The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  not very important instance, but it is representative, and to say that is to pass a radical criticism.

  Moreover, a general doubt arises regarding that personal distinction of style—that distinction which might seem to give Mr

  J O O

  Forster an advantage over, say, Mr L. H. Myers (to take another novelist who offers some obvious points of comparison). The doubt expresses itself in an emphasis on the * personal'.

  Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life.

  Sir Gilbert, though not an enlightened man, held enlightened opinions.

  Rorniy's religion was of the sterilized Public School brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics.

  Incurably inaccurate, he already thought that this was what had occurred. He was inaccurate because he was sensitive. He did not like to remember Miss Quested's remark about polygamy, because it was unworthy of a guest, so he put it away from his mind, and with it the knowledge that he had bolted into a cave to get away from her. He was inaccurate because he desired to honour her, and—facts being entangled —he had to arrange them in her vicinity, as one tidies the ground after extracting a weeo.

  What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite What dwelt in the first of the caves ? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity—the undying worm itself.

  A larger assemblage of quotations (there would be no difficulty but that of space in going on indefinitely) would make the point fairly conclusively: Mr Forster's style is personal in the sense that it keeps us very much aware of the personality of the writer, so that even where actions, events and the experiences of characters are supposed to be speaking for themselves the turn of phrase and tone of voice bring the presenter and commentator into the foreground. Mr Forster's felicities and his charm, then, involve limitations. Even where he is not betrayed into lapses of the kind illustrated above, his habit doesn't favour the impersonality, the presentment of themes and experiences as things standing there in themselves, that would be necessary for convincing success at the level of his highest intention.

  The comparative reference to Mr L. H. Myers thrown out above suggests a return to the question of Mr Forster's representative significance. When one has recognized the interest and value his work has as representing liberal culture in the early years of the twentieth century, there is perhaps a temptation to see the weaknesses too simply as representative. That that culture has of its very nature grave weaknesses Mr Forster's work itself constitutes an explicit recognition. But it seems worth while insisting at this point on the measure in which Mr Forster's weaknesses are personal ones, qualifying the gifts that have earned him (I believe) a lasting place in English literature. He seems then, for one so perceptive and sensitive, extraordinarily lacking in force, or robustness, of intelligence; it is, perhaps, a general lack of vitality. The deficiencies of his novels must be correlated with the weakness so apparent in his critical and journalistic writings— Aspects of the Novel, Abinger Harvest —the weakness that makes them representative in so disconcerting a way. They are disconcerting because they exhibit a lively critical mind accepting, it seems, uncritically the very inferior social-intellectual milieu in which it has developed. Mr Forster, we know, has been associated with Bloomsbury—the Bloomsbury which (to confine ourselves to one name) produced Lytton Strachey and took him for a great writer. And these writings of Mr Forster's are, in their amiable way, Bloomsbury. They are Bloomsbury in the valuations they accept (in spite of the showings of real critical perception), in the assumptions they innocently express, and in prevailing ethos.

  It might, of course, be said that it is just die weakness of liberal culture—'bourgeois', die Marxist would say—that is manifested by Bloomsbury (which certainly had claims to some kind of representative status). But there seems no need to deal directly with such a proposition here, or to discuss at any length what significance shall be given to the terms * liberal' and 'culture'. The necessary point is made by insisting that the weaknesses of Mr Forster's work and of Bloomsbury are placed as such by standards implicit in what is best in that work. That those standards are not complete in themselves or securely based or sufficiently guaranteed by contemporary civilization there is no need to dispute: the recognition has been an essential part of the creative impulse in Mr Forster. But that, in the exploration of the radical problems, more

  power than he commands may be shown by a creative writer who may equally be said to represent liberal culture appears well enough in The Root and the Flower —at least, I throw out this judgment as pretty obviously acceptable. And I cannot see how we can dispense with what they both stand for. They represent, the spokesmen of the finer consciousness of our time, the humane tradition as it emerges from a period of'bourgeois* security, divorced from dogma and left by social change, the breakdown of traditional forms and the loss of sanctions embarrassingly 'in the air'; no longer serenely confident or self-sufficient, but conscious of being not less than before the custodian of something essential. In these representatives it is far from the complacency of * freedom of thought', but they stand, nevertheless, for the free play of critical intelligence as a sine qua non of any hope for a human future. And it seems to me plain that this tradition really is, for all its weakness, the indispensable transmitter of something that humanity cannot afford to lose.

