The Cambridge Connection
This essay was written for a series of talks given by various speakers at the London Festival Hall in January 2000. It is meant to be straightforward enough for a general audience with an interest but no professional familiarity with the subject of the series, which treated of modern literary criticism. The subject has of course been treated elsewhere in more intimate detail, but here what was wanted was a general account of the importance of the ‘connection’.
No doubt to come from Cambridge and speak about the importance of Cambridge to modern literary criticism is to risk the accusation of parochialism; but the risk must be taken, for there is a real sense in which modern Anglophone criticism had its origins there in the years immediately after the Great War. This tradition of criticism flourished for quite a long time, probably reaching some sort of peak in the Fifties and Sixties.
Literary criticism in those days was a discipline that clearly interested a considerable non-specialist, non-academic, educated public. Respectable general publishers were glad to include literary criticism in their lists. I shall later say something about the way in which this public was created and sustained, and why the likes of Chatto & Windus and Routledge published so much of it, far more, indeed, than the university presses. Some professors found the abundance of such critical books alarming, though one remarked that the fashion reminded her of the nineteenth-century vogue for sermons, and would, in time, be as dead as they were.
The forecast was not far out. Immense quantities of criticism are still produced, but are now almost entirely academic and presuppose
little or no interest in a wider educated public. Lionel Trilling, a fine, independent critic of what we must now call the old school, was always worried about keeping open the channels between the academy and the intelligentsia broadly conceived; he contemplated with dismay the decline of serious periodicals that discussed literature, as well as of other matters, politics and society, with that public in view. Writing of that kind has not wholly disappeared, but it has certainly diminished in quantity and perhaps in quality also. This is an age of theory, and theory is both difficult and usually not related to anything that meets the wider interest I speak of. Expansion and professionalization have meant that the common pursuit of true judgement, as Eliot, echoed by F. R. Leavis, called it, is a lot less common than it used to be.
The age of criticism, if one can call it that, can be dated, as I said, from the Cambridge of the years immediately after 1918. The idea of English literature as a proper form of academic study had hitherto not been countenanced at Oxbridge, and in institutions where it was accepted the methods employed, for example at University College London, and in the great northern universities, were based largely on Germanic philology and literary history. So it was, with some differences, in the American universities. The study of literature in one’s own language seemed too easy, so Old and Middle English were conscripted to do the work of Greek and Latin grammar. One motive for the changes I’m about to describe was a new conviction that real literary criticism was not at all too easy; that it called for hard theoretical competence and high analytic intelligence as well as common sense.
The idea of the importance of literary criticism, considered as a necessary aspect of the national culture, was not in itself entirely novel, and the achievement of the great nineteenth-century reviewers was still remembered. Other Victorian bearers of this civilized tradition were Matthew Arnold and, to a slightly lesser degree, Leslie Stephen, and they provided an obvious contrast to modern Sunday newspaper reviewing. Note that these models were essentially non-academic, though products of the academy. Indeed one of the reasons why Stephen was admired was that he had given up a Cambridge fellowship on conscientious grounds and become something like a modern freelance writer without sacrifice of scholarly standards and authority.
The new Cambridge critics wanted to foster the more valuable elements in the culture of their own time, so, despite wide differences of method and assumption, they shared some basic ethical assumptions with these predecessors.
The academics who sought to introduce a new style of literary study in Cambridge were, necessarily, not men who had been trained in ‘English literature’. No such training was available, at any rate in Oxbridge. They had started out as classicists or historians or philosophers, though their educational experience was much wider than those descriptions might suggest, for they had benefited from the relative smallness and intimacy of the university and the accessible presence of some very impressive minds. I. A. Richards, reading History and later Moral Science, had access to Bertrand Russell and his pupil Wittgenstein (but he meant ‘very little’ to Richards), G. E. Moore and J. M. E. McTaggart among the philosophers. James Ward the psychologist was his teacher; without Charles Sherrington’s neurology Richards’ Principles would not have been possible.
Among his contemporaries and collaborators, the polymathic C. K. Ogden (‘he was just unbelievable as an intelligence’) was within his daily reach. ‘In those days at Cambridge,’ said Richards, ‘you had no assigned reading’, and he called the Moral Science courses ‘the last word in philosophic savagery’. However, the audience at the Moral Science Club might include Russell and Moore and F. C. Bartlett, McTaggart and other neo-Hegelians; possibly Lowes Dickinson and Forster and Keynes as well. Moore was particularly important to Richards, but Ogden, as a contemporary and his collaborator on The Meaning of Meaning, a severe treatise on semantics, had perhaps a more direct influence, and so had Mansfield Forbes, a brilliant colleague who died young; he alone shared Richards’ interest in matters of literary-critical theory and practice.
