The Academic Study of English Literature’

HELEN GARDNER

It is well over fifty years since a handful of candidates-all, I think, women-submitted themselves for the first examination to be held in the Honour School of English Language and Literature at Oxford. When I read the School in the late 1920’s there were, on an average, a little over a hundred candidates, of whom about half were women. Nowadays well over two hundred present themselves, of whom two-thirds are men. English has become one of the ‘big Schools’, and, as far as one can see, is likely to remain so. The School was founded in the teeth of considerable opposition which can be characterized by two then current phrases: ‘reading Shelley in a punt’ and ‘chatter about Harriet’. The subject was suspected of being a very soft option, unlikely to demand any great powers of mind from its students, and unlikely to impose on them any very strict intellectual discipline. The opposition argued that the School would not require from its students anything more than an educated person might be expected to achieve without reading it at all: a knowledge of the great writers in his own tongue and a capacity to talk about them intelligently and knowledgeably. The notion of English as a ‘soft option’, a subject which exists for the benefit of the weaker brethren, and particularly the weaker sisters, who are not capable of reading the classics, or wrestling with philosophy, was a bogy. It still is. The original way of meeting it was to insist on the inclusion of a liberal amount of Anglo-Saxon and Philology, to act as a ‘stiffening’, on the highly absurd assumption that some hours spent in doing what you did not want to do would compensate morally and intellectually for hours spent indulging yourself in studying what you wanted to study. I suspect that the same uneasi- ness in face of the charge of ‘softness’ is one motive behind the various attempts in our own day to professionalize English literature and make it a kind of ‘closed subject’ which can be discussed pro- fitably only by experts. There is a tendency to use an obscure and technical vocabulary, and to load the page with a ferocious apparatus of footnotes and references and cross-references, as if we need to impress the world with the depth of our knowledge and the extreme difficulty of interpreting and evaluating works of literature. This ‘Read to a conference of university teachers of English at Liverpool, Easter, 1958.

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essentially nervous disease infects both wings. Its symptoms can be observed among both the ‘historical’ and the ‘new’ critics.

Those who worked to establish the Honour School of English Language and Literature at Oxford did so on two main grounds. They accepted the age-old liberal and humane tradition, going back to the schools of antiquity, powerfully revived in the humanistic movement of the twelfth century and again at the Renaissance, that the foundation of a liberal education is the study of ‘the authors’, the great masters of ‘wisdom and eloquence’. But they claimed that the study of the English authors could provide as good an intel- lectual training and discipline, as much enrich the imagination, and as strongly fortify the moral life and purify the feelings, as the study of the authors of antiquity. English literature, they held, could and should be studied in the same way that classical literature was studied, in close connection with the study of language and the study of history. The second main ground on which the founders argued was that English literature, which has the longest continuous history of any literature in a modern vernacular, and has produced good writing in every century from the ninth to the present, and masterpieces in nearly all of them, was as worthy of the effort and devotion of scholarship as was any other literature ancient or modern. Looking at the long and illustrious record of classical scholarship, they felt it a reproach that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton had not been thought as worthy of intellectual effort and devotion as Homer or Aeschylus, Virgil or Horace. They believed, that is to say, that a School of English Language and Literature would produce not only well-educated young men and women to go out into the professions but also scholars, who would find in the subject the same profound intellectual reward as the classics offered: the deep satisfaction of intellectual enquiry pursued for its own sake, in pursuance of the mind’s desire to attain truth and enlarge its knowledge.

The two concepts cannot, of course, be separated. A subject wins a place in a university curriculum because it is held that the study of it trains the mind generally. It should fit those who study it ‘to fill office in church or state’, as the older formula was, or ‘to enter the professions’, and also to preserve and advance the intellectual health of the community by upholding standards of intellectual integrity and cultivating the intellectual virtues in all walks of life. A subject which merely produces persons fitted to teach that subject is not a fit subject for an Honour School. But no subject can thus train the minds of the young unless it has the power to attract to its study persons who are willing to devote their lives to its advance- ment. Unless the subject is itself growing it will not nourish fresh generations of young people; and the young become conscious of

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intellectual values and the intellectual virtues not by being told about them but by seeing them honoured and practised. In their years at the University, when ‘ease and leisure are given them out of other men’s sweat’, they need to come into contact with persons who have found their vocation in the life of intellectual enquiry. A subject can no more live and flourish without its scholars than a religion can without its saints. The men who founded the School at Oxford and other Schools throughout the country were con- vinced that the subject demanded and would repay arduous intel- lectual investigations and that it would produce its own roll of scholars: editors, literary historians, expositors, and critics.

