304
REUBEN A. BROWER
critical reading and wntmg, there is no question in this plan for
General Education of directly teaching values or of handing over an
approved philosophy. The aim is to keep putting the student m
situations where he can and must make his own discriminations.
Here we must add "his own" with a difference: for Leavis is
thinking of English undergraduates in an ancient English university,
immersed in a traditional civilized way of life.
In
the "Sketch for an
English School," the adjective has a peculiar stress. No American
university could take the plan over directly, nor could American teachers
or students quite belong in it.
In
drawing up his program both for
education and for criticism Leavis saw with admirable clarity that he
must think locally and particularly to think and act effectively. Yet
it can be said without paradox that
Scrutiny--in
part because it kept a
window open on the American intellectual scene-pointed to the pos–
sibility of a Jamesian ideal cultural community that if the term were
not soiled we might call "Atlantic."
Scrutiny
has in fact anticipated in
attitude that has now become fashionable in English literary periodicals.
From the early numbers of the journal, where the editors referred a
little too enthusiastically to the
New R epublic
and the
Hound and Horn
as exemplary publications,
Scrutiny
gave attention, at times over-generous
and at times condescending, to American writers and American literary
and social critics: among others, to Dos Passos, James, Hawthorne,
Twain and Santayana, Edmund Wilson and Veblen, and the Lynds of
Middletown.
In
view of the fairly common notion among American
academics that
Scrutiny
criticism is anti-historical, it is amusing to recall
that an early English critic of Leavis's plan for an English school chided
him
for giving too much emphasis to history. Those who are alarmed
a:bout two or more cultures might note the inclusion of the history of
science in the plan and the pieces on scientific thought scattered through
various issues of
Scrutiny.
Leavis can say with some justification in his "Retrospect" that
writers for the journal demonstrated at an early date the importance of
sociological studies for literary criticism.
In
that remote era when
critical journals were expected to have a political line,
Scrutiny
was often
attacked even by friendly readers (including Santayana) for failing to
make its position clear.
In
various pronouncements, beginning with
"Under Which King, Bezonian?," the editors maintained "in face of
the Marxist attitude, that to recognize the influence of the economic
process and of material conditions generally upon culture should be to
recognize also a need to assert a certain autonomy of the human
spirit ..." (III). Readers who can recall pro-Marxist or typically
