Reuben A. Brower
SCRUTINY : REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN
The republication of
Scrutinyl
is
a cultural event-a Scru–
tmIZer might say--of some importance, a generous recognition of the
fact that the journal and the movement behind it formed a revolutionary
episode in the history of education and of literary criticism. For
Scrutiny
to be republished by the Cambridge University Press is a tribute both
to Dr. Leavis and Mrs. Leavis and to that ancient University-a
characteristically English gesture that would be hard to match in this
country. Suppose that a brash young instructor in one of our older
universities had started a journal in which he published to the world
a plan of studies that was
to
serve as a model for his department and
for humane education generally, a plan that would radically alter the
habits of thinking of both teachers and students. Then let us envisage
the same university thirty years later consecrating this effrontery by
re-issuing the journal and advertising it as "worthy to rank with the
great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." We may
well wonder whether an American university press would be capable of
a similar gesture, at once so generous and so cannily respectable.
For
Scrutiny
represented the least forgivable of revolutions, a
revolution from within the academy:
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what 'Other people think.
..
Hence the cries of pain with which the publication was greeted in
university circles, both English and American. But though
Scrutiny
proved
to be Cambridge's severest critic, it was very much an expression of
the Cambridge mind, and a local outgrowth of a literary revolution
that had been going on in England for some twenty or more years.
1. Scrutiny: A Quart<'rly Revitlw.
Reissued in 20 volumes 1932-1953. New York:
Cambridge University Press: $125 the set; $6.50
per
volume.