Twenty years ago it would have been accepted, I think, that the beliefs and hopes of the ‘founding fathers’ had been justified and that English had established itself as a university subject, of proved value to the undergraduate, and enriched by the labours of its scholars. Today the subject is once more under very heavy fire. I have to own that I have an uneasy sense that much of the criticism cannot, and should not, be shrugged off. We have the great privilege of teaching a subject which is the concern of all educated persons. The editor of The Bee-Keepers’ Journal (if there is such a paper) may legitimately ignore criticism from all but professional bee-keepers; a teacher of English literature cannot, in the same way, declare that he is only interested in what other teachers of English literature think, unless he has ceased to be interested in the subject itself and is only interested in teaching it, in which case he should not be teaching at a university. Criticism of English literature as an academic subject is most vocal among the older reviewers in our Sunday papers, who declare, from time to time, that it gives no proper training; but the same note can be heard in the weeklies, in intellectual and literary circles generally, and from original writers, who are exasperated or amused at academic antics according to their temperaments. I was rather disturbed a year or so ago when a very distinguished Emeritus Professor of English said to me, after we had been discussing some recent books on the subject: “I am beginning to wonder whether the whole thing wasn’t a mistake.” I was equally disturbed when one of the directors of a famous publishing house said to me that he had found that persons with good degrees in English (he excepted those from one or two universities) were no good to him in his office. He had found them incapable of taking minutes of a discussion or of presenting useful reports. I am also unhappy at the number of times in recent years when, in my own field, I have read reviews whose authors knew the right critical jargon but did not know relevant facts, and at the number of times that such reviewers have to be corrected for not having read with attention or understanding the book which they

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are reviewing. It was because I have a general feeling of uneasiness over the state of English studies today that I was glad of an oppor- tunity to speak on the teaching of English in universities. I realize that I am probably talking from out of the sense, very common in middle age, that things are not as they were, and that, being different, they are worse. I may also, as happens again in middle life, be idealizing the teachers of my youth and the intellectual abilities of my own contemporaries. I am probably also over-valuing my own abilities when young and forgetting how much I did not know while remembering with too much complacency what I did. My excuse for speaking on the subject, in spite of these handicaps, is that I have taught in four very different universities: London, Birmingham, Oxford and California. Also, my present duties, as a Reader rather than a Tutor at Oxford, bring me in contact with young graduates from all over the world, so that I am in a position which gives me something of a bird’s-eye view of the general state of English studies.

The attack on English as an academic subject is made, by and large, on two grounds. There is first the attack on academic pedantry. This is usually directed against American scholars who are castigated for the zeal with which they ‘leave no stone untuned’, explain what nobody has ever found difficult, and plough their own half-acres while remaining unconscious of everything which lies on the other side of the hedge which bounds their chosen ‘field’. There is secondly the attack on the narrowness of taste, arrogance, provinciality, and uncouthness of academic critics, who tell us what we are and are not to approve on the basis of very narrow reading in their own language, and an almost complete ignorance of what has been written in any other, and who express their views with more or less disregard for the art of communication. Behind both complaints is an unexpressed assumption that persons who have read English at a university ought ips0 facto to have finer taste, more interesting and original views, and write with more vigour and grace than those who have not. The critics in the Sunday papers who did not read English as undergraduates are really saying: “See how well read we are, never at a loss for an apt classical parallel and speaking French like natives! See what good taste we have, how cultured and humane is our approach to literature, and how lucidly and gracefully we write! Compare us, who have not gone through the academic grind, with these American emmets labouring to build their dusty ant- heaps of largely irrelevant knowledge, and with these English hobbledehoys and provincials airing their nonconformist con- sciences and their grudges against each other and against those with wider and finer sensibilities than theirs. It is obvious that reading English has done these poor creatures no good; therefore, abolish the subject. It has failed to educate its students and only taught

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them to perform various depressing gymnastics for the benefit of each other and the boredom of everyone else. Put them back on to the classics or history or, if these severer studies are beyond their powers, on to a good Pass School which would have the benefit of teaching them how to acquire information and learn languages. They might then come out as good writers as we are, or else have the grace to realize their limitations and shut up.”

