SCRUTINY
313
One could say something of the same sort for many writers that
Scrutiny
has helped) not to re-establish- many of them were too well
"established" in popular or academic taste--but
to
bring back into the
current of imaginative and moral life that flows through and beyond
classrooms and literary coteries. We could cite among other examples:
Pope and poets of the Augustan line through Crabbe, Wordsworth,
Arnold and Leslie Stephen, Jane Austen, Dickens, and George Eliot,
James and Hawthorne.
It
is true, as it was true of the criticism of
Johnson and Arnold, that sometimes the moral judgment enters at too
early a stage in the discussion. Numerous particular judgments will
undoubtedly seem wrong or exaggerated to the most tolerant of readers.
But it may also be said at the risk of committing a bull, that though
the judgments offered in
Scrutiny
are on occasion wrong, they are
relevantly wrong. "Relevantly," because they are deliberately and clearly
directed to the great questions that must be attempted though they
can never be finally answered. For a good example, consider Leavis's
comments on Quentin Anderson's study of the influence on James of his
father's symbolic system.
In
discussing Anderson's discovery, Leavis
dismisses
The Ambassadors
as a "feeble piece of word-spinning," but in
the course of making these and similarly trenchant criticisms, he points
firmly to the kind of critical business neglected by Anderson: Anderson's
discovery is interesting and may not be irrelevant, but "his use of his
key seems to be something apart from his critical sensibility." The job
of evaluating the later novels is left to one side and remains to be
done.
It
can be clearly advanced only by essaying some kind of answer
to the question of "What to do, how to live?" which the later novels
pose so irritatingly for the responsible reader.
We return to
Scrutiny
then not to agree--I rarely read more than
three or four pages without a rise of temperature--but to renew our
vision of the full duty of the critic. The sense we recover, especially in
returning to the volumes of the earlier decades, is of "reading for our
lives." So we must, if we regard the critic's business as more than
politely placing works in an agreeably disjunct past or a present
aesthetically distanced from where we live. The importance of the
republication of
Scrutiny
is not that it will forward certain social and
moral doctrines or particular literary judgments, but that it may remind
us of work to be done. No one will suggest, not Leavis himself, as he
acknowledges in his "Retrospect," that
Scrutiny
should be revived.
Whatever might be possible in England, it clearly would be impossible
here.
It
always was. No American, even in the thirties, could speak with
Scrutiny's
assurance of
"the
tradition."
It
is our complex fate to be
