Literature and Society by FR. Leavis Bangla Summary & Analysis PDF

Mofizur Rahman
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Literature and Society by FR. Leavis Bangla Summary & Analysis PDF

Literature and Society by FR. Leavis Bangla Summary & Analysis PDF

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Literature and Society by FR. Leavis Bangla Summary & Analysis Bangla Summary & Analysis সাহিত্য ও সমাজ সামারি ও বিশ্লেষণ

M.A Final Year (Department of English)
Course Name: Prose
Enclouded Life and Literary Work
Topics: Literature and Society by FR. Leavis
Bangla & English Summary And Critical Review also Characters

About F.R. Leavis (Life and Work)

F.R. Leavis (1895-1978)

F.R. Leavis, in full Frank Raymond Leavis, (born July 14, 1895, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng-died April 14, 1978, Cambridge), English literary critic who championed seriousness and moral depth in literature and criticized what he considered the amateur belletrism of his time.

Leavis attended Cambridge University and then served throughout World War 1 as an ambulance bearer on the Western Front. He lectured at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from 1925 but moved in the early 1930s to Downing College, where he was elected into a fellowship in 1936. He retired in 1962 and thereafter served as visiting professor at a number of English universities. In 1967 he delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge (published in 1969 as English Literature in Our Time and the University). He was made a Companion of Honour in 1978.

In 1932 with his wife, the former Queenie Dorothy Roth, author of the important Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), he founded Scrutiny, a quarterly journal of criticism that was published until 1953 and is regarded by many as his greatest contribution to English letters. Always expressing his opinions with severity, Leavis believed that literature should be closely related to criticism of life and that it is therefore a literary critic's duty to assess works according to the author's and society's moral position.

জীবন ও কর্ম

জন্ম: ফ্রাঙ্ক রেমন্ড লিভিস ১৪ই জুলাই ১৮৯৫ সালে জন্মগ্রহণ করেন। তিনি ছিলেন একজন ইংরেজি সাহিত্যিক। শিক্ষাজীবন: তিনি ইমানুয়েল কলেজে, ক্যামব্রিজে পড়াশোনা করেন। কর্মজীবন: তার কর্মজীবন ছিল ডওনিং কলেজে এবং ইমানুয়েল কলেজে।

সাহিত্যকর্ম: Literary Work

তার বিখ্যাত বইসমূহ :

  1. মহান ঐতিহ্য
  2. সাধারণ সাধনা
  3. ইংরেজি কবিতায় নতুন বিয়ারিং

সাহিত্য ও সমাজ

ফ্র্যাঙ্ক রেমন্ড লেভিস জন্ম কেমিব্রজ গ্রেট ব্রিটেন এবং আয়ারল্যান্ডের যুক্তরাজ্য (14 জুলাই 1895 - 14 এপ্রিল 1978) মপলন একজন প্রভাবশালী ইংরেজী সাহিত্য সমালোচক ছিলেন। তিনি তার ক্যারিয়ারের বেশিরভাগ সময় ক্যামব্রিজের ডাউনিং কলেজ এবং পরে ইয়র্ক ইউনিভার্সিটিতে পরিয়েছিলেন। তার বাবা ছিলেন এক সংস্কৃত মানুষ যিনি কেমব্রিজের একটি দোকান চালাতেন যেটি পিয়ানো এবং অন্যান্য বাদ্যযন্ত্র বিক্রি করেছিলেন করেছিল, এবং তাঁর পুত্রকে সারা জীবন তাঁর পুত্রকে সারা জীবন তাঁর প্রতি শ্রদ্ধা বজায় রাখতে হয়েছিল।

