in my views as to the connection of Classical Literature with ours.

As the English Literature question assumes a somewhat prominent position at this time it may be given the distinction of a chapter to itself.

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CHAPTER VI

1886-7

ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES

T is nearly four o'clock in the morning of Sep. 23, 1886, when I have just finished my article on "English Literature at the Universities.' I have been glancing over some of the back pages, and am very dissatisfied with it indeed, it seems loose and feeble: perhaps it will look better in print. I hope it may direct attention to a serious question. It is a relief to get it done, but it doesn't satisfy me at all. I have been at it for about four months, a very much shorter time than I have given to any other Quarterly article. [And yet I now hear, Oct. 18th, that it is perhaps in point of style the best thing I have written: it has certainly made a very great sensation and, on the whole, I am quite satisfied with it.]

It is no exaggeration to say that the article here referred to in the Memoirs created a great sensation -and more-it was the subject of a controversy which, as a paper put it, "excited more interest than any merely literary subject has aroused since the days of Macaulay." And not only was the whole of the literary and scholastic world involved

in the controversy, but the ecclesiastical and political world shared in it. When such men as W. E. Gladstone, John Bright, Dr Benson (then Archbishop of Canterbury), Cardinal Manning, Dr Fairbairn, Lord Coleridge (then Lord Chief Justice), Prof. Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and Lord Lytton (to mention but a few), gave their opinions on the subject, it will be seen how universal was the interest shown.

His article in the Quarterly Review may be said to have been the climax of a controversy in which interest had first been aroused by his two articles which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette on May 28 and 31, 1886, entitled Educational Crisis, and how to avert it."

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These articles were the prelude to the article which appeared in the October following in the Quarterly Review entitled "English Literature at the Universities," which aroused a storm of controversy and also created something of a sensation in literary circles. For, in order to exemplify the need for a School of English Literature, he had occasion to criticize severely a book written by a prominent teacher at one of the universities; so that in addition to the general issues involved, some feeling was aroused in certain quarters because it was thought that the first part of the article was a personal attack. But

-1887 NEGLECT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 93

as a "leader" in the Pall Mall Gazette pointed out: "The Quarterly Reviewer, it is right to recall, did not in reality make any personal attack at all; he incidentally criticized a particular book because its author was first the darling of the literary journals, and secondly a teacher of the most important College at Cambridge. Here, argued the Reviewer, is a particular case to illustrate my general remarks on the slovenly character of so much contemporary criticism, and on the contempt in which English literature is held at the universities."

An idea of the article may be gathered from these few extracts :

Why Oxford and Cambridge should not deem the interpretation of our national literature as worthy of their serious attention as the study of our national history-how it has come to pass that, while the most liberal and enlightened views prevail with regard to the teaching of history, the teaching of literature is either neglected altogether, or abandoned contemptuously to dilettants and philologists-is a problem which we at least are quite unable to solve. . .

It is indeed half painful, half ludicrous, to reflect that at the present moment, in Oxford alone, upwards of £3000 a year are expended on the interpretation of writings which are fessedly of no literary value, and of interest only as monuments of language, while not one farthing

a year is spent on the interpretation of works which are the glory of our country.

We feel confident that English literature, in the proper sense of the term, will sooner or later receive the recognition to which at the centres of culture it is assuredly entitled. Our only fear is either that it may be considered too exclusively with reference to itself, or that it may be assigned a place in some other part of the curriculum than that part to which, as we have endeavoured to show, it properly belongs. It would, we submit, be a great mistake to make it form a portion, as some propose to do, of the curriculum of a School of Modern Literature, and to treat it only in connection with Modern Literature. It would be a still greater mistake to attach it collaterally, as others propose, to the curriculum of the Modern History School, and to consider it mainly in its relations to Modern History. To prescribe, on the other hand, an independent and uncomparative study of it, to deal with it, that is to say, as a subject bounded by and complete in itself, would be equally objectionable, because equally insufficient. Its proper place is the place which we have indicated-with the literatures which are at the head of all literatures, with the literatures which nourished it, which moulded it, which best illustrate it.

What is needed, and we venture to add imperatively needed, is the institution of a school, which shall stand in the same relation to pure literature, to poetry, oratory, and criticism, as the present school of history stands to history,