The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  What ails Russell is, in matters of life and emotion, the inexperience of youth ... It isn't that life has been too much for him, but too little.

  Keynes, looking back, does of course criticize the 'religion* for certain defects that fall under inexperience. He says that, in its account of human nature, it ignored the formidable part of the irrational forces, and ignored at die same time 'certain powerful and valuable springs of feeling*. But his criticisms have a way of not being able to realize the weight they ought to carry and the depth to which they ought to strike. 'We lacked reverence, as Lawrence observed . . / Keynes endorses, as he thinks, this radical criticism. But what it means to him is just this and no more (damaging enough by itself, of course):

  We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom ... It did not occur to any of us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework they had devised to protect this order.

  How little Keynes can understand the full force of Lawrence's criticism he shows when he explains what he calls the 'individualism of our philosophy*.

  Now what we got from Moore was by no means entirely what he

  KEYNES, LAWRENCE AND CAMBRIDGE 259

  offered us. He had one foot on the threshold of the new heaven, but the other foot in Sidgwick and the Benthamite calculus and the general rules of correct behaviour. We accepted Moore's religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals.

  ... we were amongst the first of our generation, perhaps alone amongst our generation, to escape from the Benthamite tradition. In practice, of course,... the outside world was not forgotten or forsworn.

  Moreover, it was this escape from Bentham, joined with the unsurpassable individualism of our philosophy, which has served to protect the whole lot of us from the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism known as Marxism .. . But we ourselves have remained .. . altogether immune from the virus, as safe in the citadel of our ultimate faith as the Pope of Rome in his.

  These extracts illustrate how seriously Keynes takes the 'civilization* that must, he is sure, have impressed the 'ignorantjealous, irritable' Lawrence. The 'unsurpassable individualism of our philosophy'—call the ethos evoked in the Memoir that, while granting that the 'philosophy' had weaknesses, and it becomes possible for Keynes to conclude that 'this religion of ours was a very good one to grow up under'. And it becomes possible for him to suggest that the Club-members would have been more subject to the infection of Marxism if they had been at all seriously affected by the spirit of Sidgwick. But what Lawrence heard was the levity of so many petty egos, each primed with conscious clevernesses and hardened in self-approval:

  they talk endlessly, but endlessly—and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard little shell of his own and out of this they talk words. There is never for one second any outgoing of feeling and no reverence, not a crumb or grain of reverence: I cannot stand it.

  The kind of triviality that Lawrence describes here is indeed a worse thing than Keynes was able to conceive it. And the significant fact that emerges unmistakably from the Memoir is that he couldn't really grasp the intention of the criticism he was considering. It is a fact that would seem substantially to confirm Lawrence.

  If this judgment seems too severe, let it be remembered that the 'civilization' celebrated by Keynes produced Lytton Strachey, and that the literary world dominated by that 'civilization' made

  Lytton Strachey a living Master and a prevailing influence. And if I should seem to be making too much here of facts belonging to the history of taste and literary fashion, I suggest a pondering of these comments which I take from a review by Sir Charles Webster (he is dealing at the moment with the other of the two memoirs in Keynes's book):

  Keynes let me read it in 1943, and its facts were then checked againsr the documents which record—in very different prose—the public incidents which it relates. They were accurate enough, as I told him at the time. But the details were of course selected and distorted to suit his purpose.

  These characterizations are of course caricatures. Keynes put down what suited his purpose at the moment. In this ruthless sacrifice of truth to literary purpose he was obviously much influenced by Lytton Strachey, whose popular boob depended on little else. The political caricatures of the Economic Consequences did as much harm as the economic insight did good.