লিভিস একটি পারিশ্রমিক প্রদত্ত একটি স্বতন্ত্র বিদ্যালয় (ইংরেজি ভাষায় একটি ছোটখাট পাবলিক স্কুল), পার্স স্কুল, যার প্রধান শিক্ষক ছিলেন ডব্লু এইচ। ডি। রাউসে শিক্ষিত। রাউস ছিলেন একজন ধ্রুপদী এবং তাঁর "সরাসরি পদ্ধতি" এর জন্য পরিচিত, এটি এমন একটি অনুশীলনের জন্য যা শিক্ষকদের তাদের ছাত্রদের সাতে লাতিন এবং শাস্ত্রীয় গ্রীক ভাষায় কথোপকথন চালিয়ে যেতে হয়েছিল। বিদেশী ভাষায় তাঁর কিছুটা সাবলীলতা থাকলেও লেভিস অনুভব করেছিলেন যে তাঁর মাতৃভাষা তিনিই একমাত্র যার উপর তিনি কর্তৃত্বের সাথে কথা বলতে পেরেছিলেন। শাস্ত্রীয় ভাষাগুলিতে তাঁর বিস্তর পাঠ তাই তাঁর রচনায় দৃঢ়ভাবে প্রমাণিত হয় না।

লিভিস ইতিহাস অধ্যয়নের জন্য পার্স স্কুল থেকে কেমব্রিজের এমমানুয়েল কলেজ স্কলারশিপ অর্জন করেছিলেন। ১৯ বছর বয়সে ব্রিটেন ম্যাট্রিক করার পরপরই জার্মানির বিরুদ্ধে যুদ্ধ ঘোষণা করে লেভিস প্রথম বছর স্নাতক হিসাবে কেমব্রিজ ছেড়ে চলে যান এবং ১৯১৫ সালে ইয়র্কের ফ্রেন্ডস অ্যাম্বুলেন্স ইউনিটে (এফএইউ) যোগ দেন। ১৯১৬ সালে নিয়োগের প্রবর্তনের পরে তার ভাই রাক্ষও এফএইউতে যোগ দিয়েছিলেন তিনি বন্ধুবান্ধব অ্যাম্বুলের ইউনিটের সদস্যদেও বিবেকবান আপত্তিকারী হিসাবে কম্বল স্বীকৃতি দিয়ে উপকৃত হন। লেভিসের বরাত দিয়ে বলা হয়েছে : “তবে রক্তাক্ত সোনমের পরে যে কেউ জানত যে আধুনিক যুদ্ধ সেনাবাহিনীতে যোগ দেওয়ার মতো ছিল তা কারও পক্ষে প্রশ্ন হতে পারে না।

তিনি ফ্রান্সে রয়েস্টার্ন ফ্রন্টের পিছনে কাজ করেছিলেন, তাঁর সাথে মিল্টনের কবিতার একটি অনুলিপি নিয়েছিলেন। তাঁর যুদ্ধকালীন অভিজ্ঞতাগুলি তার উপর দীর্ঘস্থায়ী প্রভাব ফেরেছিল এবং তাকে অনিদ্রার ঝুঁকিতে ফেলেছিল। তিনি দু রূপে বলেছিলেন যে সৈন্যদেও আমাকাপড়ের মধ্যে রাখা গ্যাসের এক্সপোজার তার শারীরিক স্বাস্থ্যেও, বিশেষত তার হজমের ক্ষতি করেছে।। লেডিস যুদ্ধ থেকে সেরে উঠতে ধীর ছিলেন এবং পরে তিনি এটিকে "দ্য গ্রেট বিরাম" হিসাবে উল্লেখ করেছিলেন। তিনি বলেছিলেন "যুদ্ধকে হিংসাত্মকভাবে বলতে গেলে আমাদের জন্য দুর্ভাগা হয়েছিল।