  These rather commonplace observations seemed worth making because of the current fashion of using 'liberal' largely and loosely as a term of derogation: too much is too lightly dismissed with it. To enforce this remark it seems to me enough to point to A Passage to India —and it will be an occasion for ensuring that I shall not, in effect, have done Mr Forster a major critical injustice. For I have been assuming, tacitly, a general agreement that A Passage to India, all criticisms made, is a classic: not only a most significant document of our age, but a truly memorable work of literature. And that there is point in calling it a classic of the liberal spirit will, I suppose, be granted fairly readily, for the appropriateness of the adjective is obvious. In its touch upon racial and cultural problems, its treatment of personal relations, and in prevailing ethos die book is an expression, undeniably, of the liberal tradition; it has, as such, its fineness, its strength and its im-pressiveness; and it makes the achievement, the humane, decent and rational—the 'civilized'—habit, of that tradition appear the invaluable thing it is.

  On this note I should like to make my parting salute. Mr Forster's is a name that, in these days, we should peculiarly honour.

  APPROACHES TO T. S. ELIOT

  HERE, 1 edited by a Fellow of Trinity, and contributed to by members of the Cambridge English Faculty and other respectable academics, is a volume of essays on T. S. Eliot, all treating him as a classic and an accepted glory of out language. As one contributor, Miss Bradbrook, indicates, such a thing was, not so very long ago, hardly conceivable; it means that a revolutionary change has been brought about. 'How was it done ?' Miss Brad-brook doesn't answer her question; but, while she slights one main part of the answer, her essay seems to me to illustrate the other. Referring back to die Cambridge of the nineteen-twentics, she surmises (exemplifying a tone and an attitude characteristic of her essay—I find them, I had better say outright, very distasteful): * -.. Mr Eliot may be relieved that the incense no longer fumes upon the local altars with quite its old intensity . . .* I can only comment that a pronounced fume, strongly suggesting incense, rises from Miss Bradbrook's own essay, and that it is of such a quality as to give us half the answer to her question. (I find her style, suggesting the influence of Miss Dorothy L. Sayers rather than Mr Eliot, corroborative.)

  For it is 'certain that a marked change in Mr Eliot's standing followed the appearance of For Lancelot Andrewes and Ask* Wednesday, and that if so difficult and disturbing a poet is so generally accepted as an established institution it is for the kind of rea
son that makes a great many people (including, one gathers, Miss Bradbrook—see a footnote to p. 21) suppose that The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral inaugurated a revival of religious poetic drama. The part played by Mr Eliot's association with religious orthodoxy is to be read plainly in at least three of the eight essays presented by Dr Rajan.

  Yet Mr Eliot would not have been there for Anglo-Catholic

  intellectuals as a triumphantly acclaimable major poet, the great

  living master, nor would the critical apparatus for confidently

  appraising and elucidating him as such, if there had not been, in

  theyears referred to by Miss Bradbrook, admirers capable of something more critical than burning incense. And, I must add, capable of something in the nature of courage that isn't necessary to-day— an aspect of that forgotten situation not done justice to by Miss Bradbrook, who says:

  When The Sacred Wood and Homage to John Dryden appeared Mr Eliot was still the subject of frightened abuse in the weeklies, and also in some academic circles. But his views percolated downwards, and are now almost common form. How was it done ?

