That F. R. Leavis is a first-rate critical personality is certain, but that is by no means the same thing as saying that he is a first-rate literary critic. No doubt he has at times achieved that stature; at other times not at all. (p. 289)

What I chiefly like about Leavis' work are its Johnsonian qualities: the robustness, the firmness, the downrightness. He is not one to beat around the bush, to play the diplomat, to cultivate ambiguity, or to shun controversy. A critic in the Arnoldian tradition, he aspires, in his own words, "to the highest critical standards and the observance of the most scrupulous critical discipline"—an admirable aspiration in the attainment of which, however, he has, to my mind, failed quite as often as he has succeeded. For he is plagued by all the defects of his virtues. What I have in mind is not his plain speaking, of course, but rather the esprit de sérieux animating many of his critical pronouncements. It expresses itself in a kind of provincial moralism (by no means to be equated with the "marked moral intensity" he so esteems in his literary preferences), a protestant narrowness of sensibility, basically puritan; resulting in what seems to me the thoroughly unjustified rejection of Flaubert, Joyce, and other important literary artists of the modern line, a tendency to elevate "English studies" to the status of a major force in the shaping of culture if not of society itself, and his endless and tiresome fulminations against Bloomsbury, the "London literary establishment," the system of "personal and institutional relations" that appears to him to dominate the British literary world and to obstruct the free play of the critical mind. (p. 290)

The trouble is that his clamorous and prolonged campaign against the establishment has all the marks of an obsession…. It is quite possible to dissent from established opinion without going on and on about it in a compulsive manner. After all, Bloomsbury, which no longer exists, is at present merely a footnote in literary history. A class struggle in literature is one thing, even if of doubtful value, as in the 1930s we saw in this country, because the partisanship involved easily gets out of hand; but the conversion of a petty social antagonism into a full-scale crusade is something else again.

In truth, what Leavis is waging can in no sense be described as a Kulturkampf, which invariably deals with basic values, the clash of opposing world-views, not merely literary issues and personalities. Leavis' obsession cannot be regarded otherwise than as a symptom. Of what? I am afraid there is no other way to characterize it than as a symptom of class resentiment, and that very condition also sufficiently explains his uncritical identification with his supreme paragon among modern writers, D. H. Lawrence, upon whom he heaps panegyrics in his regrettably influential book, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955). (p. 291)

[In "The Orthodoxy of Enlightenment," the last essay of Leavis' new book, Anna Karenina and Other Essays], we are again embroiled in the Lawrence question. Reviewing the Penguin documentary record of the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, he strains to show, though without any recognition of the irony involved, that his backing of Lawrence had been misconceived and misused in the trial by persons of a type that would have been inevitably hostile to Lawrence during his lifetime and who are now, to put it bluntly, kowtowing to him because of the new "enlightenment" of sex. It should be observed that even in his extravagant book about Lawrence …, Leavis excised Lady Chatterley, as well as The Plumed Serpent, from the canon. Now he speaks of it as "a bad novel," arguing that his distaste for it is something "that the normal Lawrence would have shared and justified," if the "abnormal state" he was in when writing the novel had not "violated his wholeness." What a way of putting it! This new evocation of a Lawrence split into normality and abnormality flagrantly contradicts the insistence in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist that there is "no profound emotional disturbance in Lawrence, no obdurate major disharmony; intelligence in him can be, as it is, the servant of the whole integrated psyche."

Plainly, there is something deeply wrong here, a tortuous, willed self-deception, on account of which this critic's reputation for integrity and independence of judgment incurs a damaging loss. No doubt there are stages to be noted in Lawrence's development as a thinker and artist, but the novels that Leavis disowns—including Sons and Lovers which he manages to dismiss, without seeming to do so, as little more than a case history—embody the essential Lawrence just as much as those Leavis acclaims as supreme masterpieces. (pp. 296-97)

Leavis' emphasis on "health" and "sanity" and his mandatory distinction between what "makes for life" and what does not are singularly inappropriate to "placing" Lawrence. Terms like "health," "sanity," and even "life" are at once too vague and too inclusive, too invertebrate as it were, for use in any precise analysis, and, above all, too moralistic to make much sense in literary discourse. As criteria they are in constant peril of toppling over—though Leavis would hardly countenance such a fall—into the popular cure-all of "the power of positive thinking." Evidently there is no getting away from the Lawrence question in examining Leavis' contribution to contemporary criticism.

The truth is that by radically separating his art from his doctrine without fully acknowledging what he is up to, Leavis has been able to create a Lawrence who never really existed. Hence the stress on the word novelist in his book on him. But this procedure is misleading in Lawrence's case. For as E. M. Forster has observed, he was "both preacher and poet … though without the preaching the poetry could not exist. With some writers one can disentangle the two, with him they were inseparable." It is this very "inseparability," which cannot be said to affect in the same drastic manner Dostoevsky and other novelists of intense ideological animus, which calls into question Lawrence's status as an artist. Furthermore, as Forster adds, as he grew older he became "more and more mannered and didactic." None of that is recognized by Leavis. Nor does the concept of neo-primitivism, of which Lawrence is the most extreme exponent in modern literature, ever engage Leavis' attention, though that concept is far more cogently deployed in appraising Lawrence than the meager literary notions Leavis brings to bear in his apotheosis of him as before all else an artist, "a creative writer of the greatest kind," as well as "an incomparable critic," and "one of the greatest masters of comedy." His determination to endow his bel idéal with every possible virtue is appalling. (pp. 297-98)

[Lawrence] is not what Leavis says he is: he is not an up-to-date version of George Eliot, nor is he a realist, except superficially and only intermittently. Leavis maintains that modern civilization found in Lawrence "a student and analyst of incomparable range and insight." But he was not so much a student or analyst of civilization as its outright and rigorous opponent. He rejected culture, intellect, consciousness, knowledge—the values that Leavis is above all attached to. (p. 298)

Leavis' assertion of his own beliefs positively disallows his solidarity with Lawrence. The visionary neo-primitivism, the regression to an animistic and archaic mode of apprehending the world, which dissolves the distinction between the human and the inhuman and between nature and culture, are wholly alien to Leavis. The latter frequently affirms Lawrence's "intelligence"; and I for one have no doubt that he was very intelligent; at the same time I have no doubt that after Sons and Lovers, ever alert to the threatening inroads of the so abominated "mental consciousness," he more often than not refused to use his intelligence. (p. 299)