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growth in authority of the avant-garde. The second and more drastic
was the takeover ofletters by the universities . Eliot's new sketch map
of literature was eventually to be the chart of literature professors,
but its impact on the profession of letters began before that. You
won't find it easy to name an important critic who was a critic and
nothing else; that is, until quite recently. The world is now full of
literary critics, some held to be important, who do nothing else but
literary criticism, and they all work in universities. The success of
university "English" was not premeditated, but it has affected our
letters much as the invention of printing, the manufacture of cheap
paper, the leisure of the bourgeoisie, the abandonment of the cir–
culating library three-decker, or any other strictly extraliterary force
has done. The first casualty was the bookman. He died, and his
place was taken by the university critic .
English departments weren't founded for the purpose of mass–
producing critics. In the United States, the speech department had
an obvious social role. In England the two principal universities did
not teach English until the present century, but departments existed
elsewhere and offered some education in the vernacular classics to
people unqualified for the study of the real classics at Oxford and
Cambridge, by virtue of their being women, dissenters, Jews, or
poor. The model they chose was of course classical philology. This
became the case, as matters developed, in the United States also ;
hence the journal titles,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology,
Modern Philology.
At University College in London, where they
established the first English Chair of English in 1832, the dry
philological tradition (lots of Old English, placename study,
"language" in all its aspects) was still strong when I arrived there in
the sixties, though major change was wanted by most people. For a
long time the
Weltanschauung
was a curious blend of Arnold and
Skeat . The training of ordinary readers was no longer a real con–
cern. And as departments expanded , it was assumed that the essen–
tial qualification of teachers should be
research;
we should match the
natural science department by performing in philology the sort of
research they did: factual, cumulative.
John Gross attaches importance to the foundation of the
Modern
Language Review
in 1905 . In the first number, W . W . Greg, a private
scholar, dismissed Professor Churton Collins's edition of Robert
Greene as the work of "an arm-chair editor." The professionals had
arrived. Soon the wave of the New Bibliography broke over
Shakespeare. "By the 1920s," says Gross, "a mood of sombre profes-
