THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN MODERNIST CRITICISM: T. S. ELIOT, EDMUND WILSON, AND F. R. LEAVIS

Negative criticism of British literature of the nineteenth century, and of the Victorian period in particular, is one of the pre-eminent features of the literary criticism associated with the Modernist movement. The reaction against the nineteenth century had already begun when Modernism started to emerge as a literary movement around the time of the First World War. T. S. Eliot began to establish a dichotomy between Modernist writing and the literary traditions of the nineteenth century. He identified Georgian poetry with the Romantic tradition, which he characterized as leading to "excess in any direction," and attacked the Victorians for using literature for non-literary purposes. In The Sacred Wood, however, he relied heavily on the work of Matthew Arnold, especially "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in his critique of Romanticisim and his description of the "perfect critic." Though Eliot attempted to minimize the influence because of Arnold's status as the spokesman for nineteenth-century literary values, the relation between the two was far-reaching. In Homage to John Dryden, Eliot made claims for an alternative to the nineteenth-century tradition, an alternative tradition comprised of metaphysical and French Symbolist poets, and at the same time attacked nineteenth-century writers by invidious comparisons with seventeenth-century writers and through an attack on nineteenth-century criticism generally. The theory of literary history presented in Homage to John Dryden was a theory of the literary personality; Eliot's critical values were much closer to the nineteenth-century tradition than his attacks indicated. An analysis of contrasted passages by Chapman and Browning shows that a world-view was being contrasted, and not a literary technique. An investigation of the conceit and the symbol reveals that they both are characteristic tropes of a religious sensibility, suggesting extra-literary motivations for Eliot's distinction between the two "traditions." Edmund Wilson differed from Eliot in his commitment to the American literary world and his progressive political outlook. Axel's Castle represents his attempt to explain both his admiration for Modernism's literary achievements and his concern over its reactionary, isolationist tendencies. The version of literary history, adapted from Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, Wilson used to explain Modernism required him to omit the Victorian literary tradition as a significant influence on twentieth-century writing. This led to a number of deficiencies in his explication of Modernist works, and especially to a neglect of the nineteenth-century English Symbolist tradition. F. R. Leavis desiderated new standards for the teaching and study of literature, and he looked to modern writers like Eliot and D. H. Lawrence for works that showed an awareness of the crisis in contemporary life and a strong connection with the values of the cultural tradition. Though he derived many of his literary values from Eliot, their difference on Lawrence indicates the individual character of Leavis's criticism. In New Bearings in English Poetry, he denounced Victorian poetry as escapist and declared that it could have nothing to do with the poetry of new bearings, of which Eliot was the model example. This led to reductive views of the poetry of writers like Yeats, Pound, and even Hopkins, and an insufficient account of Eliot's own work. Leavis's standard of "seriousness" is characteristic of Modernist criticism generally, which made strong and, in the end, illegitimate demands on the literature of the past.