19 Tradition and the Great Tradition: T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis

Mr. Aruni Mahapatra

About the chapter :

In the following module I will introduce two influential thinkers in twentieth century English literary criticism: T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. I will first situate them as outsiders to the elite literary culture of twentieth century England, and then, by analyzing some representative early works, explain how they helped create the modern institution of English studies by giving new ways for dealing with older literature. “Tradition” in their work changed from a stifling, dead weight, and became an invitation for young readers to read and critically reinvent for their own circumstances a body of older literature.

Tradition and the Great Tradition: T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis

Why should one spend time reading English novels and poems when there are more obviously important political matters at hand? For many in early twentieth century England, this was a rhetorical question. Departments of Classics had existed for centuries, and, considered perfectly sufficient for the cultural education of a country—or those who had the time and money to attend university, anyway. It was not obvious what cultural and moral value the study of English literature would add to the study of classics, whose moral value was never in doubt. Two men, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, however, answered that question in the affirmative, and the reasons they gave to justify the reading of English literature established the Departments of English as we know them today.

In compelling ways, both defined and defended a “tradition” of literature. Their essays and books determined the way we would talk of the relevance of literature to society. This is slightly ironic, because socially and economically they were both ‘outsiders’ to the literary establishment of early twentieth-century England, but ended their careers as authorities in the institution of English literature, an institution that they had created. But even as they added to the prestige of new institutions by arguing for the prestige of literary studies, they could not have been more different.

Gate-Crashers Who Became Gate-Keepers: Brief Backgrounds 

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 to perhaps the most influential American Unitarian family in St Louis, Missouri. His paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had founded the Unitarian Church in St Louis after graduating from the Harvard Divinity School. The Eliot family struck deep roots in the American South West, but also maintained a strong connection to New England. The family spent every summer in Massachusetts, and, in 1906, Eliot followed his grandfather, father, and most recently, his elder brother Henry, to study at Harvard. He spent his four undergraduate years discovering literature from a range of traditions, earning a BA in three years and an MA in his fourth. In his second year, he discovered a book that changed his life: Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Symons introduced the young Eliot to Jules Laforgue, and this French poet gave a poetic voice to the young American’s juvenile literary efforts. After graduating from Harvard he went to Paris for a year, and was enamored by the philosophers Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson. On his return, he enrolled in the PhD program at Harvard’s Philosophy Department.

Over the next few years, as he began work on a dissertation on F H Bradley, the Harvard department saw him as a future colleague, and were simply waiting for him to submit his dissertation. Just then, he took a trip to England and everything changed. He was headed to Merton College to read Philosophy under Harold Joachim, Bradley’s successor. On his way to Oxford, however, he stopped at London and met Ezra Pound, who convinced him to give up the security of an academic position and instead devote himself to the creative life of writing poems. Pound, along with Bertrand Russell the philosopher convinced Eliot’s parents that it was not entirely foolhardy to give up a professorship at Harvard, stay in London, scratch out a living writing reviews and teaching in schools, and try to make it as a poet. It was as an aspiring poet that Eliot began writing the essays that are today among the classics of English literary criticism.

Frank Raymond Leavis was born in 1895 (roughly a decade after Eliot) of a musical shop-owner in Cambridge, England, and won a scholarship to read History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. He had completed one year of college when the Battle of Somme took place, killing a million men (about a third of them English). Leavis left Cambridge with a copy of Milton’s poems, fought in the trenches of Northern France, and, when he returned to Cambridge with indigestion and insomnia from poison gas, he left history to read English literature. In 1924 he submitted one of the earliest doctoral theses at the newly founded English School school, on “The Relation of Journalism to Literature” and three years later, in 1927 began his career as a “probationary lecturer” at Cambridge University.

As a teacher and literary scholar, Leavis devoted the formidable resources of Cambridge to developing and challenging several of the numerous brilliant insights into literature that were strewn across Eliot’s writings and essays. One of Eliot’s most influential essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) influenced Leavis greatly. While Leavis was hardly alone in being influenced by Eliot, he also disagreed fundamentally with Eliot. Eliot’s argument—which I discuss in greater detail below—is simply that without reading how and what older poets wrote, young poets have no “tradition” to assimilate, inherit, or challenge, all of which are ultimately part of one organic process of literary creation. Leavis disagreed with what Eliot wrote in the second part of the essay, namely that good poetry comes not from the exhibition of personality but its sublimation into literary form. Instead of a private apprenticeship in poetry-writing, Leavis sought to take this respect for tradition that Eliot had made popular and make it serve a more practical purpose. Leavis looked for ways  in which ordinary people, not simply aspiring poets, could read English literature, and, by doing so, live a morally and ethically superior life, challenging what Leavis saw as the merciless industrialization of the 1920s, and of which the first World War was only the earliest instance. And for such an ambitious humanitarian project, Leavis sought to create a tradition of writers who were alive and active rather than poets who had lived and died centuries ago (Eliot’s favorites, in descending order, were Dante, Donne and Marvell).

