Part 4

Literature at the universities is in even a worse plight. The scientific historical method applied in this field is steadily devitalising literary study. Criticism and enjoyment of the great masters have to give place to the study of tendencies and influences, of historical minutiae and bibliographical irrelevancies. The academic mind apparently fails to see any incongruity in the eagerness and seriousness with which learned societies recently discussed the precise circumstances of the death of Marlowe; nor is it shocked at the regularity with which university lecturers and others write letters to the “Times Literary Supplement,” taking leave to record some “new fact” about a relative of a tenth-rate poet whose name lives only in the bigger histories of literature. Immature graduates in the American schools of English are steadily working through all our writers who are sufficiently unimportant to have escaped attention hitherto and producing monographs on them “in part preparation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of ――――.” And as money is plentiful in the American universities the theses are duly printed. Similar so-called literary research is being carried on with unremitting energy in this country also; happily the results of most of it remain decently buried in the university archives. Dr Butler foresees a probable decline in the educational importance of scientific study through concentration on the unessentials and neglect of the essentials: for the same reason it is to be feared that the university departments of modern literature are already well on the road to decadence.

The outlook for university education is therefore not hopeful. It seems probable that the worship of the false gods of the academic world will take an unconscionable time in dying. Universities are conservative places: they hold themselves superior, and often rightly superior, to the rough and tumble of the world outside, and thus they are tardy in responding to the changing spirit of the age. Moreover, by their very system they are cramping the free intelligence and narrowing the vision of those who are to direct the universities of the future. Success in university life necessarily involves obedience to the tradition.

Thus it may be assumed that present tendencies will take a generation or two to reach their limit. With the improvement in the secondary schools through the better selection of pupils the standard of work there will be forced up to such a pitch that every student proceeding to the university will immediately specialise in a narrow field. Pass degrees will be abolished. The prestige of research-degrees will be such that most, if not all, graduates will proceed to them. In every university there will be a busy colony of researchers. In the departments of science in its various branches men and women will be labouring to discover new phenomena and to formulate fresh theories. Much of this work will fulfil the laudable purpose of improving man’s material lot. Much of it, on the other hand, will have the practical result of supplying an industrialised community with a surfeit of mechanical luxuries which the ordinary person will have neither the desire nor the time to use. The spirit of man may find some consolation in increased knowledge of such matters as the habits of atoms exposed to various sorts of experimental bombardments. In the departments of the modern languages and literatures the soil will have been so far exhausted that students will be reduced to collating and editing (with linguistic commentary) the dullest and most obscure mediaeval manuscripts. Or the American example will be followed of writing dissertations on recent or contemporary writers. We may expect doctoral theses with such titles as――“A Bibliographical Account of the Works of Arnold Bennett, together with a Hand-list of his Contributions to the Periodical Press”; or “The Sussex Farm-Labourer in English Fiction from 1900 to 1930.” In the realm of history, the evidence of the past will, in most directions, have been sifted and re-sifted; accounts of first-rate, second-rate, and even third-rate men and movements will have been multiplied _ad nauseam_ on the excuse that an additional insignificant fact or two has been added to information that was already accessible. Students will be driven to editing the dreariest records (if any still remain unpublished) elucidating matters of the least possible concern to the twentieth century. They will, no doubt, be sustained in their thankless tasks by the thought that they are doing the Spade-work: they are doing their share, however humble, towards providing a greater than themselves with the materials for a new survey of a period. We can only hope that their single-minded devotion may not be disturbed by the horrible thought that the mass of accumulated research on any given topic will eventually be so vast that no single human life will give sufficient time in which to read it, and that no single human mind will be equal to the task of synthesising it.

When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the time will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought and action.

But that time is not yet.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.