The Great Tradition

He’d likely hate this as introduction but… there was a bloke called Frank R. Leavis, and be wrote a book of criticism about books written in the English language called The Great Tradition. As academics will, Leavis assessed backlooks, safely, and so at the time of this review there have been shelves of literature since, and many more ideas of how criticism should be. Why bother?

Some people would talk about the influence. I’m not going to crawl into it, and I’m barely researching this text, but there’s simply no doubt about it. If you go to school, come essay time what tutors in England expect, to this day, is a Leavisite essay… and the man edited a twenty‐year magazine which started fights for and against, while he wrote a shelf of books which Wikipedia reports as increasing in ‘…literary, educational and social issues.’

So, though I talk about his work down a bit, he may have contributed to the destruction of the English essay. The Brits used to write amazing essays but, in my admittedly limited scope, I don’t see anything similar, especially out of academia, nowadays. Though globalised Public Relations and Promotion may, if blame is due, also carry blame. In an Amazon comment on this book, a reviewer said he would at the risk of spoilers say what the book was about. The comment became an essay at least as long as this article. Which proves this book has something to say. That said, this book is a modern essay, meaning the duller for it, on few and older authors. But it is urgent, almost Hectoring in style. Which, many years later, is impressive.

Now, I like a critic to lay out their terms, in introduction or chapter. The Great Tradition does not. However, the text frequently states what it is looking for, and whether a text delivers. So it’s easy to read what Mr. Leavis values, which is… Leavis says he want text for grown‐ups. I’m not summing, here’s a quote,

Scott, Thackeray, Meredith and Hardy are commonly accounted great English novelists: if the criterion is the achievement in work addressed to the adult mind, and capable as such of engaging again and again it’s full critical attention, then Conrad is certainly a greater novelist.

This is judgement, especially to modern ears—so everything else is for kids, who are naive? But the drift is clear, good if you write text that appreciates another point of view and represents reasonable talk—I’d add that without that there will be no drama.

Leavis also favours psychological description for text, here he is in a section on the writing by George Eliot in the book Felix Holt,

…psychological observation so utterly convincing in it’s significance that the price paid… didn’t need a moralist’s insistence….

and this point asserted in pages of rewrites of psychological drama… though he was able to flex to a recognition of multiple force and perhaps caotic outcome in a societal space, this of Joseph Conrad,

It is not a matter of any profundity of search into human experience… It is a matter of the firm and vivid concreteness with which the representative attitudes and motives are realised…

so,

Clearly, Conrad’s study of motives… doesn’t depend for it’s impressiveness on any sustained analysis of the individual psyche.

I’m not at all sure Leavis realised, but it’s there—he expects a text to deliver ‘’grown up’ insight by way of psychology. This is a feature that written stories can deliver, unatural in other artforms, so a virtue to seek.

Finally, this criticism pursues something I would, though it would likely have infuriated the author perhaps cause him to complain about incomplete definition overlap, but I would yet summarise as ‘sincerity’. He wants to know if the texts display realistic psychological reactions, and for this there must be feeling that the text analysed is working from experience—he says an abstract or moralistic construct is bad,

Felix Holt’s very unideal mother, though not the same kind of disaster [artistically, as in other characters and scenes in Felix Holt]… is not much more convincing; she seems to be done out of Dickens rather than from life.

but that a victory should be hollow or a hero empty is good—so heros and villains, good vs, evil, ploughboys and princes are insincere.

Leavis has a virtue in this, though unstated, he sticks to his premises. This causes him to value D. H. Laurence, though that author is not covered in the book—that’s interesting, because Laurence has a fundamentally different style to those listed and some on other grounds would argue against—but Levis defends as part of his scheme. We’re out in the fields, yes? On the other hand, there are downsides. For one, Leavis is missing several critical approaches. Here’s one, for example—‐in the classic form of a novel, the organisation of drama into plot matters. Some writers are refined about this, provide a steady flow of scenes with development, a construct in itself, and not psychology. Late‐period Charles Dickens is like this, and so is much by a writer who Leavis has little time for, Walther Scott. Well, we can’t be all things to all people, and no work of criticism will ever be the last word, anymore than there will be a story to end all stories. It may or may not be to a reader’s taste that Leavis seems to have little sense there may be more to say—it’s his road or out to crap. But I don’t think he can be judged by this, though it makes him, to deal with, prickly.