Leavis began where Eliot had begun: with poetry. In 1932, five years after joining the Cambridge faculty, he published his first book, New Bearings in English Poetry. Leavis began with the following arresting sentences: Poetry matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary intelligence concerns itself with poetry.

He went on to reject Romantic poets and celebrate Modernist poets (Pound and Eliot), but he did so by arguing that the latter were more traditional. In Leavis’s scheme, Pound and Eliot were better because they had inherited a tradition that many of their predecessors had ignored. This was a tradition started by the Victorian-era poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The same year he collaborated with his colleague L. C. Knights to start the critical journal Scrutiny. For twenty one years, until 1953, this journal that would single-handedly run a campaign to justify the moral and humanitarian benefits of reading literature. Leavis wrote about the moral benefits of reading English novelists, and started with Jane Austen and ended with Joseph Conrad. He later declared that D H Lawrence was the greatest writer of his time. Indeed, his distance from Eliot was complete when Eliot wrote that Lawrence could not  fulfill his potential as an artist because he remained uneducated. In response, Leavis wrote that he identified more with Lawrence the miner’s son than the Anglican poet Eliot.

And yet, today, Eliot is a powerful institution in English literary studies, a poet whose reviews teach students of literature, even today, a century after they were written, how to read poetry. Leavis, on the other hand, is commonly perceived as the typical Cambridge don, representing the conservatism of the English literary establishment, resistant to changing the canon, and generally elitist. In this essay I will problematize this somewhat neat binary between the radical poet and the conservative professor and suggest that the poet’s invocation of past masters could be quite “traditional” and the professor’s creation of a “great tradition” of English novelists was quite radical.

Tradition and Mr. Eliot’s Talent 

In the year 1919 a young man named T. S. Eliot published an essay in the newly started literary journal The Egoist. Almost a century after its first publication, this essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” remains one of the most widely read essays across English literature classrooms all over the world. Generations of students have become scholars of literature by reading and quoting from this–it has to be admitted–delightfully- written essay. While both the essay’s argument and manner in which Eliot made it deserve such widespread reading, many scholars have assumed that this essay contains the germ of Eliot’s aesthetic theory. The first and most obvious problem with that assumption is that Eliot’s own work does not support it. Four years after this essay, Eliot published another essay, “The Function of Criticism” (1923). This essay, which Eliot claimed was an effort to apply to criticism the ideas developed for the study of poetry in “Tradition”, withdrew the most revolutionary claims he had made in the earlier essay. “Tradition” imagined poetic creation as a mysterious fusion of older literature and individual (but not new) emotions. By replacing his ‘feelings’ with something outside himself, the poet could produce a work of art in which his emotions transcended his historical moment and became a medium through which the past spoke to the present. By contrast, in “Function”, the depersonalization necessary for poetic composition took on a highly conservative meaning, as Eliot rejected the “inner voice” for a “social authority”. Whereas earlier he had respectfully preserved something unknowable about the mysterious workings of art by comparing it to the platinum film that produces sulphurous acid (explained later), he now made a sharp contrast between Classicism (aligned with Catholism) and Individuality (aligned with Protestantism) and came down very heavily on the latter. While debating whether the critic should pay more attention to the “inner voice” of the artist or a larger community (not necessarily artistic) in which all writers operate, Eliot adds this:

The possessors of the inner voice ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear and lust.

Between these two essays, thus, one can see Eliot’s transformation from a young poet with exciting new ideas for using tradition to a critic entrenched in the power structures of Anglo- Catholic establishment in England. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was the first step in Eliot’s effort to clear a space for the objective study of literature as literature. When his first set of essays were collected and published as a book, The Sacred Wood, Eliot prefaced the collection by declaring the principle guiding the essays thus:

[…] when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing.

