Chris Joyce
Abstract
This paper argues that although the names of Richards, Leavis and Empson are often associated in relation to the phase of literary study between the two world wars known as “Cambridge Criticism” or “Cambridge English”, it is Leavis who is pre-eminent among them in his literary-critical achievement and in the power of thought it exemplifies. The author attributes this to the profound seriousness of Leavis’s work, which can be discussed in terms of its moral depth. The term ‘moral’ here is not to be understood as denoting any wish on Leavis’s part to influence the conduct of individuals’ lives but as suggested by the quotation from his Richmond Lecture: “In coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for – what ultimately for? … the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling.” For Leavis, questions concerning the human significance of a literary work cannot be dissociated from its intellectual character or technical accomplishment. Going along with this is his recognition that discussion of literature must complete itself in valuation (for this is implicit in the agreement that there is something of value to discuss). These qualities are not prominent in the work of either of the two other critics. The influence of T. S. Eliot also has important bearings on the matters considered.
Keywords: Criticism, Significance, Valuation, Judgement, Cambridge
“I am not an idolator of T. S. Eliot”, wrote Leavis in a late essay (Valuation 129). That he was not is made plain in the long critique of Four Quartets which he wrote a few years before his death.1 Indeed, his eyes had lost their respectful innocence towards Eliot at least as early as the 1950s (Leavis, English Literature 137), witness his severe admonitions of the latter in D. H. Lawrence Novelist and in his 1958 essay “T. S. Eliot as Critic”. 2 That Eliot had been a major – perhaps the major – influence on Leavis’s early development as a literary critic is however undeniable – “never had criticism a more decisive influence” (‘Anna Karenina’ 178), he wrote of The Sacred Wood, which he bought when it came out in 1920 (but only slowly absorbed) and the essays in the Hogarth Press pamphlet of 1924, Homage to John Dryden. Going along with this early influence was Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism – also 1924 – the second edition of which (1926) contained a short appreciation of Eliot’s poetry. Together with Eliot’s early criticism, this book contributed to a major reorientation in English studies, especially at Cambridge – away from the impressionistic and belletristic ethos still dominant in the early 20th century towards a more rigorous (and even ostensibly scientific) concentration on close analysis of text and (in Richards’ case) the underlying reasons for what in modern terminology we would call the reader’s response to it.
It was Richards who introduced Eliot to the innovations in the recently established English Tripos at Cambridge and in the approaches to the study of literature which he and Mansfield Forbes (among others) were pioneering there. Richards had met Eliot as early as 1920. His book referred to above, together with his later Practical Criticism (1929), containing the famous protocols, would lead John Crowe Ransom to identify him as the progenitor of the ‘New Criticism’ (New Criticism 3), though Richards himself demurred (Letters 194). Eliot would later speak of the “lemon squeezer school” of criticism (On Poetry 113), probably with critics such as Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt in mind. The words of Richards’ title would of course enter the vocabulary of university English courses and have remained there. Leavis’s preferred term became “criticism in practice” (Living Principle 19), avoiding any suggestion that some form of theoretical criticism might be set over against or assumed to complement the “practical”. But no-one can question the immense significance of these two strikingly original books by Richards in relation to the development of literary study at Cambridge and more widely (albeit that they are less than wholly cogent in exposition of theory). No-one can question, I say, but …
Another early influence for Leavis was John Middleton Murry (on whom a separate paper would be required). It was probably Murry who put Eliot’s name forward as a successor to himself as Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. Eliot delivered the lectures in 1926 on The Metaphysical Poetry of the 17th Century. His interest in the Metaphysical poets, whom he referred to as “the successors of the dramatists of the 16th” would be decisively influential for Leavis (Leavis qtd in English Literature 72), as the opening chapter of his Revaluation (1936) makes plain. By the time Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry appeared in 1932, Eliot was well established both as poet and critic (though significant pockets of resistance to him remained, F. L. Lucas’s being a conspicuous case in point). That year saw the publication of his Selected Essays, coming ten years after The Waste Land and his founding of The Criterion, the journal he would edit until it ceased publication in 1939. Leavis thought of himself, with some justification, as a pioneering critic of Eliot. Although a chapter on Eliot had appeared in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle in 1931 (placing him in a wider European context) and Bonamy Dobrée had written on him in The Lamp and the Lute as early as 1929, Leavis’s analysis of the poetry up to ‘Ash-Wednesday’ in New Bearings was the most inward and sustained close reading that existed at that time.
