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it is true, but also by gloomy tenacity of will. The Ververs are just
about as innocent as Eliot's Thomas
a
Becket, whose final temptation
is to use his spiritual power for worldly ends and "rule from the tomb."
They are akin to the alienated, discarnate Adamses, a type of Amer–
ican "idealist" that seems destined to play a crucial part in the con–
temporary world struggle for power. The crucial question about them
is not whether they are innocent, but whether they are evil. Mr. Leavis
does not sense either the toughness or the prescience in
The Golden Bowl.
Both James and Eliot learned early in their careers to address
the
English, if not in their language, at least
in
the language they
ought
to have had. Both had their English literary careers after absorb–
ing some very un-English impressions. In Eliot's case these included
modern French poetry, Dante, Harvard Buddhism, Mark Twain's Mis–
sissippi, and I do not know what other outlandish elements. And both
of them, late in their careers, entered a phase in which their literary
attainments in England came to have for them only a secondary,
symbolic value. I think it is significant that Mr. Leavis likes them both
best as English men of letters, and has little light to shed either on their
genesis or on their final explorations. It was from the early Eliot that
Mr. Leavis got his first clues to literary criticism. In this book he is
still
practicing that art, and in several places, notably the first essay,
"Mr. Eliot and Milton," he feels obliged to defend it from Mr. Eliot
himself as he is now, with his political and religious preoccupations, his
comparatively tepid enthusiasm for literature as such.
We must be very grateful that Mr. Leavis is all in literature, for
in that lies the inestimable value of his work. I hope that modern
criticism will not stay in its present phase; Mr. Leavis' virtuosity shows
that it has reached a point of mastery after which some new develop–
ment is needed. But Mr. Leavis' trained sensibility is something which
is and will continue to
be
badly needed, and every part of his book
shows it. Consider the way he pays his respects to the Cambridge in–
tellectuals who patronized D. H. Lawrence: "Articulateness and un–
reality cultivated together; callowness disguised from itself in articu–
lateness; conceit casing itself safely in a confirmed
sense
of high sophis–
tication; the uncertainty as to whether
one
is
serious
or not taking itself
for ironic poise: who has not at some time observed the process?" Who
indeed?-though usually in academic circles without much of the Cam–
bridge brilliance. Mr. Leavis' attack, in defense of literary sensibility,
is itself literature, accurate and final and heartening as only excellent
writing can be.
Francis FerCJusson
