Page 44 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

LEAVISISM AS A PROFESSIONAL IDEOLOGY

conventional sense of being on the political “left”. But if Leavis’s
culturalism, or for that matter Eliot’s, is a conservatism, then it is a
conservatism of a very different kind to those now common in British
politics. British Conservatism, in the party political sense of the term,
is merely another variant of utilitarianism, of what Leavis himself
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contemptuously described as “technologico-Benthamism”. And Eliot
and Leavis were not, in this sense, conservatives at all, but rather
reactionaries, in revolt against precisely that capitalist civilization
which contemporary Conservatism so tenaciously defends. Thus
inspired, English literature became not simply one intellectual discipline
amongst others, but rather a rallying point for the defence of humane
values, “a centre of consciousness (and conscience) for our
civilization”. Leavisite English aspired, then, in Mulhern’s phrase,
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to create “an intellectual formation of a type virtually unknown in
and deeply alien to English bourgeois culture: an ‘intelligentsia’ in the
classic sense of the term, a body of intellectuals dissociated from every
established social interest”. 42
For all its distinctly unEnglish intellectual sectarianism, Leavisism
also came to embody a particular form of English nationalism. As
Perry Anderson observed, “prejudice and bafflement were predictable
products” of Leavis’s disorientation in the face of foreign literature. 43
This Leavisite nationalism is evident, for example, in the peculiar
centrality attached to the notion of a national literary canon. It is
evident too in Leavis’s own peculiar theory of language, with its
improbable affirmation of the non-arbitrary nature of the (English)
sign. For Leavis, as we have seen, English is a language, unlike either
Latin or Greek, in which “words seem to do what they say’; hence,
the famous dismissal of Milton’s Latinized English as exhibiting a
“feeling for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words”. 44
The result is a nationalistic preoccupation with the superior virtues,
if not of the contemporary English, then of their peasant ancestors
and of the language bequeathed them by those ancestors. In England,
at least, such nationalism continued powerfully to underwrite the
emotional and intellectual appeal of Leavisite English. As Martin
Green would insist, Leavis remained “intensely and integrally British.
Not Europeanized, not of the intelligentsia, not of the upper classes,
not of Bloomsbury… Alone in all Cambridge his voice has echoes of
the best things in my parents’ England”. 45

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