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Page 37 of “complaisance” or “acquiescence,” there can be no doubt of his crucial involvement in the machinations, deliberations, and haphazard events which in 1917 resulted in the establishment of “English Literature, Life and Thought” as an academic subject there (Mulhern 1979:21, 22).1 Opposition was considerable, and his support and commitment were vital to the project. He had, after all, been enlisted in a specific cause. Viscount Rothermere, the newspaper proprietor who endowed the King Edward VII Chair, had made clear his requirement that, in promoting the subject of English Literature, the professor should be committed to ‘‘treat this subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines” (Tillyard 1958:38). In the event, Quiller-Couch’s—and the country’s—anti-German prejudices, fuelled by the war, proved decisive in creating a climate appropriate to the exclusion of “Teutonic” philological studies from its sphere, ending what the crusading J.Churton Collins had already denounced as literature’s “degrading vassalage to Philology” (cited in Tillyard 1958:31). Almost at a stroke, this stratagem gave “English” at Cambridge, and worldwide, some of the characteristic lineaments it retains to this day: its project to function not as a narrow academic specialism, mired in the minutiae of Old and Middle English phonetics, but as the basis of a general humane education, engaging freely with the pressures of the modern world and valuing and promoting the individual human experience of them (31–32).2 The “fine old English gentleman” turned out to be not only one of the founding fathers of a hugely expanding field of study, but also instrumental in imposing on it a form and purpose which most of its native-language students in the world can still—however dimly— recognize. Faced with the death of Liberalism, Q assisted at the birth of a subject which, certainly in its early Cambridge manifestation, and despite a complex history and the counter-claims of some of the younger firebrands involved, could be said to have embodied many of Liberalism’s central, defining principles (81–92).3 Within the overall structure of the Tripos (the Cambridge examination for the B.A. honors degree), Q had a particular favorite scheme, one which, when realized, lent the subject an even more distinctive flavor. This was a paper on what he called “the English Moralists.” Asked, by objecting colleagues, which authors he intended by this, his usual retort, according to Tillyard, was “a lyrical outburst on the glories of their writings issuing into a roll-call of the great names: ‘Hooker—Hobbes—Locke—Berkeley—Hume’; and ending with |
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