A year before the appearance of New Bearings, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity came out. Leavis would review it with approbation – almost excitedly – in The Cambridge Review.3 Empson, then 23 years of age, had been Richards’ protégé. His book – though it would take up many of Richards’ ideas – was markedly different from anything the latter had produced but was at least as innovative in its own way. (We find Richards, incidentally, writing to Eliot in 1929 from Tsinghua University, commending Empson both as a young literary scholar and a poet).4 The work of both master and pupil was marked by characteristics that Leavis would later call, in another context, “brilliance” and “aplomb” (Thought 22). Neither term puts us in mind of Leavis. War service had held him back – he was just two years younger than Richards and eleven older than Empson – but in any case his disposition was quite different from either’s. He was given to careful (sometimes painful) thought but not to showiness. And here we approach the parting of the ways between Leavis and the others referred to and the beginnings of an explanation of my title, and of the ‘but’ I left hanging.
One aspect of Richards’ brilliance is exhibited in the following poem, probably written shortly after Leavis’s death in 1978 (Richards himself would die the following year):
‘To, Of & For FRL’
Embattled soul too early won to strife,
Our somewhat drear old Cambridge, the Rome
He gave his heart to, being his Imperial home.
This Coriolanus of our literary life,
Toil-racked, tyrannic, a bit too thick with Truth
And hardly ever teased or taxed by ruth
Held it his duty to tell us what is what
With a scrutannic eye on what the plebs can dish up
Being indeed himself an old style Bishop. (Letters 203)
Brilliant but unpleasant in its supercilious tone and unconscious irony, and certainly untaxed by ruth. When a young research student, L. C. Knights, set up a meeting of fellow researchers at Leavis’s house, attended by Richards, the latter, Leavis wrote, “dismissed with an amused superiority that was often close to a snigger every possibility of profitable research in English” (MacKillop142).5 The difference in attitude is shown if we turn up Leavis’s introduction to his Revaluation where he acknowledges a debt “to those with whom I have, during the past dozen years, discussed literature as a ‘teacher’: if I have learnt anything about … the profitable discussion of literature, I have learnt it in collaboration with them.” (See footnote 7.) For Leavis the idea of a university was of immense importance. He disliked to see it and the serious study of literature, which for him belonged to it centrally, disparaged. Although he would speak of the achievement of Scrutiny as having been won in spite of Cambridge,6 the actual University represented a kind of ideal for him and he felt a piety towards it. By contrast, Richards – who also took issue with Leavis (and QDL) over their concern with ‘mass civilization and minority culture’ – soon became bored both with academic life and with Cambridge,7 and after the early years had as little to do with either as he could contrive. By contrast again, Empson (encouraged by Richards towards an adverse view of Leavis) followed a distinguished if unconventional academic career principally (after his years in China) at the University of Sheffield (MacKillop 206-7).
But we must ask what in sum Empson’s career amounted to after the early work on ‘ambiguity’ and Some Versions of Pastoral that followed in 1935. As Thom Gunn (an astute poet-critic) observed in a letter to John Holmstrom, (Gunn Letters p. 20): “neither [Empson nor Graves] have, really, done anything big with their talent.” By the time of The Structure of Complex Words (1951) we feel that Empson has gone as far as his technique can take him. His astonishing intellectual agility in the analysis of poetry is in some respects unsurpassed, but Leavis’s “Notes in the Analysis of Poetry” which he reprinted in his penultimate book, The Living Principle,and the essays which enclose it, while providing exemplary close readings, also reveal a dimension largely absent in Empson (as in Richards also). We may call this the moral dimension. “Moral” not in the sense that Leavis ever offered to instruct pupils (or readers) in matters of personal morality, which he did not (indeed he would have flinched from such intrusions), but in the sense implied when he says that literary works enact their moral valuations. His concern was for the human significance of a work viewed inseparably from questions of its skilfulness and originality of thought. If we ask ourselves, for example, which of the two roughly contemporary essays on Measure for Measure, Leavis’s in The Common Pursuit (1952) (originally in Scrutiny X, Summer 1942) and Empson’s in The Structure of Complex Words (1951)(originally in The Southern Review, Autumn 1938), casts the more illumination on the play as a profound creative work rather than just a compelling collection of words on the page, it is surely the former. It is unlikely that either author had read the other’s essay although Empson’s first chapter contains a sneering reference to the ‘religious’ nature of Leavis’s view of great literature.
