Leavis The Common Pursuit

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28122-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

F. R. Leavis was the chief editor of Scrutiny, which between 1932 and 1953 had some claim on being the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world. The Common Pursuit is a selection of Leavis's essays from Scrutiny, including his robust defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot, his deeply-felt engagement with Shakespeare, and his severe strictures on attempts to import sociology and political activism into the study of literature. The title of the book comes from a passage in Eliot's 'The Function of Criticism', in which the poet argues that the critic must engage in 'the common pursuit of true judgment'. For Leavis, this meant a strenuous insistence on discriminatory criticism - clear statements about what is good and morally mature and admirable, and equally clear condemnation of what is trivial. The Common Pursuit, with its controversial judgments of Bunyan and Auden, Swift and Forster, remains as challenging now as it did in 1952, and it is easy to see why Leavis - who was never offered a professorship by Cambridge University - held such sway over the study of English literature in his time.

F.R. Leavis was born in 1895 in Cambridge, where he would live and teach for most of the rest of his life. He volunteered as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, and was badly gassed on the Western Front. Appointed Director of Studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1930, he remained there for the next thirty years, often at odds with the University establishment. In 1932 he and his wife Queenie Roth founded the hugely influential journal Scrutiny, which ran until 1953. He was one of the most important figures in the development of modern literary criticism, and in the elevation of English as a serious academic subject. He died in 1978.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leavis, F. R.

Leseproben

IN DEFENCE OF MILTON

TODAY, when the quality of the literary studies encouraged or permitted at the academic places of education has an obviously important bearing on the prospects of literary culture (that is, of humane culture generally), it is correspondingly important, and certainly not less important than it has been in less desperate times, to defend literature – to defend the classics and the literary tradition against the academic mind. The professional student of letters, the ‘authority’ – authority also, it must be remembered, in matters of curricula, instruction and examination at the high seats of learning – is rarely qualified in relation to his subject with one very relevant kind of authority (I had almost said the indispensable kind, but things are as they are), a kind that is not constituted, and need not be asserted or claimed: he is rarely a good first-hand critic – or even a good second-hand one. This is a truth we are often reminded of by the evident limitations of justly respected scholars: a man may do work that exacts the gratitude of us all as readers of poetry who yet betrays a lack of any developed sensibility, any fineness of perception and judgement.

So when Dr Tillyard1 adduces Sir Herbert Grierson (in a large and varied company of supporters – Dr Tillyard seems to think that numbers strengthen his case and recruits even from the Sunday newspaper) as pronouncing with peculiar authority on the critical questions concerning Milton’s verse and its influence, one can only reply that the genuine respect in which one holds the editor of Donne doesn’t confer on him authority of that kind:

Professor Grierson has one peculiar advantage in writing on Milton. Having edited and praised Donne he cannot be suspected of giving untested allegiance to the old poetic hierarchy of the seventeenth century in which the Metaphysicals were accorded an inferior place. It is this that gives a peculiar force to his defence of Milton against modern defamation. The defence is admirable in itself: coming from the editor of Donne it may penetrate ears which had otherwise been quite sealed up against it.

I am obliged to comment that on Donne himself Professor Grierson speaks only with a limited kind of authority, the limitations being apparent in (to take a recent piece of evidence) this sentence from the Preface to the Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse:

Palgrave’s chief and best guide was Tennyson, on whose fine ear the metres of the ‘metaphysicals’ must have grated as did those of his friend Browning; and a distinguished poet of our own day has in a recent lecture indicated clearly that his judgement is more in agreement with that of Tennyson than with that of the admirers of Donne.

If anyone should think that this remark, with the reference to A. E. Housman, is susceptible of something less disqualifying than the obvious interpretation I refer him to the Introduction (so valuable in various ways) to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, and especially to the passage (see p. xxxiii) in which Professor Grierson agrees with Professor Gregory Smith that ‘the direct indebtedness of the courtly poets to Ben Jonson is probably … small.’

I do not recall these things wantonly, but in order to make, with all due respect to Professor Grierson, a necessary point. At the worst, perhaps, I shall be taken as returning the note of impatience and asperity perceptible in his comments on my own criticism. What is there to say, then, except that the scholar who commits himself to such pronouncements, distinguished authority on seventeenth-century matters as he certainly is, has no claim to be treated as a critical authority on the verse of the period – of any verse?