১৯১৯ সালে যুদ্ধ থেকে ফিরে এসে লেভিস তার পড়াশোনার ক্ষেত্রটি ইংরেজি ভাষায় পরিবর্তন করেন এবং কেমব্রিজের নতুন প্রতিষ্ঠিত ইংলিশ স্কুলে শিক্ষার্থী হন। প্রথম-শ্রেণীর সম্মান সহ স্নাতক সত্ত্বেও, লেভিসকে গবেষণা ফেলোশিপের পক্ষে শক্ত প্রার্থী হিসাবে দেখা যায়নি এবং পরিবর্তে পিএইচডি শুরু করেছিলেন, তবে উচ্চাকাঙ্ক্ষী একাডেমিকের জন্য একটি অস্বাভাবিক ক্যারিয়ারের। পদক্ষেপ সাহিত্যেও সাথে সাংবাদিকতার সম্পর্ক, যা ইংল্যান্ডের প্রেসের উত্থান এবং তার আগের বিকাশ অধ্যয়ন করেছিল"। এই কাজটি তাঁর আজীবন উদ্বেগকে যেভাবে সাময়িকীটির নীতিবোধ উভয়ই বিস্তৃত জনগণের সাংস্কৃতিক আকাঙ্ক্ষাকে প্রতিফলিত করতে পারে তার সাতে ভূমিকা রেখিছিল। ১৯২৭ সালে, লেভিসকে বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের প্রবেশনারি প্রভাবক হিসাবে নিয়োগ দেওয়া হয়েছিল এবং কয়েক বছর পরে যখন তাঁর প্রথম উল্লেখযোগ্য প্রকাশনা প্রকাশিত হতে শুরু হয়েছিল, তখন তাদের স্টাইলটি শিক্ষার দাবির দ্বারা অনেকটা প্রভাবিত হয়েছিল।


জটিল বিশ্লেষন

সাহিত্যের অর্থ এমন কিছু যা সতেজ ও অনুপ্রেরণার জন্য রচিত মন। এটি মহান মনের চিন্তাভাবনা এবং অনুভুতি রেকর্ড করে। এটি দুটি আকর্ষণ করে উপায় এর মাধ্যমে এবং তার পদ্ধতি মাধ্যমে। বিষয়টি অবশ্যই এ জাতীয় হওয়া উচিত যারা এটি পড়ে তারা হল আগ্রহী। পদ্ধতিটি এমন হতে হবে যা পাঠককে সন্তুষ্ট করবে এবং তার জ্ঞানের তহবিলকে যুক্ত করবে। আমরা একটি সমাজে বাস করি। অর্থাৎ এর মধ্যে সম্পর্ক আন্তঃসম্পর্ক রয়েছে পুরুষ এবং নারীর মাঝে যারা সমাজে বাস করে। আমরা আমাদের বেঁচে থাকা সহকর্মীদেও সম্পর্কে শুনতে পছন্দ করি সমাজে, তাদের চিন্তাভাবনা এবং অনুভূতি, তাদের পছন্দ এবং অপছন্দ গুলো জানার চেষ্টাকরি।

স্বাভাবিকভাবেই, অনুভূতি প্রকাশ করার মতো ভাষা যদি আমাদের থাকে তবে আমরা আছি সাহিত্য তৈরি করার পথে। অন্য কথায়, সাহিত্যেও বিষয় কোনও না কোনও সমাজের রূপকে প্রকাশ কওে, কবি তার অনুভূতি প্রকাশ করেন এবং আমরা যারা তাঁর কবিতা পড়ি বা তার আগ্রহী তারা অনুভব করি তাঁর সাথে এক সাথে এবং নিজেদেরকে। সর্বোপরি, সমাজই হল মানুষ এবং এর মধ্যে মেলামেশার এই বন্ধনের মাধ্যমে যা কবি বা লেখক সন্ধান করেন সাহিত্যের সাহিত্য যদি ঐতিহ্য এবং সামাজিক সহানুভূতি প্রকাশ করে তবে স্বাভাবিকভাবেই এটিতে আবদ্ধ আমাদের মন এবং মনোভাব উপর কিছু ইতিবাচক প্রভাব অনুশীলন।

