The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  The deepening of the cleavage between public and art through Naturalism. The aesthetic movement in Germany was of no great importance. Of more note was the German movement of Naturalism. In Germany naturalism (or realism) came remarkably late. In France its most eminent representative, Emile Zola, had written his most famous novels in die 'seventies; he sought admittance to the Academy in 1888. About the same time (1886) Tennyson indignantly hurled his lame imprecations (now of great historic interest) in Locksley Hall sixty years after against the new movement, which had already had in the 'seventies a typical representative in Henry James. Tolstoy s Anna Karenina was begun in 1874; Ibsen's League of Youth dates from 1869.

  It is bad enough to bracket the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina with

  Zola, as this passage seems to do. But to be capable of referring to Henry James as a 'typical representative' of Naturalism, or a typical representative of anything—what considerable conclusions are compatible with such an approach ?

  There can be no pleasure in elaborating this kind of commentary. Enough has been said as a preliminary to making the point Dr Schiicking's book provides an opportunity for making— the more suitable an opportunity because of the drive in sociology with which, in its English publication, it is associated. It is an elementary point, but one that seems unlikely to get too much attention as the Sociology of Literature forges ahead: no 'sociology of literature* and no attempt to relate literary studies with sociological will yield much profit unless informed and controlled by a real and intelligent interest—a first-hand critical interest—in literature. That is, no use of literature is of any use unless it is a real use; literature isn't so much material lying there to be turned over from the outside, and drawn on, for reference and exemplification, by the critically inert.

  There are, indeed, many different kinds of possible sociological approach to literature and of literary approach to sociology, but to all of them the axiom just enunciated applies. To Dr Schiicking's offer it most patently applies. You cannot make changes in taste the centre of your inquiry without implicitly undertaking, as an essential part of your work, a great deal of perception, discrimination and analysis such as demand a sensitive, trained and active critic. You can, of course, collect some kinds of relevant material without being, critically, very deeply engaged: there is, for instance, the economic history of literature. (Dr Schiicking, by the way, doesn't mention Beljame's admirable book, 1 nor does he the work of A. S. Collins.) 2 But as soon as you start using it in a 'sociological' handling of literature, as, for instance, in Fiction and the Reading Public, you are committed to being essentially and

  1 Le public et les homines de lettres au XVIII siecle, by Alexandre Bcljamc (translated as Men of Letters and the English Public in the XVIIIth Century).

  8 Nor does he appear to know Courthope's History of English Poetry or Leslie Stephen's English Literature and Society in the XVIIIth Century, both of which are half a century old. Leslie Stephen's classic is brief and modest, but in the ready fulness of ordered knowledge and with the ease of a trained and vigorous mind he really does something; something as relevant to Dr

  SOCIOLOGY AND LITERATURE 199

  constantly a critic if your use of the information and of the literature is to amount to anything.

  This is so, even if your concern is primarily with the condition of the literary market—so long, that is, as your concern is with the effect of these on literature. And any serious inquiry into changes of'taste* (a more complex and less delimitable field of interest than perhaps Dr Schiicking realizes) tends inevitably to develop into a consideration of the most radical ways in which the use of individual talent is conditioned—into the kind of inquiry, for instance, suggested above into the art and language of Chaucer. Everyone interested in literature must have noted a number of inquiries of that order asking to be undertaken. It is an order of inquiry that, properly undertaken, would pre-eminently justify a 'sociology of literature*; but it could hardly propose itself except to a mind taking the most inward kind of critical interest in the relevant literature. That a German scholar should miss it where Chaucer is concerned is not surprising. That Shakespeare, though Dr Schiicking makes a great deal (relatively) of the Elizabethan theatre as a sociological theme, shouldn't propose it to him brings home more strikingly the disability of an external approach. This suggests fairly enough all the significance he sees (p. 12):

  New fields lay open. An infinitely wider sphere of activity showed itself. Literature was written no longer with an eye to the approval of a particular aristocratic patron* who might easily demand, in consequence of his conservative outlook, that traditions should be respected; and the work of the artist was no longer directed by a small and exclusive social group, whose atmosphere was the breath of his life. The

  Schucking's confused and ambitious gesturings as this suggests: ' Briefly, in talking of literary changes, I shall have, first, to take note of the main intellectual characteristics of the period; and secondly, what changes took place in the audience to which men of letters addressed themselves, and how the gradual extension of the reading class affected the development of the literature addressed to them *. The possibilities of a ' sociology of literary taste * are incomparably better presented by Leslie Stephen's book (written late in life as lectures, which he was too ill to deliver, or to correct for publication) than by Dr Schucking's inconsequent assortment of loosely thrown out and loosely thought adumbrations.

  artist depended instead indirectly on the box-office receipts, and directly on the theatre managers who ordered plays from him.

  But in the theatre the works that won applause were precisely those which through their closeness to life and their realistic psychology were bound to be foreign to the taste of the aristocratic world. Thus the shackles of tradition could here be struck off and a wealth of varied talents could find scope.

