Leavis on Lawrence
BY JOHN WAIN I T is my considered, opinion that only two of our academic • literary critics have produced, in the past twenty years, . books that could be called great; and both have appeared M the past twelve months. One'was Mr. C. S. Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century; the other is Dr. Leavis's new book.* (Professor Empson's The Structure of Complex Words runs them both very close, but it does not quite stay the distance.) To compare Lewis and Leavis is to realise the truth Of the old academic maxim that there is more variation within the first class than within any other. The men, the styles, the preoccupations, are utterly different. Mr. Lewis takes us back into a period we can barely imagine; with superb and sustained organising power, he conducts us through a forest of books which, without his help, we should hardly understand; and he illuminates each one until we seem to stand at the author's elbow. Since I reviewed his book. in the Spectator a year ago, I have read it a dozen times, and always with the same astonish- ment that 'one small head could carry all he knew,' and that he should have found something original and enlightening, some- thing always sustained by a directing purpose, to say about so Many authors. Turning to Dr. Leavis, I feel the same admira- tion, amounting to awe, but for qualities exactly the opposite. Here it is the very narrowness that is striking : the utterly serious and scrupulous concentration on what immediately matters. Lawrence is, in the literary sense, a contemporary; had he lived till today he would only have been ten years older than Dr. Leavis himself. It was Lawrence's great gift that he isolated exactly those pro.blems which lie at the heart of modern Western life; it is Leavis's great gift that he isolates exactly those .preoccupations which lie at the heart of Lawrence's work. What the novelist was concerned about, the critic is • Concerned about; the answers given by the novelist are re- affirmed by the critic, and shown to be invested with all the force and authority of imaginative literature. It is rarely that one sees a work of criticism fit to stand beside the best work of the author in question, but I think this is one.
* * * Criticism, to Dr. Leavis, is a moral activity. Everyone who seriously tries to comment on great literature knows that sooner or later—and probably sooner—he reaches a point where the merely technical analysis is not enough. When you have said that this book is soundly constructed, as compared with that one; that its language is clearer, or richer, or more subtle; that its humour and pathos are better balanced; you are left with the consciousness of having said nothing that really matters. War and Peace, for example, is not a very well * D. H. LAWRENCE, NOVELIST. By F. R. Leavis. (Chatto and
Windus, 2Is.) ..
constructed book; technically it is inferior to the latest novel by this or,that expert hack; we all feel this, but to show why it is so we have to go beyond the domain of merely technical criticism and look for the answer somewhere else. Dr. Leavis is in no doubt as to where he looks for the answer. After pointing out some of Lawrence's technical blemishes, he goes on : -
But how little the things that call for such criticisms count
for in the whole body of Lawrence's work. It is an immense body of living creation in which a supreme vital intelligence is the creative spirit—a spirit informed by an almost infallible sense for health and sanity. Itself it educates for the kind of criticism that here and there it challenges—it provides the incitement and the criteria.
Notice these terms. The vital intelligence, health, sanity, educates. And again : There is no profound emotional disorder in Lawrence, no obdurate imajor disharmony; intelligence in him can be, as it is, the servant of the whole integrated psyche.
If you are tempted to dismiss this 'integrated psyche' stuff as a bit of jargon picked up from psychoanalysis, read the clarifying next sentence:
It is the representative in consciousness of the complex need of the whole being, and is not thwarted or disabled by inner contradictions in him, whether we have him as artist, critic or expositor.
This is the essence of Dr. Leavis's criticism. People who do not accept it should at least recognise their responsibility to meet this sort of thing head on. Attempts to dismiss and discount Leavis's criticism are seldom effective because they are usually directed towards irrelevant side issues. For in- stance, a correspondent in the current issue of the London Magazine. stepping forward with a fine show of being about to cut through the tangle, tells us that the whole issue is one of social class : Dr. Leavis's adherents are largely state-aided young men
who cannot afford a claret and Peacock approach to litera- ture. They come from poor homes where books are luxury and must be taken seriously. They come from a naturally Puritan caste; they cannot accept pleasure without first justi- fying themselves, etc. etc.
If I were to write down my candid opinion of this line of argument, no compositor would set it up, for compositors come from a naturally Puritan caste. What has to be said, however, if literary criticism is to have any future among us, is that Dr. Leavis is surely an opponent worth meeting squarely. If the justification of great literature is not, in the end, a moral justification, then what is it? And if it is moral, then where has Leavis gone wrong? That is the issue, and no amount of whiffling about claret can obscure it, except for readers who want it obscured.
It will be seen that I regard Dr. Leavis as one of those critics whose assumptions and procedure are sufficient to give them classical status, whether or not we agree with them in detail. I might as well add that he has not always, in my eyes, been such a critic. His work on poetry is nothing like as good as his work on the novel, and, indeed, there is a kind of oblique admission of this in the ferocity with which he has now turned on Mr. Eliot, whose attitudes in those days he so largely. adopted. I cannot, in the space I have left, come 'between the fell opposed points of mighty opposites,' but surely everyone must feel sorry that Dr. Leavis has, even for high motives, battered Mr. Eliot so violently in this book. To him, Law- rence's true fame has been withheld from him by what amounts to a dark conspiracy. The pages he devotes to sketching this conspiracy are, in my opinion, largely wasted. It does not matter how stupidly an author is criticised as long as he is read, and Lawrence has always been read. It is true that Mr. Eliot is not exactly a generous critic of Lawrence—and Dr. Leavis, who appears to have read every scrap of print in which Lawrence's name is mentioned, has dug out some pretty bad staff--but it is also true that the best single sentence ever uttered in praise of Lawrence was, in fact, uttered by Eliot. I. do not think Dr. Leavis quotes it, unless it is lying about somewhere in tiny print, but he has quoted it elsewhere. It is from After Strange Gods: Against the living death of modern material civilization [says Eliot of Lawrence] he spoke again and again; and even if these dead could speak, what he said is unanswerable. it would be hard to praise Lawrence more justly in one sentence.
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