The moral depth of Leavis’s teaching – its seriousness – impressed itself on generations of his students. One such – an Indian (who would found his own journal on the model of Scrutiny on his return to India)8 – wrote, “I sometimes wonder whether Cambridge minus Leavis would have meant much to me” (Narasimhaiah 11).9 Another recalled that, although Leavis’s teaching concerned itself closely with the text in front of one, the discussion always seemed to involve everything one felt was most important in life – even the significance of life itself (Walsh 47). A surprising witness was Raymond Williams, who spoke of observing in Leavis “a condition I have only ever seen in one or two other men: a true sense of mystery, and of very painful exposure to mystery, which was even harder to understand because this was the man of so many well known beliefs and opinions” (Williams 22) . There is indeed – again in striking contrast to Richards and Empson – a sense in which Leavis’s seriousness takes on a religious intensity despite his implacable agnosticism (I am of course aware of the special case – or “case” – of Empson’s Milton’s God).
In his Richmond Lecture, Two Cultures? Leavis puts it to us that “In coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for – what ultimately for? … the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling” (Nor Shall 56). Elsewhere, he suggests that a great work of literature “explores and evokes the grounds and sanctions of our most important choices, valuations and decisions – those decisions which are not acts of will, but are so important that they seem to make themselves rather than to be made by us” (Preface 19).
My convinced view is that Leavis’s work exhibits great clarity and penetration of thought – much more so than Richards’. His thinking, however, always resolves itself into criticism in actual practice. And it assumes (rightly) the possibility of a common access to literature, an access that may be said to transcend or subtend whatever cultural, religious or other influences may have conditioned our ways of looking at the world: the possibility, that is, of the common pursuit of true judgement. Leavis observes seminally that a language (and there is, as he puts it, no such thing as language in general) is an immemorial phenomenon, continually manifesting creative change but never becoming the possession of any individual person. Great creative – that is to say, exploratory – writers avail themselves of a language they have inherited; a kind of gift from countless generations of speakers before them, and discover hitherto unrealised possibilities within it.
He was of course fully aware that there is no single right reading of a literary text, 10 but he believed that this does not and should not preclude the effort to achieve a commonality of assessment: a collaborative effort towards valuation in criticism. The element of appeal expressed in his well-known formulation, “This is so, is it not?”, is crucial to his critical practice notwithstanding the sometimes seemingly dogmatic nature of his judgements and mode of expression. He usually seems not to invite dissent, but a real understanding of his work means recognising that he genuinely sought, as he so often said, an answer in the form “Yes, but” in order that the critical argument might be advanced. It is by reference to these considerations: the idea that valuation in criticism (which must be implicit in the discussion itself) is continually collaborative (denying therefore the usefulness for literary-critical thought of such terms as “objective”, “subjective” and the derivative “inter-subjective”) just as the maintenance of a language itself (“there is no such thing as language in general”) is a continuously creative and collaborative achievement (Living Principle 58),11 that we can see how Leavis’s work differentiates itself equally from that of Richards, Empson (and, one must add, Raymond Williams), and the American ‘New Critics’.
No more than Empson (I must also mention) did Leavis relegate the significance of the cultural and historical context from which works of literature come – quite the reverse (see his late essay on Yeats, for example)12 – but he eschewed the sort of socio-political commentary that Empson offers in, for example, his commentary on Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in Some Versions. Leavis’s criticism is consciously (and in the early days expressly) apolitical; it especially marked him out in the era when “the Marxising expositors of human affairs thronged the arena” (Luddites 94); and that it is so, far from diminishing his stature, makes him, in my view, our transcendent critic.