সমাজ প্রতিক্রিয়া জানায় একটি জীবন্ত উপায়ে সাহিত্যেও অনুশীলনের। একটি অনুপ্রেরণামূলক কবিতা উপর সাধারণ প্রভাব তৈরি করে সমাজ। এটি আমাদের অনুভূতি এবং কল্যাণের জন্য উৎসাহকে বাড়িয়ে কোলে। প্রবন্ধে সাহিত্য ও সমাজের প্রতি লিভিস এলিয়টের ধারণাই আমাদের এই আহ্বান জানিয়েছে। লিভিসের জন্য এই সামাজিক প্রকৃতিটি হলো অন্তর্নিহিত মানব প্রকৃতি। সুতরাং, সাহিত্যেও অধ্যয়ন হল একটি গবেষণা যা জটিলতা, সম্ভাবনা এবং মানব প্রকৃতির প্রয়োজনীয় অবস্থা, যা এই প্রবন্ধটির মূল কেন্দ্রবিন্দুও। লিভিস প্রধান পার্থক্য চিহ্নিত করে যা এলিয়েটের ঐতিহ্যেও ধারণা এবং মার্কসবাদী ধারণার মধ্যে রয়েছে।

ট্র্যাডিশনের ধারণা, লেভিস রাজ্যগুলির মার্কসবাদী তত্ত্বগুলির সাথে মতবিরোধ রয়েছে সংস্কৃতিতে। মার্কসবাদী তত্ত্বগুলি মূলত অর্থনৈতিক বা প্রকৃতির উপাদান, মূলত যে স্ট্রেসের চাপ তা ঐতিহ্যেও ধারণা থেকে সম্পূর্ণ আলাদা আধ্যাত্মিক ধারণা। রেক কবিদেরকে মানবজাতির অগ্রহণিত বিধায়ক বলে অভিহিত করেছেন। যা একজন বিধায়কের কাজ হল আইন পেশ করা, তার মতে কর্মেও একটি নিষ্পত্তির উপায় পুরুষরা অনুসরণ করতে পারে। কবিতা এবং সাহিত্য সাধারণত একটি নিঃশব্দে এবং এটি করে অবিরাম উপায় উপন্যাসগুলি এর দিক পরিবর্তন করেছে বলে জানা যায়।

মানুষের মন এবং গতিশীল গতিবিধি যা আমাদের উপায়গুলির পরিবর্তন করেছে যার কারণে জীবনসমাজে সাহিত্যেও প্রভাব প্রত্যক্ষ বা পরোক্ষভাবে অনুভূত হয়। এইভাবে মিস স্টোরের "আঙ্কেল টমস কেবিন" সরাসরি একটি আন্দোলনের জন্য দায়বদ্ধ ছিল। সেই সময়ের মার্কিন যুক্তরাষ্ট্রে সাহিত্য ছিল জীবনের দাসত্ত্বেও বিরুদ্ধে। সেই সমাজে সাহিত্যের অনুভূতি তৈরির ক্ষেত্রে ডিকেন্সের একটি অপ্রত্যক্ষ প্রভাব ছিল। তিনি সামাজিক ভুলগুলি নিয়ন্ত্রণ ও অপসারণ, প্রয়োজনীয় সংস্কারের আহ্বান করেন। এভাবে সমাজে সাহিত্য তৈরি হয়। এবং এটিকে সমাজের আয়নার হিসাবে বর্ণনা করা যেতে পারে। তবে প্রতিবিম্বের গুণমান এবং প্রকৃতি নির্ভও করে লেখকের মনের মনোভাব, সে তার দৃষ্টিভঙ্গিও উপর।