  Keynes was a great representative Cambridge man of his rime, Cambridge produced him, as it produced die 'civilization' with which he associated himself and which exercised so strong a sway over the metropolitan centres of taste and fashion. Can we imagine Sidgwick or Leslie Stephen or Maitland being influenced by, or interested in, the equivalent of Lytton Strachey ? By what steps, and by the operation of what causes, did so great a change come over Cambridge in so comparatively short a time ? These are the questions that we find ourselves once more asking as we put down Keynes's little book. The inquiry into which the second would lead, if seriously pursued, would tell us about a great deal more than Cambridge. That is a reason for thinking it very much worth undertaking.

  E. M. FORSTER

  THE problem with wliich E. M. Forster immediately confronts criticism is that of the oddly limited and uncertain quality of his distinction—his real and very fine distinction. It is a problem that Miss Macaulay, in The Writings of E. M. Forster, doesn't raise. In fact, she doesn't offer a critique; her book is rather a guide, simply and chattily descriptive, to the not very large corpus of Mr Forster's work. Nor does she provide the biographical information that, however impertinently in one sense of the adverb, we should like to have, and that we might have been led by the publisher's imprint to hope for, however faintly. We should like to have it because it would, there is good reason for supposing, be very pertinent to die problem facing the critic. Still we do, after all, without extra-critical pryings or impartings, know quite a lot about the particular milieu and the phase of English culture with which Mr Forster's work is associated; enough, perhaps, to discuss with some profit the extent to which, highly individual as it is, it is also, in its virtues and its limitations, representative.

  The inequality in the early novels—the contrast between maturity and immaturity, the fine and the crude—is extreme; so extreme that a simple formula proposes itself. In his comedy, one might carelessly say, he shows himself the born novelist; but he aims also at making a poetic communication about life, and here he is, by contrast, almost unbelievably crude and weak. Yet, though his strength in these novels, it is true, comes out in an art that suggests comparisons with Jane Austen, while it is in the element, the intention, relating them most obviously to The Celestial Omnibus that he incurs disaster, the formula is too simple. For one thing, to lump the four pre-war novels together is clumsy; a distinction has to be made. There is no disastrous weakness in die first of them, Where Angels fear to tread, or in A Room with a View (which, in order of publication, comes third). And the distinction here isn't one of'comedy' as against 'poetry' or 'comedy-cum-poetry'. For though the art of the 'born novelist' i*

  has, in these two novels, a characteristic spinsterly touch, that novelist is at the same time very perceptibly the author of The Celestial Omnibus, die tales in which suggest, in ^ their poetic ambition—they may fairly be said to specialize in 'poetry'—no one less than Jane Austen. Italy, in those novels, represents the same bent of interest as Pan and die other symbols do in the tales, and it is a bent that plays an essential part in the novelist's peculiar distinction. Pre-eminendy a novelist of civilized personal relations, he has at the same time a radical dissatisfaction with civilization—with the finest civilization of personal intercourse that he knows; a radical dissatisfaction that prompts references to D. H. Lawrence rather than to Jane Austen.

  In his treatment of personal relations the bent manifests itself in the manner and accent of his preoccupation with sincerity—a term that takes on, indeed, a different value from that which it w
ould have if we used it in discussing Jane Austen. His preoccupation with emotional vitality, with the problem of living truly and freshly from a centre, leads him, at any rate in intention, outside the limits of consciousness that his comedy, in so far as we can separate it off, might seem to involve—the limits, roughly, that it is Jane Austen's distinction to have kept. The intention is most obvious in his way of bringing in, in association, love and sudden death; as, for instance, in chapter IV of A Room with a View (see pp. 54-58). It is still more strikingly manifested in Where Angels fear to tread. There Italy figures much more substantially and disturbingly as the critical challenge to the * civilization' of Mr Forster's cultivated English people, and what may be called for the moment the Lawrencian bent is more pronounced. There is the scene (c. VIE) in which passionate paternal love, a kind of elemental hunger for continuance, is enacted in the devotion of the caddish and mercenary Italian husband to the baby; and the baby it is that, in dais book, suffers the violent death. There follows the episode in which the Italian tortures Philip Herriton by wrenching his broken arm. Yet none of Mr Forster's books is more notable for his characteristic comedy, with its light, sedate and rather spinsterly poise. And there is, nevertheless, no discrepancy or clash of modes or tones: Where Angels fear to tread is decidedly a success. It seems to me the most successful of the pre-war novels.