I think the premise behind this argument is false. I do not believe that it is the purpose and function of schools of English to turn out critics any more than it is their purpose and function to turn out poets and novelists. I should hope there would be among my students some persons with a gift for criticism, that is, with the power to say things about works of literature which will make these works live with a fresh life in their own generation and, for this is surely true of the great critics, will permanently enrich the work for future generations. Criticism is an art and good critics are rare, rarer, I would say, than good poets and good novelists. I should hope that this gifted few would, by reading English at the university, be helped in the exercise of their art. But I do not think that to read the subject profitably a person must be someone of this kind, someone peculiarly sensitive, perceptive and original. I would hope that my pupils’ taste and power of judgment would grow by familiarity with great writers, and that their general powers of dis- crimination would be sharpened, in the sense that they would be better able to distinguish sense from nonsense, facts from opinions, established facts from well-supported hypotheses, and that they would have learned to read carefully and to write lucidly. In other words, I hope that they would emerge as educated persons, able to conduct arguments, collect relevant information, and scrutinize their own opinions as well as those of other people. I should hope that they would be scrupulous in not talking about a subject without making a proper enquiry into what is known about it. But I do not believe that the study of English literature at the university can, of itself, make people more capable of original and significant judge- ments. If criticism is to be equated with ‘evaluation’ and the critic is the person with the power to recognize the excellent, distinguish it from the merely pleasing, and reject the meretricious, I have not found, nor should I expect to find, critical authority to have any connection with whether or not the critic read English as an under- graduate. If criticism is taken, beyond this rudiment of choice of the excellent, to mean the power to illuminate excellence, I should again not expect this power to be confined to persons who had read English. But I should expect there to be commerce here, and that criticism would be affected by literary scholarship as I think poetry and the novel are.

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I am, therefore, not at all disturbed to find that persons trained in classics, philosophy, law, history, mathematics, or any other academic discipline may show finer taste and better judgement and write more interesting criticism than persons trained in English. But I am very much disturbed that many persons who have read English at a university and received high academic honours seem to me to write incoherently and illogically and with very little precision, to be often extremely narrowly read, and to have little awareness of the necessity of informing themselves of relevant facts before pronouncing opinions, or of what facts might be relevant or of where to look for them, I connect this with what I think has been a wrong emphasis in the last twenty years, particularly in some universities, where the ‘production of critics’ has come to be thought of as the proper aim of a School of English. The main functions of a School of English in any university in my view are to make those young people who choose to study the subject read more widely, intelligently and deeply than they would otherwise do, and to ‘produce scholars’. The first is dependent on the second. It is the function of literary scholars to make and keep available for their own and for future generations the heritage of the past and to give to young men and women who are to become ‘Bachelors of Arts’ in their subject decent intellectual habits. If they are so fortunate, as they often are, as to have among their pupils persons more gifted than themselves, their duty is still the same: to give them the intellectual discipline and training which will enable them to make the best use of their powers and to give them a sense of the value and values of scholarship.

I am sure myself that English can, should, and does provide an intellectual discipline fully equal to that provided by any other academic subject, and that, like all true academic subjects, it has in addition its own peculiar rewards to give. In no other subject is the pupil brought more immediately and continuously into contact with original sources, the actual material of his study. In no other subject is he so able and so bound to make his own selection of the material he wishes to discuss, or able so confidently to check the statements of authorities against the documents on which they are based. No other study involves him so necessarily in ancillary disciplines. Most important of all, no other study touches his own life at so many points and more illuminates the world of his own daily experience. I see no reason why we should be afraid to confess that our subject is highly delightful to study and to teach at any and every level. It can be taught profitably and pleasurably to the very young and to the simple. The ablest and the most learned scholar can receive light from the questions and answers of an eleven-year-old child who has been reading a book with real

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attention. All the ‘same, when properly pursued at any stage it has its own proper strenuousness and requires no extraneous stiffening to make it academically respectable.

The first demand that I should make of a School of English is that it should aim at inclusiveness. Of course nobody can read everything that could conceivably come under the heading of English literature even if undergraduate courses were extended far beyond three years. All syllabuses must select and all teachers have to select within the syllabus. But while all teachers have some authors and some periods which they find particularly congenial, I believe a large part of the value of reading English as an academic subject, com- pared with reading for oneself, comes from having to read and try to understand and come to terms with writers of all periods and of very different kinds. One thing which our pupils ought to learn from us is a sense of the whole tradition of English literature from its beginnings. I do not believe this sense of the living tradition, which nourishes, and is nourished by, individual talents, can be fully grasped unless we are willing to go back to the beginnings. This, and not its supposed moral value, is the best, though not the only, reason for the inclusion of Old and Middle English literature. No pupil can read, and no teacher can teach, all periods and all authors with equal intensity; but I think we have become too afraid in recent years of the dangers of superficiality and too much wedded to the idea that the only way to study literature is by the intensive study of certain texts. There is a rather exaggerated fear today of ‘general knowledge’ and of having some acquaintance with a great many writers as well as knowing a handful very well. I still think it is better to know something about something than to know nothing; and to know something may awaken the desire to know more. Bacon’s advice on studies is worth remembering. We should encourage our pupils to taste and swallow as well as to chew and digest.

The notion that English literature should be read and studied as widely and inclusively as possible, and that works of very different kinds, and which differ considerably in value, can be studied with profit and enjoyment, conflicts with the notion that Schools of English should be shapers and guardians of taste. I do not believe this, any more than I believe that they exist to produce critics. Of course we have among our pupils persons of strong individual tastes and these are very delightful to teach and very interesting to talk with, and it is our duty to help our pupils to develop their own tastes and judgements. But it is not our task, in my view, to attempt to impose canons and either to follow or to attempt to create literary fashions. Our function is to keep in the mind of our culture the memory of its past; for a civilisation, like a person, is conscious of

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itself through memory, and the richer our memories the richer we are. This function of scholarship has been very notably performed in this century which will, I think, be looked upon by literary historians of the future as a very full and creative period. I think such historians will see something of the same connection between twentieth-century poetry and the growth of the study of our older literature in the universities as we find between the literature of the sixteenth century and the revival of classical studies at the Renais- sance. The interest in Donne and metaphysical poetry is a case in point. The literary historian, Courthope, writing a comprehensive history, had to include a chapter on Donne and his followers; the professor, Grierson, could not answer his classes’ questions and set to work on an edition, in place of the unsatisfactory one by the antiquarian, Grosart. Grierson sent his edition to Yeats. Another professor suggested to Grierson an anthology of metaphysical lyrics and this, when published, went to T. S . Eliot for review. The scholars fed the poets. A similar case could be made out for a relation between the academic study of medieval English poetry and the very remarkable changes in the rhythms and metrical bases of poetry in this century, and for a complex interaction between the academic interest in medieval allegory and the markedly allegorical and symbolic trends of poetry and fiction in the last twenty or thirty years. The less the universities attempt to impose a pattern or try to follow contemporary trends the better. At the moment the poets of the eighteenth century seem to be attracting our younger poets as disciples rather than the metaphysicals. This does not mean that the universities should now neglect the early seventeenth century and concentrate on the eighteenth. In the last few years the move- ment of Hopkins’s stock on the critical market has been rather ‘bearish’, while D. H. Lawrence and Conrad have for some time seemed rather dangerously ‘bullish‘. Such fluctuations are to be expected in critical reviews. They should not be reflected in exami- nation papers. There must and always will be a commerce between contemporary literature and scholarship. It will be most fruitful if scholarship attends to its own proper business, the preservation and extension of knowledge.