It was (to return) the publication of Richards’ Coleridge on Imagination (1934) that finally precipitated the loss of respect that Leavis had felt for him in the formative years of the 1920s. Reviewing the book in Scrutiny he criticised its wordy generalities,13 but more importantly discerned a loss of focus in Richards’ interests, which by this time occupied an indeterminate field, part literary, part philosophical (in a rather diffuse sense of the term), part pseudo-scientific: “I write [said Leavis] not as an indignant religionist who has seen through Dr Richards’s blarney, but as a person of literary interests who is nevertheless concerned for rigorous thinking” (Valuation 155).
Leavis’s exasperation with Richards would be matched by a similar disillusionment with Eliot as he recognised more and more the “limitation attendant on the achievement” (Valuation 129). By this he meant the co-existence in Eliot of painful sincerity and capricious judgement, and – as Leavis diagnosed it – an inveterate and paradoxical will to discredit human creativity. The importance of his later critiques of Eliot is twofold: they shed light on his own approach to literature and criticism, being himself one of the great literary teachers of the twentieth century; and they illuminate with unrivalled inwardness Eliot’s conflicted genius. In his later years, Leavis became ever more preoccupied with Eliot as a touchstone in defining his own attitudes concerning those “grounds and sanctions of our most important choices, valuations and decisions.” (Preface 19). Speaking of Eliot’s “uncritical admiration” of Paul Valéry he recalled having discussed with students at Cambridge in the 1920s some examples of Valéry’s prose (Thought 16-17). They exemplified, he suggested, “the confusions, vacuities, and non-sequiturs that a training in la clarté and la logique didn’t exclude.” With reference to Eliot similarly, he recalled:
I still have, bought in 1924 when it came out, a little book containing ‘Le Serpent’ (Valéry’s ‘Ébauche d’un Serpent’) together with an introductory essay by Eliot [exemplifying his] exasperating Francophil mannerisms: exhibitionism, false aplomb and fallacious suggestion … ‘To English amateurs, rather inclined to dismiss poetry which appears reticent, and to peer lasciviously between the lines for biographical confession, such an activity may appear no better than a jeu de quilles [a game of skittles]. But … to reduce one’s disorderly and mostly silly personality to the gravity of a jeu de quilles would be to do an excellent thing … ’ (Thought 17)
On this Leavis comments that Eliot could hardly have said of his work from ‘Ash- Wednesday’ onwards, which “enacts a religious quest” that he was “offering this as … fairly describable as a jeu de quilles.” Christopher Ricks has raised the issue of Leavis’s use of such terms as ‘unanswerable’, ‘indisputable’, etc (though these are of course rhetorical uses).14 Leavis’s observation here, however, seems to me to be unanswerable – calling, that is, for a corroborative ‘Yes’ (or ‘Yes, and’) rather than a ‘Yes, but’, and an example of his penetrating analytical powers and clarity of thought. Exploring the nature of Eliot’s ‘hints and guesses’ in ‘The Dry Salvages’, Leavis casts back to ‘Burnt Norton’ as Eliot intends (“sudden in a shaft of sunlight”) and the problem of love and time “caught in the form of limitation/Between un-being and being”. Attuned to self-refutation in the poet, he notes how the ‘hints’
suggest that ‘being’ … means something positively other than the unlivingness of death. But they do that … by being essentially of the life that Eliot lives – lives purposefully and creatively in the way his undertaking commits him to, as he works at the poem, corrects his proofs, and remembers childhood in Missouri and holidays on the Massachusetts coast. (Living Principle 247) (My italics)
Leavis’s insight here has bearings on the reality of livingness that go far beyond Eliot’s case. To undertake the writing of a poem is to write for others also, and to assume unconsciously that for them too it is able to embody significant meaning – the creative reality of being – in which reader and writer can meet, thus forming a community without which there could be no idea of a poem and therefore no critical discussion about it.
