Beauty and the Footnote: Universities and the Study of Literature

Stefan Collini, FBA. Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge.

The Donald Winch Lectures in Intellectual History. University of St Andrews. 11th, 12th & 13th October 2022.

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, universities expanded to include a wide range of what came to be regarded as academic ‘disciplines’. In Britain, the study of ‘English literature’ was eventually to become one of the biggest and most popular of these subjects, yet it was in some ways an awkward fit: not obviously susceptible to the ‘scientific’ treatment considered the hallmark of a scholarly discipline, it aroused a kind of existential commitment in many of those who taught and studied it. These lectures explore some of the ways in which these tensions worked themselves out in the last two hundred years, drawing on a wide range of sources to understand the aspirations invested in the subject, the resistance that it constantly encountered, and the distinctive forms of enquiry that came to define it. In so doing, they raise larger questions about the changing character of universities, the peculiar cultural standing of ‘literature’, and the conflicting social expectations that societies have entertained towards higher education and specialized scholarship.

Handout.

1. ‘Neglected and despised as it is in comparison with its favoured competitor, how far more does it deserve the notice bestowed on her. It is not partial in its cultivation of the intellect, but tends at once to correct the taste, to strengthen the judgement, to instruct us in the wisdom of men better and wiser than ourselves, to exercise the reasoning faculties on subjects which demand and deserve their attention, and to show them the boundaries imposed on them by Providence. It is literature which fits and prepares us best of all for the examination of those moral and intellectual truths, which are not only the worthiest exercise of our reason, but most concern our future destiny.’

2. ‘The teaching of English literature will contribute to the formation of sound conclusions on social and political questions; to right feeling and right thinking in all that appertains to morality and religion; to largeness, to sanity, to elevation, to refinement in judgement, taste and sentiment, to all, in short, which constitutes in the proper sense of the term the education of the British citizen.’

3. ‘By the humanizing power of literature we mean the development of the higher faculties, the imagination, the sense of beauty and the intellectual comprehension, clear vision, mental harmony, a just sense of proportion, higher illumination.’

4. ‘In all my Lectures, more particularly when treating upon that glorious and inexhaustible subject, the LITERATURE of our country - I shall esteem it my duty - and I trust I shall find it my delight - to inculcate lessons of virtue, through the medium of the masters of our language.’

5. ‘A chief burden in maintaining and keeping uppermost the spiritual element in man must rest, for a variety of reasons, more upon the teaching of English and English literature than upon any other subject.’

6. ‘The value of critical training, and of the various methods of study that I have touched upon, is simply that they educate our power of appreciation and make it possible for us to enter into the life and meaning of the highest poetry. Without some such mental discipline we shall always be in danger of accepting the second-rate for a masterpiece, and shall either be content with this shallower outlet for our emotions or be inclined to dispute the power of art to satisfy us at all. But if we submit our taste for poetry to education, the highest in ourselves will be drawn out to meet what is highest in the great artist: we shall realize our kinship with him and participate in his vision.’

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