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9 F. R. Leavis: criticism and culture
Gary Day
Why include F. R. Leavis in a history of criticism and ~heory? Because he was the most
influential critic of his day. It is no exaggeration to say that, in a career spanning more
than forty years, from the late 1920s to the mid-1970s, Leavis changed the perception of
English literature and professionalized its study. Following T. S. Eliot's lead, he redefined
English poetry in terms of the seventeenth-century metaphysical tradition of John
Donne rather than the nineteenth-century Romantic one of Wordsworth. In typically
robust fashion, Leavis also proposed a 'great tradition' of novelists-Jane Austen, George
Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad-that critics have often used as evidence for their
claim that Leavis was a dogmatic figure with only a limited view of literature. What is less
often pointed out is that Leavis immediately went on to say that he supposed the view
would be confidently attributed to him that, except for these authors, there were no
novelists in English worth reading. Throughout his life, Leavis complained that he was
misrepresented, and with some justification. Despite his repeated claim that there was
no ideal condition of humanity to be found in the past, he found himself portrayed as a
man who harked back to a golden age. And even though he stated that he was in favour
of extending higher education to the utmost, he was still attacked for wanting to restrict
access to university.
How are we to account for these discrepancies? In part they are due to Leavis making
apparently conflicting claims. For example, although he approves, to use the current
term, of 'widening participation', he also asserts that only people of university quality
and with a positive bent for literature should be admitted to study English. To read Leavis
is to try to understand the relationship between such statements. Another reason for this
discrepancy is that critics demonstrate the strengths of their own positions by high-
lighting the weaknesses of their opponents, and they therefore tend to caricature a rival
rather than dwell on the complexity of his or her work. The result is that Leavis is often
portrayed as a conservative critic. His concentration on the individual work, how it
explores and enacts experience, has led many to assume that he had no interest in a
text's relationship to its context. In fact, Leavis consistently maintained that a tradition
of literature held out possibilities of growth and development that were denied by the
wider society. His work is therefore more radical than it first appears, particularly in its
attack on the spread of commercialism, which I would argue is still relevant today. There
are two aspects to Leavis's criticism, the literary and the cultural, and, beginning with the
latter, we will try to correct some of the distorted views of his work.
Leavis's cultural criticism
Both Leavis's cultural and literary criticism is based on the destruction of what he called
the 'organic community' by the advent of the machine and mass culture. Leavis's main
source for the organic community is the work of George Sturt, who owned a wheel-
wright's shop in Farnham, Surrey. Based on tradition, craft-work, and close personal
relationships, the organic community is harmonious, whereas industrial society, based
on rules, machines, and anonymity, is dissonant. Leavis's comments on culture belong
to a tradition dating back to at least the late eighteenth century, whose thinkers were
alarmed by the growing separation of the ec;onomy and society. Would commercial
values triumph over human ones? Wasn't personal well-being more important than
the pursuit of wealth? Shouldn't co-operation, not competition, be the ruling principle
of society? Leavis's interest in cultural matters was evident in his doctoral thesis, entitled
'The Relationship of Journalism to Literature: Studies in the Rise and Earlier Develop-
ment of the Press in England' (1924). His argument, in brief, was that the growth of the
press undermined a common culture by creating different markets for different tastes.
The constant reinforcement of these 'taste barriers' made it difficult for any one niche
group to find common ground with any other niche group. Consequently, there was no
agreement about what constituted 'standards', and in this situation the artist had little
choice but to write for a particular market rather than 'an educated public'.
Leavis's supervisor for his dissertation was the chair of the English Faculty at Cam-
bridge, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch. Affectionately known as 'Q', he imparted to Leavis the
idea that too great an emphasis on vocation and training in the culture led to a neglect of
other matters equally important to human development. The man who made Practical
Criticism the corner-stone of English at Cambridge, I. A. Richards, was another influence
on Leavis, particularly his view that mass culture encouraged people to prefer fantasy to
reality. From both men Leavis learnt that literature could be an antidote to the practical
orientation and superficial pleasures of modern society. We might almost say that the
study of literature as a university subject developed as a defensive reaction to the siren
calls of the cinema and cheap fiction.
Leavis believed that mass culture, along with industrialization, had destroyed an
authentic, unified culture, replacing it with a synthetic, divided one. A persistent mis-
conception is that Leavis defines culture purely in terms of high art. In fact, he insists
that culture, like all-important words, has more than one meaning. By using it to refer to
an art of living as well as literary achievement, Leavis anticipates how the term will be
deployed by later thinkers like Raymond Williams. As an example of the sort of culture
we have lost, Leavis offers us Elizabethan England, where, he claims, popular and