References
Eliot, T. S. ‘The Frontiers of Criticism.’ On Poetry and Poets, Faber, 1957. 103-118.
Leavis, F. R. “T. S. Eliot: A Reply to the Condescending.” Cambridge Review, 8 February 1929. Reprinted in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays. Ed. G. Singh. Cambridge University Press, 1986. 13-14.
——. “William Empson: Intelligence and Sensibility.” The Cambridge Review,16 January 1931. Reprinted in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays. Ed G. Singh, Cambridge University Press, 1986. 26-28.
——. “Dr Richards, Bentham and Coleridge.” Scrutiny, vol 3, March 1935. Reprinted in
Valuation in Criticism and Other Essay. Ed. G. Singh. Cambridge University Press, 1986. 151-166.
——. “Sociology and literature.” The Common Pursuit. Chatto & Windus, 1952. 195-203.
——. D. H. Lawrence Novelist, Chatto & Windus, 1955.
——. Two Cultures: The Significance of C. P. Snow. Chatto & Windus, 1962. Reprinted in Nor
Shall My Sword. Chatto & Windus, 1972 (new edition with an Introduction by Stefan Collini. CUP, 2013).
——. Scrutiny. Reprinted in 20 vols. CUP, 1962.
——. Preface to Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism (1963). Ed. Morris Shapira,
Heinemann, 1963 (new edition CUP, 1981).
——. “Scrutiny: A Retrospect.” Scrutiny XX. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963.
——. “T. S. Eliot as Critic.” “Anna Karenina” and Other Essays, Chatto & Windus, 1967.
——. English Literature in Our Time & the University (the 1967 Clark Lectures).
Chatto & Windus, 1969. Reprinted CUP, 1979.
——. “T. S. Eliot and the life of English Literature.” (1968 Cheltenham Festival Lecture). Reprinted in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays. Ed G. Singh, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
——. “Yeats: The Problem and the Challenge.” Lectures in America. Chatto & Windus, 1969.
——. “Luddites? or There is Only One Culture.” Lectures in America. Reprinted in Nor Shall My Sword. Chatto & Windus, 1972. 77-99.
——. “ ‘Four Quartets’ ”. The Living Principle. Chatto & Windus, 1975. 155-264.
——. Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence, Chatto & Windus, 1976.
MacKillop, Ian. F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism, Allen Lane, 1995. Reprinted Penguin, 1997.
Narasimhaiah, C. D. F. R. Leavis: Some Aspects of His Work. Mysore, 1963.
Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Connecticut: New Directions. 1941.
Richards, I. A. Selected Letters of I. A. Richards. Ed. J. Constable. Oxford University
Press, 1990.
Ricks, Christopher. Unpublished lecture given at the University of York, inaugurating the “Leavis at York” conference, 18 October 2013.
Walsh, William. Three Honest Men. Ed. Philip French. Carcanet, 1980.
Williams, Raymond. “Seeing a Man Running.” What I Came to Say. Hutchinson Radius, 1989. 15-23.
Chris Joyce
Dr Chris Joyce is a member of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has a specialist interest in the history of English literary criticism with a particular focus on its development between the two world wars: the early evolution of ‘Cambridge English’, associated especially with the work of I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis and William Empson. He has taught at the universities of Reading (where he took a PhD in the literary criticism of the inter-war period), and Surrey, and for occasional programmes at Cambridge. He is now an independent scholar lecturing for various organisations and leading literary study tours. He conducts occasional seminars in Cambridge on writers associated with the University city and is the author of Cambridge: A Short Literary Guide (Arts Tours Publishing, 2019).
He has published a number of chapters and papers (some listed below) and has convened several conferences about the work of critics and editors of the ‘Cambridge Criticism’ phase at Cambridge and the University of York. He has collaborated with Downing College, Cambridge, in developing their literary archive. He is the author of a short book called The American T. S. Eliot and of Cambridge: A Short Literary Guide; and is writing a biographical-critical study of Leavis. His entries on Q. D. Leavis and L. C. Knights appear in the online Literary Encyclopedia.