  A Room with a View is far from being a failure, but, though the themes here might seem to be much less dangerous, there are certain weaknesses to be noted. There is, as Miss Macaulay points out, a curious spinsterish inadequacy in the immediate presentation of love (in Where Angels fear to tread, significantly, serious love between the sexes doesn't come in, at any rate immediately). And old Mr Emerson, though not a disaster, does lead one to question the substantiality of the wisdom that he seems intended to represent. Nevertheless A Room with a View is a charming and very original book—extremely original and personal. Yet decidedly it provokes a comparison with Meredith, for to The Egoist it obviously owes its inspiration. The Egoist tries only to do something simple (as we are bound to feel if we think of The Portrait oj a Lady), but, apart from faults of over-writing, over-thronging and prolixity, The Egoist is entirely successful. The Lucy-Cecil Vyse^George Emerson trio who replace and imitate Clara Middleton, Sir Willoughby and Vernon Whitford are quite perfunctorily handled and but feebly animated—they are not realized, their emotions are stated but not convincingly conveyed, and the borrowed theme, losing its substance and force, loses also its symbolic strength. Being no longer a parable (though the fashionable term 'myth' could be for once justifiably invoked for The Egoist] the Forster version achieves the status only of minor comedy; it is essentially trivial. And if we were unkind enough to bring out the story Other Kingdom from The Celestial Omnibus volume for similar comparison with its source, which is again The Egoist, we should have to make an even more saddening report in which the charge of'whimsy' would appear.

  The reference above to D. H. Lawrence was, of course, an overemphasis, but as a way of calling attention to Mr Forster's peculiar distinction among Edwardian novelists it can perhaps be justified. The critic who deals so damagingly with Meredith in Aspects of the Novel is potentially there in the genuineness of the element in Mr Forster's early novels that sets them apart by themselves in the period of Arnold Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy. But having credited him with that distinction, one has to admit that in comparison with the major contemporary practitioners he appears very differently. Even leaving Conrad out as not inviting comparison, there are the two to whom he owes so much—Henry James and

  Meredith. His relation to Meredith we have discussed. And where the other is in question, Forster's art has to be recognized as only too unmistakably minor. Take even the slightest of James's stories which is fairly comparable: The Marriages is, we might say, at first glance entirely a 'Forster' story, with just such characters, plot and setting as Forster chooses. Then we recognize, in its complex ironic pattern and its really startling psychological insight, the art of a master whose depiction of human behaviour is not marginal and whose knowledge of passion is profound.

  But Mr Forster's 'poetic' intention is genuine and radical, even if in expression it may manifest itself as a surprising immaturity; and actually, in Where Angels fear to tread and A Room with a View, it for the most part commands a touch that is hardly to be distinguished from that of the comedy. Or perhaps it would have been better to say *is commanded by'; for when, coming to the other two pre-war novels, The Longest Journey and Howards End, we ask how it is that they should be so much less successful, we notice at once how the contrast brings out the sure easy poise, in Where Angels fear to tread and A Room with a View, of the artist's— the 'born novelist's'—control. The art of the comedy is a distancing art, and it is a tribute to the novelist's skill that we should have no disturbing sense of a change in mode and convention when we pass to effects quite other than those of comedy. That is, the whole action is framed and distanced. Lilia, Gino's silly tragic victim in Where Angels fear to tread, Philip Herriton, commissioned to retrieve the baby, Miss Abbott and die rest, are all simplified figures, seen from the outside; it is only in a very qualified way that they engage us (though they engage enough for a measure of poignancy). The complexity of the situation we see as such: though we are interested and sympathetic, we are hardly worried. The critical scenes and episodes towards the end are, of course, not undisturbing; yet we are not immersed in them—the detachment, though modified, still holds. In this effect the Italian setting, exotic and quaint—its people seen as another kind from us, has its part; it lends itself beautifully to the reconciliation of the 'comedy' with the 'poetry' and of tragic intensity with detachment.

