C.P. Champion. The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism

C.P. Champion. The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism



Book review

In 1933, the London firm of Chatto and Windus published Culture and Environment by Cambridge don and literary critic F.R. Leavis and poet Denys Thompson. Remarkably, this little book, addressed to school teachers, was intended to ensure the survival of English life and literature. Ultimately, it reflected early interwar concerns about the increase in leisure time and consumerism, anxieties over the meaningless nature of modern work, fretfulness about the general public's incapacity to engage in positive forms of recreation, disquiet at rising levels of unemployment after 1929, and a critique of industrialism voiced by Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. On the face of it, however, Culture and Environment was an attack on the enemies of good taste and sensibility - “films, newspapers, and advertising - indeed, the whole world outside the class-room” - and an assertion that “it is on literary tradition that the office of maintaining continuity must rest.”1 Leavis and Thompson accepted that literature was only a substitute for experience, but in the circumstances of the times they regarded it as the best hope for the future. Their book opens with a lament for the loss of an earlier England, for “the organic community with the living culture it embodied.” In their view, “folk-songs, folk-dances, Cotswold cottages, and handicraft products” were “signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year.” There was a time, in other words, when “English people did once have a culture” but it had been destroyed by the machine and all that it brought with it in the way of standardization and leveling-down. This, said Leavis and Thompson, had produced a loss of oral tradition, and of “the memory that preserves the 'picked experience of ages,'” since it had debased words, emotional life, and the quality of living. There could be no going back, but literature could substitute for talk, foster the remembrance of things past, and sustain the sense of “something more.” There is a mythic quality to this history, and the logic of the argument it seeks to advance is weak. So Raymond Williams has pointed out that this picture of lode England ignores the “the penury, the petty tyranny, the disease and mortality, the ignorance and frustrated intelligence” that marked earlier times. Indeed, Denis Cosgrove authored a series of elegant and cogent contributions associating geography's visual bias with the discipline's embrace of the landscape idea, equating the geographers' use of the concept of landscape with Western traditions of landscape painting, and arguing that this way of seeing worked to entrench notions of objective knowledge and visual authority.10 According to one of its practitioners, who perhaps chafed a little at this realization almost ...