[In the following excerpt, Eagleton explains the role of the nineteenth-century man of letters as commentator and interpreter of literature for the middle-class reading public.]

The nineteenth century was to produce a category which yoked sage and critical hack uneasily together: ‘man of letters’. It is an interestingly elusive term, broader and more nebulous than ‘creative writer’, not quite synonymous with scholar, critic or journalist. T. W. Heyck has argued that it is the nearest term we have in nineteenth-century England to the significantly absent category of ‘intellectual’, which was not to gain currency in its modern sense until the 1870s.¹ Like the eighteenth-century periodicalists, the man of letters is the bearer and dispenser of a generalized ideological wisdom rather than the exponent of a specialist intellectual skill, one whose synoptic vision, undimmed by any narrowly technical interest, is able to survey the whole cultural and intellectual landscape of his age. Such comprehensive authority links the man of letters on one side with the sage; but whereas the sage's synopticism is a function of transcendental detachment, the man of letters sees as widely as he does because material necessity compels him to be a bricoleur, dilettante, jack-of-all-trades, deeply embroiled for survival in the very commercial literary world from which Carlyle beat his disdainful retreat. The man of letters knows as much as he does because he cannot make a living out of only one intellectual specialism. The expansion of the reading public by the mid-nineteenth century, and consequently of the periodical market, greatly enhanced opportunities of professional writing; G. H. Lewes correctly considered that the possibility of authorship as a profession was due to the periodical press. The man of letters is in this sense a hack; but he is a figure of sagelike ideological authority too, and in the Victorian period one can observe this unsettling coexistence as often as not within the same individuals.

It was a conflict which Thomas Carlyle hoped to resolve by elevating the man of letters to heroic stature, in a gesture which can only seem to us profoundly bathetic. In ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, Carlyle writes of the power of print in spreading the word of parliament (‘Literature is our Parliament too’) and of the press as having superseded both pulpit and senate.² Printing brings with it (indeed, Carlyle implies, actually causes) democracy, creating a community of the literate—‘men of letters’—with, so we are informed, incalculable influence. The whole essay, that is to say, represents a strained, nostalgic reinvention of the classical bourgeois public sphere, lauding the power of discourse to influence political life and raising parliamentary reporters to the status of prophets, priests and kings. Yet there is anxiety and ambiguity too: if men of letters are so incalculably influential, why, Carlyle has the realism to ask himself, do they go so dismally unrecognized? The predictably Carlylean response is that the ‘Literary Class’ is ‘disorganic’, socially diffuse and disorganized, something less than Guild-like in its corporate social being. No doubt there is an echo here of the later Coleridge's fear of a rootless, déclassé, disaffected caste of intellectuals, which he believed had done much to bring about the French revolution. The unspoken contradiction in Carlyle's effusion—are men of letters saviours of society or unheeded hacks?—is familiarly Romantic: the poet as unacknowledged legislator, a dream of power continually crossed with what purports to be a description of the actual. Does the classical public sphere still exist, or has it disintegrated?

If the sage's judgements are aloofly authoritarian, the man of letters, attached to one or more of the great Victorian periodicals, is still striving to weld together a public sphere of enlightened bourgeois discourse. His role, like that of Addison and Steele, is to be commentator, informer, mediator, interpreter, popularizer; like his eighteenth-century predecessors he must reflect as well as consolidate public opinion, working in close touch with the broad habits and prejudices of the middle-class reading public. ‘The ability to assimilate and interpret,’ as Heyck puts it, ‘rated as a higher quality than the ability to report special knowledge.’³ To the extent that the Victorian man of letters achieved considerable success in this task, the bourgeois public sphere may be said to have survived in some form into the mid-nineteenth century. Heyck points out that, given the small size of the electorate before 1867 and its essentially middle-class composition, it is probable that any important novel, historical work or social polemic would have reached ‘a very large proportion of the governing elite’. ‘Through their newspapers, periodicals and books,’ he adds, ‘the men of letters wrote directly for all the people who counted in decision-making.’⁴ Many of them in addition had close personal and familial relations with men of affairs and the ruling class. Sharing common standards with their audience, they could write out of an instinctive sense of what would be popular, intelligible and acceptable. Leslie Stephen believed that the man of letters had to ‘develop a living literature by becoming a representative of the ideas which really interested the whole cultivated classes, instead of writing merely for the exquisite critic.’⁵ In an essay on ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, he winced at a brutally dismissive judgement of Jeffrey's on Wilhelm Meister, precisely because it suggested a critic damagingly estranged from a sense of his audience's common sensibilities. ‘There is a kind of indecency, a wanton disregard of the general consensus of opinion, in such treatment of a contemporary classic … which one would hope to be now impossible.’⁶

