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GEORGE LEVINE
which inevitably will cut it off from the ordinary man. (There is, by the
way, one "teacher" discussed in the book who, by implication, treats the
flesh and blood actualities of the classroom as Gross suggests no teacher
should want to-F. R. Leavis.)
Gross is aware of the implications of standards, their danger to
the ordinary man, and their necessity for serious critics. But as with so
much else in this book, he grants their importance in a context that
implies melancholy necessity. Still, some necessities are less necessary than
others, and if there is a villain of the piece (Gross will not explicitly
allow any), it is Leavis. The forebodings of Leavis's role are clear enough
in the summary of Desmond MacCarthy's position in English letters:
MacCarthy was not a strikingly original critic, nor even, in himself,
a particularly important one. His importance was simply that of
someone who helped to keep alive a tradition of breadth, enlighten–
ment, rational sociability, civilized forebearance . . . it
is
not a
tradition which was entirely superseded, even
in
the baton-swinging
1930's-though no doubt we should all
be
much more rigorous
and exacting today if it had been. Those of us, that is, who survived
to tell the story.
The animus against unqualified rigor is clear. And had Gross attempted
to find a language more likely to antagonize Leavis (it is hard to imag–
ine he didn't have Leavis in mind), he couldn't have done better. Rigor
as opposed to "rational sociability and civilized forebearance!" One
can hardly doubt where Leavis would stand if these were the options
(see his remarks about David Cecil or C. S. Lewis); there can be equally
little doubt about where Gross stands. The rhetoric is still largely that of
the judicious man who sees and values both alternatives, but the balance
is shaking. It shakes particularly in light of the way in which the
very prose is intended to manifest those qualities of "rational sociability
and civilized forebearance" it is describing.
Understandably, Leavis gets a more extended (and perhaps less
sociable) treatment than any other writer. In discussing him Gross's
rhetoric acquires its most intensely negative energy. The habit of judi–
ciousness remains, but it seems only a habit. Certainly it does insufficient
justice to Leavis' attempt (I do not say achievement) to bridge the gap
between rigor and the general experience of the culture with which
Gross is himself concerned. There may be, Gross says, some virtue in
the Leavisite insistence on criticizing popular culture, but the all-in–
clusiveness of the rhetoric of the early pages of Leavis and Thompson's
Culture and Environment
points toward
a state of mind in which only those in the 'classroom' are regarded
as having any chance of salvation-a classroom where increasingly
only one subject is taught, and there is only one teacher.
