310
REUBEN A. BROWER
to
the Sonnets, Knights tactfully balances the claims of individual
sensibility and of the cultural setting.
One of the strongest among the older group of
Scrutiny
critics is
Martin Tumell, whose essays on French writers of the seventeenth
century are among the best examples in
Scrutiny
of the gift for renewing
literature from a past or comparatively alien culture. English speaking
readers who have difficulty in appreciating or sizing up the greatness
of Racine could hardly find a better start than in Tumell's brief note
of 1938 (VI). Tumell, like other
Scrutiny
critics of earlier literature,
has been criticized for defects in scholarship, most strenuously in a
review in
Scrutiny
itself (XVI). (In this instance and in many others,
the editors published in letters and reviews some of the most stringent
criticisms of writers for the journal.) John Speirs's essays on medieval
subjects have perhaps drawn most fire from specialists. Although a first–
rate medievalist has assured me that Speirs is less than first-rate, I
doubt whether it can be denied, as Leavis says, that Speirs has done
good service in "taking medieval literature out of the hands of the
specialists and professionals and laying it open to the cultivated reader
as living literature" (XX). As testimony to the need for someone to
perform this office, I may recall a year's study of Chaucer in which
a single critical remark was offered on the last day of the course, and
a course in middle-English dialects in which no hint was offered that
Gawain and the Green Knight
was of the greatest literary interest.
It
is
almost certain that the increased enthusiasm of late for medieval and
Anglo-Saxon studies is in great measure traceable to writers like Speirs
and Pound, who have made the young certain that there
was
an earlier
English literature to be excited :about. It is to be hoped that the next
generation of medievalists will be both better scholars and better literary
critics.
If
we tum to minor contributors to
Scrutiny,
especially in the later
volumes, we are less troubled by defective scholarship than by the
relative uniformity of tone, the recurrence of the same or similar stances,
and the predictability of judgments. Examples can be found without
much effort, though less easily than the too eager opposition would
have us believe. Of the sometimes disheartening exchanges between
Leavis and various correspondents, no complete outsider can say much.
Anyone who has had a few glimpses of Leavis's early years at Cambridge
will agree that here is a subject calling for the exercise of tragic insight,
that defenses and explanations cannot now undo the damage done,
or clear away the misunderstandings that have grown up on all sides.
Let it be remembered in charity that
Scrutiny
was carried on under the
