SCRUTINY
299
E. M. Forster. They claimed Moore as their philosophic guide, though
Moore said he never "did know" what "The Method" was that they
regarded as his. Their cult of the "moment" reached back to Pater and
the fading Aesthetic movement of the nineties. For this Cambridge,
Clive Bell
(Art)
was an aesthetician of some importance, and Strachey
a major critic and an authority on French literature. (In the early
thirties, Strachey's Home University
Landmarks
was regularly being
recommended to Cambridge undergraduates.)
In addition to these more novel forms of literary life there was at
Cambridge as at other universities what
Q.
D. Leavis has described
as "the academic English club." In a brilliant and amusing essay, "The
Discipline of Letters, a Sociological Note" (XII), Mrs. Leavis defines the
distinguishing marks of the discipline as represented by the late George S.
Gordon and the Oxford School of English: "On the one hand linguistic–
philological studies as an end in themselves. On the other, scholarship–
the ideal of perfect editing...." "We see Gordon," Mrs. Leavis observes,
"through his letters, filling all the university posts he can, at home and
abroad, with men who have proved their right to 'a senior post' by editing
something, and with every conviction of righteousness spreading despair
and blight on university students throughout the British Commonwealth."
It is fair to add that this type flourished more abundantly in Oxford
than in Cambridge-which is one more reason why
Scrutiny
came into
being where it did.
Upon this academic world at once revolutionary and inert, Leavis
impinged. He in fact continued and completed the local revolution,
carrying it sharply into the world of education, where Richards had
already made his force felt with the disturbing revelations in
Practical
Criticism
of how students of literature actually did read. The way that
Leavis and
Scrutiny
were to take is indicated by his pamphlet of 1930,
Mass Civilization and Minority Culture
and by
Q.
D. Leavis's
Fiction
and the Reading Public,
of the same year. Both titles make clear what
was to become clearer in time, that Arnold was the impelling example
for Leavis even more than Eliot or Richards. Behind Arnold stands
Dr. Johnson:
Scrutiny
belongs to the eighteenth-century tradition of the
personal periodical. As in the
Idler
and the
IOOmbler,
the discipline of
letters embraces the discipline of the soul and of society. When Eliot
mistakenly diagnosed Arnold as "rather a propagandist for criticism
than a critic," he was indicating what is for Leavis the central business
of criticism: the preparation of a community of mind in which the
"best that is known and thought" can freely circulate and prepare
