English literature's last stand

New Statesman​

a day ago

Illustration by Michelle Mildenberg
English literature – so it seemed to me when I was a bookish zealot of 18 – was the prince of the humanities. When I was interviewed at Oxford and asked why I wanted to study English, I informed my interrogators (I still remember the phrase that I had practised beforehand and considered richly impressive) that 'literature shows us what it is or might be to be human'. I believed it. In books, I felt with Tennyson that I had sensed the living souls of the dead flashed on mine. Poems – especially by Hopkins, Eliot and Auden – worked on me like spells. I had contrived to download a recording of Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' on to my primitive mobile phone, and at school would stand in the playground with the device pressed to my ear, enraptured by the tinny incantation, convinced I was responding to a higher call. Literature, if one were to reduce it to anything so tawdry as a formula, was history multiplied by philosophy multiplied by life. I regarded my peers who had chosen to study mere facts at university rather than to be inducted into the glamorous mysteries of the human heart with some pity (an attitude I have still not entirely shaken off).
English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry. Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its besotted disciples. To the patrician epicures and monied amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the 20th century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret), the study of literature was 'a glory of the universe' or 'the spring which unlocks the hidden life'. For the evangelists of the critic FR Leavis and charismatic secondary school teachers of the Sixties it was a moral crusade that pitted humanity against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had 'life-enhancing powers', and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain 'any capacity for a humane existence'. Collini winces fastidiously at some of these 'soaring affirmations'. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read strangely in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Today, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students 'transferable skills', that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus writers which holds that studying ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making PowerPoints at PWC.
But for all the Gradgrindian propaganda embattled modern departments are obliged to turn out, it remains the case that it is only because people have felt extravagantly about books that English is taught at universities at all. The subject remains an academic anomaly, a scholarly discipline premised on the acquisition not of knowledge but of aesthetic experience; on the unlikely marriage of (in Collini's happy phrase) 'beauty and the footnote'. Students of English do not expect to emerge from their degrees able to speak a foreign language (save perhaps a smattering of Anglo-Saxon) or code or say anything useful about the differences between arthropods and crustaceans. According to the purest conception of the subject, Collini points out, 'the ur-exam question should be something like 'Isn't this beautiful?''. Though surely, 'the way to get high marks would not simply be to answer, 'Yes, it is.''
This has been the source of English's insecurity as an academic discipline, but also its self-confidence as the purest and most noble of the humanities. I was a late product of this passionate tradition. My English-teacher father brought me up to regard Eng lit as a secular religion. Our god was Shakespeare, whose birthday we celebrated annually with a homemade cake. Like Catholic peasants, our house was strewn with tasteless devotional items: Shakespeare mugs, Shakespeare socks, Shakespeare tea towels. We quoted Shakespeare, and his attendant lesser deities Wordsworth, Tennyson and Milton, like scripture and in the summer holidays we made solemn pilgrimages to their shrines: Dove Cottage, the Globe Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. My father particularly impressed me with the information that a friend of his had once repelled a home invader by descending the staircase in the dark carrying a single lighted candle and intoning a sulphurous passage from Book One of Paradise Lost. Such – the moral of the story ran – was the power of blank verse.
If the atmosphere of militant bardolatry in which I was raised was anachronistic in the early 2000s, it seems as archaic as Assyria now. English is in precipitous decline. Still one of the most popular A-levels when I left school in 2011, it no longer even makes the top ten, having been displaced by various Stem subjects and those vulgar parvenus, sociology and psychology. Another university English department shuts down practically every year. My friends who pursued academic careers in English – no more apocalyptically disillusioned class of person exists – feel they are heirs to a ruined inheritance. They were preparing to take possession of great mansions of learning only to find the windows have been smashed, the furniture looted and the electricity cut off. Partly the problem is tuition fees, but most importantly, literature is becoming culturally marginal. The screen is replacing the book. Studies show dramatic and unprecedented drops in literacy and reading, especially among teenagers. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust found time spent reading books 'at a historic low'. In this environment, the study of literature is far from an obvious use of three crucial years of young adulthood. And if the slew of viral journalistic reports from universities – 'The end of the English major', 'The elite college students who can't read books' – are to be believed, even students who choose to study English are unable to actually force themselves through novels. 'Most of our students are functionally illiterate' runs a characteristic de profundis wail. A gloomy young Oxbridge academic I spoke to recently described 'a collapse of literacy' among his students.
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The first enemies of English worried not that reading novels was too hard for students, but that it was much too easy. When English arrived in universities (at Oxford in 1894 and Cambridge in 1914) conservative dons objected that the subject wouldn't provide students with 'the mental training' inculcated by mathematics or classics. Others feared that English was an invitation to students to be 'specious and superficial': why did you need educating in how to read poems?
