Dr. Leavis has for long been a target for criticism; but some of those who pass strictures upon him remind one of the colonel who goggled on being told by a psycho-analyst that some men were in love with their mothers ╤ goggled because he was incapable of talking the same language. Why is Dr. Leavis╒s language so different? Partly because he does not write to divert your leisure hours with benign reflections about literature; his book is an arduous, subtle, and prolonged exercise in a highly developed technique of reasoning ╤ what he would call the discipline of literary criticism. Partly also because he challenges the approach to literature which is commonly accepted in literary quarters to-day. To read his book carefully and with sympathy is to understand why he enjoys an international reputation and why his influence is extended by his pupils who teach in our secondary schools.
Only by such study can his importance be understood. By casting his essays often into the form of an argument with both friendly and hostile critics he shows very rightly what he is not, as well as what he is, saying; and by so doing he shows the intention and meaning behind his famous remark that Milton╒s dislodgment had been effected with remarkably little fuss, which has been so wearisomely bandied about by his enemies. He defends his refusal to state his principles of criticism by replying that criticism is not philosophy and that to enunciate them would impair the process of perception by which criticism is carried on. Indeed, what stamps his work as being by a critic of the first rank is the quality of his perception. His insight enables him to discern connections and the point of emphasis unseen by others, and his intellect enables him to begin to argue where others stop.
His essay on the ╥Dunciad╙ illustrates these powers. Nor are they confined to examining the works of the past. He is concerned with contemporary literature, and if he finds little to praise, are we so sure that genius surrounds us, as it did when Yeats and Lawrence were alive, that we can confidently disagree? Dr. Leavis always judges literature in relation to the highest as he sees it: he intends to make the lasting judgment here and now in the present. His essay on Mr. E. M. Forster, which is far more penetrating than those by other hands, shows how far he will go in praise while yet reserving severity and judgment.
Most striking is his rejection of the cultural assumptions made by the literary world, which he stigmatises as purveying a decadent form of liberalism, anarchical in its refusal to distinguish the valuable from the trivial; and he argues that its standards have been established not by independent minds but by echoing and re-echoing. As one who presumably belongs to this world, I think some of his criticisms just; and I think it good that he voices them, good to take them to heart, and good that he calls critics to think harder and more precisely.
