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sionalism had set in.... The apparatchiks were in full command
and it was too late to change the patterns which had been laid
down."
I think this is true, even though philology in that older austere
sense soon lost some of its hold. In England the major change came
with the experiments of
I.
A. Richards at Cambridge, themselves
made possible by the decision of bookman Professor Quiller Couch
to exclude Old English and leave it to the archaeologists. Richards
discovered that apparently highly educated people couldn't really
read poetry, and his methods of teaching, founded not in philology
but in philosophy and psychology, were devised to teach reading.
Later he extended his program and tried to teach the whole world to
read. But in that attempt he had no success. It was two of his
associates who really changed the world of university criticism:
Leavis, with a mystique of a Cambridge elite trained by non–
philological critical methods; and Empson, bold, restlessly inter–
disciplinary, with a poet's attitude to fact and theory. Even before
1939, members of my generation were taking their cues from these
critics. In the United States, the change came when the New Critics
got themselves into the universities.
Yet Gross is right about the unchangeable course of the profes–
sional institution. "Research" was still necessary to advancement.
After the war the universities expanded greatly, and in the sixties
they expanded again; and in that expansion English grew enormously,
partly because of the increasingly monoglot nature of the intake . As
the teachers, themselves increasingly monoglot, grew into a great
company, they developed more intense specializations and wrote
more and more books. First they taught the whole field of English
literature, but did research in only one area; then they did research
and also taught in only one area. As the books multiplied, it seemed
less and less possible to master even one aspect of the subject. In the
sixties , also the period of student unrest, many professors moved up
a level to theoretical work in its nature not directly literary at all. A
generation of metacritics sprang up. The languages of criticism and
of metacriticism grew more and more arcane and now seem to the
educated outsider impenetrable or perhaps gibberish.
Of course the constituency is now so large that work of this kind
still finds publishers and readers; and some of it is very exciting, for
when there are literally thousands of critics around, it is likely that
some will be people of force and intelligence. Certainly one doesn't
want them to stop doing what they do. Only one wonders whether