As time passed, however, Eliot grew increasingly dissatisfied with the utility of “tradition” as a way to both respect the autonomy of literary production and to evaluate it in a social world with diverse political opinions. He indicated such a dissatisfaction in the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood, where he wrote that “poetry certainly has something to do with  morals, religion and politics”. But let us begin with the younger, more likeable Eliot, and briefly delight in his wonderful essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”.

The first mistake people commonly make, Eliot says, is that they praise a poem by identifying parts of it which seem most different from older poems. Uniqueness and individuality were good things, but Eliot did not believe that they should be praised at the cost of “tradition”. Not all traditional poetry was bad, and, indeed, in some cases, those parts of individual poets that seem “most” individual may, if read closely, may be the most “traditional”. If we understand that “the dead poets” can assert their immortality most vigorously when a young poet produces what seem to us verses full of unique emotions, we can make the first step towards understanding tradition: not as dead weight that constrains young poets and stifles creativity, but rather enables it.

Eliot then explains that he does not expect a poet to mechanically adhere to piles of old books written by old authors, but simply to be conscious of a community of poets larger than his own generation. Such a consciousness will ensure that when the poet writes, “the whole literature of Europe ranging from Homer to the literature of his own country” will speak through his words. Such a globalism, an awareness of poems written centuries before, is not simply historically but aesthetically useful. For decades Eliot scholars read this as a sign of Eliot’s conservatism, that he was defending a traditional canon, judging all new work by standards set by old work. But if read closely, one can see clearly that this was far from Eliot’s point. Eliot imagined a process of poetic creation in which poets re-created a tradition in the process of imbibing it.

The following is a simplified version of Eliot’s version of what happens, and how tradition enables new poetry. In any medium, poetry or painting, there is a long history of earlier practitioners who have left a body of work. This body forms an order that is complete and perfect in itself, before the poet is even born. Many scholars have objected to Eliot’s phrase “ideal order” to describe this body. But as Louis Menand argued recently, Eliot meant it philosophically, not prescriptively. Our perception of the new work of art depends on our perception of the history of art, which takes a certain shape, is “idealised” in our minds.

Whatever the poet does, for it to be accepted as art, it has to form a part of that self- sufficient and “idealised” order (later critics would praise the order as the “classic” or deride it as “the canon”). And to ensure that the new set, with this addition, in its own way, continues to remain self-sufficient, each item in the existing order must slightly change. For readers, once we encounter a new work, and perceive it as “art” in the way that we have perceived a long tradition of “art”, the entire tradition is automatically slightly altered. Eliot thus gave both the critics and poets of his time a revolutionary new theory of thinking about poetry. For professional readers, literary value could neither be the result of emotional uniqueness or a political/patriotic notion: it was a function of the relation between works of art. For poets, Eliot gave a compelling new reason for why they should read older poets: not to repeat what the dead poets had already said, or even the way they had said it, but to change what had been said.

This was an old idea, and went back at least to Wordsworth, who, in his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, had spoken of a similar creative transfusion of old poetry to express old feelings in new forms. Subsequently, Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century had also delineated similar aesthetic theories. Eliot’s difference from these accounts of the artist’s use of tradition was that for him, the poet was not a person but instead a medium: the tradition as it passed through the poet’s time.

Anticipating the objection that erudition may come in the way of a poet’s creativity, Eliot clarifies that for the poet reading older literature is not the accumulation of knowledge for his own sake but to make space in his thinking and creative process for things other than his feelings. For Eliot, Shakespeare set the standard for how poets could use erudition or their knowledge of things other than their feelings. Shakespeare “acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum”, referring, obviously, to the Roman plays, in which Shakespeare re-told, with altered emotional emphases, historical episodes from Roman history that Plutarch had recorded in his Lives.

Shakespeare’s use of Roman history for his plays demonstrates how the progression of the artist is simultaneously an acquisition of knowledge and an effacement of his personality. It is only by emptying his mind of feelings that Eliot believed a poet could succeed in giving the most powerful form to his feelings. Eliot explains this in the second  half of the essay, a section unique in all English literature, part Bildungsroman and part Literary Theory.

