858
PARTISAN REVIEW
is priggish and insular (and inconsistent). What was then
Work in Pro–
gress
Mr. Leavis calls a piece of "sophistication, cosmopolitan
if
not
very subtle," and against it raises the angry philistine cry of cultural
decadence (though
The Waste Land
meets with his approval). In–
volved in this lack of sympathy is the historically inappropriate standard
of the Johnsonian Common Reader, in terms of which the "anti-high–
brow publics" and the "'modernist' publics" of today are a pair of
aberrant extremes, there being "no public of Common Readers with
whom the critic can rejoice to concur. He cannot leave his standards
to look after themselves." The implication here-that simple benighted–
ness, "cultural decline," is responsible for this state of affairs-is mis–
leading and unhistorical. Mr. Leavis is obliged to criticize criticism for
the same reason that Eliot writes poetry about writing poetry: in an
age that calls all things into question, literature, to continue to exist at
all, has been compelled to tum in upon itself in an attempt to elucidate
an indestructible essence.
*
The modem poet and critic require from
their audience, not the concurrence, possible only in a stable culture, of
Common Readers, but a faith on the reader's part in the validity of
their enterprise. The avant-garde public, for all its vagaries and mis–
takes, gave the first hearing to, and consistently supported, among other
things, the only serious poetry written in this century. This too ought to
be recalled
if
one is going to recall that it once thought
Point Counter
Point
a great novel.
But, having noted these things, one can go on to say that Mr. Leavis
is a critic of genuine personal taste and independent conviction, though
the evidence for this is less in these pages than in such a work as
The
Great Tradition.
Judgment is paramount in all his writings; there is
a refreshing absence of coyness in his constant committing of himself
to an opinion about how good something is. Some of these opinions are
egregiously wrongheaded-as for instance the denunciatory asides Mr.
Leavis directs at Flaubert in
The Great Tradition;
but then, how pleas–
ant to read a critic willing so plainly to mark out the limits of his sensi–
bility. There are critics who can speculate boldly about literature, their
pages strewn with references to a hundred books, and never once imply
a judgment that challenges the "best" opinion. How
reasonable
they are,
how urbane their taste; everything is "significant"-and everything is
as good as everything else. Mr. Leavis is not one of these.
It is easy to lose patience with a kind of criticism that says A is
better than B but not so good as C; that, to praise Jane Austen, must
• See "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," by Clement Greenberg,
Thtl Partisan Reader.
