Like certain writers of narrow, characteristic force, Leavis has set aside from the currency of language a number of words and turns of phrase for his singular purpose…. "Close, delicate wholeness"; "pressure of intelligence"; "concrete realisation"; "achieved actuality"—are phrases which carry Leavis' signature as indelibly as "high seriousness" bears that of Matthew Arnold.

The list is worth examining. It does not rely on jargon, on the shimmering technical obscurities which mar so much of American New Criticism. It is a spiky, gray, abstract parlance, heavy with exact intent. A style which tells us that Tennyson's verse "doesn't offer, characteristically, any very interesting local life for inspection," or that "Shakespeare's marvelous faculty of intense local realisation is a faculty of realising the whole locally" can be parodied with fearful ease. But what matters is to understand why Leavis "writes badly," why he insists on presenting his case in a grim suet of prose.

His refusal of elegance is the expression of a deep, underlying Puritanism. Leavis detests the kind of "fine" writing which by flash of phrase or lyric surge of argument obscures thinness of meaning or unsoundness of logic. He distrusts as spurious frivolity all that would embroider on the naked march of thought. His manner is easy to parody precisely because there lies behind it so unswerving a preoccupation with the matter in hand, so constant a refusal to be distracted by grace of touch. It has a kind of noble ugliness and points a finger of Puritan scorn at the false glitter of Pater.

But the source of Leavis' style, of that bleak, hectoring, yet ultimately hypnotizing tone, may lie even deeper. One striking fact distinguishes him from all other major critics. So far as I am aware, he has never wished or striven to be a writer—a poet, novelist, or playwright. In the criticism of Dryden, Coleridge, and Arnold, there is an immediate neighborhood of art.

In Edmund Wilson there lurks a disappointed novelist. Sainte-Beuve yielded to his critical genius with rage in heart, having railed to match the fiction and lyric verse of his Romantic peers. John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate are poets who turned to criticism either in defense or elaboration of their own view of poetry, or when the vein of invention had run dry. In most great critics (perhaps even in Johnson) there is a writer manqué.

This has two effects. It can make of criticism a minor art, an attempt to achieve, by force of style, something like the novel or drama which the critic has failed to produce successfully. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Sainte-Beuve's critical portraits, Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, have in them strong relics of poetic form. Blackmur's critical essays are often poems arrested. This can produce a grace of persuasion to which Leavis hardly comes near. But he would not wish to. For it can also entail a subtle disloyalty to the critical purpose. Where it becomes a substitute for "creative writing," where it shows the scars of lost dreams, criticism tends toward rhetoric, self-revelation, shapely aphorism. It loses its grip on the objects before it and turns to an unsteady mirror held up by the critic to his own ambitions or humility.

Leavis conveys persistently the absolute conviction that criticism is a central, life-giving pursuit. It need offer no apology for not being something else. Though in a manner radically different from that of the poet, it creates possibilities of apprehension and a consensus of perceived values without which poetry could not be sustained. To see Dr. Leavis at his lectern, compact and indrawn as if wary of some inner challenge, yet richly communicative to his listeners, is to observe a man doing precisely the job he wishes to do. And it is a job he regards as immensely important. (pp. 224-25)

Leavis' reorientation of critical focus—his stress on that lineage of intelligence and realized form which goes from Shakespeare and the Metaphysicals to Pope, Blake, Hopkins, and Eliot—is rooted in the change of sensibility occurring in the 1920's and early '30's. What he has done is to give that change its most precise and cogent critical justification. His mastery lies not in the general devising, but in the particular instance.

Here there is much that will live among the classic pages of criticism. Wherever one turns in the impressive array of Leavis' writings, one is arrested by the exhilarating presence of an intelligence superbly exact, and having within reach formidable resources of historical and textual knowledge. That intelligence is brought into close, subtle commerce with the poem in an act of total awareness which is, in the best instances, near to art…. [Certain moments] stand out for sheer brilliance and propriety of gathered insight. (pp. 226-27)

Undoubtedly, Leavis' principal achievement in his critique of the English novel. The Great Tradition is one of those very rare books of literary comment (one thinks of Johnson's Lives of the Poets or Arnold's Essays in Criticism) that have reshaped the inner landscape of taste. Anyone dealing seriously with the development of English fiction must start, even if in disagreement, from Leavis' proposals. Whereas much of what Leavis argued about poetry, moreover, was already being said around him, his treatment of the novel has only one precedent—the essays and prefaces of Henry James. Like James, but with a more deliberate intent of order and completeness, Leavis has brought to bear on the novel that closeness of reading and expectation of form reserved prevously for the study of poetry or poetic drama.

