[What] is the immediate and total impression of [The Common Pursuit]? Dr. Leavis's criticism is nothing if not personal (the word is not meant in a depreciatory sense); my assessment of it will therefore be personal too. Re-reading, then, in one volume essays which (most of them) I had read before scattered over several years, the effect for me was—let me say frankly—one of a profound satisfaction. To describe the satisfaction a little more precisely I should say that it was the satisfaction of seeing a pavement well-laid. The individual stones one had noticed before, and they were of pleasing shape and colour; but now that they can be taken in as a whole there is the added pleasure of observing that they fit. Even 'added pleasure' will not do. For it is not merely the enumerative addition of the more pleasure in the same kind, like one more stone; but the completing kind of knowledge that further enumeration is at best only confirmation of, at worst even redundant to, what can now be taken as an overruling design.

Having thus dared to burn my critical boats, let me be more explicit. Here, I think, is the most precious quality of Dr. Leavis's criticism: that, without any easy superficial play with pretty metaphors like 'pattern'—so often a dodge to escape examination of details or a short cut to finding relations which one expects to find but can't put one's fingers on … his reaction to the most varied work is all-of-a-piece. If one doubts the variety of the work examined, and—it is fair to add, in view of the narrow ranges of approval that Dr. Leavis is so often charged with—the variety of the work praised, there is no need to go beyond the present volume. Shakespeare, Bunyan, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Gray, Keats, Hopkins, James, Forster, Eliot: they are all here. And others (Crabbe, Blake, Lawrence, Yeats) lie just off the page. Even in his dismissals, to which the slothful or the pusillanimous will turn at once as what they expect most obtrusively to find, there are the qualifications which should make it impossible any longer to accuse Dr. Leavis of 'block' judgments. (pp. 352-53)

The variety of interest and appreciation, then, is there. What do I mean by saying that Dr. Leavis's reaction to such variety is 'all-of-a-piece'? I do not, of course, mean that he detects some quality common to such different writers as he examines. If there were such a nameable quality it could only be something very imprecise (like 'sublimity' or 'aesthetic form') which would be the reverse of what Dr. Leavis singles out for distinction. There are, no doubt, certain qualities which at least cannot be absent (though they need not all appear at once) from the work of any great creative writer, and Dr. Leavis cannot avoid (no critic could) referring to some of them. It is here that his characteristic terminology, so often singled out for sarcasm or abuse, becomes serviceable: I mean such phrases as 'poise', 'intelligence', 'mastery over material', 'powers of organization', etc. But I find it encouraging to be able to note that where Dr. Leavis is at his best in criticism such terms become of merely secondary importance, merely elucidatory of what he has already managed to say without them. What I think Dr. Leavis succeeds again and again in doing, faced with this diverse material, is this. First, he keeps his head—which is no mean matter; some of the greatest critics have, in the close proximity of genius, found their compass-needle quivering and spinning, quite out of control, in the violent magnetic field. And then he is able to approach and describe what is happening 'See,' he says (in effect), 'what this poetry is doing; see what that prose is really up to'. The terminology that follows then becomes merely short-hand employed in the description, not a substitute for it…. [Further, when Leavis] needs to balance close and detailed examination with wide generalization … he succeeds remarkably in finding the summary which never ventures wildly beyond the evidence but is a genuine deduction from it. (pp. 354-55)

[Although few reviewers of this or previous works of Dr. Leavis have failed to complain somewhere of his style,] it seems to me that again and again the style is admirably fitted to the kind of nuance with which [he] operates…. The frequent parentheses … are when he is really hot on the scent, carried along with the general critical movement—they are not felt as interrupting the chase, but as reaching out a hand to pluck refreshment for the chase from the fruit bushes that lie beside the route. Sometimes he can hit on a telling epigram, especially for a dismissal…. But sometimes the style is merely cumbersome and tortuous; and the reasons for this are worth examining. To read a page of Dr. Leavis shortly after reading a page of Henry James is to be left in no doubt whatever whence the Leavis style is derived. And Henry James can be a dangerous influence where sentence-construction is concerned. Dr. Leavis himself has drawn attention to the weaknesses, the sheer boredom, of James's later novels; and with this weakness and boredom goes a complication of style which becomes merely irritating…. [What] I feel bound to point out is that there is a similar decline in Dr. Leavis's own style, and it is possible that where that occurs there may be analogous reasons. When, that is, we come upon cumbersome sentences …, one has the impression of a failure in critical direction: the turns and pauses, the distracting asides, appear to show us the critic stopping in his tracks to beat off flies, and we do not really believe, in spite of his insistence, that the flies are the Furies.

This absence of self-criticism which starts in the style extends, we are therefore bound to say, to other areas. And first, because most obvious, there is a failure, which has become more marked of late, to appreciate the proportions of his own critical contribution. The last essay in this book, which Dr. Leavis himself sees will be taken as 'wanton provocativeness', is, alas, less important than that: it is destined to ephemerality by the very ephemerality of those whom it criticizes—principally Mr. John Hayward and the Warden of Wadham; it is noticeable that the latter's work is not examined, that in fact his name has merely become an adjective with which to characterize other people…. An even more glaring instance is the essay 'In Defence of Milton', which it is astonishing to find Dr. Leavis wanting to preserve. It is an admittedly devasting review of a book on Milton by Dr. Tillyard, but without this essay would anyone have remembered the book? (pp. 360-62)

[Leavis also fails to show] a readiness to revise opinions, to avoid wholesale judgments, and above all to allow for, and place, the lesser talent. It seems to me increasingly that Dr. Leavis, when faced with younger contemporary writers, refuses to give any marks where he cannot give full marks. (p. 364)

Further, Dr. Leavis does not always allow that there are imaginative writers who are not primarily creators at all and yet who have a valid function. (p. 365)

[Finally], if there is any sign of the narrowness of interest and response [of which Dr. Leavis is so often accused,] it would be in his comparative neglect of comedy, and in the sense that goes with that neglect, the sense that the critic should never 'let himself go'. Perhaps we cannot have it both ways: I have praised Dr. Leavis for always 'keeping his head', and now I am asking that he should let himself go. But we must register the limitation that goes with Dr. Leavis's kind of strength. I am not asking that he should reverse his judgment on (say) Fielding; or that he should not continue to admire the achievement of Hard Times; only that there should be a little more allowance for the place of sheer exuberance, real laughter, in the 'life' that is so constantly his criterion. Of course, there must continue to be discriminations; this is a plea to give more weight to 'fun' in Chaucer or Shakespeare, not a plea to sell out to Chesterton.

These critical remarks will, I hope, be recognized as growing out of and even enforcing the tribute that it has been my desire to pay Dr. Leavis. And if I have had occasionally to accuse him of prejudice, of the already-made-up-mind, that is an exceptional occurrence in a critic who can analyse with such admirable objectivity the work of writers whose general views he cannot accept. (p. 367)