SCRUTINY
307
carried us through "disciplined relevance of response" beyond the words
to a sense of "what the living thing feels like...."
The most remarkable thing for many of us was to find works of
earlier writers treated with this immediacy of concern and works by
contemporaries explored with an equally vivid sense of their relation
to a living past. Eliot had led the way, but by the mid-thirties his
criticism began to seem too remote in tone, too diplomatic in strategy
for a generation insistently faced with the choice of life in so many
areas outside literature. We were asking, with Dr. Johnson, that literature
teach us in some way how to live life or endure it. Hence the excitement
with which we read those earlier volumes of
Scrutiny.
Consider for
example volume II (1933-34), and in particular some of the surprises
and satisfactions it offered. Re-imagine the surprise of encountering in
1933 an essay on Pope that placed him in the line of Metaphysical Wit.
(Remember that the Metaphysicals as we read them were contempor–
aries.) More important was to witness the skill and energy with which
Leavis rescued Pope both from Victorian distaste and over-easy Sitwellian
embrace of "the perfect craftsman" and "the wasp of Twit'nam." For
the reader of English poetry to hear a critic write with conviction of
Pope's moral allegiances was a major recovery. The analysis in this
same volume of Swift's irony brought fresh recognition of the negation,
the panic and emptiness, that more comforting interpretations had
shielded us from. It was equally salutary to see as early as 1933 Joyce's
"liberties with English" in "Work in Progress" definitely placed by
contrast with Shakespeare's. Although the review in which Leavis makes
the comparison is weakened by some longing for a "national culture
rooted in the soil," the point that is made and well made is that
Shakespeare's success depended in part on a cultural
order
now lost.
In the same volume Leavis reviews Yeats's
Winding Stair
both fairly
and generously, and with a happy lack of the solemnity and ingenious
pedantry now in vogue. MacLeish's
Conquistador- it
was an event in
1932- is neatly related to Pound and-another surprise-warmly recom–
mended. Faulkner's
Light in August
is handled with a similar temperance
and related to "that great book,
Huckleberry Finn."
There are other
novelties in pieces by other hands: Miss Bradbrook on the "caricature"
and "Chaucerian" element in
Hero and Leander;
John Speirs reminding
us that Dunbar is "modern" by being "medieval," that Burns acquires
a new critical interest when related to the Scottish vernacular tradition;
and Mrs. Leavis in the first of her pieces on the sociology of literature,
demonstrating a shrewd and at that time less common awareness of the
"differences that result from living in the world of letters and living