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The literary gentlemen who were first summoned from the chaos and clan warfare of Grub Street to establish English amid the Groves of Academe were not always reassuring models of scholarly subtlety and rigour. Cambridge's first professor of English, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was in the habit of addressing his audiences of mostly female undergraduates as 'Gentlemen'! George Saintsbury, the king of fin-de-siècle belles-lettres – with his wine cellar, 'extreme Toryism', prodigious forest of a beard and apparently omniscient command of his country's literary heritage – was making £190,000 a year in modern money from literary journalism before he was made a don (his earnings much enhanced by his genial willingness to write 'as many as five reviews' of the same volume). His own innumerable books (The History of Elizabethan Literature, A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature, The History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, an 800-page Short History of English Literature) combined panoptic ambition with 'a large number of errors' and sold in the tens of thousands.
Saintsbury's career was only an unusually florid symptom of a society in which English literature was culturally central to a degree not easy to grasp today and which throws a stark light on the subject's present crisis of marginality. English was born as an academic subject in a world in which journals and magazines 'carried an endless stream of critical essays celebrating or reconsidering the achievement of major and minor poets alike'. For many people 'a deep intimacy with English poetry was a living presence, not simply a social affectation or a relic of a half-remembered education'. When the littérateur-turned-don John Bailey gave public lectures ('Can We Tell Good Books from Bad?', 'Shelley') he addressed 'crowded' halls of hundreds of people ('many standing') and met with 'wild success'; when he lunched with the former prime minister Arthur Balfour in 1914, the two men chatted about 'Dryden, Pope, Browning, etc'.
As Collini writes, the enthusiasm of men like Bailey meant Eng lit was able to draw on 'deep wells of cultural validation'. The apogee of the subject's prestige arrived in the 'two decades after 1945'. By this point, English had acquired the dignity and purpose of a modern, professional discipline. The lingering uncertainty about what the subject was actually for left a convenient space that could be filled with ambitious claims. To IA Richards, the father of practical criticism, the study of literature was a laboratory science (the amputated text tweezered and probed beneath the critic's microscope); to Leavis, English was a kind of nonconformist religion. The prevailing tone of high moral seriousness – 'a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilisation itself', as Terry Eagleton once summarised the Leavisite view of literary studies – charged English with a charisma that no other academic discipline has ever matched, either before or since.
The nearest analogue for English's status 'as the central subject' in the giddy decades of its prime is probably the position enjoyed by classics in the 19th century. Where Latin and Greek had been vessels for the themes of imperial destiny and Western cultural superiority so closely cherished by the Victorian elite, Eng lit's meridian coincided with the zenith of postwar liberalism. In his 1950 book The Liberal Imagination, released at the very chiming of this high noon, Lionel Trilling argued that by dramatising the world's moral complexity and encouraging readers to inhabit other consciousnesses, literature could help form the tolerant, independent-minded, 'morally mature' citizens necessary for a successful liberal democracy. English was a bulwark against those twin threats to human intellectual freedom most feared by the establishment intellectuals of the Fifties: the totalitarian ideologies of the Eastern Bloc and the stupefying and ominously expanding empire of mass culture. It was liberal commitment to the autonomy of the human mind, not mere reactionary loathing of modernity, that animated Leavis's famous animadversions against the new forms of electronic entertainment which – the thought seems more prophetic now than ever before – demanded 'surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional appeals'.
The students who streamed through the redbrick portals and concrete geometries of, respectively, Manchester and York in the Sixties for lectures on 'the English Augustans' were no doubt responding to the high, clear call of art but also to the shriller trumpetings of social status. Academic critics were celebrities and, for a while, the culture bowed to them. 'It is no exaggeration to say,' writes one historian quoted by Collini, 'that in the late Forties and early Fifties, for the hippest of the young (even among those who were beginning to be beat) the best thing in the world to be was TS Eliot or Edmund Wilson. Literary criticism was the philosophers' stone.' In the US in the Fifties it was possible to watch 'a regular TV programme… featuring Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and WH Auden'.
Literature's prestige has declined precipitously since then. To many students in the 21st century, English seems not a liberal discipline but a positively anti-democratic one, with its cultural hierarchies, decaying canons and excessive reverence for the scribblings of dead white males. If sympathy with Jane Eyre once implied an expanded sphere of moral concern capable of enhancing a person's feeling for all humanity, it now signifies attachment to the culture of an oppressive elite. The rise of electronic distraction has only tended to increase English's political vulnerability. Not only is English more remote than it has ever been from the cultural mainstream but the fewer people actually read Charles Dickens and George Eliot, the more their exalted place in the canon seems like the conspiracy of an establishment minority rather than something that is obvious to all intelligent people.
'In time,' Collini writes, 'it may become possible to be accepted as a cultivated person (whatever that archaic term will by then have come to represent) without having an acquaintance with any literature written before one's own era, or perhaps with any literature at all.' I agree but with one qualification: 'May become possible?' To anybody under 40 it is clear that time is already upon us. Whether this heralds catastrophe – the fate of literature being coterminous with the fate of civilisation – remains to be seen. But when those of us raised in the faith survey the darkness of the modern world, the thought is a hard one to avoid.
Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain
Stefan Collini
Oxford University Press, 656pp, £35
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