প্রগতিশীল হোক বা পতিক্রিয়াশীল হোক স্বাভাবিকভাবেই, রক্ষণশীল মনের লেখকগণ সামাজিক জীবনের সেই দিকগুলি জোর দেবেন। যা জীবনের ঐতিহ্যবাহী পদ্ধতি ধরে রাখে। এবং যা বহু বছরের পুরানো আদর্শেও প্রতি শ্রদ্ধা, ধর্মেও প্রতি শ্রদ্ধা, মহিলার পরিবত্রতাকে সম্মান কর। অন্যদিকে, একজন প্রগতিশীল লেখক পুরানো আদর্শগুলি কীভাবে প্রকাতিক স্বাধীনতার প্রতিবন্ধক হিসাবে কাজ করে তা দেখাবেন। মহিলাদের মুক্ত চলাচল পঙ্গু আদর্শকে মুক্ত করার এবং সমাজকে সরিয়ে দেওয়ার জন্য অবিচ্ছিন্ন পরিবশে তৈরি করবেন সুতরাং, এই প্রবন্ধে নিভিস নির্দেশ করেছেন যে কীভাবে সাহিত্যের অধ্যয়ন সামাজিক এবং এছাড়াও সৃজনশীল প্রক্রিয়ায় সমাজ অংশ নেয়। সাহিত্যের কাজ সমালোচনা করা হলেও সাহিত্য সামাজিক, সংস্কৃতিক বিষয় গুলোর সঠিক ব্যাখ্যা বিশ্লেষণ করে থাকে। লেডিস, প্রকৃত সাহিত্যের আগ্রহকে সমাজকি মানবতাবাদ বলে মনে করেন।

Literature and Society by FR. Leavis

Literature and Society Text

Two or three years back, or at any time in the Marxizing decade, having been invited to discourse on 'Literature and Society', I should have known what was expected of me- and what to expect. I should have been expected to discuss, or to give opportunities for discussing, the duty of the writer to identify himself with the working-class, the duty of the critic to evaluate works of literature in terms of the degree in which they seemed calculated to further (or otherwise) the proper and pre-destined outcome of the class- struggle,


and the duty of the literary historian to explain literary history as the reflection of changing economic and material realities (the third adjective, 'social', which I almost added here, would be otiose). i should have been braced for such challenges as the proposition that D.H. Lawrence, though he was unquestionably aware of and tried to describe the outside forces that were undermining the bourgeois society into which he made his way.. saw those forces fro a bourgeois viewpoint, as destroyers to be combated. Consequently he misrepresented reality. What was wrong with his work was that he 'shared the life of a social class which has passed it's prime'.


I assume that the expectation I should have had to address myself to in those not so very remote days isn't entertained at all generally on the present occasion, and I assume it gladly. But that does leave me with a large undirected formula on my hands: 'Literature and Society' might, in fact, seem to be daunting and embarrassing in the wealth of possibilities it covers.


However, certain major interests of my own respond to it quite comfortably and I had no difficulty in concluding that I should be expected to do what, in accordance with those interests, it would suit me to do: that is, to try and define on what grounds and in what ways the study of literature- literature as it concerns me, who am avowedly in the first place a literary critic should, I think, be seen as intimately relevant to what may be presumed to be the major interest of students at the London School of Economics.

For if the Marxist approach to literature seems to me un profitable, that is not because I think of literature as a matter of isolated works of art, belonging to a realm of pure literary values ( Whatever they might be). works regarding the production of which it is enough to say that individuals of specific creative gifts were born and created them. No one interested I literature who began to read and think immediately after the 1914 war- at a time, that is, co- incident with the early critical work of T. S Eliot- can fail to have taken stock, for conscious rejection, of the Romantic critical tradition( if it can be called that): the set of ideas and attitudes about literary creation coming down thought the nineteenth century.


That tradition laid all the stress on inspiration and the individual genius. How do masterpieces arrive? Gifted individuals occur, inspiration sets in, creation results. Mr. Eliot, all of whose early prose may be said to have been directed against the Romantic tradition, which till then had not been effectively challenged, lays the stress on the there things or some of them) besides individual talent and originative impulse from within that have to be taken account of when we try to understand any significant achievement in art.


Of course, it was no discovery that there are these things to be taken account of: criticism and literary history had of generations dealt I influences., environments and the extra literary conditions of literary production. But we are apt to be peculiarly under the influence of ideas and attitudes of which we are not fully conscious, they prevail until rejected, and the Romantic set- an atmosphere of the unformulated and vague- may be said it have prevailed until Mr Eliot's criticism co-operation with his poetry, mad unconsciousness impossible and rejection inevitable.