  What wealth of * sociological' interest presented by Shakespearean drama and the Elizabethan theatre has been missed here Acre is no need to insist; this is a field that has had much attention in recent years. Its significance for an understanding of the nature of a national culture and of the conditions of vitality in art will not be quickly exhausted. There are other fields less obviously inviting attention and offering less obvious rewards. There is that marked out by L. C. Knights in his paper on 'The Social Background of Metaphysical Poetry' (see Scrutiny, Vol. XHI, 207)— one to which it is very much to be hoped that he will devote a book. If it is asked of such an inquiry whether it is primarily sociological or literary it will be enough to answer that it represents the kind of sociological interest into which a real literary, or critical, interest in literature develops, and that, correlatively, the sociologist here will be a literary critic or nothing.

  For to insist that literary criticism is, or should be, a specific discipline of intelligence is not to suggest that a serious interest in literature can confine itself to the kind of intensive local analysis associated with 'practical criticism*—to the scrutiny of the 'words on the page' in their minute relations, their effects of imagery, and so on: a real literary interest is an interest in man, society and civilization, and its boundaries cannot be drawn; the adjective is not a circumscribing one. On the other hand, a living critical inwardness with literature, and a mind trained in dealing analytically with it, would have improved much work undertaken in fields for which these qualifications are not commonly thought of as among the essential ones, if they are thought of as relevant at all. Here is a passage from a distinguished historian—one distinguished among historians for the humane cultivation he brings to his work (he is, moreover, discussing the quality of English civilization in the seventeenth century):

  Since thought among common people had now reached a

  SOCIOLOGY AND LITERATURE 201

  momentary perfection for the purposes of religious and imaginative literature, the English language was for those purposes perfect. Whether in the Bible, the play-book, the street ballad, the broad-sheet or report
of the commonest dialogue of daily life, it was always the same language, ignorant of scientific terms, and instinct with a poetical feeling about life that was native to the whole generation of those who used it. Its fault, corresponding to the state of thought in that age, is want of exactness and of complexity in ideas, that renders it unfit for psychology or for close analysis of things either material or spiritual.

  A footnote to this paragraph runs:

  If Mill or Darwin, Browning or Mr Meredith had tried to express their ideas in the English of the seventeenth century they would have failed. The extreme simplicity of Hamlet's thought is only concealed by the obscurity of his motives and the richness of his poetical diction.

  G. M. Trevelyan's England Under the Stuarts (which I re-read with gratitude at fairly frequent intervals—the quotation conies from page 54) was written, of course, a good many years ago, and literary fashions since then have changed in ways calculated to help, in respect of the particular point, a similarly cultivated writer who should embark on a similar undertaking. Nevertheless, the passages are sufficiently striking: the appreciation of seventeenth-century civilization that goes with them is clearly a seriously limited one. And one would be agreeably surprised to find a historian who was essentially any better provided with the kind of qualification under discussion.

  On the same author's recent English Social History I have heard the comment that it is disappointing in that it does little more than add to some economic history that almost every educated person knows some information about English life that any educated person has gathered, and could supplement, from his acquaintance with English literature. Whether this is a fair comment or not (and the book was clearly designed for a given kind of public—it belongs with that higher advertising of England which has employed so many distinguished pens of late), it is certain that a social historian might make a much greater, more profound and more essential use of literature than English Social History exemplifies; a use that would help him to direct his inquiries by some sharper definition of aims and interests than is

  represented by Mr Trevelyan's account of'social history* in his Introduction:

  Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

  Positively, we have:

  But social history does not merely provide the required link between economic and political history. It has also its own positive value and peculiar concern. Its scope may be defined as the daily life of the inhabitants of the land in past ages: this includes the human as well as die economic relation of different classes to one another, the character of family and household life, the conditions of labour and of leisure, the attitude of man to nature, the culture of each age as it arose out of these general conditions of life, and took ever-changing forms in religion, literature and music, architecture, learning and thought.

  A social historian who appreciated the nature of the vitality of the English language and of English literature in the seventeenth century—and such appreciation itself leads to sociological inquiries—would, in defining and developing his interests, be sensitized by more positively and potently realized questions than any that have given life, form and significance to English Social History: questions as to the conditions of a vigorous and spiritually vital culture, the relations between the sophisticated and the popular, and the criteria by which one might attempt to judge the different phases of a national civilization. To say this is not to envisage with complaisance a habit of naive comparative valuation. But social history will have shape and significance—will have significant lines and contours—only so far as informed by the life and pressure of such questions; and as intent preoccupations it is towards comparative valuation that they press, even if they actually issue in none that is explicit, definitive and comprehensive. What, as civilization to live in and be of, did England offer at such and such a time ? As we pass from now to then, what light is thrown on human possibilities—on the potentialities and desirabilities of civilized life 2 In what respects might it have been better to live then than now ? What tentative conception of an ideal civilization are we prompted towards by the hints we gather from history ? It is with such questions in mind—which is not to say that he will come out with answers to them—that a

  SOCIOLOGY AND LITERATURE 203

  social historian, in so far as his history is anything more than an assemblage of mechanically arranged external information, must define the changes and developments that he discerns. Some such questions were no doubt in Mr Trevelyan's mind. But they hadn't a sufficient concrete charge; they were not sufficiently informed with that kind of appreciation of the higher possibilities of a civilization which, in the earlier book, would have made it impossible for him to pronounce that the English of the seventeenth century was inadequate to the complexities and subtleties of Browning and Meredith, or to suggest that one has disposed of the language of Shakespeare in saying that 'the extreme simplicity of Hamlet's thought is only concealed by the obscurity of his motives and the richness of his poetical diction'.