Richards took a first in ‘Moral Science’ and eventually eased his way, and spread his doctrines of philosophical and linguistic analysis, into the newly founded English School (the course was ‘English Literature, Life and Thought’). The history of the foundation of that School, and later of the Faculty of English, has been told many times: the opposition of the classicists and others; the doubt as to whether such a course, shorn of the linguistic study that was demanded elsewhere,
was sufficiently difficult to be called a discipline. All agree that Richards’ was a dominant voice. But neither he nor his sympathizers had any real power in the university, for they were not recognized university teachers. Consequently they were unable to do much about the bureaucratic development of the new Faculty. Over the following years English at Cambridge remained distinctive, not very like the subject anywhere else, but it was not what Forbes and Richards wanted.
It is right and necessary to emphasize that in spite of the psychologistic element in such books as The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and the methodological novelty of its sequel Practical Criticism (1929), there was always a strong ethical component in Richards. He was interested of course in science, but believed that art of high quality was needed to supplement the cognitive achievements of the scientists. He expressly agreed with Matthew Arnold that poetry could do the work of religion (that it was ‘a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos’), but to achieve that end it was necessary to understand how poetry worked. ‘I was interested in psychology … But my psychology came out of G. F. Stout … and William James’s The Principles of Psychology. Those were the real formative things. Those and Sherrington’s Integrative Action of the Nervous System to put the physiology into it. I was someone really saturated in psychology and neurology making up a book about the literary approaches.’
The display and explanation of this psychological machinery was largely confined to the early books – all the talk of equilibrium of impulse, the psychological justification of that high claim for poetry, yielded to the urgent necessity of practical criticism, the intense study of ‘words on the page’. Richards spoke of its object thus: he intended ‘to introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary state of culture, whether as critics, as philosophers, as psychologists, or merely as curious persons. Secondly, to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry, and why they should like or dislike it. Thirdly, to prepare the way for educational methods more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read’. Of course he had opponents who believed that it was absurd to say that you needed to be taught to read your own language. But by means of his work on
the Cambridge course he may be thought to have beaten them. Later, more successful opposition came from a resurgent Marxism, from younger critics like Raymond Williams who condemned Richards’ notion of ‘equilibrium’ as entirely passive: according to Richards the desired effect of poetry was the achievement of a condition in which no further action was necessary, and, for Williams, this was to stop the process at just the point where it should have issued in political action. These are important objections. The fading of Richards’ influence meant the end of the first age of the Cambridge connection. His methods gave way to a newer, anti-aesthetic style of criticism that is even today dominant in the academy.
To return to the Twenties: once there was a Faculty of English in existence, conditions grew harder for Richards and his colleagues, all of whom, as I’ve said, lacked regular appointments. And as the enterprise began to crumble, Richards considered new possibilities outside Cambridge. He was attracted by China and by the USA; it was as if having dedicated himself to the education of a handful of people in Cambridge he wanted to take on the education of the whole world. He devoted more and more time to Basic English, in the invention of which he had assisted Ogden. He remained a prolific writer about literature, but his influence on criticism waned. He continued to write poetry and climb mountains, and he was deeply respected in China as well as in the United States; but when he returned to Cambridge for his last years he felt himself to be rather irrelevant, now an outsider, and a victim of the well-known froideur of the Cambridge social climate. Still, he was an unignorable figure, and we have lost much by forgetting his example to the degree that we have.
Of course he belonged to a world now remote; he took little interest in Freud, and with Ogden decided against Saussure, two of the founding fathers of modern criticism. But we could do with a revival, not of the old psychologies and linguistics and semantics, but of the application of devoted intelligence to the actual texts of literature.
Practical Criticism is still a paper in the Cambridge English Tripos, and it has been imitated, with many variations, all over the Anglophone world. Richards’ book, with its ‘protocols’ and lists of critical faults (inability to get the plain sense, stock responses, doctrinal adhesions, etc.) may now seem in some respects quaint, but in the course of
assembling it he discovered a truth no less important today than in 1929. What he discovered, with surprise and some incredulity, was that people who had enjoyed what was assumed to be the best education available made absurdly elementary mistakes in writing about the poems he set before them. They missed the plain sense, were slaves to stock responses, judged poems in terms of their doctrinal assumptions, and so on. Such readers were, in spite of their paper qualifications, dangerously uneducated, manifestly ill-equipped to receive the psychic or neural benefits that poetry can offer, as well as being vulnerable to exploitation elsewhere.
