'He Never Relied on His Sensibility Alone'

In 1937, Desmond MacCarthy delivered a lecture at Cambridge on Leslie Stephen, author of the three-volume Hours in a Library (1874-7) and father of Virginia Woolf. For a century England had specialized in producing formidably well-read, non-academic literary critics. In addition to Stephen and MacCarthy there came George Saintsbury, V.S. Pritchett and John Gross, among others. They worked as literary journalists and wrote some of the best criticism of their time, often in the form of essays combining close readings of texts with the lives of their authors. They wrote for the intelligent common reader, not specialists. 

Cambridge published MacCarthy’s lecture as a monograph later in 1937. He describes Stephen as “the least aesthetic of noteworthy critics,’ one who “inevitably discourse[s] more about human nature and morals than about art.” He reminds MacCarthy of Dr. Johnson. Stephen published five monographs in the “English Men of Letters” series issued by Macmillan. After Johnson (1878), Stephen contributed volumes on Swift (1882), Alexander Pope (1880), George Eliot and Thomas Hobbes (1904). MacCarthy writes: “Johnson was the man he loved most in literature, though not (need it be said?) the writer he admired most, which incidentally throws some doubt of his critical method,” and continues:

 

“We cannot be in Johnson’s company long without becoming aware that what attracts us to him so strongly is that he combined a disillusioned estimate of human nature, sufficient to launch twenty little cynics, with a craving for love and sympathy so urgent that it would have turned a weaker nature into a benign sentimentalist, and in a lesser degree this is what attracts us in Leslie Stephen. His raciest passages might often be described as cynical. There are also evidences of deep feeling. There is a Johnsonian contempt for those who look only upon the bright side of life or human nature, equalled only by a contempt for those who adopt a querulous or dainty tone.”

 

It's easy to trace a lineage from Johnson to Stephen to MacCarthy. One senses a chain of affinity. All human actions are open to moral evaluation, whether endorsement or condemnation, and our three critics assume as much. In a 1929 essay “A Question of Standards” (Humanities, 1953), MacCarthy returns to Stephen:

 

“The virtue of Leslie Stephen’s criticism is that there is so much intellectual hard work in it, and that its acuteness is always controlled by a steady sense of proportion. He has, of course, like every critic, his limitations. His criticism was never impressionistic and he never relied on his sensibility alone.”

 

Here is a critical tradition one can rely on: Johnson, Stephen, MacCarthy. All could write. All were stylists tempered by moral seriousness.

 

[Go  here to read six volumes of MacCarthy’s essays, digitally published by Isaac Waisberg at IWP Press.]