SCRUTINY
"socially-conscious" cntlclsm of the thirties, or who tum
to
con–
temporary quotations in
Scrutiny
from Granville Hicks, Edmund Wilson,
or (at the other extreme) T . S. Eliot, will agree that
Scrutiny's
humanism
in politics has weathered the years remarkably well. But there is also,
especially among minor contributors to
Scrutiny,
a current of nostalgia
present also in Eliot, for an organic culture vaguely located in a
medieval-village world, or more precisely in Elizabethan or Jacobean
England. One writer on folk songs fondly places it in Appalachia!
But the belief in a possible society where more of the potentialities of
the individual might be realized and where the gap is less complete
between the vision of the good life held by the intellectual and that
held by the worker even if not realized at any point in history, remains
a necessary one. The value of the standard when applied with an
awareness of the complexities of actual situations past or present, ran be
seen in various
Scrutiny
essays, notably in the admirable review by
L.
C. Knights of Louis Wright's
Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan
England
(III).
II
A critical evaluation of society as of education is thus implied
everywhere in the more strictly literary contributions to
Scrutiny
from
the earliest to the latest issues. Though a surprisingly wide range of
subjects is represented in the critiques and reviews, including history,
anthropology, economics, philosophy, music and art, I shall speak only
of articles in literary criticism, limiting myself to the few areas in which
I can speak with moderate confidence. What shall we say of the
performance, if we take a broad look at the work of Leavis and Mrs.
Leavis, of Knights, Traversi, Turnell, Harding- the writers who have
established themselves, as Arnold would say, both by the "historical"
and the "real" estimates? The historical measure should be kept well in
mind, for we can hardly estimate the importance of these critics if we
cannot recall actually or imaginatively the impact of their criticism in
the period between the wars. In the thirties and forties Richardsian–
Empsonian attention to the workings of language--call it "ambiguity"
or "interinanimation"-still retained a dewy freshness, and to be con–
cerned about society was so very "concerning." For those of us who had
escaped from the impressionists and the philologists, to read Empson on
Marvell, or Knights on Jonson or Mrs. Leavis on lady novelists, or
Leavis on Yeats, Hopkins, and Forster was to breathe the breath of
life. "Life" is the significant word, for we had discovered critics who