Some relevant papers
‘Philosophy and Theory in the Work of F. R. Leavis’, Modern Age (2005, reprinted with addenda, ed. Robinson, Brynmill Press, 2008), revised and expanded in The Cambridge Quarterly (2009,1) and in Philosophy and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2016).
‘Affirmation in the Work of F. R. Leavis’ in F. R. Leavis: The Critic as Crusader, ed. Holman 2016, a special edition of The Literary Criterion (Mysore) (and contributions to earlier numbers). A much expanded version of this essay awaits publication.
‘Ad textum, ad hominem’ in The New Criticism: Formalist Literary Theory in America, eds. Drake, Armstrong & Steiner, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
Forthcoming: ‘Thom Gunn’s Cambridge’ in Thom Gunn: a Prismatic Portrait (ed Michelucci, Edinburgh UP, 2026)
© Chris Joyce – 2025
Email: chris.joyce.1969@pem.cam.ac.uk
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Post-publication postscript: My remarks on Richards’ Practical Criticism and the protocols should ideally be read in conjunction with my short essay on Mansfield Forbes which appeared in the 2025 edition of 9 West Road, the magazine of the Cambridge English Faculty.
1 Leavis, “ ‘Four Quartets’ ” in The Living Principle,Chatto & Windus, 1975.
2 See especially the chapter “Mr Eliot and Lawrence”in D. H. Lawrence Novelist, Chatto & Windus, 1955, and “T. S. Eliot as Critic” in ‘Anna Karenina’ and Other Essays, Chatto & Windus, 1967.
*
In China and the World: Cambridge Criticism beyond Cambridge, Ed. Cao Li (Tsinghua University Press, 2025). [Note: at present this work exists in a slightly shortened form in Chinese language editions only.]
3 See “William Empson: Intelligence and Sensibility” in The Cambridge Review,16 January 1931, reprinted in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays, Ed G. Singh (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4 Selected Letters of I. A. Richards. Ed. John Constable (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 52, 60.
5 Information taken from a letter from Leavis to Ronald Bottrall, 11th December 1931. In the present author’s possession.
6 “In spite of Cambridge” – see “Scrutiny: a retrospect, reprinted in Valuation in Criticism, 218.
7 See Letters from 1930 onwards. In that year we find him in China, and again in the mid-1930s, where his teaching is mainly non-literary. At the end of the decade he is at Harvard, where he remains until old age, when he returns to England. The editor of Letters states (p. xxxiv) that he was “anxious to stay in England to assist in the war effort, but [was] persuaded by T. S. Eliot to go to the United States.” Nothing in Richards’ career offers a parallel to Leavis’s dedication to his students at the close of his introduction to Revaluation (1936), which I have referred to in the main text: “The debt that I wish to acknowledge is to those with whom I have, during the past dozen years, discussed literature as a ‘teacher’. If I have learnt anything about the methods of profitable discussion, I have learnt it in collaboration with them.”
8 The Literary Criterion (Mysore), founded by C. D. Narasimhaih in 1952 and still current.
9 Narasimhaiah, F. R. Leavis: Some Aspects of His Work. Mysore, 1963.
10 See “T. S. Eliot: A Reply to the Condescending,” Cambridge Review, 8 February 1929, reprinted in Valuation in Criticism 13-14.
11 This should be considered in its whole context, in which Leavis speaks of how we “meet in meaning.”
12 Leavis, “Yeats: The Problem and the Challenge” in Lectures in America, Chatto & Windus, 1969. “The most resolutely literary-critical study of his career entails biography, personalities, public affairs and history.” In recommending Yvor Winters’ Maule’s Curse, Leavis speaks of the way it illustrates how “the understanding of literature stands to gain much from sociological interests.” See “Sociology and literature” in The Common Pursuit (Chatto & Windus, 1952) 203.
13 Leavis, “Dr Richards, Bentham and Coleridge” in Scrutiny, vol 3, March 1935, reprinted in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays.
14 Unpublished lecture given at the University of York, inaugurating the “Leavis at York”
conference, 18 October 2013.