Leavis The Great Tradition

George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28080-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.' So begins F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemical survey of English fiction, first published in 1948. Leavis makes his case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for an author's inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Hard Times as Dickens' one 'completely serious work of art'; while Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce are among those weighed in the balance and found wanting. '[Leavis] gave one a new idea of what it meant to read... the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

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

CHAPTER 1

THE GREAT TRADITION

‘… not dogmatically but deliberately …’

JOHNSON:

THE great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad – to stop for the moment at that comparatively safe point in history. Since Jane Austen, for special reasons, needs to be studied at considerable length, I confine myself in this book to the last three. Critics have found me narrow, and I have no doubt that my opening proposition, whatever I may say to explain and justify it, will be adduced in reinforcement of their strictures. It passes as fact (in spite of the printed evidence) that I pronounce Milton negligible, dismiss ‘the Romantics’, and hold that, since Donne, there is no poet we need bother about except Hopkins and Eliot. The view, I suppose, will be as confidently attributed to me that, except Jane Austen, George Eliot, James, and Conrad, there are no novelists in English worth reading.

The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact – that is, never to say anything. I still, however, think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary). And it seems to me that in the field of fiction some challenging discriminations are very much called for; the field is so large and offers such insidious temptations to complacent confusions of judgement and to critical indolence. It is of the field of fiction belonging to Literature that I am thinking, and I am thinking in particular of the present vogue of the Victorian age. Trollope, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Charles and Henry Kingsley, Marryat, Shorthouse1 – one after another the minor novelists of that period are being commended to our attention, written up, and publicized by broadcast, and there is a marked tendency to suggest that they not only have various kinds of interest to offer but that they are living classics. (Are not they all in the literary histories?) There are Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell, Scott, ‘the Brontës’,2 Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, and so on, all, one gathers, classical novelists.

It is necessary to insist, then, that there are important distinctions to be made, and that far from all of the names in the literary histories really belong to the realm of significant creative achievement. And as a recall to a due sense of differences it is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.3

To insist on the pre-eminent few in this way is not to be indifferent to tradition; on the contrary, it is the way towards understanding what tradition is. ‘Tradition’, of course, is a term with many forces – and often very little at all. There is a habit nowadays of suggesting that there is a tradition of ‘the English Novel’, and that all that can be said of the tradition (that being its peculiarity) is that ‘the English Novel’ can be anything you like. To distinguish the major novelists in the spirit proposed is to form a more useful idea of tradition (and to recognize that the conventionally established view of the past of English fiction needs to be drastically revised). It is in terms of the major novelists, those significant in the way suggested, that tradition, in any serious sense, has its significance.

To be important historically is not, of course, to be necessarily one of the significant few. Fielding deserves the place of importance given him in the literary histories, but he hasn’t the kind of classical distinction we are also invited to credit him with. He is important not because he leads to Mr J. B. Priestley but because he leads to Jane Austen, to appreciate whose distinction is to feel that life isn’t long enough to permit of one’s giving much time to Fielding or any to Mr Priestley.

Fielding made Jane Austen possible by opening the central tradition of English fiction. In fact, to say that the English novel began with him is as reasonable as such propositions ever are. He completed the work begun by the Tatler and the Spectator, in the pages of which we see the drama turning into the novel – that this development should occur by way of journalism being in the natural course of things. To the art of presenting character and mœurs learnt in that school (he himself, before he became a novelist, was both playwright and periodical essayist) he joined a narrative habit the nature of which is sufficiently indicated by his own phrase, ‘comic epic in prose’. That the eighteenth century, which hadn’t much lively reading to choose from, but had much leisure, should have found Tom Jones exhilarating is not surprising; nor is it that Scott, and Coleridge, should have been able to give that work superlative praise. Standards are formed in comparison, and what opportunities had they for that? But the conventional talk about the ‘perfect construction’ of Tom Jones (the late Hugh Walpole brought it out triumphantly and you may hear it in almost any course of lectures on ‘the English Novel’) is absurd. There can’t be subtlety of organization without richer matter to organize, and subtler interests, than Fielding has to offer. He is credited with range and variety and it is true that some episodes take place in the country and some in Town, some in the churchyard and some in the inn, some on the high-road and some in the bedchamber, and so on. But we haven’t to read a very large proportion of Tom Jones in order to discover the limits of the essential interests it has to offer us. Fielding’s attitudes, and his concern with human nature, are simple, and not such as to produce an effect of anything but monotony (on a mind, that is, demanding more than external action) when exhibited at the length of an ‘epic in prose’. What he can do appears to best advantage in Joseph Andrews. Jonathan Wild, with its famous irony, seems to me mere hobbledehoydom (much as one applauds the determination to explode the gangster-hero), and by Amelia Fielding has gone soft.

We all know that if we want a more inward interest it is to Richardson we must go. And there is more to be said for Johnson’s preference, and his emphatic way of expressing it at Fielding’s expense, than is generally recognized. Richardson’s strength in the analysis of emotional and moral states is in any case a matter of common acceptance; and Clarissa is a really impressive work. But it’s no use pretending that Richardson can ever be made a current classic again. The substance of interest that he too has to offer is in its own way extremely limited in range and variety, and the demand he makes on the reader’s time is in proportion – and absolutely – so immense as to be found, in general, prohibitive (though I don’t know that I wouldn’t sooner read through again Clarissa than Á la recherche du temps perdu). But we can understand well enough why his reputation and influence should have been so great throughout Europe; and his immediately relevant historical importance is plain: he too is a major fact in the background of Jane Austen.

The social gap between them was too wide, however, for his work to be usable by her directly: the more he tries to deal with ladies and gentlemen, the more immitigably vulgar he is. It was Fanny Burney who, by transposing him into educated life, made it possible for Jane Austen to absorb what he had to teach her. Here we have one of the important lines of English literary history – Richardson – Fanny Burney – Jane Austen. It is important because Jane Austen is one of the truly great writers, and herself a major fact in the background of other great writers. Not that Fanny Burney is the only other novelist who counts in her formation; she read all there was to read, and took all that was useful to her – which wasn’t only lessons.4 In fact, Jane Austen, in her indebtedness to others, provides an exceptionally illuminating study of the nature of originality, and she exemplifies beautifully the relations of ‘the individual talent’ to tradition. If the influences bearing on her hadn’t comprised something fairly to be called tradition she couldn’t have found herself and her true direction; but her relation to tradition is a creative one. She not only makes tradition for those coming after, but her achievement has for us a retroactive effect: as we look back beyond her we see in what goes before, and see because of her, potentialities and significances brought out in such a way that, for us, she creates the tradition we see leading down to her. Her work, like the work of all great creative writers, gives a meaning to the past.

Having, in examination papers and undergraduate essays, come much too often on the proposition that ‘George Eliot is the first modern novelist’, I finally tracked it down to Lord David Cecil’s Early Victorian Novelists. In so far as it is possible to...