sharp's introduction with Bunyan should sufficiently confirm and enforce the significance attributed to Bunyan above. And Bunyan himself shows how the popular culture to which he bears witness could merge with literary culture at the level of great literature. The converse, regarding the advantages enjoyed by the literary writer, the 'intellectual', need not be stated: they are apparent in English literature from Shakespeare to Marvell. We seeMarvell—it is, of course, for this reason I name him.—as pre-eminently refined, European in sophistication, and intimately related to a tradition of courtly urbanity; but his refinement involves no insulation from the popular—the force of which judgment is brought out by contrast with Pope. In prose, compare Halifax with Dryden. Halifax (the Trimmer) is 'easy*, * natural' and urbane, a master of the spoken tone and movement; in short he is unmistakably of the Restoration; but his raciness and idiomatic life relate him as unmistakably to Bunyan. I don't think I am being fanciful when I say that when Dryden gets lively, as in the Preface to All for Love, he tends towards the Cockney; he assimilates, in fact, with L'Estrange. At least, his polite idiomatic ease is wholly of the coffee-house, that new organ of metropolitan culture the vibration of which seems essentially to exclude any intimate relations with Bunyan's world. The exclusive, or insulating, efficacy of the politeness of Augustan verse, even in Pope, whose greatness manifests itself in his power of transcending the

  Augustan, is at any rate obvious; and Pope's politeness belongs to the same world as the politeness of Addison's prose. Where, in short, Augustan convention and idiom, with their social suggestion, prevail, sophisticated culture cuts itself off from the traditional culture of the people.

  The eighteenth century, significantly, had a habit of attempting the naive, and, characteristically, evoked its touching simplicities of low life in modes that, Augustan tone and movement being inescapable, evoked at the same time the elegant and polite. It is one of the manifestations of Blake's genius that he, unique in this, can—the evidence is apparent here and there in Poetical Sketches (1783)—be genuinely, in verse that has nothing Augustan about it, of the people (popular London in his time was clearly still something of a 'folk'). The mention of this aspect of Blake serves to bring out by contrast the significance of Wordsworth's kind of interest in rustic life. It is essentially—in so far as it is more than nominal—an interest in something felt as external to the world to which he himself belongs, and very remote from it: the reaction that Wordsworth represents against the Augustan century doesn't mean any movement towards re-establishing the old organic relations between literary culture and the sources of vitality in the general life. By Wordsworth's death, the Industrial Revolution had done its work, and the traditional culture of the people was no longer there, except vestigially.

  No one, then, seriously interested in modern literature can feel that it represents a satisfactory cultural order. But if any one should conclude that it ought therefore—the literature that the literary critic finds significant—to be contemned, and that a really significant contemporary literature would ha
ve the Marxking or Wellsiankind of relation to social, political andeconomicproblems, he may be reminded that, but for the persisting literary tradition, the history I have so inadequately sketched would have been lost, and our notions of what a popular culture might be, and what relations might exist between it and a 'highbrow* culture, would have been very different. And it needs stressing that where there isn't, in the literary critic's sense, a significant contemporary literature, the literary tradition—the 'mind' (and mind includes memory)—is not folly alive. To have a vital literary culture we must have a literature that is a going concern; and that will be

  what, under present conditions of civilization, it has to be. Where it is can be determined only by the literary critic's kind of judgment.

  What one has to suggest in general by way of urging on students of politics and society the claims of literary studies (I don't mean the ordinary academic kind) to be regarded as relevant and important is that thinking about political and social matters ought to be done by minds of some real literary education, and done in an intellectual climate informed by a vital literary culture. More particularly, of course, there are, capable of endless development and illustration, the hints for the social historian and the sociologist I have thrown out in the course of my argument. These all involve the principle that literature will yield to the sociologist, or anyone else, what it has to give only if it is approached as literature. For what I have in mind is no mere industrious searching for 'evidence', and collecting of examples, in whatever happens to have been printed and preserved. The 'literature' in question is something in the definition of which terms of value-judgment figure essentially, and something accessible only to die reader capable of intelligent and sensitive criticism.

  I am thinking, in this insistence, not of the actual business of explicit valuation, but of the ability to respond appropriately and appreciatively to the subtleties of the artist's use of language and to the complexities of his organizations. And I am not thinking merely of poetry. It is to poetry, mainly, that I have made my illustrative references, but if one were enumerating the more obvious kinds of interest that literature has to offer the sociologist, prose fiction, it is plain, would figure very largely. There seems to be a general view that anyone can read a novel; and the uses commonly made of novels as evidence, sociological or other, would seem to illustrate that view. Actually, to use as evidence or illustration the kinds of novel that are most significant and have most to offer requires an uncommon skill, the product of a kind of training that few readers submit themselves to. For instance, the sociologist can't learn what D. H. Lawrence has to teach about the problems of modern civilized man without being a more intelligent critic than any professional literary guide he is likely to find. Nor, without being an original critic, adverted and sensitized by experience and die habit of critical analysis, can the

  social psychologist learn what Conrad has to teach about the social nature of the individual's 'reality'.

  Then there are kinds of inquiry where the literary-critical control cannot be so delicate and full, but where, at the same time, the critic's experience and understanding have their essential role. Hints are to be found in Gilbert Murray's Rise of fa Greek Epic— a book that has a still greater value when pondered along with Dame Bertha Phillpotts' WA and Saga. She, towards the end of chapter viii, throws out some peculiarly good incitements to inquiry. Observing that the Saga literature was democratic ('it had to interest all classes, because all classes listened to it') she says:

  But though it was democratic in the sense that it appealed to the whole people, [it] was mainly the creation of the intellectual classes, and it obviously brought about a general levelling-up of interests and culture. This is an effect of oral literature which it is easy to overlook. Printing... makes knowledge very easy to avoid.