The second thing which I should demand from a School of English is that it should train its pupils in careful and exact reading and develop in them, beyond the accuracy of expression and preci- sion of reference expected of any educated person, a special sensi- tiveness to the values of words. I do not think this can be done without a thorough, if rudimentary, linguistic training, beginning with the translation of the earliest written English literary monu- ments and proceeding through Middle English, which they must learn if they are to read with real understanding one of our greatest

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poets, Chaucer. I am quite aware that it can be answered that weapons such as the O.E.D. exist and that there are Shakespearian and Chaucerian glossaries. My answer is that I have found by experience that persons with no linguistic training are often quite unaware of when they should turn to these aids. I do not want to produce the kind of pupil who only looks up the ‘hard words’ and is quite unconscious that he may be assuming a meaning which was not the author’s. A person who has read English ought to be con- tinuously aware that ‘in forme of speche is chaunge’. 1 cannot see how a study of English literature can be divorced from a study of the English language. The awareness of language as something which grows and develops, and of the uses our writers have made of it, and of what we owe to them for making it one of the greatest of all instruments for the expression of thought and feeling, is one of the most valuable things which we can give to our pupils and through them to the community. To read English ought to produce a sense of responsibility towards the language, as a currency to be preserved from debasement. I find it very shocking that I have to spend so much of my time as a supervisor teaching persons with good degrees in English how to write so that their meaning can be understood and their readers are not bored and exasperated by their clumsiness of expression.

The third thing I ask of a School of English is that it should put before its students the ideal of so naturalising themselves in a past age that its products can speak to them with directness in the present, so that they do not feel as they read that ‘allowances have to be made’, that this idea is obscure, or that expression ‘quaint’. This is an ideal, never fully to be realised: but it is the great reward of the scholar to feel more and more ‘at home’ in his period. I believe that in a university literature should be studied primarily as a historical phenomenon, produced by historical beings who were shaped and conditioned by the pressure of their own lives and their own times. I do not mean by this that we should study literature in order to find out about past ages, though, of course, we can. Nor do I mean that we should study poetry in order to investigate through it the psychology of the poet, which we cannot do, except in the most general, unfruitful, and unscientific way. Our study is literature, not social history, or the history of ideas, or the history of art, or the lives of the poets. We shall find ourselves concerned with these and other things, but not primarily. They are the context in which literature exists and without which it would not be as it is. The more a work is placed in its context, and the more we are able by familiarity to take that context for granted, the more strongly it speaks to us in our present condition. The paradox of literary study is that when we attempt to get directly at the ‘eternal meaning

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of the work itself‘, we find in it the pre-occupations and concerns of our own day; ‘eternal truth’ turns out to be just what we have always thought, and the great poets become propagandists for our own ideas, or else assume the appearance of our opponents and have to ’be exposed as dangerous. The historical approach both gives the work distance and enables us to hear what it has to say to us.

There is no short cut here and I am afraid ‘backgrounds’ and ‘world pictures’ do not take us very far. How we are to give our pupils the sense of the living historical context of literature is, I think, the most difficult of all problems at the moment for the university teacher of English. We have of recent years overstressed the history of ideas, perhaps, and neglected events and material circumstances which affect more deeply man’s response to his world. A rapprochement between History and English is long overdue and would benefit both sides.

There are, of course, other ways of regarding works of art and of discussing literature profitably. But these can be developed out- side our universities and will be. The historical study of literature is the peculiar concern of universities because, unless it is pursued with ardour and intellectual vigour there, it seems unlikely, in our present economic circumstances, that it will be pursued at all, to the infinite impoverishment of the intellectual life of the community and its capacity for aesthetic response.

I think if the stress is laid here, that is to say, if we encourage wide reading, linguistic awareness, and the need to understand what we read within the context of the age and circumstances which produced it, other things will take care of themselves. I think we should be very cautious in attempting to train our pupils’ sensi- bilities, refine their taste, give them ‘critical standards’, and improve their moral attitudes. If we do, we may only succeed in turning out prigs with no capacity for further growth, not ‘Bachelors of Arts’. Inevitably our own sensibilities, tastes, moral values, political and religious beliefs will colour and give warmth to our teaching; but our task is to help our pupils grow and discover their own values: by developing their power to read widely and with understanding, and by helping them to develop the intellectual virtues of respect for fact and for evidence, and by making them aware of the need to take all the evidence into account and to argue not for victory but for truth. We all hope our pupils will be brilliant and original. We cannot make them so, and they cannot make themselves so. We cannot make them intellectually honest. It ought to be our aim to make them want to be. If we succeed in this, they can make themselves become what we have given them the desire to be.

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