The Teaching of Literature: A Reply to Mr. Eliot

The Teaching of Literature: A Reply to Mr. Eliot F. W. Bateson The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism is a difficult, chaotic, and irritating book. Its critical virtue, I think, lies in the obiter dicta and incidental comments that are scattered haphazardly through its pages. There are also some illuminating and entertaining autobiographical passages. (My own favourite is the final trope: "If, as James Thomson observed, 'lips only sing when they cannot kiss,' it may also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing.... The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows.") A section in which the argument is more coherent than elsewhere, and which also possesses considerable autobiographical interest for the Eliot amateur, is the long note "On the Development of Taste in Poetry." The real subject of this note, as its first paragraph makes clear, is "the teaching of literature in schools and colleges." Can taste be taught? Or is it a faculty that is vouchsafed--or not vouchsafed-in the mere process of growing up? On the whole, Mr. Eliot makes it clear, he is against the teaching of literature. The general verdict, in the note's last sentence, is uncompromisingly sceptical: This note is real1y introductory to a large and difficult question: whether the attempt to teach students to appreciate English literature should be made at all; and with what restrictions the teaching of English literature can rightly be included in any academic curriculum, if at all. If at all. Mr. Eliot's challenge is directed, apparently, against the whole apparatus of English schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, university English departments, with their lectures and tutorials, and English examinations from the General Certificate (or junior matriculation) upwards. And, although it was originally issued over twenty years ago, the challenge, as far as I know, has still to be met. Perhaps it cannot be met? Perhaps the "restrictions" would have to be so drastic that the 38 THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE 39 English sides and departments could not continue in business any longer? The vested interests may have preferred to pretend not to notice the exceedingly uncomfortable points that Mr. Eliot makes. On the face of it, certainly, Mr. Eliot's case is a formidable one. It is not, essentially, that literature cannot be taught at all, but that it cannot be taught to the young. (As an experienced extra-mural lecturer Mr. Eliot must know that it can be taught, very successfully, to adults.) According to his note there are three periods in the individual's development of taste in poetry. The lirst period ends when he is round about twelve to fourteen years old. This is the stage, for boys, of "martial and sanguinary poetry," like Macaulay's "Horatius" or some of the traditional ballads; and it is almost universal. At or about puberty, however , a second stage sets in for a small minority of boys and girls. In Mr. Eliot's own case it was FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam that was the cause or the occasion of the metamorphosis. "It was like a sudden conversion ; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious and painful colours." This condition of ecstatic self-identification with the favourite poem or poet of the moment ended, for him, when he was twenty-one, and he then entered the third or mature stage in the enjoyment of poetry. It is not until this third stage is reached, according to Mr. Eliot, that an objective attitude to literature becomes possible, and that degrees of greatuess can be distinguished in it. In the second stage all that can be expected is the ability to distinguish between genuine poetry and sham poetry The reading of poetry that is not congenial must also be deferred to the third stage. At the second stage immersion in poetry that is naturally uncongenial may easily deaden the reader's sensibility to poetry itself and result in a "sham acquisition" of taste rather than a "genuine development" of it. It will be seen that Mr. Eliot's second stage, its nature, its duration, and its relative rarity, is the crux of his argument. If he is right in thinking that the only...