THE STATE OF CRITICISM
175
situation as well. In so recruiting Eliot for my bias, I want nevertheless
to remember the Yiddish proverb that "for example is no proof."
The question of the relation between literary theory and critical
practice was raised several decades ago in a public letter sent by Rene
Wellek, a literary historian and theorist, to F.R. Leavis, a literary critic.
Where, demanded Wellek, is your theory? How do you explain or
control or justify whatever it is you do? Most of us might be intimi–
dated by this query, as if called to a court of judgment at Yale. Leavis
was not. A critic, he replied, might just be " the better for a philosophi–
cal training [that is, in aesthetic theory] but if he were, the advan–
tage ... would manifest itself partly in a surer realization that literary
criticism is not philosophy."
Well, then, what
is
it? I would say that it is the disciplined act of
reading "simply to help us [that is, others] with works of art. " This act
of reading requires the capacity, partly intuitive, to see works of art in
their community with others and partly to see them in their fragile
uniqueness. "The critic's aim," writes Leavis, "is, first, to realize as
sensitively and completely as possible this or that which claims his
attention; and a certain valuing is implicit in the realizing.... The
business of the literary critic is to attain a peculiar completeness of
response and to observe a peculiarly strict relevance in developing his
response into commentary; he must be on guard against abstracting
improperly from what is in front of him.... "
The charged and difficult words here are "peculiar completeness
of response" and " abstracting improperly. " Let me try to suggest what
Leavis means, or ought to mean, by providing two examples.
In reading the poems of Robert Frost we may wonder why we so
often hear, especially in those we judge to be less than great, a jeer in
his voice. What does that jeer signify? Even moderately expert readers
are likely to recognize that this note, the description of which I have
barely begun , is special to Frost, not part of the common language of
American or modern poetry. Were that note all we encountered in
Frost's poems, they would hardly be worth our attention, but to miss it
would, I think, mean to fail in Leavis's "peculiar completeness of
response." That completeness requires a delicate balancing of Frost's
wish-the wish we conclude
to
be present
in
the poems-to convey
both
the tone of the sage and the tone of the simple feller, the inheritor
of wisdom and the tiller of soil, the mind superior to, indeed, con–
temptuous of intellectuals and the mind evidently uneasy with, per–
haps afraid of intellectuals. Now, properly to make this " peculiar
completeness of response" requires some knowledge, tactfully invoked,
