298
REUBEN A. BROWER
Perhaps I can bring home to American readers what the arrival of
Scrutiny
meant by indulging in a personal reminiscence or two, since I
had the good luck to have been on the scene and to have overheard some
of the talk when
Scrutiny
was being invented. For a graduate fresh from
a fresh-water college and the teaching of the New Humanists, where, as
Santayana said, the "cry" was
Let us
be
well-balanced, let us be cultivated, let us be high–
minded; let us control ourselves, as if we were wild; let us
chasten ourselves, as if we had passions. . .
(Quoted by Q. D. Leavis, IV2)
-for anyone bred in such simplicities, it was a considerable shock to
encounter the Cambridge and England of Richards, Eliot, Frazer, and
G. E. Moore. To find as I did, that one's supervisor of studies was a
young man with the eye of Blake and a sensitive and sharply outlined
profile, his collar Byronically open at the throat (in the England of
1930!), with a voice of unforgettable timbre and incredibly persuasive
power, to find an ally against the academic who was at once morally
intense and sardonically irreverent! And what did the fresher do? He
went to the nearest bookstore and bought at once:
The Principles of
Literary Criticism, The Sacred Wood
and
Poems,
1909-1925,
To the
Lighthouse,
and
A Passage to India.
He had joined the revolution.
The revolution had of course begun elsewhere, with Pound, Eliot,
Yeats and Hulme (among others). But by 1930, Cambridge had a going
literary revolution of its own, related to what was happening in London,
but deriving from local philosophic and critical habits of mind ("What
do you
mean?"
had been the watchword at Cambridge long before
The
Meaning of Meaning).
Richards had brought out
Practical Criticism
in
1929 and was now lecturing on modern poetry and "the philosophy of
rhetoric." Basil Willey was giving the lectures that were to become
The Seventeenth Century Background.
A young poet-critic had just gone
down after writing a book enigmatically entitled
Seven Types of Am–
biguity,
and somewhere in a cave-like chamber Wittgenstein sat darkly
meditating to the dedicated few.
But there was also another Cambridge, the literary and intellectual
culture that may be described as "King's College-Bloomsbury." The
Two Memoirs
of
J.
M. Keynes sums up perfectly the attitudes and
allegiances of the group that included the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey, and
2. Roman numerals throughout the article refer to volumes of
Scrutiny.
There is
an excellent index.