  And she makes—is it acceptable; (and if not, why not?)—an optimistic suggestion about broadcasting.

  These instances must suffice—I choose them for their suggestive diversity. Instead of offering any further, I will end by making a general contention in other terms. Without the sensitizing familiarity with the subtleties of language, and the insight into the relations between abstract or generalizing thought and the concrete of human experience, that the trained frequentation of literature alone can bring, the thinking that attends social and political studies will not have the edge and force it should.

  SOCIOLOGY AND LITERATURE

  'spirit of the age 5 doesn't amount to much of an explan-JL ation where changes of literary taste are concerned, and that there are sociological lines of inquiry capable of yielding profit-in these suggestions one readily concurs: they are not new, and were not when Dr Schiicking's essay, The Sociology of Literary Taste, was first published in German, in 1931. And I cannot, after several re-readings, find substantially more to bring away from it. That anyone could write the most casual note relevant to Dr Schucking's tide without proposing any more definite inquiry than he does, or making any more of an attempt to distinguish between possible inquiries, is remarkable. But then, the apparent casualness of his whole procedure is very remarkable. He throws out the most vague of general suggestions and proceeds to demonstrate them with a random assortment of * evidence* in this way (p. 10):

  Elsewhere, with the general understanding less, the conditions were still worse. Chaucer had his Visconti—the unscrupulous John of Gaunt, He ate the bread of a court at which French taste and the rather stale theories of love of past centuries were still accepted; and a good part of his literary activity ran on these lines. They still left room for the play of his sense of grace and elegance, his taste and wit and irony, but not for the real element in his popularity, his wonderful sense of the Thing as It Is, which made him at the end of his life the most vivid portrayer of the Middle Ages. But by then his relations with the court had probably grown far less intimate, and it may be that these descriptions were written for recital to an audience of burghers. Such examples might be multiplied.

  This kind of thing, of course, is not a use of evidence at all, and no amount of it can forward our knowledge or understanding of anything. If you are to conduct a profitable argument about the * sociological medium of literature' you must have a more inward acquaintance with the works of literature from which you argue than can be got from a literary history or a text-book. There is

  indeed a most interesting and significant inquiry to be made into the sociological background of Chaucer, but it is of a kind that can hardly fall within Dr Schiicking's ken. It is what, in spite of the reference to 'the philologists', Raleigh suggests here (in one of the extracts from his lecture-notes published posthumously as On Writing and Writers):

  It is impossible to overpraise Chaucer's mastery of language. Here at the beginning, as it is commonly reckoned, of Modern English literature, is a treasury of perfect speech. We can trace his themes, and tell something of the events of his life. But where did he get his style— from which it may be said that English literature has been (in some respects) a long falling away ?

  What is the ordinary account ? I do not wish to cite individual scholars, and there is no need. Take what can be gathered from the ordinary text-books—what are the current ideas ? Is not this a fair statement of them?

  'English was a despised language used by the upper classes. A certain number of dreary works written chiefly for homileric purposes or in order to appeal to the humble people, are to be found in the half-century before Chaucer. They are poor and flat and feeble, giving no promise of the new dawn. Then arose the morning star! Chaucer adopted the despised English tongue and set himself to modify it, to shape it, to polish it, to render it fit for his purpose. He imported words from the French; he purified the English of Ms time from its dross; he shaped it into a fit instrument for his use/

  Now I have no doubt that a competent philologist examining the facts could easily show that this account must be nonsense, from beginning to end. But even a literary critic can say something certain on the
point—perhaps can even give aid by divination to the philologists, and tell them where it will best repay them to ply their pickaxes and spades.

  No poet makes his own language. No poet introduces serious or numerous modification into the language that he uses. Some, no doubt, coin words and revive them, like Spenser or Keats in verse, Carlyle or Sir Thomas Browne in prose. But least of all great English poets did Chaucer mould and modify the speech he found. The poets who take liberties with speech are either prophets or eccentrics. From either of these characters Chaucer was far removed. He held fast by communal and social standards for literary speech. He desired to be understood of the people. His English is plain, terse, homely, colloquial English, taken alive out of daily speech. He expresses his ideal again and again . . .

  Chaucer has expressed his views on the model literary style so clearly

  SOCIOLOGY AND LITERATURE 197

  and so often, and has illustrated them so well in his practice, that no mistake is possible. His style is the perfect courtly style; it has all the qualities of ease, directness, simplicity, of the best colloquial English, in short, which Chaucer recognized, three centuries before the French Academy, as the English spoken by cultivated women in society. His 'facound', like Virginia's, 'is ful womanly and pleyn'. He avoids all 'counterfeited terms', all subtleties of rhetoric, and addresses himself to the 'commune intente'.

  .. . Now a style like this, and in this perfection, implies a society at the back of it. If we are told that educated people at the Court of Edward III spoke French and that English was a despised tongue, we could deny it on the evidence of Chaucer alone. His language was shaped by rustics. No English style draws so much as Chaucer's from the communal and colloquial elements of the language. And his poems made it certain that from his youth up he had heard much admirable, witty talk in the English tongue.

  Investigations of the kind suggested could be prosecuted—they are, indeed, likely to be conceived—only by a more sensitively critical reader of English poetry than most scholars show themselves to be, even when they are born to the language. A point that has to be made is that Dr Schiicking's dealings with German literature seem to be no more inward than his dealings with English. He certainly betrays no sense of not being qualified to deal with English, and his confident reference to Thackeray as 'the greatest English novelist of the nineteenth century' (p. 7) is representative. But if the critical quality of his approach to literature can be brought home in a quotation, this is perhaps the one: