F.R. Leavis and Cambridge English

Notes from The Preachers of Culture by Margaret Mathieson (1975)

Chapter 9 – F.R. Leavis and Cambridge English

This chapter presents the influence of F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School on English teaching in university and schools. Like the progressives, they distrusted industrialism and believed that society’s quality of life was at stake. They particularly disparaged cinema, television and the cheap press. The teachers they required were to be “warriors” who would cultivate a critical discrimination in children. For Leavis and Richards, critical skills were a form of morality and would save culture (and society).

  • Leavis tightened the link between English studies at university level and the school teacher’s responsibility in the out­ side world.
  • Leavis gave English teachers the responsibility “to resist”.
  • He inspired graduates to become teachers and demanded men “who would fight” to teach critical discrimination as a form of continuous warfare against hostile forces.
  • Mathieson: “Leavis demanded men ‘who would fight’, and many graduates responded to the battle cry by entering schools to teach English as he had taught them. They adopted his aggressive stance, his military imagery and his combative tones; and as the cultural crisis was viewed as increasingly desperate, they became ‘warriors’ in the place of the ‘preachers’, ‘missionaries’ and ‘ambas­sadors’.”
  • The Cambridge School was influential on:
    • Denys Thompson – Reading and Discrimination (1943)
    • Boris Ford – Young Readers, Young Writers (1960)
    • G.H. Bantock – Education in an Industrial Society (1963)
    • Frank Whitehead – The Disappearing Dias (1961)
    • David Holbrook – English for Maturity (1965)
  • Quotes Denys Thompson: “In an ordinary school, all the time a literary education is striving to sharpen percipience and to provide standards, it is fighting a running engagement against the environment.”
  • Mathieson: “Leavis and his first disciples were deeply worried in the 1930s about what they saw as severe threats to quality of life at every level: com­munism and fascism; the conditions of work and leisure in advanced industrial society; university indifference to their ‘serious’ approach to literature. Their response was to put their faith in the teacher’s power to encourage the spirit of criticism. Their proposed solution to problems of ‘false’ living produced by commercial culture was the development of pupil’s ability to respond individually to great litera­ture. Through the critical method they would learn, it was hoped, to reject the persuasive appeals of the media.”
  • Mathieson briefly reviews history of English studies in universities: During 19th Century lectures on literature at college level were mainly given at Mechanics’ Institute (founded in 1850).
    • London University included it as a subject.
    • English studies established in Scottish universities: Glasgow in 1862, Edinburgh in 1865, Aberdeen in 1893 and St Andrew’s in 1897 – English literature studied in classes of rhetoric and logic under a system much like the Dissenting Academies.
    • English studies expanded in 1880s in elementary schools, girls’ schools and Mechanics’ Institutes – but not in public schools and universities.
    • Sole study of English at Oxford and Cambridge until middle 19th Century was Anglo Saxon until it turned its interest to Middle English. Their attention was mainly philology and phonetics. Mathieson: “Generally trained in Germany and influenced by the German conviction that a speech which had lost its inflexions was in a state of decay, language scholars tended to resist the entry of English literature at university level; their tendency was to despise the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth as degenerate.”
    • Oxford tutors believed that the subject lacked rigorous mental discipline and would lower standards. Consequently at Oxford, English developed more or less as a study of philology with “scientific coolness” supplying the discipline which reading of novels and poetry lacked.
    • Situation at Cambridge:English, as an independent Tripos, consisted of two sections—Modern and Medieval, and Old English. Students were allowed to combine one of these with a part of any other Tripos, few choosing to take both parts.
    • In 1913 A.C. Benson proposed a School of English – with Arnold and Quiller-Couch they linked the notion of founding a School of English to the cultural health of the country.
    • Before WW1, scholars were preparing the English Tripos of 1917. English Tripos became independent from the Modern Languages Board at Cambridge in 1926.
    • Mathieson: “When Leavis, drawing on the different critical powers of T. S. Eliot (The Sacred Wood, 1920), I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism, 1926) and W. Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930), evolved what came to be recognisable as ‘Cambridge English’, he retained these earlier scholars’ sense of mission, ‘this sense of obligation’ to all levels of education and society, as well as to the furtherance of knowledge, and ‘faith in the saving effects of literature’.”
    • The Newbolt Report’s chapter on English at university conveys widespread confusion about the subject. Mathieson says that the reader of the report gets the impression that the Committee was almost overwhelmed by witnesses’ anxieties about consequencesr university studies if English courses were encouraged to be separate from the classics.
    • The Newbolt Committee members were less enthusiastic in linking English with the classics than many of the witnesses. They were prepared to extend outward from English to Anglo-Saxon and pre-Chaucerian texts.
    • In the section of the Report, The Study of Language in the Universities, “the precarious state of English becomes even clearer”. Classicists disdained new subject from the outside and linguists held a strong position (linguists had been trained in Germany or were under the influence of German ideals and educational methods). The Tripos in English and German were run on parallel lines and based on courses persued in German universities.
    • Mathieson: “The Report employs the term ‘humane’ throughout these dis­ cussions. The Committee is keenly aware of its dilemma; concentra­ tion upon the humane to the exclusion of the classics, history, philology, modern languages and philology, was to incur contempt for the ‘soft option’, while inclusion of other subjects could diminish the humanising potential of the central humane study.”
    • Mathieson: “The Committee members suggest, finally, a compromise; they propose that candidates should, with the study of modern writers, be allowed to choose their comLatin. Thus, while accepting that English students should take a second course, they do not insist that it should be Anglo-Saxon. Their fears lest the English School becomes ‘overloaded with primitive literature’ are very clear; their concern is primarily with recom­mendation for the establishment of English Schools which would be­ come ‘true Schools of the Humanities’. At every stage of the argu­ment, while concessions are made to the claims of other languages, convictions are expressed firmly about the educative power of English studies at the very highest academic level.”
    • In London University after WW1 the stress was on the facts and history of Literature.
    • At Oxford, English studies were primarily linguistic.
    • At Cambridge it was unusual for students to study more than one English course.
    • Mathieson: “Sup­porters of English studies were preoccupied with the subject’s central problems of the relative merits of facts about literature, or good taste in literature. Although facts could be taught, this would fall far short of the subject’s highest humanising potential; although the training of taste was undeniably attractive, professors asked each other whether it could be done. Some supporters looked to the addition of other easily taught subjects to support the fragile new undertaking, while others fought for the establishment of a new, humane, central study as disciplined and ennobling as the classics had once been.”
  • Leavis on I.A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism: “The benefit it conferred was liberation. To be released from the thought-frustrating spell of “Form”, “pure sound value”, prosody and the other time-honoured, quasi-critical futilities had a positively vitalising effect that can hardly be done justice to today.”
  • Fusion of Freudian psychology, G.Moore‘s linguistic philosophy and I.A. Richards’ critical method gave Cambridge’s modern English School its unique “astringency and discipline” (Tillyard). Mathieson: “This absorption of other disciplines had the effect of immeasurably strengthening English studies and liber­ating them from their burdens of classics and philology.”
  • I.A. Richards’ work central to Leavis’ critical approach and evident in the work of teachers and critics trained in the Cambridge tradition:
    • art and the rest of human activity are continuous and not contrasting (denial of the isolated aesthetic experience);
    • his theory of “impulses” (popular culture hindered personal balance and integration through its power to “dis-organise” through its continual stimulation of “stock responses”).
  • Richards provided English studies with an approach that could compete with science and confound accusations of English being a “soft option”.
  • Richards equated “fine conduct of life” with “fine ordering of responses”. Quotes Richards: “Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are confused and disorganised.”
  • Quotes Raymond Williams: “It is not too much to say that Principles of Literary Criticism . . . contained a programme of critical work for a generation … on this attitude to good and bad literature a whole subsequent critical and educational programme has been based.”
  • Leavis believed that modern urban society was in a state of cultural disintegration (ugly environment, mechanised work, trivialising media). He believed that liberal education of the past bear no relationship with real life conduct. Convinced that English Literature should now replace the classics as a discipline characterised by a critical rigour as demanding as the sciences.
  • Leavis believed that English Literature was central because it provided opportunities for sustaining tradition and providing continuity. Mathieson: “He hoped that the universities would take responsibility for the education of an intelligent, sensitive minority capable of appreciating the great works of the past and responding critically to contemporary literature, thereby sustaining and perpetuating a valuable tradition.”
  • Quotes Leavis: “It trains, in a way no other discipline can, intelligence and sensitivity together, cultivating a sensitiveness and precision of response and a delicate integrity of intelligence that integrates as well as analyses and must have pertinacity as well as delicacy.“
  • Richards’ and Leavis’ definition of an act of discrimination was a finely-judged response to a writer’s use of language which involved the reader’s intelligence and feelings. It involved an activity they defined as moral. Language is used by a writer to recreate experience in such a way as to affect our reactions to it. In discriminating between the supremely accurate and sensitive or the banal or gross, the reader trains himself to respond more delicately to life itself.