  That 'still' must appear very odd to anyone who recalls the chronology of Mr Eliot's ceuvre. The Sacred Wood came out in 1920 and Homage to John Dryden in 1924 (when in most academic circles Mr Eliot's name would hardly have met with recognition). ' Still', I must testify, havingthe strongest of grounds for confident insistence, still in 1930 (and later), and in the academic circles that now receive Dr Rajan's enterprise without a flutter, Mr Eliot's mere name, however modestly mentioned, was as a red rag to a bull. I could tell Miss Bradbrook, privately, some piquant and true anecdotes in illustration. I will confine myself here to two reminiscences of sufficiently public fact. When in 1929 an innocent young editor printed an article of mine on Mr Eliot's criticism in The Cambridge Review (a reply to a contemptuous dismissal of him by a Cambridge 'English' don in Mr Desmond MacCarthy's Life and Letters) he very soon had cause to realize that he had committed a scandalous impropriety, and I myself was left in no doubt as to the unforgivableness of my offence. And when, in 1932, a book of mine came out that made a study of Mr Eliot die centre of an attempt to define the distinctive aspects of significant contemporary poetry, so much worse than imprudent was it found to be that the advanced 'English' intellectual of the day declined (or so the gloating whisper ran) to have anything to do with it, and The Cambridge Review could find no reviewer for it in Cambridge. I remember, too, with some amusement, the embarrassed notes I received from correct friends who felt that some form of congratulation on the appearance of a book had to be gone through, but knew also that the offence was rank, disastrous and unpardonable. Yet the matter of that offensive book is seen, in Dr Rajan's symposium, to be now 'common form'. How was it done ?

  I have thought this note on the development of a literary-critical orthodoxy worth making, not only because history will go on repeating itself and, though it undoubtedly in any case will, there is always some point in insisting on the moral as presented by the nearest striking instance, but because such an orthodoxy naturally tends to discourage true respect for the genius it offers to exalt—to substitute, that is, deference. True respect is inseparable from the concern to see the object as in itself it really is, to insist on the necessary discriminations, and so to make the essential achievement, with the special life and virtue it embodies, effective as influence* Of this respect Miss Bradbrook seems to me to fail.

  She is not, among Dr Rajan's contributors, alone in that. I read her first because so much, largely repetitive, had already been written about Mr Eliot's poetry, and the opportunity, I told myself, still lay open for a first-hand attempt to appraise the criticism. My disappointment is the heavier because such an appraisal seems to me very much to be desired. It would involve some firm disoiminating and delimiting, and until these are performed, the ambiguity that hangs about the nature and tendency of Mr Eliot's influence must impede the recognition of our debt. It is a debt that I recognize for myself as immense. By some accident (it must have been—I had not come on Mr Eliot's name before) I bought The Sacred Wood just after it came out, in 1920. For the next few years I read it through several times a year, pencil in hand. I got from it, of course, orientations, particular illuminations, and critical ideas of general instrumental value. But if I had to characterize the nature of the debt briefly I should say that it was a matter of having had incisively demonstrated, for pattern and incitement, what the disinterested and effective application of intelligence to literature looks like, what is the nature of purity of interest, and what is meant by the principle (as Mr Eliot himself states it) that * when you judge poetry it is as poetry you must judge it, and not as another dtung'.

  There are few pieces of his criticism after For Lancelot Andrewes to which one would send the student of literature for such demonstration. 'When he stabilized his own style as a poet, some informing power departed from his critical writing. If for example the essay on In Memoriam be compared with that on Massinger, or

  the introduction to the volume of Kipling's verse with the essay on Dryden, it will be seen that Mr Eliot has withdrawn from his subjects: he is no longer so closely engaged . ..' Ah, if that were all. It seems to me, in fact, that Miss Bradbrook's handling of the change isn't free from disingenuousness:

  Mr Eliot has apologized for the 'pontifical solemnity' of some of his early writings. Nervous stiffness and defensive irony were inevitable in an age when 'a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs' could be imputed to him for righteousness. The later criticism exhibits rather a haughty humility—'The poem Gethsemane (by Kipling) which I do not think I understand . ..'; the implication being, *I expect you think it's simple, but that only shows how superficial your reading is'.