Richards was not recommending very loose or licentious interpretation. He was hostile to what he later called ‘omnipossibilism’; as he expressed the point much later, ‘deep freedom in reading is made possible only by the widest surface conformities’. That is why ‘deep reading’ can be taught. Attention to surface conformities must precede and control imaginative interpretation.
The importance of this position for future criticism is obvious. Readers could be trained; they would, in consequence, be more balanced and valuable persons. Practical criticism, deep, informed attention to texts – texts, not doctrines – was to be of all intellectual disciplines the most rewarding. You could become very good at it, at the same time sharpening your sensibility, balancing your impulses, and receiving a modern substitute for the comforts of religion.
Such interpretative experiences need not be confined to the academy. The appearance of a non-academic criticism of superior quality was signalled by the opportune publication of Eliot’s The Sacred Wood in 1920. Richards was in touch with Eliot, though they did not always agree. Richards wrote the first important critique of The Waste Land; and Trinity thought Eliot serious enough to give him honorary academic status as Clark Lecturer.
It can be seen, then, that the Twenties were alive with possibilities for a new criticism. It was not all Richardsian, but he was the principal academic figure. And soon the whole narrative was to take a new turn under the influence of Richards’ extraordinary pupil, William Empson. Empson, born in 1906, was thirteen years junior to Richards. He had read mathematics at Magdalene but switched to English for Part Two of the Tripos and became Richards’ pupil. Like his teacher, and partly
because of his example, Empson spent many years of his life abroad, mostly in China and Japan, and he loyally proselytized for Basic English, lamenting its failure to the end, and perhaps unreasonably blaming Churchill for killing it by his sponsorship. Though sometimes critical of Richards and temperamentally quite unlike him, Empson remained devoted to his teacher, who was the dedicatee of The Structure of Complex Words (1951), the book Empson regarded as his major achievement.
Empson’s first critical collection, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), is well known to have had its origin in undergraduate essays written for Richards, and so far as I know it is, considered as the work of a critical prodigy, without rival. It was very fortunate that there was a young person of genius at hand to show what high intelligence, combined with a measure of youthful irresponsibility, could achieve by using the method of close reading. Though Empson was always sure that what he was describing in his criticism had been part of the writer’s intention, however broadly conceived, his primary interest was in the ingenuities possible to his own mind. In the opinion of many, he flouted Richards on the matter of omnipossibilism. But nobody who has experienced the exhilaration and daring of Empson’s early books will regret this wickedness. The Structure of Complex Words, written when Empson, after a wonderfully adventurous career, had reached his forties, is probably – as he himself certainly believed - a greater achievement than Seven Types or its successor, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), but it was less outrageously unexpected.
By the time I was an undergraduate in the late Thirties Empson’s early books were in the hands of all young lecturers and the more enterprising students, though they were treated with some suspicion by their elders. It is safe to say that nobody had ever done this kind of thing before. To take a single example at random: here are some lines from a soliloquy of Claudius in the third act of Hamlet:
May one be pardon’d and retain th‘offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law, but ’tis not so above:
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compell’d
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence.
(III. iii. 56 – 64)
I would offer the following as a competent gloss in accordance with ‘the widest possible conformities’: Claudius asks, already knowing the answer, whether he can repent and still retain the benefits of his crime. ‘Retain th’offence’ is very compressed; a soliloquy of this sort is distinguished by its great alterations of pace, its constrictions as well as its expatiations (some of which, like ‘teeth and forehead’, are highly characteristic of the language of Hamlet). Claudius speaks of ‘the corrupted currents of this world’, and ‘currents’ is vague – it can mean the course of events, as in modern ‘current affairs’, but can also have a sense of ‘flowing’ or even ‘sloping’, ‘having an inclination to fall’. A ‘corrupted current’ could be a sewer. Claudius, represented as a man of turbulent intelligence, does not develop this idea but instead presents an allegory so briefly sketched in that it almost avoids being identified as allegory: Offence, the crime, holds money in his hand and shoves by Justice – pushes him away. Then, relaxing into the literal, the speaker puts the matter thus: the gold obtained by the crime may be the bribe that ensures the offender’s security. He contrasts this position with what obtains in the world above where ‘There is no shuffling, there the action lies / In his true nature’. ‘Shuffling’ means underhand or equivocating conduct, here especially legal trickery (he moves from Justice to Law). The action (the prosecutor’s case in court) lies – is sustainable, and a full confession is inevitable. ‘Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults’: the brow, the facial expression that can give a man away, is now associated with the teeth. The lines are usually taken to mean a hostile face-to-face confrontation, but the point is that the evidence of the accused amounts to a total confession; the teeth and brows will be ashamed not defiant. The fault is now an unconcealed shame; no mask or helmet can cover it. The violent, rapidly shifting metaphors of this wonderful passage prefigure the complexity of Shakespeare’s later language. It is just the kind of thing that must, if literary criticism was to do the job proposed for it, be submitted to intensive close reading.
