SCRUTINY
101
sensibility and intelligence for the creation and evaluation of works
of literature.
The
Scrutiny
movement was above all educational in aim and
in
action, the effecting of a critical revolution through a revolution in
literary education. The journal itself is a reoord, and an impressive one,
of the kind of engagement with literature that has characterized Leavis's
own teaching and that of his pupils from Manchester to Malaya. It is
not possible to assume the proper stance in reading
Scrutiny,
to "go at
it" in the right way without keeping in mind this concern with education
in the broad Arnoldian sense. Readers who
go
to these volumes only
in order to collect opinions and judgments (there are plenty of them!)
are liable to be either too easily converted or too easily infuriated.
We do not read
Scrutiny
to
reach conclusions, but to share the excitement
of the journey, to take part in an athletic encounter from which we
emerge with a heightened awareness of what it is to read, and what
it is to exercise literary and moral discrimination. We shall not travel
far in these remarkable volumes without feeling how often the explora–
tion of literature in other journals is confined by academic and social
convenience, to what a degree the politics of literary or professional
life enervate and inhibit both insight and evaluation.
The main emphasis of
Scrutiny's
educational program cannot be
separated from its critical program : the insistence on the exercise of
literary sensibility as at once literary in the strict sense (referring to
the use of words "here" and "here") and as moral in the most personal
and the largest social meanings of that term. The choice between poems
is a choice between lives, and a choice between lives implies a choice
between societies. But no choice whatever is possible without the finest
individual response to the expression of the poet, the novelist, the
dramatist. What surprised readers early and late was that Leavis and
his colleagues insisted on adding to this conventional list of creative
writers the historian, the philosopher, the sociologist, the anthropologist,
in short all writers who are engaged in the business of evaluating and
shaping the world in which we live. With close reading of texts
American teachers and critics are sufficiently familiar, but the typical
explications "produced" (too often the right word) in this country are
not to be confused with the characteristic explorations of Leavis and
his colleagues. It is ironic that the academic reaction against writers for
Scrutiny
has often tended to take them for fellow-travelers of the New
Critics. The difference is a radical one: the typical
Scrutiny
critic is
always persuading us--at times too urgently-to reach the
right
reading,
