1BOOKS

The Oxford Tradition

By F. R. LEAVIS

' A s a critic he could be sensitive and percep- tive.' It is to Lawrence that the concession is made, and the critical poise is characteristic of Mr. Stewart.* He admires Lawrence's genius, but cannot admit that it comprises anything impressive in the way of humour. The criteria by which he judges are sufficiently present to us in Mr. Stewart's own brightness—for there is a good deal of humour in his book (or perhaps he would prefer to have it called 'wit'). In a given ominous year, marked by dates, we 'bear history turning with a faint creak on its hinge' (page 2). Of R. L. Stevenson we are told (page 5) that 'his hair depended upon his shoulders and he wore a velvet jacket—dangerous manifestations for which, it may be here recorded, Edinburgh parents and schoolmasters were looking out with anxiety many years after his death.' Of Pater—but no; the reader will find these things on almost any page. Everyone will recognise that Mr. Stewart's cultivation of point aspires, (for all its reminding us sometimes of Norman Shrapnel being like Alistair Cooke) to a certain elegance, and belongs to a specific tradition of English 'civilisation.'

It is immediately relevant to , note that he judges Rico, the 'playboy amateur artist' of Si. Mawr, a 'mere Aunt Sally.' He pronounces against that tale, showing in this an indepen- dence of discrimination; for he appreciates in- tensely (and expounds) 'The Captain's Doll,' another of the tales that have been very favour- ably dealt with in published criticism. Not that he doesn't discriminate in respect of St. Mawr itself: he avows an intensity of response to Lawrence's evocation of •thc mountain region round Taos, and he does this with a quotation about the art of the very great painters from Beren son. In his critical• disapproval of Lawrence's portrayals of the 'playboy amateur artist' he is consistent. In his large apprecia- tion of Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance (which in my view he preposterously overvalues), he insists firmly that Sir Clifford's alleged liter- ary addiction has no plausibility; it's gratuitous, and he can't pass it. And again, in discussing Aaron's Rod, which on the whole he likes, he remarks on the pointlessness of the representa- tions in that book of 'the social 'distinction' that runs to literariness and the patronising of artists. I write, I had better say, as one whose judgment goes clean contrary to Mr. Stewart's: the en- counter in the train between Aaron and the two benign young elegants of the Eddie Marsh type seems to me especially good—irresistibly true, and, in its lightness of touch, profound.

But how, in fact, so far on—after the first pages of the Introduction—could any other attitude have been expected of Mr. Stewart, as to whom

* OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. VOL. XII: EIGHT MODERN WRITERS. By 1. 1. M. Stewart. (0.U.P., 48s.) there is abundant supporting evidence in his book that he was formed in the Oxford tradition of 'scholarship' and belles lettres—the tradition of Oxford civilisation that boasted Gordon as a representative eminence and affirmed its spirit in the conferring of an honorary doctorate on P. G. Wodehouse? Today there is Mr. C. S.

Lewis (cited, with what intention not sure, by Mr. Stewart as admonishing us to be careful: what we take today for nothing but a 'well- written' boy's book for adults, may very well become for future examiners a classic, to be critically appreciated and expounded); Mr. C. S. Lewis, whose curious book, An Experiment in Criticism, expresses that evasive but certainly hostile attitude towards literary criticism, and who complains that Cambridge takes literature with the 'wrong kind of seriousness.'

Mr. Stewart, however, is committed to criti- cism. Whether the Oxford History of English Literature as originally conceived knew it was committed to criticism one can't say. But when you offer, as this Volume XII of the Oxford

• History-of English Literature does, to deal with the literature of your own time, then, even if you stop at 1940 and exclude all living authors, you can't evade the knowledge. In Mr. Stewart (whose representative quality gives his book what interest and significance it has) the wrong kind of seriousness becomes the right kind

• (voila oh t nous en sommes). I am thinking of his , avowed intention. He writes on page 4 in- timating (with a picking from I. A. Richards) the nature of the essential kind of discrimination he sees himself as having to make: 'any literature and art will be of inferior quality which has not been created at the growing-point of its time.'

