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PARTISAN REVIEW
new "science" of human behavior, then we have a considerable distance
to go before resigning ourselves to a regime of total manipulation. Its
practitioners are in the stage of alchemy, not of chemistry. Probably
that
is
why they proclaim so loudly that they are on the verge of
dis–
covering the philosopher's stone.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
THE INFLUENCE OF MR. LEAVIS
THE IMPORTANCE OF SCRUTINY. Edited by Eric Bentley. George W.
Stewort, Inc. $5.75.
Though F. R. Leavis is a first-rate critic, and he dominates
this collection,
it
is rather a duB book. So much of
it
is given over to
an arid defense of the autonomy of literary criticism:
it is
not literary
history, says Mr. Leavis in reply to F. W. Bateson ; not philosophy, in
reply to Rene Wellek and George Santayana; not a new science, in
reply to I . A. Richards.
"If
I profess myself so freely to be no philoso–
pher," Mr. Leavis says,
"it is
because I feel that I can afford my mod–
esty; it is because I have pretensions-pretensions to being a literary
critic." Such a statement evades the very question
it
seems to answer.
Of course the critic
is
no philosopher. But at the practical level at
which criticism is carried on, literature only reluctantly admits of such
distinctions;
it is
impure and keeps stubbornly propounding us extra–
aesthetic problems. The trick is to deal with them and yet remain a
literary critic. How priggish Mr. Leavis' declaration sounds when it is
set off against what Eliot has said, who
is
also concerned to defend the
autonomy of literary criticism: "You can never draw the line between
aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism; you cannot draw a
line between criticism and metaphysics; you start with literary criticism,
and however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier
into something else sooner or later. The best you can do is to accept
these conditions and know what you are doing when you do
it.
And,
on the other hand, you must know how and when to retrace your steps.
You must be very nimble."
There is something of this priggishness about
Scrutiny
generaBy,
and it prompts the editor of this book priggishly to praise
it
for refusing
to foBow the "fashion of the decade-Cynicism in the Twenties, Marx–
ism in the Thirties, Existentialism and Crisis Theology in the Forties."
Scrutiny's
detachment has its value, but it springs as much from narrow