And this is what Empson gives it. He insists that the passage requires the reader to ‘open his mind to’ all the associations of the words. And he goes on to quote five lines of the speech, before commenting thus: [Seven Types of Ambiguity, Penguin ed., pp. 91 – 2]
You put your hand down the hole, feel at the rat’s head and face (forehead) in an attempt to drag it out, and then (teeth) it bites back at you. ‘God will force us to bring our faults out into the open, however much we struggle.’ A forehead, besides being a target for blows, is used both for blushing and frowning. ‘We will be ashamed and a little indignant at having to confess such things.’ Teeth, besides being a weapon of offence, are used in making confessions, and it is a mark of contempt, I suppose for your weakness, even where you might seem most dangerous, that you are struck there. ‘We must confess all in plain words, or God will give us the lie in our teeth.’ Perhaps, too, the forehead covers the brain where the fault is planned, while the teeth are used (whether for talking or biting) in carrying it out, so that they stand for the will to sin and the act of sin respectively. Or, making a fair attempt to give of its grammatical meaning, so that the teeth and forehead are not ours but our faults’; ‘We shall have to start giving evidence at the very bottom of our faults, and go right on up to the top where they are at their most striking and important.’ Teeth are a naked part of the skeleton and the forehead’s bone is near the surface; ‘The Last Judgment will give little or no margin to the flesh; we shall have to go right down to bedrock in turning up our faults.’
This is all very fanciful and irrelevant, the reader may think. But what is relevant to these notes of the material for rhetoric, this poetry by physiological shorthand? All we are given is two parts of the body and the Day of Judgment; these have got to be associated by the imagination of the reader. There is no immediate meaning, and in spite of this there is an impression of urgency and practicality, and being in the clutches of an omnipotent ferret. Such an effect must rely, not perhaps on flashes of fancy in the directions I have indicated; I doubt if such occur in the normal reader; but on a sense that the words themselves, in such a context, include, as part of the way in which they are apprehended, the possibility of flashes of fancy in the directions I have indicated. The words are intended for the stage; they certainly convey something to an audience; and there is no time for them to convey anything more definite than this before the soliloquy has swept on to another effect of the same kind.
How did those rats get in? Empson hedges a bit, but it is clear that his notion of the range of association is much less restrictive than Richards’, and his love of what he calls ‘the great parades of association’ (p. 93) amounts almost to an acceptance of ‘omnipossibilism’.
And this was one important question raised by the criticism that flowed from Richards’ pioneer work. The question was how to keep comment within bounds, to show respect for the widest possible conformities. It recurred in another development of the Richards tradition. He and his work became well known in America, perhaps principally through the work of Cleanth Brooks, but also because of Empson. Brooks was a Rhodes Scholar at the right time, and he got to know Richards and his work. He took his ideas to Vanderbilt, where they were welcomed by John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and others. What came to be called the New Criticism was born, and it became a powerful educational influence through the successful Brooks – Warren anthology, Understanding Poetry. There were some doctrinal differences; Brooks was a Christian, and the movement was politically associated with Southern Agrarianism. It inherited from Eliot the historical hypothesis of a seventeenth-century dissociation of sensibility, and this belief had some effect on its criticism. But it was accepted that doctrine was not a primary issue, that poetry certainly should not be didactic, and that the mark of great poetry was that it reconciled impulses of ‘extraordinary heterogeneity’, as Richards claimed. The reconciliation was to be detected and experienced by intensive, accurate reading.
Brooks developed his own terminology (tension, paradox) and in due course the movement, settling down at Yale, acquired its own theorist and adjudicator, W. K. Wimsatt. One of the common principles was a refusal to regard literature as something proper to be discussed in terms of biography and literary history; Wimsatt wrote a famous article about the ‘intentional fallacy’, a complaint against the quest for meaning in the biography of the author.
