RENÉ WELLEK

I am, I fear, too much of a theorist not to feel strongly the ambiguity, shiftiness, and vagueness of Leavis's ultimate value criterion. Life. In its implications and rejections it brings out the limitations of Leavis's concept of literature and the narrow range of his sympathies. Life for Leavis is first of all simply realist art—not merely in a sense of copying or transcribing a social situation, a dramatic, objective rendering of life, of course, but as we find it in Shakespeare and the English novel of the nineteenth century. In practice, Leavis has no sympathy for stylized, conventionalized art, the art defined in Ortega's Dehumanization of the Arts. This serious ideal of Life makes Leavis also suspicious of art which is merely playful, rococo, ornamental, aesthetic, formalistic in a narrow sense, while his optimism makes him hostile to out-and-out pessimists such as Hardy or Flaubert. Leavis's taste is rooted in nineteenth-century critical realism, to which he manages to add the early poetry of T. S. Eliot and a selection from the novels of D. H. Lawrence; The Rainbow and Women in Love in particular. He is really deeply hostile to what could be called modernism or avant-garde: to Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Auden, Dylan Thomas, to almost every author who has become prominent in the last thirty years. He clings, as I suppose we all do, to the discoveries of his youth: Conrad, Lawrence, Hopkins, the early Eliot.

The emphasis on life in the sense of the concrete and immediate is connected with Leavis's concern with the English provincial rural tradition which he apparently finds in Shakespeare, in Bunyan, in Jane Austen, George Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence, all countryfolk of a sort to which the Londoners, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, provide a foil of learned urban poetry. Life means also pedagogy, the concern for his students, for the controversies of his university. It accounts also for what I cannot help calling Leavis's provinciality and insularity. Besides English and American, he seems to have no interest whatever in another literature: I can recall only a few highly laudatory references to Tolstoy and some critical remarks on Flaubert. In Scrutiny he may have left French and German literature to the specialists, Martin Turnell and D. H. Enright, Leavis's gravest failing seems to me his distrust and even hatred for theory: his resolute, complacent, nominalistic empiricism, his worship of the concrete and particular at any price. This allows him to leave his norms unexamined: the standards of life, common speech, centrality, firm grasp of the actual, impersonality, no afflatus, no emotionality, but sharp concrete realization, sensuous particularity, presentment—all terms of praise which I quote literally from Leavis's writings, though he would object (and did so) that, stated so baldly, they are "intolerably clumsy." I recognize that they assume their proper meaning only in a context, but they do represent implicit norms, an underlying scheme or pattern which is discoverable in every critic and which it is the business of a historian of criticism to describe and judge. The refusal to theorize has a paralyzing effect on Leavis's practice; it makes him reject the tools and concepts of technical analysis and be content with impressions or dogmatically stated feelings. He refers to the "complex rhythm organizing" The Rainbow without even attempting to describe it, or gropes to find terms for metrical or metaphorical effects in Donne which he can only sense but not name, or indulges in open contradictions when his feelings run counter to his unexamined presuppositions…. The struggle for expression, the entanglement in favorite words is painfully obvious in many passages of Leavis's tortuous and tortured writing, which, in its fierce clinging to the immediate, seems often to deny the life and light of Reason. Empiricism, observation, sensitive submission to the object postulated as an ideal have been increasingly in conflict with the obscurantist vitalism preached by Lawrence and accepted by Leavis with uncritical adoration.

Still, whatever Leavis's limitations, he has succeeded in defining his taste, identifying the tradition he considers central, and imposing his judgement on his contemporaries. Leavis has accomplished what he set out to do: "A judgment," he tells us, "is a real judgment, or it is nothing. It must, that is, be a sincere personal judgment; but it aspires to be more than personal. Essentially it has the form: 'This is so, is it not?'" A great many of our contemporaries have answered "It is so," and this is after all the success which every critic who is not merely a theorist, but a molder of taste, can hope for. Leavis has defined and given voice to a widespread taste and change of taste. I am convinced that he will preserve a position in the history of English criticism not far distant and even different from that of the much sweeter tempered Matthew Arnold. (pp. 190-92)