  Mr Trevelyan, as I have said, is distinguished among historians by his general culture. But his use of literature is nowhere more than external (see, e.g., his use of Chaucer in England in the Age of Wycliffe): he knows that literature exists—it nowhere amounts to evidence of much more than that. The possible uses of literature to the historian and the sociologist are many in kind, and all the important ones demand that the user shall be able, in the fullest sense, to read. If, for instance, we want to go further than the mere constatation that a century and a half ago the family counted for much more than it does now, if we want some notion of the difference involved in day-to-day living—in, the sense of life and its dimensions and in its emotional and moral accenting—for the ordinary cultivated person, we may profitably start trying to form it from the novels of Jane Austen. But only if we are capable of appreciating shade, tone, implication and essential structure—as (it is necessary to add) none of die academically, or fashionably, accredited authorities seems to be.

  On the other hand, the understanding of literature stands to gain much from sociological interests and a knowledge of social history. And this is an opportunity to mention, for illustration, Mr Yvor Winters' Maules Curse, a book that deserves to be distinguished, seeing how few good books of literary criticism appear. In it Mr Winters, by relating the key American authors with the New England background and the heritage of Puritanism, throws a truly revealing light on their work and on the evolution of American literature.

  BUNYAN THROUGH MODERN EYES

  MR LINDSAY is Marxist and psycho-analytic. The arrival of his book 1 reminded me of one on Bunyan that came out some years ago, and in this earlier book 2 now open before me—it is by William York Tindall—I read (p. 94):

  For the saints too the class struggle needed the dignity of divine auspices, and as the miserable of to-day look for their sanction to Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto, their seventeenth-century predecessors looked to Jesus and the Bible,

  The religious man may remain only half-aware, or by virtue of a rationalization, quite unaware of the social or economic motives which determine his sectarian allegiance.

  Mr Lindsay and Mr Tindall, then, in their modes of approach have something in common. But whereas Mr Lindsay is mainly concerned to show that Bunyan's religion was merely a self-uncomprehending reaction to the class-war, Mr Tindall is mainly concerned to show that Bunyan was merely one of a mob—a large, ludicrous and Hudibrastic mob of preaching and scribbling fanatics:

  Bunyan was one of a great number of eloquent tinkers, cobblers and tailors; he thought what they thought, felt what they felt, and wrote according to their conventions; he was one of hundreds of literary mechanicks, and he can be considered unique only by his survival to our day as the sole conspicuous representative of a class of men from whom he differed less in kind than in degree, (viii.)

  While Mr Lindsay's * merely' has the intention of exalting, the intention as
well as the effect of Mr TindalTs is the reverse, It is true he speaks of Bunyan's 'genius', but what this consists in he gives no sign that he knows or cares. As for the superiority in 'expression': 'The qualities of style for which Bunyan is esteemed to-day', he says, 'his raciness, earthiness, and familiarity were common to his kind, and are not easily to be distinguished from

  l john Bunyan: Maker of Myths. 2 John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher.

  BUNYAN THROUGH MODERN EYES 205

  those of other mechanicks*. And any other superiority there may be doesn't impress Mr Tindall. His set attitude expresses itself in the heavy Gibbonian affectation that (inspired, no doubt, by Lytton Strachey) he practises, with complacent insistence, as his own style:

  The ingenious speculations of Mr Gerald Owst have been valuable in suggesting the sermons of Bunyan's time as the principal sources of his similitudes.., Apparently at the impulse of the Spirit, Bunyan condescended to employ and to imitate for his imperishable works the materials of pamphlets, which are now as remote as they were once familiar, and of oral sermons, which are now, perhaps, recorded only in heaven, (p. 196.)

  I still bear something of a grudge against The New Republic for having persuaded me, by a eulogistic review, to spend seventeen and six on such a book. The book has, nevertheless, a use. Mr Tindall—and in this he has the advantage over Mr Lindsay—is a scholar; his book represents a disciplined and laborious research, and makes a * genuine contribution to knowledge'—one in which, moreover, in spite of the obtuseness and die offensive tone, we may see some value. In demonstrating so thoroughly that Bunyan was one of a host, and how much he belonged to his environment, Mr Tindall does, if not for himself, illuminate Bunyan's distinctive genius. And at the same time he tells us something about the genius of the English people in that age.