BOOKS
The Scholar as Critic
BY KINGSLEY AMIS THE generation of scholars and teachers which included Saintsbury, Bradley, Raleigh and W. P. Ker is unlikely to draw any cheers from the modern-minded. They were unfortunate in finishing their careers at a time when Mr. Eliot seemed to be revolutionising our attitudes to the literature of the past, and their own attitude to modernity tended to the hostile or contemptuous. With Ker this took the form of, among other things, defending his college rooms against the onslaught of electric light and ignoring the newly installed bathroom on his staircase in favour of his own primeval tub. As a writer, being less trenchant than Saintsbury, less organised (even though less wicked) than Bradley, less vivacious than Raleigh, he now looks uninviting and positively unhelpful. His ambit is the dustier shelves of the university library, and the student who mournfully flicks a Ker volume from its resting- place beside Skeat and Sweet probably has a tutor nearing retiring-age, or else thinks that Leavis is a well-nourished Canadian who periodically presents supposed discoveries on the telly, or else has an essay on Beowulf to write and finds that the Tolkien is out. In the last case he is unlikely to be aware that Ker will guide him better than Tolkien, nor will he readily see that Ker, by virtue of the very fact that he was an old- fashioned scholar, still has a good deal to teach him in certain special fields.
One's first impulse, then, is to be quite glad to find a volume of unpublished Ker lectures* coming out, especially after working it out that this year is the centenary of the old fellow's birth, a fact which his present editors are oddly reluctant to divulge. Those who feel a slight quickening of interest at the term Modern Literature, as opposed, say, to Late Early Middle English Literature, will, admittedly be downcast to discover that the course offered extends from Hudibras Butler to Keats, with Trollope thrown in at the end for fanatics of the contem- porary. But that's no more than fair play in a world where Skelton started Modern English, and there can be few OUP fans who buy for railway reading, guided only by the outside of the jacket. The book in fact is taken for the most part from transcripts of lectures delivered by Ker as Professor of English at University College, London, a post he held from 1889 to 1922, the year before his death. The lectures themselves date from the period 1911-1917, and although Ker had clearly intended, we are told. to revise the transcripts for publication. he never got round to it. It is at least possible that he thought the material unworthy of such attention, but quite apart from that the service to be rendered to anybody by raking out a dead man's files deserves questioning. Even the publication of Jean Santeuil may appear to some an act of dubious piety, and to perform the same exhumatory office upon a lecturer (who may have just as 'strong reasons as the novelist for avoiding print before he is ready) is less justifiable as a sop to inquisitiveness. To be uncharitable, the issue of this volume looks less like a memorial than a piece of irresponsible academic book-making. And it costs much too much.
Ker's faults as a critic—which are typically those of the academic, and not only the old-style sort either, or there would be no point in rehearsing them—are here thrown into uncom- fortable relief. To begin with, there is the tendency to use learning as a means of wriggling away from the issue, to liken Burns to Boethius or suggest a difference between Jane Austen and Ben Jonson. Then there is the practice of using literature as a jumping-off ground into something else. With Ker this something else is commonly the writer's mind, with contem- porary academics it may be the history of ideas or some religiose conception of moral health. And then there is the habitual dodging of the hard question, the complacent uttering of what might be called the how-do-you-mean reagent, where- by 'the art of the ode' and so-and-so's 'classical strain' and the `natural growth' of Elizabethan drama are left echoing in the void—although it would be hard to demonstrate how much better off we are today with 'objective correlative' or 'dissocia- tion of sensibility,' sonorous as these are. Ker had little verbal dexterity : his resources when menaced with the obligation of textual comment were either to quote fifty or sixty lines or to observe that great poems are miraculous.
Dr. B. Ifor Evans records an occasion when Ker, addressing a student society on the Victorian age and expected to give Faith and Doubt a good going-over, talked instead about how the appearance of books had changed with the perfection of modern techniques of photogravure. The joke was on the students all right, but that kind of joke, in various forms, has been played on them too often and too long. It could be argued in Ker's favour here that these lectures were surely delivered to large and perhaps semi-public audiences and, in the mode followed at our older universities, only loosely geared to any syllabus. He could have been but rarely confronted with the wondering frown, the mute appeal for explanation, the naive but discomforting query that conceivably help to keep the provincial lecturer to his muttons. (But, you know, they usually keep on happily taking notes just when they ought to be wondering and appealing and querying.) Anyway, the cir- cumstances of these lectures of Ker's may well have something to do with theit" circumambulatory approach, their biographi- * ON MODERN LITERATURE, Lectures and Addresses. By W. P. Ker. Edited by Terence Spencer and James Sutherland. (0.U.P., 35s.) cal chit-chat, their sometimes intolerable going-on-ness, above all their neglect of a chief task of the lecturer, the careful and connected illumination of the obvious, which is not at all the same thing as the platitude-game, the deep-love-of-nature, finest-elegy-in-our-language stuff. One is saved from any feel- ing of comfortable superiority to Ker by the consciousness that that particular game is still far from being played out. It was unlikely from the start that forty-year-old lectures, delivered by a man then aged about sixty, should seem much better than tame and evasive to a generation nourished on the ideal of close reading. What is really remarkable is how much of Ker's criticism, considered as such, has escaped being turned into shuffling or rigmarole by the passage of time. Even at his most irrelevant he never betrays literature by forcing it into a closed system, by herding it behind the barriers of symbolism or polysemy. He provides a reminder, too, that textual analysis can only give the reader one set of results, and that generalisa- tion, however sweeping, is useful if it is also verifiable. His lecture on Crabbe, for instance, rises above the ordinary read- able level with its reference, unargued as it is, to the 'cheerful- ness' with which that poet recounted what is conventionally harrowing. Buried in an incoherent account of Jane Austen are two very penetrating remarks : one of them, about her use of progressive disillusion, shows up for a moment in an other- wise meaningless peroration, the other notes her selection of incidents that will establish difference and likeness among her characters, then gets thrown aside in favour of a mouth-filler about the spirit of the age. The best lecture, however, is an almost purely informative one about William Gilpin, a travel-writer of the later eighteenth century, who was addicted to observations relative to pic- turesque beauty. Though not directly critical, this can be criti- cally used, for it indicates how the nature poetry of that period was read and so helps us to read it ourselves. It was indeed in the compiling, selecting and ordering of information, in scholarship, that Ker made his great contribution to English studies. His work Epic and Romance, on the narrative poetry of the Middle Ages, is still standard after nearly half a century, or at least ought to be at a time when poor old Beowulf has found his critics to be more potent monsters than Grendel or his dam. One can only find it regrettable that like so many of his colleagues, past and present, a man like Ker was lured out of the field he had mastered and into what is for the most part pseudo-criticism. That entity needs no scholarly accretion.
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