Meanwhile the older school of literary historians and philologists vigorously opposed these innovators. The New Criticism won a great though not a lasting victory. There is something in the complaint that it led to a situation in which clever students could write Ph.D. theses without ever disturbing the dust in the library; and in the hands of less
clever students it could be mechanical and tedious. Its dismissive attitudes to history and doctrine proved fatal in the end; a new, revived anti-aesthetic historicism meant the end of the New Criticism.
The question of the relations between poetry and belief (especially Christian belief) was a popular topic at the time. But although the purposes of Richards were always in a sense ethical (via psychology) the clause about ‘doctrinal adhesion’ liberated poetry from belief as ordinarily understood. Behind his views lay a sort of psychologistic humanism, but in principle you could, and should, adopt his methods whether you had a religious adherence or not. The Formalists of course disagreed among themselves as well as with other people, and indeed were thought by some to be too interested in literary theory, especially as formulated and contested by Wimsatt (who happened, incidentally, to be a Catholic, as was Allen Tate, a distinguished poet as well as a critic). The heyday of the New Criticism ended in the Sixties, even before the onset of a New New Criticism, and a resurgence of Marxist interests in a far more sophisticated form than was available in earlier times signalled the re-evaluation of doctrine. But it is remarkable, given the speed of change in this world, that the ideas formulated by Richards in the Twenties had their influence, however remote, in thousands of American classrooms as late as the Sixties. It is worth adding that the new regime had, and has, little time for ‘close’ criticism of the Brooksian sort, and that in the opinion of some it is time for close criticism to return, in whatever new theoretical guise, as necessary to the continuation of an interest in the text itself rather than in the text as one among many competing contemporary discourses to be studied by way of illustrating the conflicts of power and resistance to it in the historical period in question.
Meanwhile, back in Cambridge, another set of ideas, ultimately stemming from Richards, was in its own way emphasizing the ethical, but this way was so different that the new school would in the course of time virtually disown Richards. The central figure was F. R. Leavis, who entered the scene just as the English school was forming, in the immediate post-war years. Leavis was twenty-four and had seen service in France. Francis Mulhern, the admirable historian of Scrutiny (the journal that became the main vehicle for Leavis’s ideas) points out that
the change in ideas about English as a subject coincided with an alteration in the social structure of the university, for a new wave of teachers (and students) was recruited predominantly from the middle classes and below, including people who did not begin with classics and who had no claim on the status of scholar-gentleman. L. C. Knights, who actually started the journal, was a Tawney-inspired left-winger, inspired by a certainty that literary criticism was the instrument necessary for the true understanding of human values, and a confidence in the purgative social power of a ‘critical minority’. Leavis’s wife Q. D. Leavis, a fierce judge, and as a sociologist devoted to the example of R. S. Lynd and H. M. Lynd’s Middletown books, was a formidable enemy of upper-class pretention in literature as well as in society.
Yet the programme of the group in its early years – not its later proclamation of an authoritative canon, not the uncertain left-wing politics – derived directly from Richards. A particular concern was the importance of affective in contrast to cognitive discourse, and the conviction that criticism was in fact the finest exercise of intellect. Of course this meant an end to the gentlemanly critical commentary of the likes of Quiller-Couch, the first King Edward VII Professor (though Leavis in his way remained loyal to that figurehead). The aim was once again ethical, and the stance was necessarily oppositional, for the group had almost no academic power, and indeed very often had no jobs, which is why Knights went off to Manchester and did not return to Cambridge for thirty or more years.
Leavis was a fine if harsh ‘close critic’ but he did not see that activity as an end in itself. He regarded his close colleagues and pupils as the nucleus of a new elite, even, as Mulhern puts it, ‘a new estate: a compact, “disinterested” intelligentsia, united in commitment to “human values”, whose function would be to watch over and guide the progress of society at large’. This was the programme of Scrutiny. Its intention was to save the culture, generally thought in those years, as in others, to be in trouble. Its enemies were not only bad critics, the London literary establishment, Bloomsbury, the Book Club, but advertising, mass production, the press, the cinema, the education system. The values they represented, the values of mass civilization, must be opposed by a minority devoted to the restoration of the values enshrined in the
great Victorian periodicals and also in the culture of early seventeenth-century England, with its peasant communities and extraordinary vitality of language.
