DAVID
J.
GORDON
97
"The quite unintentional is not part of communication." Again,
"If
the user is completely uncons'cious of the double meaning, it should
not count." Yet "there are different degrees of unconsciousness." And if
an ambiguity seems to correspond to inconsistencies which are typical
of a work or which illuminate the changing history of language, it may
add richness and force rather than create a muddle. Thus he can assert,
apropos of
Paradise Lost,
"That [Milton's] feelings were crying out
against his appalling theology in favor of freedom, happiness, and the
pursuit of truth was I think not apparent to him" -and add, in a note,
"the poem gets its great merit from presenting the real ambiguity of its
theme with such dramatic and insinuating power." An admittedly
"irrelevant" interpretation of two lines from Ben Jonson is neverthe–
less "not an accident": it is "meaning latent in the mode of action of
poetry." What Empson is reaching for is an expanded idea of inten–
tion, equated not so much with the will of a particular writer as with a
sort of collective mind responsive to the total situation of language at a
cultural moment.
Leavis, more interested in "true judgment" than verbal ambiguity,
addresses the text-writer relationship in a different way. He distin–
guishes between better and worse art according to how well the artist
knows and disciplines his emotions and how sensitive he is to the
opportunities of his language and form. Often Leavis seems to be the
purest kind of aesthetic critic (notably in "Thought' and Emotional
Quality," reprinted most recently in
The Living Principle),
intent
upon descriptive accuracy and the pressure of feeling upon language.
Yet moral argument is never far behind and sometimes rather too near.
David Lodge (in
The Language of Fiction)
suggests that verse brings
out the aesthetic critic in Leavis more fully than prose. This seems true.
Discussing verse, he usually conveys an implicit appeal to a
consensus- "this is so, isn't it?" -whereas in discussing prose, he tends
to preach positive moral tone, belittling a Swift for lacking it, indulg–
ing a Lawrence for displaying it.
The combination in Leavis of descriptive accuracy and moral
readiness leads sometimes to the result that other critics find themselves
able to use the same evidence as the basis for quite different evalua–
tions.
C.
S. Lewis memorably observed:
"It
is not that [Leavis] and I see
different things when we look at
Paradise Lost.
He sees and hates the
very same things I see and love." Compare this to Alfred Kazin's shrewd
remark that Eliot said precisely the right things about Blake's imagina–
tive independence and drew the wrong conclusions. Or to numerous
observations on other Romantic poets by Winters, Tate, and Blackmur,
which someone more favorably disposed could accept as description
