ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on topic of morality and art through the narrow focus of F. R. Leavis. Leavis's attraction for teachers was in large measure connected to the fact that any arts teacher is likely to believe that the arts can help children develop, and development is an ethical notion insofar as people have a normative conception of what it is to be a person. The teacher of the arts is likely to share Wordsworth's faith that 'poetry by sensitizing, purifying and strengthening the feelings, directly makes us better'. Leavis's approach invites comparison with his near contemporary, Gyorgy Lukacs. In works which appal Roger Scruton 'not only for their horrifying bigotry but also for their total lack of grace, charm, irony or percipience', Lukacs sorts novelists and their novels according to whether they are able to penetrate beneath superficial appearances to the real structures of social reality.
