The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (Faber Finds) by F. R. Leavis (PDF)

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The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.’So begins F. R. Leavis’s most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemical survey of English fiction, first published in 1948. Leavis makes his case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for an author’s inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Hard Times as Dickens’ one ‘completely serious work of art’; while Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce are among those weighed in the balance and found wanting.'[Leavis] gave one a new idea of what it meant to read… the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality.’Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

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Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The major critical study of the English novel published in the 20th century … which suggests I’ve read all (or most) of them, and I haven’t. But I state without reservation that Leavis judgments will stand as a guide after 70 years in print.Don’t be put off by his rebarbative prose style: he was a teacher, not a writer, and brilliance in the classroom doesn’t translate into fautless prose. His total lack of humor, his obsessive use of the epithets “adult” and “mature”, his inability to understand the subtler meaning of the word “aesthetic” in respect to fiction are also of minor importance compared with the brilliance of his trajectory through the English novel.Please read the introduction carefully. Leavis clearly says that his chosen few–George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad,–are not the only English novelists worth reading, which nullifies the attacks of those who call him “narrow”.Of course, the area for disagreement with his inclusions and exclusions is large. Is CHANCE really a better novel than LORD JIM? Did James descend into perfect pointlessness with THE AMBASSADORS? Is the “good” half of DANIEL DERONDA so much better than the “bad”? To dismiss HEART OF DARKNESS as second-rate on the basis of some flawed adjectival flights just won’t do.And to include THE AWKWARD AGE as one of James’ triumphs, rather than a novel corrupted by a dramatist manque, makes no sense, as does praising THE EUROPEANS out of proportion to its minor meritsStill, what he has to say about MIDDLEMARCH, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, and NOSTROMO convinces me that he was a critic of genius, likely the best one “professing” English in his time.Given his standards, I’m sure it would be amusing and enlightening to read Leavis on, say, Nabokov. What would he have made of a writer whose critical standard was the spinal frisson? Leavis on Beckett’s novels … I just can’t imagine that!Alas, Leavis’s overblown praise of D.H. Lawrence in later books shows that he could go terribly–and imcomprehensibly–wrong. If anyone deserved the critical cat of nine tails it was Lawrence, most of whose oeuvre is megalomania raised to towering heights, and his few masterpieces won’t compensate for the pages of errant nonsense he produced.Finally, for a man who apparently lacked a sense of humor, Leavis was capable of a jest at least once in THE GREAT TRADITION, stating in the introductory chapter that though rereading CLARISSA would be more a duty than a pleasure, he’d prefer it to reading through Proust again. Now there’s a desert island choice that would turn your isolation into hell on earth …

⭐This is one of the most important books of literary criticism written in the 20th century.Leaving aside the issue of how much of it F.R. himself wrote (Q.D., his wife and literary partner, once claimed that she wrote a substantial part of it), and leaving aside his tortuous (tortured?) prose style, the book definitely contains insights of genius.What Leavis (or the Leavises) get right:(1) Late Henry James is far inferior to earlier novels like PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE BOSTONIANS, though praise for THE AWKWARD AGE is, IMHO, misguided.(2) George Eliot is a great novelist, not a philosopher and novelist manque, even if most of her later works are uneven (Leavis analysis of DERONDA is superb). However, I think MIDDLEMARCH deserves a higher mark than he gives it.(3) Conrad is definitely part of the “great tradition”, but the list of his best books should include LORD JIM and HEART OF DARKNESS, which Leavis dismisses, and exclude VICTORY and CHANCE, which he praises.(4) Thomas Hardy should be part of the “great tradition”, because TESS, JUDE, and THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE are the equals of the writers Leavis includes, even on Leavis’ terms (“maturity”, “moral seriousness”, etc.)Leavis has no appreciation of comic novels (witness his exclusion of Sterne and Fielding from the GT), and he mentions Lawrence in passing, only to overpraise this dubious “genius” in two later books.His position on Dickens is ridiculous. HARD TIMES is the only book he thinks isn’t “entertainment”, a view he renounced several years later without apology or explanation.I’m glad Leavis is no longer a power in literary criticism, but he was once a force and what’s good in him still rings true.