Anyway, there’s other results from the Leavis premises and approach. First, Leavis tends in this book at least to writers who form incredibly long sentences jangled with sub‐sentences that develop the theme, be that a sidestep into psychology or psychological comment, often from one impulse to stir to another, or symbolic projection of meaning, and so grown‐upness of style becomes laced with stylistic ability to bewilder with that dread word ‘nuance’ when not wandering wilfully into dark regions you cant help but wonder what the author may spoon out—his original start of Jane Austen seems terse as he follows with George Eliot and Henry James. Since Leavis himself sometimes will construct an entire paragraph from a sentence, it can not be argued he doesn’t live by his apparent stylistic conclusion.

On the other hand, the man insists on his sincerity meaning a kind of humanity,

(there is, of course, no significant unlikeness without the common concern—and the common seriousness of concern—with essential human issues)

Except generosity and other mild virtues are understood often as ‘humanity’, so crashing measures of worth,

The great, the disabling failure is in the presentment of the Dove, Milly Theale.

and thumped paragraph introductions do not demonstrate self‐practice. Not to mention a low regard for comedy or wit, which it could be said even at it’s most brutal or refined is a self‐reflexive dramatisation of the other. I’m not the guy for this but it is said of Leavis later in life he became… well, here’s from Wikipedia, Martin Seymour Smith,

fanatic and rancid in manner

and there was plenty more.

And then some people approach criticism as a guide to further material. If a critic lays out their boundaries, and a reader is intrigued, it’s reasonable or joyous to read what follows from the premises. F.R. Leavis fails in that, and the Great Tradition fails demonstrably, as it only discusses three authors, with a scattering of other mentions, mostly not common‐known, as examples of his points, but for me that’s not an adverse criticism, means only that this book will not work as guide.

Then the title, The Great Tradition. Having no premises stated for the style of criticism is alright, we the readers can deduce, but where this title arrives from is a mystery. It’s perhaps not inappropriate, seems to work in some way as capstone, but without reference. Leavis works to justify. He makes many references to how one author may have been influenced by another, such as this about Henry James,

It is not for nothing, that, like George Eliot, he admired her [Jane Austin] immensely, and that from him too passages can be found that show her clear influence.

Yet this seems a struggle, there could be many other references to other writers—analyses always seem to be on shaky ground when speaking of influence, and I for one would never trust authors themselves, so while Leavis’s connections may have weight as contrast, it’s tricky to believe as a tide of development.

The idea of ‘tradition’ may work if there were features concrete, such as English writers devoting a quarter of their pages to half‐timber and thatch, or writing altimes in haiku. Lacking this, I think the only way sense can be made of the title is with a heavy stress on the second word, “The Great Tradition”, so not a following of forms and progress, as commonly understood, but a statement that when writing in English reaches it’s finest pitch, it tends to become this manner and form with these virtues… which idea Leavis hints at,

There is a habit nowadays of suggesting that there is a tradition of the ‘English Novel’ and that all that can be said of the tradition (that being it’s peculiarity) is that ’the English Novel’ can be anything you like.

There are those who have said that, given Leavis was one of the first to have his job justified by a specific nationalist ‘English’ literature he needed to create justification. To earn his salt. Well, well, as you like it.

I find the Leavis premises a useful and new approach. With other influences and thought to hand, I wouldn’t follow them all or nothing. But it amounts to an ask for complexity, usually psychologically realised, and sincerity—particularly I was intrigued by how Leavis uses historical data and his own psychological proposals to try sincerity, as well as physical anchoring,

Borrowing a phrase from Mr. Eliot’s critical writings, one might say that Heart of Darkness achieves it’s overpowering evocation of atmosphere by means of ‘objective correlatives’. The details and circumstances of the voyage to and up the Congo are present to us as if we were making the voyage ourselves… they carry specificities of emotion and suggestion with them.

And I feel his argument is sound. In The Great Tradition, at least, he gives convincing support for statements he starts from. I do enjoy one of his methods, which old critics did muchly and is now lost, which is to disassemble a text and say which parts they like or think work, and which do not—which fragmentation could use a revival.

So I enjoyed reading the book. It’s an open of the oven, a blast of hot air, a scorch of fingers. But I find I don’t want to pursue F. R. Leavis work further than this—the premises and style enough, further pursuit unpromising in measure.