Now every book reviewer or undergraduate is able to mouth insights about the "stature" of Jane Austen, the "mature art" of George Eliot, or the "creative wealth" of intelligence in The Portrait of a Lady. Today it would seem ludicrous or wilfully eccentric to deny that The Secret Sharer or Women in Love are works of consummate art and classics of imagined life. But the very triumph of it should not make us forget the novelty, the unflinching audacity of Leavis' revaluation. Even where we challenge his list for ranking or omission, our sense of the novel as form, of its responsibility to moral perception and "vivid essential record," is that defined by Leavis' treatment. The assertion that after the decline of the epic and of verse drama the prose novel has concentrated the major energies in Western literature—an assertion put forward provisionally by Flaubert, Turgenev, and James—is now a commonplace. It was not so when Leavis first focused on a chapter in Middlemarch or a paragraph in Nostromo the same kind of total apprehension exhibited in relation to Shakespeare or Donne. The mere suggestion (at present nearly a cliché) that there is in Heart of Darkness a realization of evil comparable to the study of diminishing moral awareness in, say, Macbeth, has behind it a revolution in criticism. More than any man except James, Leavis has caused that revolution. (pp. 229-30)

[Even at its prime, however,] Leavis' criticism exhibits certain grave limitations and quirks. If the scope of his radical accomplishments is to be defined, these too must be noted.

There are the overestimates (particularly in Leavis' early criticism) of such minor talents as Ronald Bottrall or the novelist L. H. Myers. There is the lack of any confrontation, large or sustained, with the poetry of Yeats, a body of work, one would have thought, no less in need of close valuation than that of Eliot or Pound. Like the Augustan critics, Leavis has been most at ease with the poetry in which the pulse of argument and systematic intelligence beats strong. Hence his decisive reading of Mauberley but his disinclination to allow for the occasions of pure lyric force, of articulate image, in the parched chaos of Pound's Cantos. (pp. 234-35)

Equally suggestive of a limitation in allowed criteria has been Leavis' neglect of Joyce. He has observed in Ulysses set pieces of sensuous realization, but has nowhere done justice either to the architectural genius of the book, or to its enrichening and renovation of the language. Leavis has taken over D. H. Lawrence's scorn and misapprehension of Joyce's achievement. By Leavis' own requirements of seriousness and vitalizing moral poise, much in Dubliners and The Portrait of the Artist should rank high in the tradition. But he has read in the obscuring light of a false distinction. The choice is not Lawrence or Joyce. Both are indispensable; and it is Joyce who has done as much as any writer in our age to keep English confident and creative. (pp. 235-36)

Leavis has refused to concern himself, on any but a perfunctory scale, with foreign literature. There is in this refusal a proud scruple. If criticism presumes complete response to a text, complete possession, how can a critic hope to deal maturely with anything but his own language? There is, unquestionably, a stringent honesty in this position. But it can be carried too far. How, for example, could most critics refer to landmarks as dominant, as unavoidable as the Bible, Homer, Dante, or Goethe, if they did not rely, in one or the other instance, on the crutch of translation? And is it not the duty of a critic to avail himself, in some imperfect measure at least, of another language—if only to experience the defining contours of his own? (p. 236)

Leavis' "critical nationalism," which contrasts so sharply with the far-ranging humanism of an Edmund Wilson, is an instrument of great discrimination and power. But it has limiting consequences. The wide, subtle plurality of modern culture, the interplay of languages and national styles, may be regrettable—but it is a fact. To "place" Henry James without close reference to Flaubert and Turgenev; to exalt the treatment of politics in Nostromo and Middlemarch without an attendant awareness of The Possessed; to discern the realization of social nuance in Jane Austen without allowing the presence in the critical context of Proust—all this is to proceed in an artifice of isolation. Is it possible to discuss comprehensively the nature of prose fiction without introducing, at signal stages of the argument, the realization that Kafka has altered, lastingly, the relations between observed and imagined truth? Could Leavis advance as far as he does in support of Lawrence, of Lawrence's treatment of social feeling, if he set Women in Love next to The Brothers Karamazov?

This resolute provincialism has its counterpart in Leavis' treatment of time. There is scarcely anything written during the past twenty years that he has found worthy of serious examination. He has abdicated from one of the commanding functions of criticism, which is to apprehend and welcome the new. One has the impression that he cannot forgive Auden for the fact that English verse should have a history after Eliot even as he cannot forgive Snow for suggesting that the English novel should have a future beyond Lawrence. To use an epithet which he himself applies to Johnson, Leavis' criticism has, since 1945, rarely been "life-giving." Dealing with contemporary literature it has pleaded not from love but from scorn.

These are, obviously, major reservations. They accumulate toward the image of a career divided midway by some essential constriction of mood and purpose. Much in the late Leavis exhibits a quality of inhumane unreality…. The depth of insight is increasingly marred by waspish contempt. There has been no criticism since Rymer's less magnanimous.

It is this which makes any "placing" of Leavis' work difficult and premature. Great critics are rarer than great poets or novelists (though their gift is more distant from the springs of life). In English, Johnson and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold are of the first order. In the excellence of both Dryden and Saintsbury there is an unsteadiness of focus, a touch of the amateur. Among moderns, T. S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson are of this rare company. What of Leavis? One's instinct calls for immediate assent. There is in the sum of his labors a power, a cogency that looms large above what has been polemic and harshly arrogant in the circumstance. If some doubt persists, it is simply because criticism must be, by Leavis' own definition, both central and humane. In his achievement the centrality is manifest; the humanity has often been tragically absent. (pp. 237-38)