The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  Mr Eliot's stress in this book, of course, falls explicitly upon the religious needs of the age. And, with conscious inadequacy, holding on to what one is sure of, one agrees that 'to re-establish a vital connexion between the individual and the race' means reviving, in a civilization that more and more, at higher and lower levels, fosters the chauffeur-mentality, what it may be crude to call the religious sense—the sense that spoke in Lawrence when he said, 'Thank God I am not free, any more than a rooted tree is free'. It is the sense, perhaps it may be said, a perception of the need to cultivate which made Dr L A. Richards, in the book in which he speculates about a future in which we shall 'have learned enough about our minds to do with them what we will' and' the question " What sort of mind shall I choose to be ? " would turn

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  into an experimental matter' (Practical Criticism, p. 347), invent his 'ritual for heightening sincerity' (ibid., p. 290)—that invention the crudities of which Mr Eliot is, if not excessively, perhaps unnecessarily severe upon in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

  What would be the drift of Mr Eliot's comments on the present kind of fumbling inadequacy one knows well enough. The relevance of this, for instance, is plain: * when morals cease to be a matter of tradition and orthodoxy—that is, of the habits of the community formulated, corrected and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church—and when one man is to elaborate his own, then personality becomes a thing of alarming importance.' Mr Eliot has no need to talk hesitantly about the 'need for a religious sense*; he adheres to a religion, and can point to his Church and recite its dogmas.

  Nevertheless, those of us who find no such approach to tradition and orthodoxy possible can only cultivate the sense of health we have. 'The number of people in possession of any criteria for distinguishing between good and evil', writes Mr Eliot, 'is very small'. As we watch his in use, we can only test them by reference to our own surest perceptions, our own most stable grounds of discrimination. When, for instance, he says that he is * applying moral principles' to literature, we cannot accept those principles as alternatives to the criteria we know. * What we can try to do', he says, 'is to develop a more critical spirit, or rather to apply to authors critical standards that are almost in desuetude/ The first phrase is strictly accurate: we could recover such standards only by the development— as the development—of a more critical spirit out of the capacity for discrimination that we have already. To put it another way: moral or religious criticism cannot be a substitute for literary criticism; it is only by being a literary critic that Mr Eliot can apply his recovered standards to literature. It is only by demonstrating convincingly that his application of moral principles leads to a more adequate criticism that he can effect the kind of persuasion that is his aim. In these lectures, if he demonstrates anything, it is the opposite: one can only report that the criticism seems painfully bad—disablingly inadequate, often irrelevant and sometimes disingenuous.

  And it has, more generally, to be said that since the religious

  preoccupation has become insistent in them Mr Eliot's critical writings have been notable for showing less discipline of thought and emotion, less purity of interest, less power of sustained devotion and less courage than before. All this must be so obvious to those who read him (except to the conventional and academic who, having reviled him, now acclaim him) that there is no need to illustrate—the only difficulties in doing so would be to select and to stop. Mr Eliot himself can hardly be happy when he contemplates his recent references to, say, Arnold and Professor Housman, and his references in the present book to Hopkins and Meredith.

  These comments one makes, in all humility, as essential to the issue; they are to enforce the point of saying that it is not as a substitute or an alternative that what Mr Eliot nowadays offers us could recommend itself, but only as a completion, and this it is far from seeming. One may at any rate venture that health— even religious health—demands a more active concern for other things than formal religion than Mr Eliot now shows or encourages. Indeed, it seems reasonable to restate in terms of Mr Eliot's situation his expressions of fear regarding Lawrence, fear that Lawrence's work 'will appeal not to what remains of health in them [" the sick and debile and confused "], but to their sickness.'

  There is hardly any need to be more explicit: it must be plain why for those preoccupied with orthodoxy, order and traditional forms, Lawrence should be especially a test. I do not—need it be said 2—mean a 'test' in the sense that one knows beforehand what the 'right' reaction is (it will certainly not be acceptance). What one demands is a truly critical attitude—a serious attempt to discriminate and evaluate after an honest and complete exposure to Lawrence. Mr Eliot has in the past made me indignant by endorsing, of all things, Mr Middleton Murry's Son of Woman while at die same time admitting to a very imperfect acquaintance with Lawrence's work. After Strange Gods exhibits something much more like a critical attitude; there has obviously been a serious attempt to understand in spite of antipathy.

  It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics, in the context in which I use the term, that they have an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more, but

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  less acutely aware of anything. So far as we are able to redress the balance, efiect the compensation, ourselves, we may find such authors of the greatest value.

  This is not explicitly said of Lawrence; but it suggests fairly Mr Eliot's implied estimate of him: he is spoken of with respect, as (what he obviously is) 'a very much greater genius' than Hardy, and there is *a very great deal to be learned' from him. We are decidedly far away from the imagined * frightful consequences* of Lawrence the don at Cambridge, * rotten and rotting others'. It would, indeed, have been ungracious to recall this unhappy past if Mr Eliot's attitude now had been consistently or in general effect critical, to be agreed or disagreed with. But it is not; its main significance still lies in its being so largely and revealingly uncritical—and so equivocally so.