If we don't read this with any hopeful expecta- tion, that, even if very forcible reasons were not suggested by every page of the text from the outset, would be sufficiently explained by the list of eight modern writers whom Mr. Stewart proposes to examine. Shaw and Kipling (and why not Wells too?)—if 'growing-point' is to intimate the criteria by which James, Conrad and Lawrence are distinguished as pre-eminently the foci of that profound exploratory and creative force which marks, and makes, the great artist, what have Shaw and Kipling to do with it? They would certainly have their place in any real attempt to write the history of English literature in the period that has been entrusted to Mr. Stewart. But the point now to be made is that his volume of the Oxford History of English Literature doesn't go in for history. Here we have the ironical upshot of the 'civilisa- tion' that produced the History and the contribu- tor to it: you can't say that his volume represents the recognition that a real literary historian must be a critic; for it represents the abandon- ment of history for what offers itself as criticism or nothing. Mr. Stewart devotes to Shaw and Kipling the same kind of study as he devotes to James, Yeats, Conrad and Lawrence. And when we read what he has to say of any of those four we find ourselves commenting that a critic of a major writer of our time must beyond question be an intelligent literary his- torian—which Mr. Stewart is not.

His bow to history in the individual critiques is mainly a matter of 'ancestors' and 'progenitors' and 'pointing forward to.' Practising this mode, he tells us some surprising things. He tells us, for 'instance, that The Princess Casamassitna was the progenitor of The Secret Agent—and thinks so highly of the perception that he in- forms us of it again, unaware that The Princess Casatnassitna, one of James's most embarrassing failures, is so feeble a work that it couldn't have begotten anything, and alat, in the intended theme and interest it presents, it has nothing in common with The Secret Agent. (But it has something, retorts Mr. Stewart; like. The Secret Agent, it deals with conspiratorial revolutionary violence— there's a river in Macedon and a river in Mdn- mouth.) One could compile from the volume, picking the more betraying things of the kind, a rich sottisier. It's enough that, for him, Dr. Sloper of Washington Square is a hard unfeeling father—as-in The Heiress.

There is of course an introduction in which Mr. 'Stewart makes a show of establishing an historical background for his critiques. It does nothing but expose the significance of his mode of wit—that is, the inertly conventional nature of his valuations (even when they are inconsistent with one another), and the absence in him Of any but a journalist's idea of what the relevant history would be. We see that he has read G. M. Young's Victorian England and G. K. Chester- ton's The Victorian Age in Literature:

In 1888 Matthew Arnold dies, T. S. Eliot is born. Arnold's niece, Mrs. Humphrey Ward . . . Adam Bede appeared in 1859, and Arnold's Literature and Dogma fourteen years later. Kipling's 'Recessional' was printed in The Times on 17 July 1897. Mr. Eliot was to have Thoughts After Lambeth in 1931. . . . When we consider against George Eliot's achievement and Arnold's what Mr. Gladstone and others were prepared to applaud in Mrs. Ward, we must suspect a seeping away of the intellectual energies of the time from the areas where they had hitherto been intensively at play . . . when we mark the tone of Mr. Eliot's theological discourses and their general odd- man-out effect we are made sharply aware of something already sufficiently evident. . . . Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh . . . cannot be called a less serious book than Adam Bede. Yet it seems to celebrate the achieving of a confident and cheerful irreverence incon- ceivable in the most assured agnostic of the mid-Victorian period. It rings out Clough and Hardy as it rings out Canon Butler himself. It rings in Shaw and Wells. (Page 2.) The banality of this is just what it appears to be. Mr. Stewart means no more, intends nothing more profound, than the journalist who should write it would. It is the serving-up of mere superficial commonplace, requiring neither re- search nor thought. Indeed, it requires, to be passed as having been worth the writing and the reading, an absence of thought in the reader. When Mr. Stewart says of The Way of All Flesh that it cannot be called a less serious book than Adam Bede he makes it impossible to believe that he knows what he means—or if he does, means anything worth attending to—when he in- vokes his criterion for the real and profound kind of creativity with that phrase about /the 'growing-point.'

It is true that, in the cultural World of the New Statesman of the 1920s and of the reign of Mr. Kingsley Martin, Mr. Stewart's proposition about the two books wquld have received general assent as just, and obvious good sense. The New Statesman culture had behind it Bloomsbury—the original Bloomsbury. But of Bloomsbury, that immensely significant fact for any real history of modern English literature, Mr. Stewart says nothing: that is not the kind of relevant history it has ever occurred to him to think about; no one in the least acquainted With the kind of marketable talent he is known for would have supposed it had. But the editors of the Oxford History of English Literature chose him for the job.. What he hasn't done (I speak of the particular default) I obviously can't do for him in a review; but the reader whom I have in mind will have no difficulty in recognising from a hint or two what I am thinking of.

