Trevor Pateman censures Leavis as a moralist with nothing pertinent to say about

the preconditions to greatness in art.

In reply this internet essay attempts to justify Leavis's 'judgment and analysis
' as both inaugurating standards of critical discernment for English students an
d establishing differing levels of excellence in English Literature that has lef
t university English permanently indebted to him.

Pateman bases his critique of Leavis on Leavis's 1948 classic, The Great Traditi
on. The importance of The Great Tradition is that it laid down a critical framew
ork for assessing the quality of the novel that moved beyond a concern for its d
rama and characterization. How?
Jane Austen is the first novelist in Leavis's groundbreaking book. Let's look at
Emma's opening chapters for a way of seeing how quality is involved.
Emma's enthusiastic match-making appears to bring Harriet and Mr. Elton together
, raising she anticipates, Harriet's social standing. Later Emma discovers that
Mr. Elton's attentions were all directed at Emma herself. Emma's self-confidence
, which had guided and bolstered Harriet's feelings, were all mistaken. Emma's m
isjudgments and Harriet's falsely aroused emotions now had to be untied. Her own
unthinking exuberance, previously her delight, was now seen as leading her to r
ecklessness.
For her to be truly responsible for Harriet, critically conscious thinking must
now permeate her buoyancy and re-shape her habitual attitudes. Such analysis bri
ng her readers through the many developing implications of the drama towards the
unitary moral understanding of the whole book.
Turning now to Dickens: in 1948 Leavis saw him mainly as an entertainer. Hard Ti
mes alone was a consciously planned book. Mostly Dickens' stories overflowed in
vibrant humor and many sub-plots, whereas Hard Times worked without the normal e
xcesses of his written energy, as a finely wrought moral fable.
However, by their 1971 book on Dickens the Leavises had reconsidered Dombey and
Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, but above all, Little D
orrit as serious works. No longer was Leavis so narrowly focused as had been in
1948. Now he saw in the later Dickens, that humor and subplot were neither exces
ses nor diversions but part of the integration that raised the level of Dicken's
overall understanding.
But for Pateman, Leavis's morality is strait-laced. How would such morality sit
is the sound of Mozart's effervescent music? Surely though, there are valid dist
inctions in Mozart. How would one compare the comedy in â The Marriage of Figaroâ with t
e very different comedy in â The Magic Fluteâ ? Is not the comedy in â The Magic Fluteâ
comedy merges with Masonic seriousness to illuminate different levels of meaning
.
Or how how might Picasso's modern openness to multiple influences have influence
d Leavis's
incisive and, for Pateman, illiberal judgments?
However, was it not just Picasso's importunate modernity that shocked the world,
devastated by World War I into perceptiveness.
At any rate in 1917 F. R. Leavis as a conscientious objector ambulance driver, p
erceived in T S Eliot just the metamorphosis of poetic form and style that the r
uined consciousness of the age needed.
How was Eliot able to enact, in his form and style, so drastic a change in tradi
tion?
From: â The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrockâ
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace: made a sudden leap,
And seeing it was a soft October night
Curled once around the house and fell asleep.
Leavis, whose reputation was much centered on his interpreting effectively the m
odernity of Eliot's poetry, himself wrote:
'(So) striking are the subtlety and flexibility of tone complexity of attitude,
in the nature of the imagery just quoted, that the canons of the poetical are fo
rgotten; the poet assumes the right to make use of any materials that seem to hi
m significant. We have here, in short, poetry that expresses freely a modern sen
sibility, the ways of feeling, the modes of experience, of one fully alive in hi
s own age'...
'Nineteenth century poetic tradition had renounced wit, the play of intellect, c
erebral muscle, and had created a dreamworld in which the poetry and the intelli
gence of the age had lost touch.'
T S Eliot had abandoned this dreamworld and had impregnated his language with co
mplex attitudes. The morality of this new poetry was no axiomatic rule separatin
g right from wrong. Rather it sang of an honesty that grasped the disordered abr
uptness of contemporary existence. Leavis also saw that in this confrontation ho
nesty was not enough. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' had opened eyes to our cultural ex
ile. Other poems pointed a new living hope laying outside our technological impr
isonments.
'Four Quarters' Eliot's crowning achievement hinted at a unitary consciousness t
hat would repudiate the Descartes-Newton subject/object divide.
In his critique of Four Quartet', Leavis pointed out that Eliot's inability to e
mbody human responsibility as a crucial aspect of such unitary consciousness ren
ders 'Four Quarters' contradictory and paradoxical.
The other most modern writer who continued the theme in the 20th century novel o
f the great tradition was D. H. Lawrence. Life in the novel did not depend on co
mbining fragments of religious insights. But Lawrence himself wrote eloquently a
bout morality and the novel.
â The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovere
d, if you try and nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel, or
the novel gets up and walks away with the novel. Morality in the novel is the t
rembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the sca
le to pull down the balance to his predilection, that is immorality.â
This is why in Lawrence morality is not a policeman as Leavis, on of Lawrence's
greatest expounders saw. Leavis in his penultimate book saw true morality as the
living principle whose discernment underlies all that we we do.
It is for this reason that James Joyce's Ulysses is not part of Leavis's 'The Gr
eat Tradition'. Joyce's experimental self-consciousness separates both individua
ls and society from any novelistic vision of organic unity. Self-consciousness i
s not an integrating term that makes for moral meaning.
Lawrence himself, as well as Leavis, criticised Joyce in these terms in April 19
23.
'Though thousands and thousands of pages Mr. Joyce and Miss Richardson tear them
selves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to their finest threads, till yo
u feel they are sewed up into a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken and yo
u are turning to wool along with the rest of the wooliness.'
'The Great Tradition' is not about wooliness or routine but how the living tradi
tion embodies itself in generation after generation. The issues that are importa
nt are important too for literature and modify themselves according to the consc
iousness of the age. Conscioujsness and morality inter-relate in literature in a
way that can unstage description with the life and language of the author's ver
bal enactment.
Leavis celebrated the priority of life over human individuality. This is somethi
ng that this environmentally and angered generation is putting to the fore. Nowa
days the Gaia hypothesis is uncovering evidence of far distant mutuality that is
both startling and unobtrusively humbling. Living intelligent English embodies
a wholeness that our desiccated world needs.
Eckhart Tolle is a contemporary mystical sriter from another perspective who poi
nts us towards Leavis's 'Living Principle'.