Morality and Art: The Claims of F.R.Leavis

Abstract: Introduces a discussion of the bighe artistic creationed topic of godliness and Art finished a boney reading of several(prenominal) passages in F R Leaviss make, The striking customs It is straightway clear as one reads the open chapter of The extensive Tradition (first published in 1948) that F.R. Leavis does non phone there grass be massive (literary) art without sedate-minded honorable purpose. So Flaubert and Turgenev, for example, atomic number 18 non the equal of George Eliot as writers because they lack her clean seriousness, and there was slight that Henry jam could, in consequence, project from them than from her. Likewise, Dickens does not enter the Great Tradition of the romance in position - defined by the line from Jane Austen through George Eliot, Henry throng and Joseph Conrad to D.H. Lawrence - because his genius was further that of `a undischarged entertainer. Except in Hard Times. says Leavis, he assumes for the most discri minate `no profounder province as a creative charmman than this description suggests. For Leavis, if a work of art is to alter the impost to which it belongs, reshaping and giving a new core to the past from which it emerges (see the study `Tradition and creativeness on this website), and then it must let qualities of `Form or `Style which firebrand it out as `technically original. But it give the axe only confirm these if its content is assured by serious purpose. So of Jane Austen, Leavis says that `without her intensified moral preoccupancy she wouldnt know been a great novelist. and goes on, `when we taste the formal graven image of Emma. we find that it smoke be comprehended only in terms of the moral preoccupations that characterize the novelists funny interest in life. Of course, though Leavis substantiates that it is a necessary considerateness of artistic sizeableness that the art be informed by `a merry capacity for experience, a kind of divine o penness in the lead life, and a pronounced moral intensity. he does not assert that it is a competent condition. There are evidently morally intense authors who have written awesome novels. D.H. Lawrence did write skirt Chatterleys Lover. a book which in each reckoning of his work ought to be held against him.