Literary History Romanticized

works, between the creative achievements of different authors, between different pasts, and between the past and the present. These matters of consideration are generally thought of as coming under the head of Literary History. Let me say at once I'm not at all happy about what commonly comes under head, or about what's commonly understood by Literary History ... Speaking realistically, our chances of restoring Professor Leavis to felicity are not at all good. His, however, is a particularly influential expression of a dissatisfaction is widely felt. Presumably it is the primary reason for the existence of this journal. The solution of Leavis, not unpredictably, invokes judicial criticism, judgments made in genuine personal self-commitment by each student for himself, or there is no judging, and no acquisition, so far as he is concerned. Since this self-commitment will apparently lead the student to immerse himself in T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, one is not quite sure who actually is to be making it. At any rate, the effect should be acquiring something coherent, meaningful and organic, a living reality he can carry away with him (or in him). . My summary of Leavis is of course inadequate, but it does reflect what I gather from his remarks: an admirable statement of an ideal, which is however approached by steps too swift for me to follow. I do, however, follow him in cleaving to criticism and to the figure of an organic and living reality. What I can say of literary history is limited by my instinctive and permanent conception of literary study as the examination of individual works, based on the fundamental experience of a reader alone with a book. Here we commence, and here we must return. And in this are involved the full implications of Coleridge's oracular dictum that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. That is, to translate freely, literary history is concerned with

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