Page 40 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

F.R.LEAVIS

entirely arbitrary, linguistic convention. It is thus fashionably easy to
scoff at Leavis’s preference in poetry for words which “seem to do
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what they say”. But if language is not entirely arbitrary, if there is
indeed a substantial reality beyond “the prison house of language”, 30
then a Leavisite linguistics might well appear rather less inherently
implausible than it so obviously does at present. The ultimate alternative
to some version or another of linguistic referentiality is that kind of
theoretical vertigo which linguistic scepticism occasions amongst much
of the French and American literary intelligentsia. We shall return to
this matter in the chapters that follow.
Like Eliot, Leavis also subscribed to a theory of cultural decline. In
his version, however, the problem arises quite specifically as a result
of industrialization, and not, therefore, as a result of whatever it was
that caused the Civil War (a set of causes which must include the
Protestant Reformation). Pre-industrial England constitutes for Leavis
the exemplar of an “organic community”, and it is only in communities
such as this that a cultural unity between the sophisticated and the
popular remains possible. But industrialization, and the techniques
of mass production that unavoidably accompany it, together generate
a “technologico-Benthamite” civilization, the defining characteristics
of which are cultural levelling and standardization. Hence the
remarkably bleak conclusion to New Bearings in English Poetry: “the
finer values are ceasing to be a matter of even conventional concern
for any except the minority… Elsewhere below, a process of
standardization, mass production and levelling down goes forward…
So that poetry, in the future, if there is poetry, seems likely to matter
even less in the world”. 31
Such pessimism very obviously echoes that of Eliot, though the
weight accorded to material factors is, perhaps, more reminiscent of
1930s Marxism. And yet Leavis remains a distinctly Protestant thinker,
neither an Anglo-Catholic content to mourn the passing of the Middle
Ages, nor a fatalistic Marxist content to await the arrival of the socialist
utopia. Thus Leavis: “enormously…as material conditions count, there
is a certain measure of spiritual autonomy in human affairs…human
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intelligence, choice and will do really and effectively operate”. It is
through the discipline of English, through the University English School,
and through the English teachers that it will train, that such intelligence,
choice and will are eventually to become operative. And so Leavis
recovers for the culturalist tradition both the general cultural evangelism

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