  The other two novels are much less the artist's: in them the imposing or seeking of any such conditions of a detached and

  happily poised art has been precluded by the author's essential interest. The Longest Journey, perhaps one may without impertinence observe, has plainly a good deal of the autobiographical about it, and it offers, in the presentment of its themes, a fulness and intimacy of realization. True, we find there too the characteristic comedy (notably in all that concerns Mr Herbert Pembroke), but we can no longer say the success of this carries with it a general success. In fact, there are discrepancies, disharmonies and disturbing shifts that go a long way towards justifying the formula thrown out and withdrawn in the second paragraph of this note. The poised success of the comedy in its own mode serves to emphasize the immaturity, the unsureness and sometimes the crudity of the other elements, with which it wouldn't have been easily congruent even if they had in themselves justified the intention they represent.

  Passionate love and, close upon it, sudden death, come early in this book:

  He had forgotten his sandwiches, and went back to get them. Gerald and Agnes were locked in each other's arms. He only looked for a moment, but the sight burnt into his brain. The man's grip was the stronger. He had drawn the woman on to his knee, was pressing her, with all his strength, against him. Already her hands slipped off him, and she whispered, 'Don't—you—hurt—.' Her face had no expression. It stared at the intruder and never saw him. Then her lover kissed it, and immediately it shone with mysterious beauty, like some star. (p. 51.)

  Gerald is a brutal and caddish minor-Public-School Apollo and Agnes a suburban snob, but this glimpse is for Rickie the hero, a revelation:

  He thought, *Do such things actually happen 2' and he seemed to be looking down coloured valleys. Brighter they glowed, till gods of pure flame were born in them, and then he was looking at pinnacles of virgin snow. While Mr Pembroke talked, die riot of fair images increased. They invaded his being and lit lamps at unsuspected shrines. Their orchestra commenced in that suburban house, where he had to stand aside for the maid to carry in the luncheon. Music flowed past him like a river. He stood at the springs of creation and heard the primeval monotony. Then an obscure instrument gave out a little phrase. The river continued unheeding. The phrase
was repeated, and a listener

  might know it was a fragment of the Tune of tunes ... In full unison was love bora, flame of the flame, flushing the dark river beneath him and the virgin snows above. His wings were infinite, his youth eternal. ..

  Then, a dozen pages later (p. 62):

  Gerald died that afternoon. He was broken up in the football match. Rickie and Mr Pembroke were on the ground when the accident took place.

  It is a key-experience for Rickie. Its significance is made explicit— perhaps rather too explicit. This memory of pure uncalculating passion as a kind of ultimate, invested by death with an awful finality and something like a religious sanction, becomes for Rickie a criterion or touch for the real, a kind of test for radical sincerity, in his questing among the automatisms, acquiescences, blurs, and blunted indifferences of everyday living:

  He has no knowledge of the world... He believes in women because he has loved his mother. And his friends are as young and ignorant as himself. They are full of the wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup—let us call it the teacup—of experience, which has made men of Mr Pembroke's type what they are. Oh, that teacup! (p. 74.)

  The theme of The Longest Journey is Rickie's struggle to live by the truth, of the wine while being immersed in knowledge of the world.

  Rickie writes stories like Mr Forster's in The Celestial Omnibus. There is a note of ironic indulgence in the references to them: Rickie is very young. The direct and serious expression that the novelist offers us of the bent represented by such stories is in terms of a character, Stephen Wonham,

  a man dowered with coarse kindliness and rustic strength, a kind of cynical ploughboy. (p. 217.)

  He is the illegitimate child (comes the shattering revelation) of Rickie's mother and a young farmer, of whom we are told

  people sometimes took him for a gentleman until they saw his hands.