Table Of ContentTHE LEAV ISES ON FICTION
THE LEAV ISES
ON FICTION
An Historic Partnership
.J.
P M. Robertson
© P.J. M. Robertson 1981
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1981 978-0-333-27886-4
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First published 1981 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-16658-9 ISBN 978-1-349-16656-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16656-5
For Rosalind, Lucy and Flora
It's nry wife (who 's very different from me-hence our
lifelong collaboration is historic) who's the authority on
prose fiction. She's both critic and scholar. I think that,
on the novel, she has no rival in the world.
F. R. Leavis, letter to the author,
29 January 1975
Contents
Preface lX
Acknowledgements Xlll
Note on the Texts and Notes XV
1 Introduction: the Leavises and Criticism of the
Novel 1
2 Q. D. Leavis: Fiction and the Reading Public and
Scrutiny (1932-47) 12
3 F. R. Leavis and The Great Tradition: George Eliot,
Henry James, Joseph Conrad 27
4 Q. D. Leavis and Major Women Novelists 50
5 F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence 76
6 The Leavises and Dickens 99
Appendix A The Leavises and Other Literatures 135
Appendix B Dickens the Novelist: Contents 143
Notes 145
Select Bibliography 165
Index 173
Vll
Preface
People with (and even without) a serious interest in literature and
the modern world do not lack for words in speaking or writing
about F. R. Leavis. The man, his beliefs and judgements have
been an intensely live issue for half this century, and the steady run
these days of commemorative articles and books seems likely to
keep them alive. So far, agreement that Leavis is worth discussion
prevails over argument about what is most important in his
work-his criticism of poetry, or of the novel, or of culture and
society. And all commentators seem agreed merely to allude to
Q. D. Leavis, though occasionally one notes and deplores, but does
nothing to put right, the general neglect of her contribution.
I see the criticism of the novel as central in Leav is-growing out
of his criticism of poetry and sustaining his critique of twentieth
century civilisation. I should prefer to say, 'central in the Leavises'.
What the acknowledgement in The Great Tradition intimates, Dickens
the Novelist conf1rms, and the tribute to Mrs Leavis (which I print as
an epigraph) seals: the Leavises' criticism of fiction has been a
partnership, with the author of Fiction and the Reading Public by no
means the junior partner. In fact, as influence on Leavis in his
work on fiction Mrs Leavis seems hardly less important than
Henry James or D. H. Lawrence, though she undoubtedly learned
from him, and from them, too.
Before the Leavises, good criticism of fiction had been provided
largely by eminent novelists-James, Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf
though sometimes it was to be found in the pages of Victorian es
sayists such as Leslie Stephen (much admired by the Leavises). It
had, however, a piecemeal look, the novelists not surprisingly writ
ing to their own idea of the novel-especially James, whose late
preoccupation with form seemed to license, through Lubbock's in
fluential The Craft of Fiction, theorising about form as the authentic
criticism of fiction. For the Leavises, aesthetic considerations nec
essarily involve moral ones: more than a skilled craftsman or stylist
IX
X Preface
or wordsmith, the really important novelist is a transmitter of
human values. Hence a theory ofthe novel must be grounded in
evaluation, otherwise a real masterpiece remains undistinguished
from artful counterfeit. Maps were needed on the novel, showing
sharper contours than marked hitherto by the literary surveyor. So
the Leavises set to to chart and evaluate the mainstream of the
English novel, having at the same time the practical and laudable
aim of providing an essential reading-list for university students
and intelligent general readers, not just for initiates.
Theirs was a collaborative effort made in two phases. The first
spanned the years of Scrutiny, 1932-53. Mrs Leavis, at first more
scholar than critic, carried out the reconnaissance work in Fiction
and the Reading Public and Scrutiny; Leavis, the practised critic with a
well-honed analytical method from evaluating English poetry, fol
lowed with the strategic discriminations in The Great Tradition. In
this period, the Leavises mainly agreed with T. S. Eliot in affirming
writers who exhibit the 'classical' virtues of order and discipline.
With D. H. Lawrence: Novelist Leavis completed the first phase
and began the second. He linked Lawrence with George Eliot in
the puritan tradition, but also found that Lawrence's affirmation of
individual creativity was a 'romantic' strength and made him a
saner, braver and greater writer than T. S. Eliot, whose classicism
and Anglo-Catholicism seemed now negatively establishmentar
ian. By fmely discriminating between the strengths and weaknesses
of these opposed geniuses Leavis realised himself (in the full
sense of that term well used by him) as a critic and thinker inde
pendent of, and perhaps equal to, them.
From the early 1960s and sparked by interest in Lawrence's ro
mantic strengths, the Leavises embarked on a further reassessment
of the impact of the Romantic movement on English fiction, Mrs
Leavis revaluing the major nineteenth-century women novelists,
including Jane Austen, and Leavis revaluing Blake and Dickens.
This culminated in Dickens the Novelist, where they combined to con
firm Dickens as the supreme English novelist and Lawrence's most
important precursor. In this phase the Leavises assimilate romantic
virtues with classical ones, rather than esteem one set over the
other: they expand rather than alter their criteria.
Leavis's essay on Hard Times in 1947 has a pivotal importance.
For it he coined the phrase 'the novel as dramatic poem', to signify
that the most important novels are best understood not as linear
prose narratives of character and plot, but as dramatic prose-poems
Preface
Xl
having metaphoric power and complexity of organisation akin to a
Shakespeare play. The discovery crowned the Leavises' efforts to
approximate criticism of the novel with criticism of poetry, and
shaped all their later work. Leavis possessed the key to Lawrence's
difficult masterpieces (which had baffled him earlier), Mrs Leavis
became fully a critic as well as a scholar of the novel, and together
they vindicated this approach in using it to judge Dickens 'the
Shakespeare of the novel'.
The Leavises have kept evaluative criticism-criticism in its
original sense-in the centre of the critical map, through blending
the strengths of the two leading schools: the analytical precision of
the formalist and the sociological depth and breadth of the histori
cal critic. Mrs Leav is shows more of the historical critic's interest in
the genesis of a literary work and more of the formalist's interest in
technique than does Leavis, and as a result emerges the more com
plete scholar and critic of the novel. But Leav is's analysis of novels
that 'affirm life' makes his criticism unique and compellingly cen
tral. Dickens the Novelist is the Leavises' best work on the novel, since
their distinctive strengths have matured and harmonise in it.
I have tried to be objective in this study, hoping to avoid the
two attitudes typically adopted towards the Leavises, modish ob
sequiousness and modish dissent. In doing so I hope I haven't
fallen into a third type, bloodless neutrality. The method of study
chosen aims at objectivity: to examine the works, mainly in chrono
logical order, without resort to biography-in adaptation of
Lawrence's dictum about trusting the tale rather than the artist.
Perhaps there are losses as well as gains in this approach. Cer
tainly, I should remark that the warm courtesy shown to me by
both Dr and Mrs Leavis in the two or three letters I have received
from them suggests that longer contact would have made dis
interestedness very much harder.
The study was completed in substantially its present form in
March 1977, when Dr Leavis was still living. I have made some re
visions since, and added a reaction to Mrs Leavis's latest work, her
perspective on Melville's 1853-6 phase.
Since these paragraphs were written, a number of Leavis and
Leavis-related studies have been published, of varying focus and
merit. In The Moment of 'Scrutiny' (London: New Left Books, 1979)
Francis Mulhern systematically examines from a Marxist point of
view the impact of Scrutiny on the cultural and intellectual life of