  To find the difference between the earlier and the later criticism in the disappearance or diminution of nervousness—that is to me an extremely odd achievement. Mr Eliot's best criticism is remarkable for its directness, its concentrated purity of interest, its intense and rigorous concern to convey the essential perception and the bearing of this as realized by the critic. It exhibits the reverse of hesitation and diffidence; its qualities are intimately related to courage. I don't find these qualities in the Kipling introduction referred to by Miss Bradbrook. On the contrary, in that too characteristic specimen of the later writing the critic seems to me to have misapplied his dangerous gift of subtle statement to the development of a manner (it is surprisingly suggestive in places of G. K. Chesterton) that gainsays the very purpose of criticism, and to have done so because of a radical uncertainty about his intention and its validity. And is what we have here (from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) 'haughty humility' ?—

  Mr Housxiian has given us an account of his own experience in writing poetry which is important evidence. Observation leads me to believe that different poets may compose in very different ways; my experience (for what it is worth) leads me to believe that Mr Housman is recounting the authentic process of a real poet. *I have seldom', he says, 'written poetry unless I was rather out of health'. I believe that I understand that sentence. If I do, it is a guarantee—if any guarantee of that nature is wanted—of the quality of Mr Housman's poetry.

  It seems to me also that in Mr Eliot's critical writing from For Lancelot Andrewes onwards a limitation that is (on a pondered

  appraisal) to be predicated of his earlier work asserts itself as a major weakness—a weakness of a kind that might seem to be disqualifying where claims to status as a great critic are in question. That the author of Selected Essays is (if not, where shall we find one ?) a great critic I don't for a moment doubt. But if he is, it is in spite of lacking a qualification that, sketching the 'idea', one would have postulated as perhaps the prime essential in a great critic. It is a qualification possessed pre-eminently by D. H. Lawrence, though he, clearly, is not to be accounted anything like as important in literary criticism as T. S. Eliot: a sure rightness in what, if one holds any serious view
of the relation between literature and life, must appear to be the most radical and important kind of judgment.

  As Miss Bradbrook intimates, Mr Eliot's best criticism was related in the closest of ways to his own problems as a poet—a practitioner who has rejected current conventions and modes as inadequate to his needs and so is committed to a labour of thorough-going technical innovation. Questions of technique— versification, convention, relation of diction to the spoken language, and so on—cannot be isolated from considerations of fundamental purpose, essential ethos, and quality of life. That is, one can hardly say where technical questions turn into questions that one wouldn't ordinarily call technical. 'The important critic is he who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear on the solution of those problems'. The attention that Mr Eliot's highly selective kind of interest (the definition just quoted is his own) directs upon Donne, Marvell, Dryden, Jonson, Marlowe, and the others, entails value-judgments. But it doesn't commit him to attempting any comprehensive evaluation or definitive placing. So that, by way of countering one's protests that he over-rates Dryden, one can adduce the very special interest with which he approaches and the strictly limiting end he has in view—one can adduce these, I must add, while deploring both the over-valuation of Dryden that he has certainly helped to establish as a fashion, and the attendant slighting of the incomparably greater Pope (without an appreciation of whom there can't be any but the most incomplete perception of Mr Eliot's seventeenth century—the seventeenth century of Jonson, Donne and Marvell).

  But the major instance of the limiting approach, the instance where the limitation is most clearly seen to entail unfortunate consequences, is what we have in Mr Eliot's treatment of Jacobean drama. No one, I think, admires more than I do his contribution in that field, or can be more grateful for it. To approach it one needs to have started reading the Jacobeans when the Lamb-Swinburne tradition was unchallenged, and no better critical equipment for dealing with poetic drama was to hand than that which has its classical exponent in Bradley. No doubt, had one been put on to them, one might have found a tip or two, here and there, in scholarly sources. But only a fine and powerful critical intelligence, informed with the insight got in dealing with its own creative problems, could have brought effective aid, and it was Mr Eliot who brought it. He supplied the equipment of ideas about drama, the enlightenment about convention and verse, that made all the difference. What he did not, however, do, was to attempt any radical revaluation of the Jacobeans. The very marked tendency of his work, in fact (in spite of his admirable asides on Beaumont and Fletcher), has been to endorse the traditional valuations. (It seems to me highly significant that he has gone on reprinting that very unsatisfactory essay on Middleton.) What he hasn't done, no one else has had the courage or the perception to do. So that, though he insisted on the need to distinguish conventions from faults (see 'Four Elizabethan Dramatists'), scholars who, stimulated by him, have undertaken to investigate the conventions have tended to repeat, in inverted form, Archer's failing: that is, to make everything convention, thus emptying the term of its force. To have acted seriously on Mr Eliot's tip, and taken proper cognizance of faults, would have been to face the need for drastic revision of some consecrated valuations.