The critic's dilemma, as Peter Hohendahl phrases it, is whether to make his judgements on behalf of the broad public or of the minority; and the answer for the Victorian man of letters is not quite so straightforward as Stephen's faith in public consensus would seem to suggest. For the Victorian intellectual climate is one of deep ideological turmoil and insecurity; and in such a situation the man of letters cannot be an exactly equal partner in the dialogue with his audience. His task is to instruct, consolidate and console—to provide a disturbed, ideologically disorientated readership with the kind of popularizing summaries of contemporary thought, all the way from geological discoveries to the Higher Criticism, which might stem the socially disruptive tides of intellectual bemusement. The man of letters, as Heyck argues, ‘was expected to help the audience through the troubles of economic, social and religious change’;⁷ his function was to explain and regulate such change as much as to reflect it, thus rendering it less ideologically fearful. He must actively reinvent a public sphere fractured by class struggle, the internal rupturing of bourgeois ideology, the growth of a confused, amorphous reading public hungry for information and consolation, the continued subversion of ‘polite’ opinion by the commercial market, and the apparently uncontrollable explosion and fragmentation of knowledges consequent upon the accelerating division of intellectual labour. His relation to his audience, that is to say, must be one of subject to object as well as in some sense subject to subject; a nervous responsiveness to public opinion must find its place within a didactic, covertly propagandist posture towards his readership, processing knowledge in the act of providing it.

In this sense the man of letters is contradictorily located between the authoritarianism of the sage and the consensualism of the eighteenth-century periodicalists, and the strains of this dual stance are obvious enough. Jeffrey was already complaining in the Edinburgh that ‘it is really provoking to find how very slowly truth and sound reason make their way, even among the reading classes of the community’;⁸ and the problem finds interesting formulation in Walter Bagehot's essay of 1855 on ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’:

It is indeed a peculiarity of our times, that we must instruct so many persons. On politics, on religion, on all less important topics still more, every one thinks himself competent to think—in some casual manner does think—to the best of our means must be taught to think—rightly. Even if we had a profound and far-reaching statesman, his deep ideas and long-reaching vision would be useless to us, unless we could impart a confidence in them to the mass of influential persons, to the unelected Commons, the unchosen Council who assist at the deliberations of the nation. In religion now the appeal is not to the technicalities of scholars, or the fiction of reclusive schoolmen, but to the deep feelings, the sure sentiments, the painful strivings of all who think and hope. And this appeal to the many necessarily brings with it a consequence. We must speak to the many so that they will listen—that they will like to listen—that they will understand. It is of no use addressing them with the forms of science, or the rigour of accuracy, or the tedium of exhaustive discussion. The multitude are impatient of system, desirous of brevity, puzzled by formality.⁹

