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most difficult circumstances: with no angelic or official support, with
little advertising, without an office staff, and for a number of years
under the most frustrating wartime conditions. That it existed, that it
grew and continued to grow, is an achievement little short of heroic.
A journal in the personal Johnsonian tradition has back of it a John–
sonian life.
It is time to say something about the achievement as a whole,
as an expression of a mind and as a revolution in the teaching and
criticism of literature. Viewed chronologically, the latest volumes will
strike most readers as less alive than those of the thirties and early
forties. There are fewer discoveries either by way of subjects or writers,
although we must make an exception for Marius Bewley's illuminating
studies of Hawthorne and James. Nor can we overlook Leavis on
Lawrence or Knights on
Troilus
or Traversi on
Lear.
The best of
Scrutiny
continues to be very good indeed. The campaign for Lawrence, which
began with the first issue, is a good example of the importance of
Scrutiny
as a force for the criticism of literature and society. The essays
that were later included in Leavis's book often call too persuasively for
assent, assent which I for one am usually ready to give, though with an
uneasy feeling that more is affirmed than shown. But those who remember
the criticism of Lawrence in the thirties will know that the case had
to be put strongly to be heard at all. At one extreme there was Middleton
Murry proclaiming
The Plumed Serpent
as Lawrence's greatest work;
at the other, Eliot damning him as a "rotten" influence. Leavis brought
attention back to where it should be directed,
to
the fiction. It is the
quality of attention elicited by Leavis and the major
Scrutiny
critics that
is worth insisting on again: an almost tactile and sinuous response to
the working of language, the most searching inquiry into the literary
experience, but with a mind pressing toward the evaluation of the kind
of life implied for the individual and society, not forgetting that any
estimate must be tempered by direct experience of the tradition of
civilized life in England and in Europe.
To demand for any writer attention of this order is in itself an
act of evaluation, and readers who have been unable to get past the
"dislodgment" of Milton should consider what has happened. Milton
has not been dislodged, nor has he been put back on the shelf with
the great unread, or if read, to be enjoyed as "a temple of sound" or
commended as a forerunner of the New Humanism (so Milton was
saved for my generation). His poetry in its full dramatic and philosophic
range has been attended
to
and revived-where revival is possible-for
a new generation of readers.
