F.R. Leavis and The Common Pursuit

I took my stab at The Great Tradition, but did not find Leavis as compelling as in Revaluation and New Bearings, largely because I have not read those authors, am less inclined to the novel (than to poetry), but also because his argument felt weaker.

So now I have embarked on The Common Pursuit, of which Leavis notes:

I take the title of this book from The Function of Criticism, one of those essays of Mr Eliot's which I most admire....—'The common pursuit of true judgment': that is how the critic should see his business, and what it should be for him. His perceptions and judgments are his, or they are nothing; but, whether or not he has consciously addressed himself to cooperative labour, they are inevitably collaborative. Collaboration may take the form of disagreement, and one is grateful to the critic whom one has found worth disagreeing with.

The book is less cohesive than the other two, but is more recent. With, as a friend points out, irony on a variety of levels, he writes:

To-day, when the quality of the literary studies encouraged or permitted at the academic places of education has an obviously important bearing on the prospects of literary culture (that is, of humane culture generally), it is correspondingly important, and certainly not less important than it has been in less desperate times, to defend literature—to defend the classics and the literary tradition—against the academic mind.

I am not—ever—entirely in agreement with his point of view (though often enough so), but often, even when not invested in his subject, find his thinking to be refreshing, as in this excerpt from "In Defense of Milton":

[T]he essay in which [Tillyard] undertakes to confute my account of Milton's Grand Style by showing (with the support of Lascelles Abercrombie, William James, A.E. Housman, Gilbert Murray and Miss Maud Bodkin) that Milton is, or may be plausibly argued to be, remarkable for 'primitive feeling', or 'a richer share than Donne of those fundamental qualities of mind that appear to have immediate contact with the forces of life'—this essay begins: 'If you judged Shakespeare and Milton by the standards of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, there is no doubt that Shakespeare would fare the better.'

What does this mean? Perhaps by dint of questioning and suggestion some discussible proposition could be elicited from Dr Tillyard. But such a sentence (and the formula is repeated more than once in the book) couldn't have been written and left standing if the author hadn't been more concerned with the response he was relying on than the thought he supposed himself to be expressing.

On Gerard Manley Hopkins he writes:

The age in poetry was Tennyson's; and an age for which the ambition 'to bring English as near the Italian as possible' seems a natural and essentially poetic one, is an age in which the genius conscious enough to form a contrary ambition is likely to be very conscious and very contrary.

Leavis is much in sympathy with Hopkins, and faults his friend, Robert Bridges, with having been antipathetic (though not maliciously):

Bridges is a superb example of what education will do for one; his expectations—his taste, his sense of Form and his love of a 'continuous literary decorum'—were uncompromising, incorruptible and completely self-confident.... Decorum for Bridges had nothing like the Augustan correlations; it was a prim donnish conventionality. What, in fact, Bridges represents is essentially the academic mind, though with such confidence, completeness and conviction of authority as to constitute a truly memorable distinction.

While Bridges was no slouch as a poet—witness this favorite of mine—Leavis paints him a prisoner to the Victorian mindset. (He criticises Dante Gabriel Rosetti's sonnet, Soul's Beauty, for being a "shamelessly cheap evocation of a romantic and bogus Platonism"—a charge which I find hard to accept albeit not understanding.)

It has been a long time since I read any of Gerard Manley Hopkins' prose. Leavis excerpts from the Letters. Hopkins writes to Bridges, "I always think however that your mind towards my verse is like mine towards Browning's: I greatly admire the touches and the details, but the general effect, the whole, offends me, I think it repulsive." And:  "I do not like your calling Matthew Arnold Mr Kidglove Cocksure. I have more reason than you for disagreeing with him and thinking him very wrong, but nevertheless I am sure he is a rare genius and a great critic."

Perhaps anticipating Ezra Pound, Hopkins gives voice to the operating ethos of poets of our own day, capturing it entirely and precisely:

So also I cut myself off from the use of ere, o’er, wellnigh, what time, say not (for do not say), because, though dignified, they neither belong to nor could arise from, or be the elevation of, ordinary modern speech. For it seems to me that the poetical language of the age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike it, but not (I mean normally: passing freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one.

Following the "cult of Spenser" (apparently) I do not subscribe to it, if to the detriment of my own verse. To Canon Dixon he writes, "A purpose may look smooth from without but be frayed and faltering from within. I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it." I have felt something similar in recent days with the completion of the new book,

The Common Pursuit is a mixed bag: essays on poetry and prose intermixed. It culminates, purposefully, in an essay on poesy. I am into Swift now; as my whimsy takes me I may report further....

[Update December 11th: I posted this last quote of Hopkins on social media, saying "Hopkins (much in advance) nails the prevailing ethos of poets today exactly" and was promptly corrected: "It's a rare writer in verse in the US today that attempts to write 'the current language heightened.' Most of what is written today is either straight prose, really bad prose, or sillinesses." Touché. Point taken.]