Something like the idea of tradition so incisively and provocatively formulated by him plays, I think, an essential part in the thinking of everyone to-day who is seriously interested in literature. If I say that idea represents an new emphasis on the social nature of artistic achievement, I ought to add at once that the word 'social probably doesn't occur in the classical essay, Tradition and the individual talent (the word that takes Mr Eliot's stress is 'impersonal').


The 'society'- and (which is, of course, my point) in the ideal of Tradition- is not the Marxist concept; and the difference is what I have my eye on. But let me first remind your of the idea as Mr Eliot formulates it. The individual writer is to be aware that his work is of the literature to which it belongs and not merely added externally to it. A literature, that is, must be thought of as essentially something more than an accumulation of separate works: it has an organic form, or constitutes an organic order, in relation to which the individual writer has his significance and his being. 'Mind' is the analogy (if this is the right word) used:

He must be aware that the mind of Europe- the mind of his own country- mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind- is a mind which changes... and so on.

Something, I said, in the nature of his way of thinking seems to me inevitable for anyone who thinks about literature at all. The ways in which it is at odds with Marxist theories of culture are obvious. It stresses, not economic and material determinates, but intellectual and spiritual, so implying a different conception from the Marxist of the relation between the present of society and the past, and a different conception of society.


It assumes that, enormously- no one will deny it- as material conditions count, there is a certain measure of spiritual autonomy in human affairs, and that human intelligence, choice and will do really and effectively operate, expressing an inherent human nature. There is a human nature- that is how, form the present point of view, we may take the stress as falling; a human nature, of which an understanding is of primary importance to students of society and politics. And here is the first way that presents itself of indication the kind of importance literature- the literary critics literature- should be recognized to have for such students: the study of it is, or should be, an intimate study of the complexities, potentialities and essential conditions of human nature.


But that by itself is too large a proposition to take us anywhere. Let me, by way of moving towards more discussible particularity, make another obvious note on the difference between the Marxist kind of attitude toward literature and that represented by the idea of Tradition I've invoked. It's true that this latter stresses the social aspect of creative achievement as the Romantic attitude didn't: but it allows for the individual aspect more than the Marxist does.


This is inevitably a crude way of putting it- as you'll see, that 'inevitably' is my point. But to postpone that for a moment: you can't be interested I literature and forget that the creative individual is indispensable. Without the individual talent there is no creation. While you are in intimate touch with literature no amount of dialectic, or of materialistic interpretation, will obscure for long the truth that human life lives only in individuals: I might have said, the truth that it is only in individuals that society lives.


The point I wanted to make is this: you can't contemplate the nature of literature without acquiring some inhibition in respect of that antithesis, 'the individual and society,' and losing any innocent freedom you may have enjoyed in handing it; without, that is acquiring some inhibiting apprehensions of the subtleties that lie behind the antithesis.


An illustration presents itself readily. I have spoken of the Romantic' attitude, and the phrase might be called misleading, since the actual poets of the Romantic period- Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats- differ widely among themselves. No general description worth offering will cover them. Though as influences they merge later in a Romantic tradition, they themselves do not exemplify any common Romanticism.

What they have in common is that they belong to the same age; and in belonging to the same age they have in common something negative: the absence of anything to replace the very positive tradition( Literary and more than literary- hence its strength) that had prevailed till towards the end of the eighteenth century. It is this tradition, the Augustan, that I want to consider briefly first.


It originated in the great changes in civilization that make the second part of the seventeenth century look so unlike the first, and its early phase may be studied in the works of John Dryden. The conventions, standards and idiom of its confident maturity offer themselves for contemplation in The Tatler and the Spectator. The relevant point to be made about it for the present purpose is that it laid a heavy stress on the social.


Its insistence that man is a social being was such as to mean in effect that all his activities, inner as well as outer, that literature took cognizance of, were to belong to an overtly social context. Even the finest expressions of the spirit were to be in resonance with a code of Good Form- for with such a code the essential modes and idioms of Augustan culture were intimately associated. The characteristic movements and dictions of the eighteenth century, in verse as well as prose, convey a suggestion of social deportment and company manners.


