This book has argued, largely by means of detailed case studies, for the important place occupied by literary criticism in the broader intellectual history of mid-twentieth-century Britain. More specifically, it has suggested that such criticism functioned as an influential medium through which understandings of history, of various kinds, were negotiated and disseminated. Implicitly, the book has presumed that the category of ‘literary criticism’ is porous and unstable: reading, analysing, and responding to whatever is understood as ‘literature’ at any given moment will always draw on more than literature. Accordingly, the frontiers between forms of criticism, forms of literary history, and forms of general history are bound to be contested and shifting, with rival claims competing for dominion. Raymond Williams put one version of this case in its strong form when he wrote, in a sentence quoted earlier, that the use of language in literature ‘is as much the record of the history of a people as political institutions and religions and philosophical modes’.1 T. S. Eliot had been putting a similar case in more teasing terms when he wrote in that pregnant sentence from 1919 that serves as an epigraph to this book: ‘The historian of literature must count with as shifting and as massive forces as the historian of politics.’2 And it was Eliot who most frankly stated the consequences of this situation when he wrote of
the dilemma which every honest literary critic, now and in the future, will have to face. On the one hand you cannot treat literary criticism as a subject isolated from every other subject of study; you must take account of general history, of philosophy, theology, economics, psychology, into all of which literary criticism merges. And on the other hand you cannot hope to embrace all of the various points of view implied by these various studies … 3
In some respects, this hits a more modest or concessive note than many of the statements I have been discussing, but it also highlights some of the practical difficulties facing any attempt to write the history of literary criticism.
From the 1960s onwards, much of the debate in the Anglo-American academic world about the character and methods of intellectual history was conducted in relation either to the history of science or to the history of political thought. In both those fields there had been strong traditions of endogenous histories, principally dealing with a sequence of theoretical constructions and informed by the preoccupations of powerful modern disciplines, so they were fertile ground for a historicist counter-attack, though in both cases, especially the history of political thought, the continuing focus on a restricted number of canonical authors has limited the extent to which these fields have been fully subsumed into a wider intellectual history. The history of literary criticism has not, for the most part, been the scene of comparable revisionist campaigns; indeed, the field has received relatively little attention from intellectual historians more generally. Across the twentieth century there was no shortage of what, borrowing the term from the debates over the history of science, we may call ‘internalist’ histories, presenting a sequence of ‘theories’ and ‘approaches’. Such accounts have their uses, but not only do they strip the story of much of its richness and often fail to do justice to the practice of literary criticism: they also tend to neglect what are potentially the most illuminating contexts for understanding individual critics’ writings and omit what may be some of the most powerful explanations for the variety and impact of such criticism.
This book has touched on only one aspect of these wider relations—the commerce between literary criticism and a range of historical assumptions, frameworks, and claims—and it has confined itself to a few decades and to a single country. My canvas has, by design, been small. This is because, in addition to trying to illuminate a given topic, I have also hoped to illustrate a particular style of work. Such work involves a close and responsive attention to the verbal texture of the sources one is using, the kind of attention we may think to be characteristic of literary criticism itself—hence the reliance on extensive quotation. But it thereby involves, in addition, an intimate familiarity with a particular milieu or specific aspect of a culture. Writing history inevitably involves the use of both the telescope and the microscope. I have no inhibitions about deploying the former when appropriate—there is no shortage in this book of longer views and comparative judgements—but it will be evident that I am, temperamentally or as a matter of intellectual style, more drawn to the microscope and to the fine grain of discrimination that it enables.
Needless to say, such a limited topic can be shown, when subject to less sympathetic or more distanced scrutiny, to be parochial or to neglect matters that later generations have come to regard as mandatory. Indeed, it may be that such work is now in danger of falling into disrepute, scanted by those who believe that our times demand a focus on the transnational and damned by those promoting one or other form of direct engagement with contemporary concerns. I have to recognize that, in terms of who was thought to ‘matter’ in contemporary public debate or what aspects of the past were seen as ‘significant’ in that debate, the story told here risks being perceived, from a later perspective, as too indulgent towards the conventions of the period under scrutiny. Within the relatively narrow limits of the story I have tried to tell, I have not set out to challenge these characteristics or to unmask the significant exclusions they may entail, though I trust no reader will conclude that I thereby endorse them. There can, of course, be benefits in attempting to do what is now sometimes termed ‘global intellectual history’, which certainly avoids the parochial, but there are also costs. In any event, I have here attempted an appropriately bounded illustration of what can still be gained by working not just on an aspect of twentieth-century British culture where history and criticism intersected in telling ways, but also in a manner that attempts to combine elements of literary criticism and intellectual history.
In my view, the story told here is not one to which a later generation can feel superior, secure in the conviction that it has exposed and surpassed any inclination to indulge tendentious or nostalgic assumptions about the past by means of more rigorous and self-conscious critique. Each age imagines various pasts in response to changed circumstances and preoccupations in the present. The intellectual fashions that help to shape those imaginings may change, but such creative retrospection is not simply a phase that criticism, or even a whole culture, grows out of. Some future intellectual historian will be able to do for the historical assumptions underlying the dominant critical approaches of the decades since 1970 the equivalent of what I have attempted for the previous half-century. But it seems unlikely, given the range and depth of related social changes, that such an account could ever form as prominent a part of the history of that later period as the present discussion does for the years covered in this book. It also seems unlikely that any such study would confine itself to British (or, in practice, English) intellectual life in the way I have been able to do. Even in my chosen period, especially in the years after 1945, the academic culture of the United States is a presence increasingly to be reckoned with, while any tendency to insular monochromy needs to be streaked, in painting individual portraits, with such internationalizing elements as Eliot’s cosmopolitanism and American roots, Empson’s affiliations to the Far East, Williams’s (in this period largely repressed) Welshness, and so on. The dimensions only touched on in these cases would call for more emphatic attention when examining later decades. Similarly, the cast of characters in the more recent period would not be so overwhelmingly male or so concentrated in the traditional centres of cultural power.
But, however much the limits of the present study might need to be challenged or extended when dealing with the more recent period, the theme itself will, I suggest, remain enduringly pertinent. To adapt a phrase from Frank Kermode—whom I have, in homage, already cited more than once—history is the imposition of a plot on time.4 We live in time, but we understand the experience of life through form, and any structure manages our expectations, which easily fall into archetypal patterns, especially, as we have repeatedly seen, patterns of decline and fall. In making a selection from the infinite flux of what has been, we give it a shape, and all shapes suggest some primitive species of starting point and imply some vaguely adumbrated end. Making sense of our history, personal or collective, is, as I remarked in the Introduction, a constant struggle to find a way to master multifariousness without denying or violating it. If ‘History has many cunning passages’, as Eliot’s familiar line declares, it should not surprise us that various forms of enquiry, literary criticism included, can find themselves being led through ‘contrived corridors and issues’ (Eliot again) as they try to assemble a usable past. I have attempted to track one sample of such traffic. Leslie Stephen acknowledged towards the end of the book that issued from his Ford Lectures that he was not providing a ‘complete survey of the intellectual history of the time’.5 In closing, I echo that caution, but nonetheless I offer this book as an illustration of what both intellectual historians and literary critics may have to gain by exploring their affinities, while at the same time suggesting that the results of such shared endeavours may also have their place in the field of ‘British History’ to which the Ford Lectures are dedicated.