⭐Can’t say I “love” old Leavis, but I am quite fond of him–F.R. and his wife Queenie (yes!) were kind of the Samuel Johnson literary dictators in English studies in England during the thirties and into the forties–While The Great Tradition of the title (1948) is represented, according to Leavis, by Eliot, James and Conrad, one might not realize that the Leavises were major advocates for D.H. Lawrence–Leavis is quite prone to making categorial statements of approval or disapprobation, as befits a literary eminence handing down his judgments from on high–Needless to say, this sort of thing is no longer to be found in contemporary literary criticism–Leavis is old-school with a capital C–I find this sort of thing salutary in moderate doses, a kind of pharmakon against too much postmodern theory–I find in this work, Leavis likes a number of titles I like, that always makes for a collegial feeling–Daniel Deronda by Eliot–Leavis pronounces that it falls into two parts, the “bad part” and the “good part,” yet he considers it a great work and combines his reading of it with his reading of James’ Portrait Of A Lady–Leavis considers two of what I consider Conrad’s underrated works, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, and the masterwork Nostromo. Well worth putting oneself under the master’s tutelage!

⭐Without wishing to write a spoiler, this quite long book can be summarised as follows:1. The great tradition of the English novel is made up of the works of just four writers – Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad.2. FRL is inclined to add DH Lawrence to this list, but not in this book3. All other novelists, except Dickens, are pretenders. This applies especially to Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Trollope, Gaskell, Meredith and Hardy, and latterly to Woolf. Sterne is beneath consideration.4. The French novel, epitomised by Flaubert, lacks moral seriousness, being hampered by a preference for form over substance and art for art’s sake.5. Turgenev is good, but not on a par with the four of the great English tradition, while Tolstoy, especially in Anna Karenina, is transcendentally great and at least on a par with them.6. Austen is not covered in this book.7. Eliot’s later works are the best, with Middlemarch as her pinnacle. Felix Holt is under-rated and Daniel Deronda is half good.8. James is the least of the four writers in the tradition and his earlier works are his best. In fact he disappeared into his own writerliness with his last, so-called great works – The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Readers should stick to Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Europeans and Washington Square, the first of these in particular.9. Conrad is genuinely great and his masterpieces are Nostromo, Victory, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes and Chance (No, not The Heart of Darkness, which is fatally flawed), with Nostromo the finest.10. Dickens has Shakespeare’s energy and facility with character, but wrote only one book worthy of comparison with the four writers in the great tradition – Hard Times.There you have it. There is now no need to read this heavy-going book. You can get straight on with reading or re-reading, as the case may be, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, Nostromo and Hard Times (and what pleasure there is to be had there!)The good thing about this book is the clarity of the opinions expressed in it. Not only are these opinions clear, but they are mostly spot on. He is wrong about The Heart of Darkness, of course, but I find everything else hard to argue with. The Golden Bowl IS just about unreadable or, rather, not worth the bother reading it entails; Thomas Hardy is over-rated; and Dickens (along with Fielding and Thackeray), brilliant though he can be, is not of the first rank.The problem with the book is the way he expresses his theses. FRL is a bully. His favoured mode of argument is strong assertion followed by frequent repetition, intolerant of contradiction or nuance. To reinforce his argument he includes between repetitions contemptuous asides about authors not on the list. Some of the latter have no pretence to be in the English great tradition, but this does not prevent Priestley and Proust receiving random put-downs regardless.FRL does surprisingly little to support his assertions. There is no close textual analysis. On the contrary, he tends to give the reader page long quotes from the works of his favoured novels, leaving the reader to work out how they support (or not) his propositions. His own prose is quite stodgy and only lightens up when he is indulging himself with one of his magisterial put-downs.The real problem with the book is with its whole premise. Is there really a Great Tradition in the English novel? The first problem is with the word “English”. Does it mean a novel written in English? No, because FRR excludes the Americans, Hawthorne, Melville et al, as part of a separate American tradition. Does it mean writers who are English? Hardly, because neither James nor Conrad were English. Also, although he did not qualify for to be one of the final four, Walter Scott was clearly considered, but found severely wanting, for inclusion.FRL traces the English tradition in a line from Fielding via Burney to Austen and then to Eliot, with Richardson chipping in. I can just about follow that, but let’s go