An age in which such a tradition gets itself established is clearly an age in which the writer feels himself very much at one with society. And the Augustan heyday, the Queen Anne period, was a period very confident of its flourishing cultural health. But we should expect such and insistence on the social to have in time a discouraging effect on the deeper sources of originality, the creative springs in the individually experiencing mind. We should expect to find evidence of this in the field of poetry, and we find it. This is no place to pretend to give a fair account of the Augustan decline, which was a complex affair:


I'm merely stressing an aspect that is relevant to my present purpose. Where, then a tradition like that I have adumbrated prevails, there is bound before long to be a movement of protest in minds of the kind that ought to be creative. They will feel that conventional expression that which, nevertheless, seems natural and inevitable to the age- imposes a conventional experience, and that this, suppressing, obtruding, muffing, and misrepresenting, is at odds with their own. There will be a malaise, a sense of blunted vitality, that would express itself to this effect it it were fully conscious. Full consciousness is genius, and manifests itself in technical achievement, the new use of words. In the seventeen eighties it is William Blake

Blake in his successful work sys implicitly: 'it is I who see and feel. I see only what I see and feel only what I feel. My experience is mind, and in its specific quality lies its significance.' He may be said to have reversed for himself the shift of stress that occurred at the Restoration. But to such a reversal there is clearly a limit. Blake uses the English language, and not one of his own invention; and to say that he uses it is not to say that it is for him a mere instrument. His individuality has developed in terms of the language, with the ways of experiencing, as well as of handling experience, that it involves. The mind and sensibility that he has to express are of the language.


I may seem here o be handling a truism of the kind that there's no point I recalling. But I believe that the familiar truths that we contemplate when we contemplate the nature of language- in the way, that is, in which we have to when we take a critical interest in literature- have the familiarity of the familiar things that we tend to lose sight of when we begin to think. And what I ha e just been touching on is perhaps the most radical of the ways in which the literary critic's interest in literature leads to a new recognition of the essential social nature of the individual - and (I may add) of the 'reality' he takes for granted.


In any case, I want to pass at once to an order of consideration that will probably seem to have more discussible bearings on the normal pre- occupations of the student of society. The measure of social collaboration and support represented by the English language didn't make Blake prosperously self-sufficient: he needed something more- something that he didn't get. This is apparent in a peculiar kind of difficulty that his work offers to the critic. I am thinking of the difficulty one so often has in deciding what kind of thing it is one has before one.


A pretty sneaking knave I knew- O! Mr Cromek, how do ye do? - that is clearly a private blow-off. The Tyger is clearly a poem (in site of the bluffed-out defeat in the third stanza). But again and again one comes on the thing that seems to be neither wholly private nor wholly a poem. It seems not to know what it is or where it belongs, and one suspects that Blake didn't know. What he did know- and know deep down in himself- was that he had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. One obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books.

Blake and ceased to be capable to taking enough trouble. The uncertainty I have just referred to is a more radical and significant form of the same kind of disability. In the absence, we may put it, of adequate social collaboration (the sense, or confident prospect, of a responsive community y of minds was the minimum he needed) his powers of attaining in achieved creation t that peculiar impersonal realm to which the work of art belongs and in which minds can meet-it is as little a world of purely private experience as it is the public world of the laboratory -a failed to develop as, his native endowment being what it was, they ought to have done.

The inevitable way in which serious literary interest develops towards the sociological is suggested well enough here. What better conditions, one asks, can one imagine for a Blake? Can one imagine him in a tradition that should have nurtured his genius rather that have been something it had to escape from, and in a society that should have provided hem with the best conceivable public? But what is the best conceivable public? And so one is led on to inquire into the nature and conditions of cultural health and prosperity.

