308
REUBEN A. BROWER
below it in the world of journalism." (The period she referred
to
was
1890-1914.)
One impression that comes out strongly from re-reading
Scrutiny
is the excellence
0'1
Mrs. ·Leavis's contributions, the originality and
incisiveness of her approach, the verve of her brilliantly ironic style,
and her power of discovering new interest in fashionable and less
fashionable writers. It has long been a pity that her essays on Jane
Austen have not been available in book form, for whether or not we
accept her reconstruction of the history of
Mansfield Park,
we must
recognize that with D. W. Harding she gave a new strength and force
to the criticism of Jane Austen. Another volume could well be collected
from her reviews of fiction. In her evaluations of Edith Wharton and
Henry James she expressed some necessary
if
unheeded reservations about
going along with the rising Jamesimania. But perhaps her best work
is to be seen in her admirable studies of nineteenth-century intellectuals.
In the essays on Sidgwick, Haddon, and Stephen Mrs. Leavis does a
remarkable job of analyzing and recovering another Cambridge "culture,"
one that also helped determine the character of the criticism published
in
Scrutiny.
The two closely related pieces on Santayana, both of them
amusing and sharp, define beautifully his value as a critic of literature
and of English and American intellectual life, although in stressing
Santayana's Latin character, Mrs. Leavis overlooks the influence of
his proper Bostonian social milieu.
Leavis's major contributions to
Scrutiny,
the essays on poetic
tradition, on the novel, and on Lawrence, are so well known in book
form, and their effect on current critical opinion is so generally
recognized as
to
need no comment here. Readers who know Leavis
only in the later polemical phase should not miss the finely appreciative
review of Hopkins's letters (IV), the well-nigh perfectly balanced
estimate of Forster (VII), the shrewd essays on Auden (V, IX) , the
more than generous criticism of Eliot's later poetry (XI, XII). Nor
should one miss the well argued answer to Wellek, "Literary Criticism
and Philosophy," which defines so well the distance between Leavis's
approach to the poem as expressive act and that of a critic who "assumes
too easily that the poet's essential 'belief is what can be most easily
extracted as such from his works by a philsopher" (VI).
Leavis's masterly-if one-sided-interpretation of
Othello
appears
in
the same volume with Traversi's interpretation of
Coriolanus,
a critical
"revival" of the play that demonstrates admirably the connection between
"the personal 'tragedy' of Coriolanus" and "the wider social study."
Though Leavis influenced both Traversi and Knights in their criticism