have intimated that I am not in the least dismissing Shaw, Wells and Kipling as relevant foci for the inquiry Mr. Stewart must be said to have undertaken—if, that is, he had known what his undertaking was. The great changes in civilisation represented by their appearance must be taken account of in any real attempt to write a history of modern English literature. This is a fact that Mr. Stewart stares at but doesn't perceive when he deals with poor James. He thinks Very poorly of The Tragic Muse, that magnificent Jamesian achievement (progenited- to adapt one of Mr. Stewart's critical terms— by certain scenes in Daniel Deronda) which 'is worth more than the whole lot of those late great novels which Mr. Stewart intensely admires but plainly doesn't know his mind about (for that is what his large-scale critical refinement amounts to). James has for theme in that book the .place of the artist in relation to English society. Of course,. 'society' for James (a truth not qualified—pare Mr. Stewart—by The Princess Casantassima) tends very„ much to be Society. This characteristic Mr. Stewart (who of course is strongly anti-snob—wasn't Blooms- bury, and the New Statetnan into Vvhich it ran on?) holds against James. It is an immediately relevant point that he gives an unenthusiastic (and wholly inadequate) account of that para- digm of Jamesian art, the very fine short story, 'The Lesson of the Master.' But it is The Death of the Lion' that gives him occasion for the explicit criticism (his.. irony, of • course, being urbanely civilised--has he not himself notoriously shown his ability to pick up, in a light but studious way, something from James?). What after all does the 'tragic fussing about the author- victim of that tale come to? And why does James spend so much of his later art ironizing the Philistinism and emptiness of the best people? If they were like that why not leave them alone? Why not drop Society and go elsewhere?

The blankness of such an attitude in a sell- proffering—and a sanctioned—authority on Henry James and the 'phase of English literature of which he is a key-figure makes one gape. One's answer involves some essential histocy- essential (I mean) for Mr. Stewart's critical under- taking. James's genius—conditioned by the upbringing and the consequent way of life that (oddly?) seemed to him natural-----being ,what it 'actually was, he thought of the people with whom as artist he was concerned as being (both in respect of theme and public) the cultivated well-to-do and socially Superior. In his prime he was forced to recognise that the well-to-do and socially superior were not, characteristically, cultivated in any sense relating to his art-- except as subjects for ironic contemplation.

We have here a major theme: the growing difficulty of the artist's position as the civilisa- tion we now have was developing. The reaction of the Nineties, the /Esthetic response, was of no help to James—a real creative writer. But the opening new century produced Blooms- bury which, consciously a focal creative milieu, associated a critical concern for literature, general enlightenment and the play of intelligence with social distinction ('Oh, Exclusion itself,' as Miss Tox said) and the art of living. Surely here James might find comfort and reassurance.

Actually, his sense of isolation and futility was intensified. Bloomsbury appreciated him? Mr. Stewart seems to think so. He refers respect- fully and at length to Mr. E. M. Forster's dis- cussion of James. One would dismiss that discussion as too silly to be significant, but for the fact that beyond question it represents the coterie climate—it represents Bloomsbury on James. Bloomsbury applauded Max Beerbohm's parody of James (and there is no sign that Mr. Stewart himself doesn't assume it ought to be applauded). But the parody is an obtuse and complacent offence that merely endorses the obtuseness and complacency that got in the way of the recognition James pined for and needed. Beerbohm also did a stupid and similarly malign cartoon of Conrad—who died of overwork, forced on him by lack of 'success.' And we re- member that both Mr. Forster. and Virginia Woolf exerted their critical authority in irresponsibly, carelessly and unintelligently unjust critiques of him which were decisively influential. But 1 mustn't pursue this line of history fur- ther. Instead I will refer briefly to another illustration of Mr. Stewart's being, with grave disadvantage to him as a critic, no literary his- torian. The difficulty of Yeats's creative achievement is that he undoubtedly brought off the tremendous feat of starting as a late- Victorian Romantic and emerging as a modern poet. On his own he proved that something could happen after Swinburne. It doesn't follow that he left any very substantial body of achieved creation. But there is no question here that interests Mr. Stewart. He is not interested at all in the nature and significance of Yeats's achievement in 'altering expression.' If he had been he would not have offered to 'appreciate' Yeats in isolation in that way: he Would have dealt with him in relation to that whole crucial chapter of English poetic history. Has such a book any respectable function? If so, what is it? The copious 'bibliography' will be of no use to the reader Who asks for guidance. It is worse than , undiscriminating; it is mis- directing and smothering in its 'scholarly' in- clusiveness. And Mr. Stewart's delicacy (shall we say?) has precluded his indicating which critics and works he himself has found of most use. He doesn't do that; quite the contrary.