back to Tom Jones, to the part where Fielding gives us an aside telling the reader not to bother reading this book any further, but to go to the source book, Don Quijote. There you have it, Brexiters and everyone else. The English novel, whatever that is, is part of a European tradition and that the only thing that differentiates it is that it is written in English and is set in British society (or in the case of James and Conrad in particular, cosmopolitan society, where the British Empire or British manners were a dominating force).Austen aside, FRL’s own group of four great novelists were great because, like Fielding, they were fully informed of literature on the Continent. Eliot earned part of her living translating German texts, mainly philosophy admittedly. James brings us not just the influence of American writing, but he was a visitor to Paris and was on familiar terms with the French authors and Turgenev. Conrad did not have English as his first or even his second language. He was fluent in Polish and French.Typically, FRL creates his Great Tradition by means of a clever omission. He side-steps the Romantics. Emily Bronte and Mary Shelley, those great misfits of English literature, are passed over in silence in his book, which is convenient because Romanticism is a movement that is unambiguously European, albeit that at least two British writers, Scott and Byron, not to mention Shakespeare, were major figures in its propagation.Of course, FRL had an ulterior motive. He was Lecturer in English Literature at Cambridge at a time when this academic discipline was still relatively young. The definition of a separate strand of thought that is the great tradition of the English novel served his purpose. It helped define academic boundaries and thereby justify his chosen profession.Besides who’s to say that we cannot identify elements which make the novels originally written in English by writers based in Britain or its overseas territories different from those originally written in France, the German-speaking lands, Russia or Italy? For example, these novels tend to be relatively free of grand moral or philosophical superstructures, not aligned to multiple –isms that are difficult to distinguish from each other and do not seek to uncover some fundamental meaning in history.Even if there is a list of characteristics that define the English novel, I do not believe in the relay race proposed by FRL whereby Austen passes the baton to Eliot who hands it on to James and thence to Conrad. Eliot was aware of Austen certainly and was probably influenced in some undefinable way by her. But equally she will have been aware of Fielding, the Brontes, Dickens and Thackeray, and of multiple Continental writers. The real link between the two women is that each was the best (not the most influential, because that would bring us to Scott and Dickens) novelist writing in English of their day.I do not accept that there is a great tradition whereby Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad were involved in some common enterprise. It’s more archaeological than that. As one digs back through the layers and layers of English language novels published first in the UK, one comes across first Beckett, then Woolf (No. Sorry, Frank, not Lawrence.), followed by Conrad, James and Eliot, back on through to Austen and Fielding. It’s not a formally linked chain or tradition, but it is one hell of a literary canon, one to which the literature of few other nations can compare. With Dickens as our first reserve (Surely a bit like leaving Jimmy Greaves out of our World Cup Final team.), possibly only the Russians can compete.The book is made up of four lectures, plus an introduction. The first lecture, on Eliot, concentrates on the weaknesses in her books, including Middlemarch, so much so that one ends up wondering why she was included in the great tradition at all (Ridiculously, the tone of the book is very much that of the great critic marking the four novelists’ homework.) The second, on James, is similar. The lecture on Conrad is much the weakest. It gives the impression of having been hurried and, unlike the others, it has no footnotes. The last lecture is a bit of an add-on, possibly to appease fans of the peerless Charles Dickens. It is a short lecture on a single novel, Hard Times, which FRL considers as the only work of Dickens that bears comparison with the novels of the four members of the great tradition. It is the only lecture that inspired me to want to read the novel concerned.Four stars for Leavis for identifying the right books from the right four authors. He loses a star for dogmatism and, apart from the lecture on Hard Times, failing to inspire one to go and re-read the books concerned. Marks were also deducted due to the weakness of the section on Conrad.The publisher gets only one star for a very poor conversion to Kindle format. Frankly the number of typos is an insult to not just to Leavis, but to publishing generally.

⭐Am reading it for the second time, not been too easy for me to follow initially but useful study aid for referencing

⭐Seminal work for those interested in the English novel. His opinions are trenchant and well-argued, even if his canon of great English novels will be too narrow for many.

⭐Good for Critical Theory studies. Would not read otherwise.

⭐a great landmark

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