  • Leavis and Richards shared the progressives concerns about cultural disintegration. Quotes Leavis: “The social and cultural disintegration that has accompanied the development of the vast modern machine is destroying what should have been the control, and leaves a terrifying apparatus of propa­ ganda ready to the hands of the more or less subtle, more or less conscious, more or less direct, emulators of Hitler and his ac­complices. What is to forestall or check them? . . . without an intelligent, educated and morally responsible public, political pro­ grammes can do nothing to arrest the process of disintegration— though they can do something to hasten it. . . . Scrutiny stands for co-operation in the work of rallying and strengthening such a public…”
  • Even up to 1960s hostility towards English as a “soft option” subject persisted at universities.
  • Leavis and students disapproved of the world of privilege – especially the Bloomsbury group. Mathieson: “What Cambridge English saw as the Bloomsbury group’s hedonistic, effete, sexually complicated life-style represented to them a deplorable, self- indulgent decadence.”
  • Lionel Trilling – Dr Leavis and the Moral Tradition.
  • Disappointment about unrealised hopes for the establishment of an English School at Cambridge conceived and structured as a centre of humane studies plus his neglect by the Faculty by the 1960s-70s deepened his views about urban society. Leavis: “What we face in immediate view is a nightmare intensification of what Arnold feared.”
  • Quotes Leavis: “…what has been said has obvious applications at the school level, and much might be done if it were permitted, if there were teachers educated to do it, and if the examination system were not allowed to get in the way… the training of sensibility … might profitably begin at an early age…. Practical criticism of literature must be associated with training in awareness of the environment—advertising, the cinema, the press, architecture, and so on, for, clearly, to the pervasive counter-influence of this environment the literary training of sensi­bility in school is an inadequate reply.”
  • Leavis and Denys Thompson – Culture and Environment (1933). Shows hostility to modern urban scene. Mathieson: “More intensely and precisely than the progressives, who wanted creativity to strengthen the individual’s personal life against threatening external pressures, Leavis and Thompson reacted against the debasement of language in modern society because of its in­ evitable debasement of our emotions.”
  • Quotes Leavis and Thompson: “Those who in school are offered [perhaps] the beginnings of education in taste are exposed, out of school, to the competing exploitation of the cheapest emotional responses …. We cannot, as we might in a healthy state of culture, leave the citizen to be formed unconsciously by his environment; if anything like a worthy idea of satisfactory living is to be saved, he must be trained to discriminate and to resist.”
  • Leavis’ followers involved in teaching have resisted proposals for the “richness” of working class culture to be included in the curriculum.
  • Mathieson: “G. H. Bantock and David Holbrook, both of whom have written fully about the curriculum of the less able, though they demand much more time spent upon affective subjects, define these by reference to high culture or the folk culture of our agricultural past. Their wish is to provoke pupils’ critical response through their engagement with whatever music, art, drama and poetry can be related to their own lives, and through their own creative work.”
  • Quotes Denys Thompson: “English is more than a subject. Its particular value (or “use”) is that it can create and heighten that critical attitude to our civilisation which current affairs teaching should strive after. And thus, in formal education it can give unity and purpose to our syllabus …. It is a common place that education must educate against the environment. And yet, after eighty years of compulsory education the environment seems to be winning. Even while at school the child is falling into the grip of the entertainment industry and by the time he is an adult the quality of his reading suggests that the environment has won.”
  • Teachers are urged to strengthen their opposition to the products of the environment (tv and cinema).
  • Quotes Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: “Can you not give them also in their short years at school, something to sustain their souls in the long Valley of Humilia­tion?”
  • Mathieson: “From Matthew Arnold to David Holbrook the response to this kind of question, with its strong indictment of the modern in­dustrial environment, has been to recommend good teaching of great literature. In the period when religious imagery had lost its power, these teachers, once ‘preachers’, were redefined in military terms; ‘the battle, desperate as the odds look, must not—shall not—be lost….”
  • Mathieson on New Left and later critics: “radical educators wishing to promote all children’s independence, confidence and personal fulfil­ment, have attacked Leavisite English for its role in perpetuating social divisions and injustices along with the tripartite school system, the traditional curriculum and authoritarian teaching methods. Wish­ ing to achieve their goals with a sense of purpose equally strong as Leavis’s or David Holbrook’s, the New Left propose several major shifts of emphasis—from the school’s values to the pupils’, from the teacher’s talk to the pupils’, and from the subjects, high art in particular, to the experiences of the pupils’ everyday lives.”