F.R.Leavis – Hard Times: An analytic note (The Great tradition)

 

F.R.Leavis – Hard Times: An analytic note

(The Great tradition)

 

          Frank Raymond Leavis is one of the leaders of Cambridge critics, who had their major influence in English literary studies from the mid 1920s.  He was also Charismatic and undisputed leader of the critical world of England.  F.R. 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.  In that way, he not merely inherited, but took upon himself the role of the torch bearer of the humanistic tradition earlier initiated by his spiritual predecessor Arnold.  So, F.R. Leavis is of the opinion that literature affords us examples of writers like Arnold, Ruskin, Conrad and Lawrence who showed what it is to lead an ideal life, a life not accessible to the one promoted by Science and technology.

          ‘The Great tradition’ (1948) of F.R. Leavis is a work in fictional poetics discussing the merits of Jane Austin, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.  It was he who declared boldly that D.H. Lawrence belonged to the great tradition of novelists.  ‘Scrutiny’ is a journal that he published for twenty one years along with his wife Queenie Roth, a specialist in British fiction is his best contribution to English letters.  Though ‘Hard Times: An analytic note’ is included in ‘The great Tradition’, it does not form a part of the principal discussions of the book.  Leavis is of the opinion that Charles Dickens is primarily an entertainer, a caricaturist who cannot be considered significant as Henry James.  The great novelists, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad in the tradition identified by Leavis are pre-occupied with form for they are technically original and use their genius to frame uniquely appropriate methods and procedures in their art.

          According to Leavis, George Eliot’s novels are the creations from her personal experiences that are closely related to the middle and lower class of the rural England of the 19^th century.  Henry James is a genius who creates an ideal civilized sensibility and possesses the capacity to communicate by the finest means of implication. Joseph Conrad is also an innovator in form and method who takes serious interest in life.

However Leavis gives great importance to Dickens's 'Hard times'. The title ‘Hard Times’ is significant as it deals with the inhumanities of Victorian civilization.  Leavis considers ‘Hard Times’ a moral fable with a definite intention that exhibits satiric irony in the first two chapters.  The descriptiveness of the passages in Hard Times reveals the sensitivity of Dickens and from the employment of symbolism that emerges out of metaphor, the candid portrayal of the Victorian society stands apart.  Sissy’s symbolic significance shows the vitality of life that is resourceful and provides a stark contrast to the lifeless rigidity of utilitarian principle. While Sissy represents vitality, Bitzer is more unemotional and mechanical in approach.  This shows Dickens unique capacity to represent human spontaneity with skill and deftness.  The descriptions of the circus athletes, their agility, frivolousness and their movements are perfectly designed by Dickens.  The circus life represents the vital human impulse that is trampled under utilitarianism.  Through this Dickens expresses profound reaction to industrialism that has degraded life in the Victorian society. 

          Dickens observes life in the urban scene where the usual depiction of human kindness and essential virtues assert themselves in the midst of ugliness and banality of life.  Sissy Jupe functions to convey the artistic flexibility of Dickens that finds her confronting utilitarianism with great subtlety.  The irony of situation is effectively designed when Gradgrind’s daughter is married off to Bounderby.   Louisa’s development under Gradgrind shows inhibition of natural affection and her capacity for ‘disinterested devotion’ is in sharp contrast to the vitality and force of life as depicted by Sissy Jupe.  Here, Leavis praises Dickens for his revealing the pathos related to the mechanistic life with a poetic beauty.  So, he calls Dickens an imaginative genius, a poetic dramatist whose possibilities of concentration and flexibility in the interpretation of life can only be compared to a dramatist like Shakespeare.

-----Thulasidharan V