F. R. Leavis and the Moral in Literature

Abstract

The idea that literature might properly be regarded as embodying moral ideas, and the related idea that literary criticism might properly be an evaluative, even morally evaluative, enterprise, are likely these days to be met with little more than a dismissive smile. The need even to consider ideas so worded, let alone to meet them in argument, is widely thought to have dissolved. The reasons for this shift of view — or rather, the various doctrines which constitute the changed viewpoint — have a wide currency, and I do not propose to discuss them. This does not mean that I think there is nothing to be learned from (for example) deconstruction, at least in its Derridean form. But my present focus is elsewhere. The two related ideas I referred to are, as I stated them, skeletal. In this paper I want to indicate a way of fleshing them out, thus to try to help revive ( a version of) a traditional ‘humanist’ conception of the nature and value of literature, and therefore of literary criticism.

There is a fair body of critical work on Leavis. Among the best of it is V. Buckley, Poetry and Morality, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), Ch. 6 and Ch. 7; J. Casey, The Language of, Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966), Ch. 8 and Ch. 9; and M. Tanner, ‘Literature and Philosophy’, New Universities Quarterly, (Winter 1975), pp. 54–64. Those who have sought to criticise Leavis from a post-modernist standpoint have for the most part shown little insight into his work: e.g. C. Belsey, ‘Re-Reading the Great Tradition’, in Re-Reading English, ed. P. Widdowson (London & New York: Methuen, 1982), and Critical Practice, (London & New York: Methuen, 1980), Ch. 1; and H. Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), Ch. 1 in an otherwise perceptive and judicious book. A partial exception is Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), Ch. 1 who spoils his brief but apt (as far as it goes) recapitulation by assuming that a sociological account of the origins of Leavis’s views suffices to discredit them.

I should like to register my indebtedness to a number of excellent articles on the moral in literature by S. L. Goldberg. These include: ‘Morality and Literature; with some Reflections on Daniel Deronda’, The Critical Review, XXII (1980), pp. 3–20; ‘Moral Thinking: The Mill on the Floss’, The Critical Review, XXIV (1982), pp. 55–79; ‘Agents and Lives: Making Moral Sense of People’, The Critical Review, XXV (1983), pp. 25–49; and ‘Literary Judgment: Making Moral Sense of Poems’, The Critical Review, XXVIII (1986), pp. 18–46. On these articles, and especially the last, I have drawn heavily in this paper.