I will illustrate with a line of reflection that has occupied me a good deal. Harking back from Blake one notes that the establishment of the Augustan tradition was associated wit - indeed, it involved a separation, new and abrupt, between sophisticated culture and popular. Anticipating the problem of bringing home as convincingly and vividly as possible to (say) students of modern social and political questions what is meant by saying that there was, in the seventeenth century, a real culture of the people, one thinks first of Dryden's contemporary, Bunyan, it

The Pilgrim's progress is a humane masterpiece, that is in spite of the bigoted sectarian creed that Banyan's allegory, in detail as in sum, directs itself to enforcing. In spite of his aim, a humane masterpiece resulted because he belonged to the civilization of his time, and that meant, for a small- town 'mechanick', participating in a rich traditional culture.

It is on the reader approaching as a literary critic that this truth compels itself others seem to miss it). Consider, not one of the most striking illustrations of Bunyan's art, such as the apologia and self characterization of By-Ends, but a passage representative in a routine kind of way:


Christian: Did you hear no talk of neighbor Pliable?

Faithful: Yes, Christian, I heard that he followed you till the came at the Slough of Despond, where, as some said, he fell in; but he would not be known to have so done; but I am sure he was soundly be dabbled with that kind of dirt.

Christian: And what said the neighbors to him?

Faithful: He hath, since his going back, been had greatly in derision, and that among all sorts of people; some do mock and despise him; and scarce will any set him on work. He is now seven times worse that if he had never gone out of the city.

Christian: But why should they be so set against him, since they also despise die way that he forsook?

Faithful: Oh, they say, hang him, he is a turncoat! He was not true to his profession. Think God has stirred up even his enemies to hiss at him, and make him a proverb, because he hath forsaken the way. Christian: Had you no talk with him before you came out?

Faithful: I met him once in the streets, but he leered away on the other side as one ashamed of what he had done; so I spoke not to him.

Christian: Well, at my first setting out, I had hopes of that man; but now I fear he will perish in the over- throw of the city; for it is happened to him according to the true proverb. The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire.


The relation of this to the consummate art of the By-Ends passage is plain; we have the idiomatic life that runs to saw and proverb, and runs also to what is closely akin to these, the kind of pungently characterizing epitome represented by 'turncoat'( which, with a capital letter, might have appeared in By-Ends' list of his kindred). The vitality here is not merely one of raciness; an art of civilized living is implicit, with its habits and standards of serious moral valuation.


This then is what the literary critic has to deduce from his reading. If the finds that others, interested primarily in social reform and social history, do not seem properly impressed by such evidence, he can by way of bringing home to them in how full a sense there is, behind the literature, a social culture and an art of living, call attention to Cecil Sharp's introduction to English Folk songs from the Southern Appalachians. Hearing that the English folk- song still persisted in the remoter valleys of those mountains sharp, during the war of 1914, went over to investigate, and brought back a fabulous haul. 

More than that, he discovered that the tradition of song and dance( and a reminder is in place at this point of the singing and dancing with which the pilgrims punctuate their progress in the second part of Bunyan's Calvinistic allegory) had persisted so vigorously because the whole context to which folk-song and folk- dance belong was there too; he discovered, in fact, a civilization or 'way of life'( in our democratic parlance) that was truly an art of social living. The mountaineers were descended from settlers who had left this country in the eighteenth century.


The region is from its inaccessibility a very secluded one....die inhabitants have for a hundred years or more been completely isolated and shut off from all traffic with the rest of the world. Their speech is English, not American, and, from the number of expressions they use that have long been obsolete elsewhere, and the old-fashioned way in which they pronounce many of their words, it is clear the they are talking the language of a past day.

They are a leisurely, cheery people in their quiet way, in whom the social instinct is very highly developed... They know their Bible intimately and subscribe to an austere creed, charged with Calvinism and the unrelenting doctrines of determinism or fatalism... They have an easy unaffected bearing and the unselfconscious manners of the well-bred... A few of those we met were able to read and write, but the majority were illiterate. They are however good talkers, using an abundant vocabulary racial and picturesquely....


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