  The first [aspect of Lawrence] is the ridiculous: his lack of sense of humour, a certain snobbery, a lack not so much of information as of the critical faculties which education should give, an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking. Of this side of Lawrence, the brilliant exposure by Wyndham Lewis in Paleface, is by far die most conclusive criticism that has been made.

  The charge of snobbery (repeated elsewhere in this book and accompanied by a most unfortunate tone) may be passed by; what damage it does is so obviously not to the object. But why, one asks, this invocation of Mr Wyndham Lewis ? With all his undeniable talent, is he qualified to * expose' any side of Lawrence ? No one who can read will acclaim Lawrence as a philosopher, but 'incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking'—does not this apply far more to Mr Wyndham Lewis than to Lawrence ? Mr Lewis stands, in a paradoxically high-pitched and excited way, for common sense; he offers us, at the common-sense level, perceptions of an uncommon intensity, and he is capable of making 'brilliant' connexions. But 'what we ordinarily call thinking' is just what he is incapable of—consider for instance the list of names brought together under the 'Time-philosophy' in Time and Western Man. His pamphleteering volumes are not books; their air of sustained and ordered argument is a kind of bluff, as the reader who, having contrived to read one through, can bring himself to attempt a summary of it discovers. If, on the other hand,

  Lawrence does not offer intellectual order or definition or an intellectual approach, to speak of him as incapable of thinking is to mislead. In the same way the phrases, 'lack of intellectual and social training' and 'soul destitute of humility', seem to me misleading in suggestion; and I think that, if Mr Eliot goes on reading Lawrence—and especially the Letters and Phoenix—in. a serious attempt to understand, he may come to wonder whether such phrases are quite consistent with humility i
n the critic.

  When we look up Mr Wyndham Lewis's' brilliant exposure' of Lawrence in Paleface, we discover that it is an 'exposure' of Lawrence and Mr Sherwood Anderson together. Now the primitivistic illusion that Mr Wyndham Lewis rightly attacks was indeed something that Lawrence was liable to (and could diagnose). Just how far, in any critical estimate, the stress may be fairly laid there is a matter for critical difference. But that Lawrence's importance is not anything that can be illuminated by assimilating him, or any side of him, to Mr Sherwood Anderson is plain on Mr Eliot's own showing: 'Lawrence lived all his life, I should imagine, on the spiritual level; no man was less a sensualist. Against the living death of material civilization he spoke again and again, and even if these dead could speak, what he said is unanswerable.' If Lawrence was this, how comes Mr Eliot to be using Mr Wyndham Lewis against him?—Mr Wyndham Lewis, who, though he may stand for Intelligence, is as unqualified to discriminate between the profound insight and the superficial romantic illusion, as anyone who could have been hit on. His remarkable satiric gift is frustrated by an unrestrained egotism, and Mr Eliot might have placed him along with Mr Pound among those whose Hells are for the other people: no one could with less injustice be said to be destitute of humility.

  Mr Eliot no doubt thought he was merely using Mr Wyndham Lewis to mark off a weaker side of Lawrence from 'the extraordinarily keen sensibility and capacity for profound intuition' which made Lawrence so irreconcilable and potent an enemy of the idea that 'by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with devotion on the part of an elite to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require ...' Mr Eliot, unhappily, was mistaken.

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  From the two sentences of supreme praise quoted in the last paragraph he goes on: * As a criticism of the modern world, Fantasia of the Unconscious is a book to keep at hand and re-read. In contrast to Nottingham, London or industrial America, his capering redskins of Mornings in Mexico seem to represent Life*— Mornings in Mexico is Mr Wyndham Lewis's text, and it is one of the very inferior books. If it represented Lawrence and the Fantasia deserved to be bracketed with it, or if the 'capering redskins' (betraying phrase) represented Lawrence's 'capacity for profound intuition', then Lawrence would not deserve the praise Mr Eliot gives him—so equivocally.

  This equivocalness, this curious sleight by which Mr Eliot surreptitiously takes away while giving, is what I mean by the revealingly uncritical in his attitude towards Lawrence. It is as if there were something he cannot bring himself to contemplate fairly. And the index obtr ded in that over-insistence on Lawrence's 'sexual morbidity' refuses to be ignored. It is an odd insistence in one whose own attitudes with reference to sex have been, in prose and poetry, almost uniformly negative—attitudes of distaste, disgust and rejection. (Mr Wyndham Lewis's treatment of sex, it is worth noting, is hard-boiled, cynical and external.) The preoccupation with sex in Lawrence's work is, perhaps, excessive by any standard of health, and no doubt psychologists, if they like, can elicit abnormalities. But who can question his own account of the preoccupation? *I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, not shameful.' And who can question that something as different as this from Mr Eliot's bent in the matter is necessary if the struggle 'to re-establish a vital connexion between the individual and the race' is to mean anything ?