Scrutiny was therefore more than a journal of literary criticism, but literary criticism was a prime agent of culture. It took certain positions of Richards (the need for great art and poetry, indispensable to both individual and social well-being) and developed them in ways he had not foreseen. Internally, as often happens when groups of this kind form, there were quarrels, expulsions, increasingly charismatic attitudes on the part of the Leavises. But their pupils went out to the schools and made a great difference there. In Cambridge they always had the old enemies, but acquired new friends and disciples; interestingly, some of them later established themselves in ways that might not have pleased their teachers. I think of Karl Miller, who joined the hated London literary establishment (and even, once or twice, persuaded Leavis to write for him) and, in America, Marius Bewley, Richard Poirier and Norman Podhoretz, editor of the fiercely rightist Commentary; for the G.I. Bill visitors were attracted to the one combative, programmed centre of English studies in Cambridge. As Leavis remarked in his ‘Retrospect’ of Scrutiny, ‘The research students and undergraduates who used … to meet at my house, which was very much a centre, did not suppose that they were meeting at an official centre of “Cambridge English”, or one that was favoured by the official powers.’
Theories of history and society were essential to the programme. ‘I have no doubt,’ wrote Leavis, ‘that [the training] will make the student a better literary critic, but the test of his having profited duly by his course of studies will be his handling of a historical or sociological work as much as his handling of a novel or a book of poems.’ Literary ‘tips’ would be offered, and the books thus recommended duly read, but the whole scheme was much more than literary.
The journal ran from 1932 to 1953, and that was in itself a remarkable achievement; twenty years is a long life for any minority journal, and its demise left Leavis weary and rather disconsolate. It had been, and according to him could only have been, a Cambridge achievement. Its causes were, he said with some defiance, ‘of great moment’ and ‘only at Cambridge could the idea of Scrutiny have taken shape,
become a formidable life, and maintained the continuous living force that made it hated and effective’.
In 1963 the Cambridge University Press reissued the whole series with Leavis’s ‘Retrospect’. He still had a good many years of work before him – on Lawrence, on Dickens, even on Tolstoy, despite the disadvantage of Tolstoy’s not having written in English. And the disciples were still active. But Richards, who had planted the seed, was no longer much admired, and Eliot, formerly a model, was set aside. Leavis’s tone grew more acerbic, the prose more contorted. ‘Leavisites’ became less prominent in schools and universities. The New New Criticism, founded on Saussure and developed by Derrida and de Man and others, now proved more exciting. Marxist criticism thrived in some universities. The group at Downing had its day, as schools of criticism do, and then it died, leaving, one hopes, something of value to its successors.
It was curiously academic and somewhat parochial (only Cambridge would do) and at the same time anti-academic, in relation to the powers it opposed. It provided a good many of those books of critical essays I mentioned earlier. From the beginning it was embattled, which can be attractive, and political, and acrimonious, often beyond necessity. But much that was good in what we are calling ‘the Cambridge connection’ derives from Leavis and his school. (We needn’t be surprised to learn from the ‘Retrospect’ that nobody in the university, though many outside it, bothered to commiserate with him on the demise of the journal.)
Despite the forces that gave it so different a shape and so different a destiny, that school derived ultimately from Richards. In the course of his long career he moved away from literary analysis into enterprises which, for good or ill, became less and less influential. At the end of his incessantly active life he was revered in Peking rather than in Cambridge, where little notice was taken of his later work. The Scrutiny school was convinced of the need for an oppositional cultural minority, whereas Richards was sure that the benefits of his methods were far more generally available, since the psychology involved was everyman’s psychology and not dependent on the existence of a specially endowed and trained cult. Perhaps if he had stayed in Cambridge matters would have turned out differently, though I doubt if he
could, in any case, have matched the moral fervour of Leavis. He would not have shared the strain of vehement anti-scientism that drove Leavis in his polemics, the most famous of which was the assault on C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’. And now even that fervour is lost, and with it what remained of Richards’ influence on a wider public than Cambridge could provide.
In America his descendants, the New Critics, were rejected. Other critics of independently founded theoretical and interpretative ingenuity - Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters – diversified the American critical scene. His English descendants narrowed and politicized their inheritance. Yet it would be impossible to write their histories without allusion to Richards, and to the scherzando adaptation of his first insights by Empson. To have done so much to make possible the achievements of Leavis and Empson, and to have given the New Critics the means to dominate American humanist education, was a great achievement. It is by no means Richards’ only claim on our gratitude. But it justifies the inclusion in this series of a talk on the Cambridge Connection.