De-personalization: Poetry is where trauma (or politics) goes to hide 

Eliot begins his discussion of depersonalization with an image from a chemistry lab experiment: the combination of oxygen and Sulphur dioxide in the presence of “a bit of finely filiated platinum”. Platinum, as high school science books tell us, is a “catalyst” in this chemical reaction, and for Eliot the poet’s mind is both literally and metaphorically like a fine sheet of platinum. It draws together diverse elements, combines them, produces new, complex entities, but remains unaffected by the combining raw materials. Just as there is no platinum in the combined result of Sulphur Dioxide and Oxygen—Sulphurous Acid—and the platinum itself remains unaffected by the combining elements, so the poet’s mind allows diverse ideas and feelings to combine and take on poetic form. Although the synthesis of diverse elements may remind one of a laboratory, Eliot describes the poet’s mind as a sheet  of platinum because he wants to stress the fact that while other elements combine and change the sheet itself remains inert, neutral. Eliot explains with the example of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”. The poem itself contains many feelings that have nothing to do with the nightingale, but which nonetheless combine to form an organic whole around the image of the nightingale.

Thus, Eliot declares that the poet does not have a personality but only a medium, and that “the more complete the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates”. This also leads Eliot to diagnose a common problem among young poets: the descent into eccentricity and perversity. This happens when poets, ignorant of the real business of poetry, seek to improve their poetry by searching for new emotions. This is foolishness; there are no new emotions, just as there is no new art. The only novelty that the young poet may hope to contribute is to express his ordinary and familiar emotions in an unfamiliar manner, and for this, he has to turn his mind into a receptacle for as diverse a range of ideas, discourses, literary forms, as possible. If patient enough, they may combine with the mundane and unremarkable reality of his experiences and turn into art. Eliot ends his discussion of depersonalization with three celebrated sentences in English literary criticism:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

By thinking of poets as self-sacrificing individuals in this way, Eliot hoped to divert his readers’ interest from the poet to the poetry, and thereby to encourage a “juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad”. Soon, however, Eliot’s thinking on this subject changed. He became less certain that literary critics should focus on literature alone, and “tradition” seemed unable to cover all that is relevant for understanding literature which was not the poet’s personality. Eliot remained committed to the autonomy of literature, as well as its universal significance, but struggled to come up with ways of asking questions about literary texts that would display this significance. From about 1923 onwards, his writings show this impatience with tradition, and a turn towards religious and political categories for interpreting literary texts. This begins with “The Function of Criticism”, which appeared in 1923, and culminates in the essay “Religion and Literature”, published in the book After Strange Gods, where Eliot states boldly:

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards, though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

The early Eliot inspired a young lecturer at Cambridge: F R Leavis. Starting in 1932, the same year that he published his first book, he began to publish a series of essays on nineteenth century novelists in the journal Scrutiny. The essays on poetry formed the book Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936). Twelve years later in 1948 he brought these essays together in a volume titled The Great Tradition: Jane Austen, George Eliot and Joseph Conrad.

Professor Leavis and the need for “Discrimination” 

Leavis had not reached the disappointment of the later Eliot, and persisted with the impulse that drove the young, idealist Eliot. However, being a teacher of literature, Leavis looked for values that non-specialist readers of literature could access and enjoy, and he shifted his focus to novels, while Eliot had focused almost entirely on poetry. The publishing trends in 1920s England followed the Victorian era, and novels were the most widely read literary material. So while Eliot laid out the beginnings of his aesthetic theory by addressing problems in how people read poems, Leavis began The Great Tradition by identifying a problem with reading novels. There were so many novels published and so many literary histories praise so many of the Victorian novelists as “classical”, that it had given rise to a great many “insidious temptations to complacent confusions of judgement and to critical indolence”. The young professor dispelled such indolence with “challenging discriminations”. Seen in this way, one can appreciate the opening pages of The Great Tradition. Instead of the common perception that reads Leavis’s first sentence as a sign of his imperial Englishness, one may recognize it as a sincere effort to find a solution to real problems that any teacher may face. Leavis begins:

The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad – to stop for the moment at that comparatively safe point in history.

But Leavis immediately qualifies the apparent bluntness of this statement. He writes that because of his reputation as “narrow”, this statement will be taken to mean that he considers no other novelist other than these four “worth reading”. Without explicitly clarifying if this was what he in fact meant to suggest, he speaks in the third person singular about the perils and necessity of making judgements about literary works. To say anything about literature is to invite “misrepresentation” (obviously hinting towards his perceived narrowness). Despite this, Leavis believes that the only way to have profitable conversations about literature is to

[…] be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary).

Clearly, discrimination is a means to a specific end. It does not serve a purpose in itself but facilitates a community and conversation. Leavis felt so strongly about it because he also believed that this pedagogical impulse, to enable students to sift the grain from the husk, also served an ethical purpose. As students would learn to value representations of family and industry in Lawrence, for instance, they would develop a more humanistic approach to their own existence. In an England moving rapidly towards aggressive industrialization, such an attitude was immensely useful.