What provides such instruction, Bagehot goes on to add, is ‘the review-like essay and the essay-like review’. What he is fearing and regretting here is the decline of the bourgeois public sphere—the ‘unelected Commons … who assist at the deliberations of the nation’—in an epoch of shallow understanding and opinionated individualism, where the ‘unchosen Council’ has spread beyond the reliably enlightened to encompass an amorphous, variably educated, culturally philistine middle class. In one sense such people are still on a par with the author himself—‘influential persons’ who at least in some casual manner think rightly. But they are also, in a crucial Victorian term, a mass of influential persons, and within a few lines have degenerated to a ‘multitude’. If they casually think rightly, they must nonetheless be taught to think rightly: ‘The modern man must be told what to think,’ Bagehot remarks later in the same essay, ‘shortly, no doubt, but he must be told it.’ The political anxiety behind the italicization is palpable. The middle-class readership is now less the critic's collaborative equal in the enterprise of cultural enlightenment than an anonymous object whose sentiments and opinions are to be moulded by techniques of intellectual simplification. An ‘amateur’ eschewal of technical discourse is now less (as with Addison) part of the very nature of true knowledge than a tactical ploy in the diffusion of it. An ideal of the classical public sphere is still acknowledged, but the political urgency of its reconstitution imparts to the critic's own language a dogmatic insistence potentially at odds with that ideal itself. It is not clear whether it is imperative to disseminate the ideas of the putative far-seeing statesman, or merely to generate pervasive emotional confidence in them; are the middle-class masses to be given intellectual illumination, or merely to be enkindled and reassured? Bagehot treats the ‘influential persons’ of the middle class as though they were the working class: intemperate, thickheaded, swayed by emotion, incapable of thought other than in its most untaxing economical forms. The classical public sphere is certainly in disarray, and with it the role of the critic. The man of letters must be at once source of sagelike authority and canny popularizer, member of a spiritual clerisy but plausible intellectual salesman. John Morley, editor of the Fortnightly Review, speaks of his contributors as being entrusted with the ‘momentous task of forming public opinion’,¹⁰ and while the declared goal is traditional to the public sphere, that ‘momentous’ tells its own bleak story. The critic is now both inside and outside the public arena, responding attentively from within only the more effectively to manage and mould opinion from some superior external vantage-point. It is a posture which threatens to invert the priorities of correction and collaboration evident in the Tatler and Spectator, where the former was possible and tolerable only on the basis of the latter.

The cultural unevenness of the nineteenth-century reading public is important in this respect. In the epoch of Addison and Steele, the frontiers between ‘polite society’ and the rest of the nation were rigorous and palpable. There were, naturally, many degrees of literacy in eighteenth-century England; but there was an obvious distinction between those who could ‘read’, in a sense of the term inseparable from ideological notions of gentility, and those who could not. The nineteenth-century man of letters must suffer the blurring and troubling of this reasonably precise boundary. What is now most problematical is not illiteracy, which is after all a sort of absolute, determinable condition, but those who, while well able to read, are not quite able to ‘read’—those who, capable of reading in a physiological and psychological but not culturally valorized sense, threaten to deconstruct the fixed opposition between ‘influential persons’ and ‘multitude’. What is most ideologically undermining is a literacy which is not literacy, a form of reading which transgresses the frontier between blindness and insight, a whole nation which reads but not in your sense of reading, and which is therefore neither quite literate nor illiterate, neither firmly within one's categories nor securely the other of them. It is at this deconstructive point, this aporia of reading, that the critic finds himself addressing an audience which is and is not his equal. Poised precariously between clerisy and market forces, he represents the last historical attempt to suture these realms together; and when the logic of commodity production will render such strivings obviously utopian, he will duly disappear from historical sight. The twentieth-century man of letters is a more notably ‘minority’ figure than his Victorian predecessor.

