This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Scrutiny, the English critical journal that exerted so great an influence on the entire Anglo-American literary world from 1932 until its demise about two decades later. Yet important though Scrutiny was, anyone, interested in how and why it mattered can more profitably spend his time on the work of its editor and chief contributor, F. R. Leavis, than by reading through the back issues. It is true that many people besides Leavis himself wrote for Scrutiny and that a few of the Scrutiny regulars—D. W. Harding, L. C. Knights, Marius Bewley, and Q. D. Leavis—were excellent critics in their own right. But it is equally true that they—not to mention their less distinguished fellows—rarely dissented in any significant degree from Leavis’s ideas and judgments. Scrutiny, in short, was Leavis. How could it have been otherwise? So powerful was his influence that no one who ever came near him could escape it; and so dogmatic was he that anyone who disagreed with him about anything was soon banished from the pages of the magazine. Leavis liked to say of his critical judgments that they had been arrived at “not dogmatically but deliberately.” In fact, he used this phrase, taken from Dr. Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare, as the epigraph to one of his most important books, The Great Tradition. But there is something even more comical in Leavis’s disclaimer of dogmatism than in Johnson’s, particularly in connection