  Lawrence's concern for health far transcends what is suggested by any talk of sex. His may be 'not the last word, only the first'; but the first is necessary. His justification is given in these remarks from After Strange Gods (p. 18):

  We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off—when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy

  may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them on to the branches: but the sound tree will

  put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe Our

  second danger is... to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time.

  The tree will not put forth new leaves unless the sap flows. The metaphor, of course, is susceptible of more than one translation, but the very choice of it is nevertheless an involuntary concession to Lawrence. To 'stimulate the life' in Lawrence's way is not all that is needed, but is nevertheless, as the phrase itself conveys, indispensable.

  It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life—for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and refreshing.

  Mr Eliot complains of a lack of moral struggle in Lawrence's novels; here we have Lawrence's reply, and his justification of the earlier description of him as an * extremely serious and improving' writer. No one will suggest that in Lawrence we have all we need of moral concern, but, as After Strange Gods reminds us, a preoccupation with discipline—the effort towards orthodoxy—also has its disabilities and dangers. These are manifest in the obvious and significant failures in touch and tone. It may be prejudice that makes one find something distasteful in the habitual manner of Mr Eliot's references during the past half-dozen years to Baudelaire and Original Sin. But such disasters as that * curtain' to the second lecture in the present volume leave no room for doubt.

  No one who sees in what way Lawrence is * serious and improving' will attribute the sum of wisdom, or anything like it, to him. And for attributing to him * spiritual sickness' Mr Eliot can make out a strong case. But it is characteristic of the world as

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  it is that health cannot anywhere be found whole; and the sense in which Lawrence stands for health is an important one. He stands at any rate for something without which the preoccupation (necessary as it is) with order, forms and deliberate construction, cannot produce health.

  i

  THE LOGIC OF CHRISTIAN DISCRIMINATION

  HAVE already had reason for concluding that Christian Discrimination is a decidedly bad thing. Bro, George Every's little book, Poetry and Personal Responsibility, has the air of having been designed defiantly to justify that conclusion. It can be recommended for a brief perusal as showing unambiguously what in the concrete Christian Discrimination is, and where its logic leads.

  One might, after looking through the book, start by asking why Mr Every has devoted so much time to poetry, and to creative literature in general, since (I hope I may be forgiven for saying) he shows no compelling interest in it, and no aptitude for its study. The answer he would give us is to be found in the first sentence of his Preface:

  This book is intended as an introduction to contemporary poetry, considered as the sensitive spot in the modern mind, where a new response to life, a new outlook upon the world, is taking shape.

  He follows it up with a sentence that hardly clarifies the idea, and wouldn't, I think, have been left standing if anyone had asked him what he meant by it:

  The best poem is die most sensitive not only to the thoughts and feelings of the author, but to those of other people with whom he is in constant communication.

  Still, I see what's in his mind. It's the idea that, in the given form, derives its currency from I. A. Richards:

  The poet is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself.

  But though this is the idea that seems to Mr Every to explain his dealings with poetry, he doesn't, as to be consistent he should, go on
to try and be a critic. He knows beforehand, in a general kind of way, what new responses to life and what *new outlook upon the world' are to be looked for as making a writer significant and important. They go with his conviction that the most impor-

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  tant activity to-day is to promote a Christian revival. He nowhere begins to come near the business of literary criticism, and it is difficult to see what, apart from names, asserted importances, and impressive generalities his pupils (the substance of the book was given as lectures) can have got from him:

  . .. the younger poets who came to light in 1937-42, such voices as Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, Alex Comfort, and Sidney Keyes, have never suffered from any illusions about the future of our civilization. For them the urgent problem is the imminence of death, the need of some significance that can be attached to dying in a world where there is no common belief in immortality.

  This suggests well enough his principles of selection and association and die nature of his commentary. It is true that he does a good deal of quoting, but the pieces of verse he quotes get no critical examination, and don't as a rule support the implicit assumption that the author matters as a poet, Mr Every's indifference to the essential critical judgment appears at its most naked in his astonishing collocations. He can glide with perfect aplomb, in a paragraph, from Little Gidding to Miss Anne Ridler and Sidney Keyes without a hint of any perception on his part that, for any serious treatment of his theme, something of a change of level has occurred, and that he cannot still be dealing with significance of the same order. Here is a characteristic passage:

  Our greatest living novelist, Mr E. M. Forster, deserted the novel twenty-five years ago for other forms of literature. Rex Warner seems to have done the same. Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Mr Desmond Hawkins have not added to their early output, which had great promise for the future. The reputation of Miss Compton-Burnett, so far chiefly among her fellow-writers, rests on a departure from the naturalistic novel into stylized conversation. Her characters are elongated and foreshortened in the manner of sculpture by Mr Henry Moore, a family group or a reclining woman. No other modern novelist cuts so close to the bone of life. As her prose recalls the verse of T. S. Eliot's plays, especially The Family Reunion, so her treatment of die novel as a form of poetry makes a convenient introduction to novels by two poets, Herbert Read and Charles Williams.