By the mid-nineteenth century, as the passage from Bagehot suggests, the drive to consolidate the bourgeois reading public has become increasingly defensive. Encircled and assailed by alien interests, grievously confused and internally divided as a consequence, the public sphere is now compelled to view its own activities in an ideological light. The provision of social information or moral education can no longer be innocent of a will to class solidarity in the face of grave political danger. Knowledge and power are no longer blandly dissociable; the diffusion of enlightenment can no longer be conceived à la Addison as a delightful end in itself, as the natural self-pleasuring of polite conversation, but is guiltily entwined with the very class issues it ought in principle to transcend. For the eighteenth century, as we have seen, ruling-class interests and rationality were really all there were; and because this problematic was universal, because to speak politely at all was only possible within it, there was less need than there was in the Victorian era to fear that men and women might not speak ‘rightly’. What they said, the particular statements they formed, might well be incorrect, but the act of speaking politely, governed as it was by certain rational protocols, was already a kind of rightness of its own. Once the critic begins to fear that his interlocutors, left to their own devices, might wander off into gross ideological error, he must jettison any trust that the free market of discourse, left to its own workings, will deliver the appropriate moral and intellectual goods. It is no longer possible to believe with Samuel Johnson that ‘about those things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right.’¹¹ The bleak courage of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is precisely this clenched eleventh-hour faith that the classical public sphere might still be viable—that the free play of opinion, untrammeled by ‘sinister interests’, will finally produce a richer, more perdurable truth than any centralized regulation of the discursive marketplace. It is a sign of the times, nevertheless, that the concept of ‘public opinion’ is now, for Mill, resoundingly negative—one of the tyrannical forces which jeopardize, ironically enough, the ‘public sphere’ itself. He writes of the ‘tyranny of the majority’, and of ‘the ascendancy of public opinion in the state’ as a dangerously homogenizing force. ‘As the various social eminences which enabled persons entrenched on them to disregard the opinion of the multitude, gradually become levelled; as the very idea of resisting the will of the public, when it is positively known that they have a will, disappears more and more from the minds of practical politicians; there ceases to be any social support for non-conformity—any substantive power in society, which, itself opposed to the ascendancy of numbers, is interested in taking under its protection opinions and tendencies at variance with those of the public.’¹² The principle of the public sphere has been turned against itself with a vengeance: the enlightened discoursing subjects of the ruling class, having been forced to extend the franchise, and with it the boundaries of the public sphere, to the ‘multitude’, suddenly find themselves an unprotected minority within their own domain—and this before the working class yet has the vote. An earlier Benthamite confidence in the power of public opinion now appears naive: Bentham, Mill writes in his celebrated essay on him, had pointed out ‘how exclusively partial and sinister interests are the ruling power (in Europe), with only such check as is imposed by public opinion—which being thus, in the existing order of things, perpetually apparent as a source of good, he was led by natural partiality to exaggerate its intrinsic excellence’.¹³ The companion piece to the essay on Bentham is thus the study of Coleridge, whose project for a clerisy of the enlightened might temper the worst effects of a now tyrannical public sphere. On Liberty, however, deploys a trust in the principle of that sphere against the depressing reality of it. To trust the free play of discourse in such conditions is of course to take an enormous risk; but Mill is well aware that error, ideological turmoil and political vulnerability may be the price one has to pay if the deep discursive structures of the bourgeois subject—freedom, equality, autonomy, reciprocity—are to be preserved at all. Matthew Arnold, characteristically, is unwilling to pay any such price: force till right is ready, state repression in the name of individual liberty, are with him the slogans of a liberalism which, observing the final disintegration of the public sphere, shifts steadily towards autocracy. Arnold is prepared to sacrifice the politico-discursive forms of classical bourgeois society for the sake of its social content; Mill is much less convinced that truths produced from beyond the spontaneous exchanges of the public sphere are as valuable as the formal truths which such exchanges embody.