Despite such evidence on the very first page of this book that Leavis put forward his  notion of “the great tradition” not as a stricture on what others should read but simply an attempt to start a conversation that would eventually lead to a great tradition, because of the title of the book, the misconception stands. The rest of the introduction gives some evidence to  the detractors,  as  Leavis  proceeds  to  dismiss  one by one  many of  the  so-called  great novelists: Charlotte Bronte, Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, among others. Instead of expressing personal preference or imposing it on others, however, such a censorial step is directed towards giving students of English literature a map to help them navigate the numerous texts that competed for their attention. In a later book, Education and the University, Leavis described this impulse as a tendency to help students “map the wilderness of books”. Thus Leavis wanted his readers to take away from his book not simply the conclusions of his study (that a select few novelists were great and the others not) but the process, the impulse to sift through a large body of literature with a critical gaze, to ask a specific kind of question so as to form a selection of works.

Indeed, if one follows the chapters closely, one finds that there is very little that connects the writers chosen to represent the greatness of the English novel: Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad. They belonged to very different economic and cultural backgrounds, faced different challenges and achieved different things in their work. There is no greatness they represent together, apart from what Leavis argues about them in the book. They do not come from a tradition but rather form one, in the way that Leavis writes about them. And what Leavis finds in them is an awareness of what it means to be human. The book reveals not an ideal order but rather a tension between their different individual contexts and their final achievement, in Leavis’s reading, of imagining the possibilities of life.

In the history of literary criticism, then,  Leavis  deserves  a place, not  for insisting on “the  great  tradition”  but  because the book  was  only an  instance of  his  life long effort  to educate students in the value of discrimination, which, for Leavis, was essential for the creation of “any tradition”, however different it  may look  from the  one he had  given in  his book.

Conclusion

To conclude, we may note some ironies. As I said in my introduction, Eliot and Leavis laid the foundations of professional literary studies. The writer of this module (and, one hopes, its readers) can hope to make a living out of their study of literature because Eliot and Leavis in their different ways, dared to say things that no one else in their time did. Eliot showed young poets that they could be true to their emotions by following the dead masters, and Leavis taught his students to create a tradition of great novelists by practicing what he called “essential discrimination”. Today, the word “discrimination” brings to mind the racial and sexist prejudices that, in the last four decades, the institution of literary studies has begun to vehemently resist. One unfortunate victim of the rise of political consciousness in literary studies has been the simple idea that without a simple and (sometimes) arbitrary judgement there can be no literary studies. Terry Eagleton’s scintillating introduction to Literary Theory treats Leavis and Eliot as “tradition” in the sense of dead weight that has to be shed before new things can begin. Eagleton was right: it was only by rejecting the methods of close- reading and the limited canon of Anglo-American literature that English has become the inclusive and socially responsible space that it is. English can be said to have become a truly “humane” discipline, when English professors can close read not only poems by John Donne but also those by Rohit Vemula in lecture-rooms across India. As we rightfully celebrate this hard-earned radicalism let us not forget that those who appear staid and boring were once, like us,  young and  radical.  It  is  too  easy today,  after postcolonialism,  deconstruction and other theoretical  schools, to  think that we know so much more than Eliot  and  Leavis.  Eliot seems to have anticipated even this judgement of the future generations, and it is with his quip, again from “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, that I will end. While discussing the popular perception of “Tradition” as boring and repetitive, Eliot paraphrases a common saying: the dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Eliot responds: “Precisely, and they are that which we know”.

Summary

In summary, we have seen how Eliot and Leavis, political and economic outsiders in the elite cultural spaces of London and Oxbridge, helped to establish the institution of English studies as it is today by redefining “tradition”. Even while upholding high standards of literary excellence and the erudition it demanded from those willing to study it or contribute to it, Eliot and Leavis made it less exclusive and more accessible. Eliot described a new aesthetic model of literary production and Leavis a new approach to pedagogy, both of which encouraged young readers to begin reading English literature, not because it was English literature but because it was English literature.

Reference

• Crawford, Robert. Young Eliot: From St. Louis to the Waste Land. Place of publication not identified: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016. Print.
• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2015. Print.
• Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1999. Print.
• —. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. N.p., 2015. Print.
• —. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Print.
• —. What Is a Classic?. Haskell House: N.p., 1974. Print.
• Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. Print.
• Litz, A. Walton, Louis Menand, and Lawrence S Rainey. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. 
• Vol. 7, Vol. 7,. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.