But I must add at once that Professor Grierson, who has all the scholarly virtues, is incapable of original critical extravagance or of any of the kinds of critical originality for which Dr Tillyard’s book is remarkable, and he must, I imagine, if he has read the book, have been at least as surprised as myself when he came to p. 8 of it. We read there, after the appropriate quotation:

That is the opening of L’Allegro, and it is one of the most puzzling passages in the whole of Milton; what possessed him that he should write such bombast? By what strange anticipation did he fall into the manner of the worst kind of eighteenth-century ode? If Milton meant to be noble, he failed dreadfully. If, however, he knew what he was doing, he can only have meant to be funny. And if he meant to be funny, to what end? There is nothing in the rest of the poem that suggests humour – at least of the burlesque sort.

I must permit myself to comment, in defence of Milton, that these remarks, it seems to me, can only have the effect of discrediting the writer’s very large critical pretensions. Did anyone ever before find that passage puzzling? I do not myself rank L’Allegro (or Il Penseroso) very high among Milton’s works, but it never occurred to me to have doubts about his intention or touch in that opening paragraph, which seems to me, in relation to the change that follows, obviously successful. As for the ‘strange anticipation’ that Dr Tillyard descries, I can only say that the descrial makes the modesty that he expresses elsewhere about his qualifications to discuss eighteenth-century verse appear well-judged.

But it is no mere academic deficiency, no mere lack of ability to perceive, that can explain so fantastic an exhibition. The explanation comes when Dr Tillyard imparts his discovery that the themes of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso were derived from one of Milton’s Latin Prolusions. If there had been no such discovery of a ‘solution’ would there have been any problem to solve? The answer is plain. The discoverer, that is, convicts himself of something worse than a deficiency, he exhibits a characteristic that has to be defined in terms of opposition to disinterestedness – a characteristic that we cannot imagine as impairing the scholarship of Professor Grierson, whom (as I have intimated) I take as representing the academic virtues.

The accumulation of scholarship – ‘work on’ – about and around the great things of literature is in any case, for all the measure one may recognize of the relevant and illuminating, a matter for misgiving. Dr Tillyard regrets, in his Preface, that he has had ‘no room to refer to more than a fraction of the recent work on Milton’ that has interested him. The problem, as a university teacher should be especially aware, is to ensure that the libraries and reading-lists of such work shall not, in effect, be the reverse of an aid and an encouragement to humane education and the vitalizing currency of the classics. In these conditions anything approaching the spirit that sets out to establish the indispensability of fresh impedimenta and seeks fresh impedimenta with a view to establishing, if possible, their indispensability, is peculiarly to be deplored. Dr Tillyard’s interest in his projects shows, it seems to me, neither the critic’s nor the scholar’s disinterestedness.

A concomitant effect apparent in the book is that of his never really knowing what, in the way of discussible theme, he is offering to do. A major explicit undertaking is to unsettle the traditional notion of Milton as a lonely genius, maintaining in his age an aloof and majestic self-sufficiency. In so far as Dr Tillyard is likely to be influential (and that he is an accepted authority is a reason for discussing him) I think this aim deplorable. He supposes himself to be defending Milton, but it seems to me an odd defence that offers to rob the English tradition – for such is explicitly Dr Tillyard’s aim – of that unique heroic figure. In fact, I must here come to Milton’s defence (and tradition’s) myself, and assert that Dr Tillyard nowhere produces anything that can be called a reason. He merely produces a Milton of his own – very much his own – and with a truly notable assurance commends him to us as the up-to-date substitute for the great Milton. For Dr Tillyard’s Milton has no greatness, and is very much preoccupied with being up to date:

When Dr Leavis, after an excellent analysis of a passage in Comus proceeds to pillory the style of Paradise Lost as exhibiting a shocking decline in vitality and flexibility, he takes no account of what the changing ideas of the age demanded. Being likewise so insistent that poets should be ‘aware of the contemporary situation’, is he altogether just? If the changes Milton made in his style correspond to the general trend, ought he to be grudged the virtue of this ‘awareness’? (p. 137.)

I should have been better pleased if Dr Tillyard had pointed out the blunder in my analysis. As for my alleged insistence that poets should be ‘aware of the contemporary situation,’ I assure him that, if (and the suggestion surprises me) I have indeed used the phrase, it was certainly without any suspicion of what it would look like in the context given it by him, and that I will make a point of leaving it alone for the future. To attempt to suggest what this virtue of ‘awareness’ is as Dr Tillyard conceives it and attributes it to Milton is to invite the charge of...