If the task of the man of letters is to assess each strain of fresh specialist knowledge by the touchstone of a general humanism, it is gradually becoming clear that such an enterprise cannot withstand the proliferating division of intellectual labour in English society. G. H. Lewes, editor of The Leader and, before Morley, of The Fortnightly, seemed more than any of his confrères to unite the whole range of cultural activities in his own person, as actor, theatre critic, amateur scientist, journalist, philosopher and penner of pot-boiling farces; but this very eclecticism was a source of anxiety rather than satisfaction to him. ‘How few men of letters think at all!’ he once complained.¹⁴ Will Ladislaw's attractively varied talents, energizing enough in 1832, were acquiring more than a smack of dilettantism by the time of Middlemarch's publication. The general ‘amateur’ humanism of the man of letters could less and less provide a plausible centre of coherence for the conflictual discursive formation of late Victorian England. Such humanism, with its trust in ethical responsibility, individual autonomy and the transcendentally free self, was coming under severe assault by some of the very intellectual developments it attempted to process and defuse. Newman made a final, doomed attempt to re-establish theology in its medieval role as metalanguage, queen of sciences and meaning of meanings. Leslie Stephen looked back nostalgically to the previous century, with its apparently more homogeneous literary culture. That homogeneity, he believed, was already under pressure by the time of Johnson, though even at that point English society was ‘still small enough to have in the club a single representative body and one man (Johnson) as dictator’.¹⁵ In a later epoch, Carlyle and Macaulay, still to some degree representative figures, ‘could only be the leaders of a single group or section in the more complex society of their time, though it was not yet so multitudinous and chaotic as the literary class in our own.’¹⁶ If Stephen looks back nostalgically, however, he does so with a certain condescension. Much as he admires Addison, he cannot help finding his ethical, aesthetic and psychological thought superficial, as indeed did Matthew Arnold: ‘A man who would speak up on such topics now must be a grave philosopher, who has digested libraries of philosophy.’¹⁷ Addison, in short, is naively unprofessional: with his ‘sancta simplicitas’ he does not suspect that he is ‘going beyond his tether’. The Victorian man of letters may resist specialization for both economic and ideological reasons, but he is impressed and influenced enough by it to patronize eighteenth-century criticism as callow, and perhaps detect in it an unsettling parody of his own growing superfluousness. The problem of the Victorian man of letters is one which has never ceased to dog the English critical institution, and is indeed quite unresolved even today: either criticism strives to justify itself at the bar of public opinion by maintaining a general humanistic responsibility for the culture as a whole, the amateurism of which will prove increasingly incapacitating as bourgeois society develops; or it converts itself into a species of technological expertise, thereby establishing its professional legitimacy at the cost of renouncing any wider social relevance. The later work of Leslie Stephen represents the last lonely moment of the Victorian man of letters, before the full force of this contradiction is unleashed.

In Victorian England, then, the critic as mediator or middleman, shaping, regulating and receiving a common discourse, is at once ideologically imperative and, with the professionalization of knowledges, warring of ideological standpoints and rapid expansion of an unevenly educated reading public, a less and less feasible project. The very conditions which provoke such a role into existence end by defeating its possibility. In other senses, too, the critic's traditional role as mediator was proving redundant. Dickens, for example, required no middleman between himself and his public; the popular authors were themselves assuming one of the critic's functions, moulding and reflecting the sensibility by which they were consumed. The critic cannot defeat the laws of the literary commodity, much as he might quarrel with them. A ‘juridical’ critical discourse on such writers is still appropriate in the periodicals, measuring how far particular literary products violate or conform to certain aesthetic-ideological norms; but this discourse must be conducted at a distance from the market, and it is the market, not the critical discourse, which has the upper hand in determining what is acceptable. The place in Victorian society where these two apparatuses—commercial and juridical—most powerfully intersect is in the twin figures whom one might well term the period's most important literary critics: Charles Mudie and W. H. Smith. The censorious, moralistic owners of the two major circulating libraries, Mudie and Smith effectively monopolized Victorian literary production, determining both the form and character of what was actually written. Both men actively intervened in the selection of books for their libraries, and regarded themselves as the protectors of public morality.¹⁸ In the face of such massively concentrated economic and cultural power, no classical public sphere was remotely conceivable.

There was another reason for the critic's growing redundancy. For if criticism's task was more moral than intellectual, a matter of guiding, uplifting and consoling a dispirited middle class, what could more effectively fulfil these ends than literature itself? ‘Morals and manners,’ remarked Thackeray, ‘we believe to be the novelist's best themes; and hence prefer romances which do not treat of algebra, religion, political economy, or any other abstract science.’¹⁹ The most searching, invigorating social critic was the writer himself; for all those who turned to Walter Bagehot for spiritual solace, there were a great many more who opened Adam Bede or In Memoriam. Once criticism had identified one of its major tasks as ideological reassurance, it was in danger of arguing itself out of a job—for this was precisely what literature itself was, among other things, designed to provide. George Eliot's contributions to the Westminster Review are those of a distinguished woman of letters; but the specialist knowledge she occasionally trades in here will only become truly efficacious when fleshed out in fictional form. As woman of letters, Eliot is from time to time partisan spokesperson for minority ‘progressive’ views; as novelist, she can supposedly transcend such prejudices, gathering them into that many-sided totality that is literary realism. If the middle-class masses, as Bagehot believes, will suffer edification only in graphic, economical, non-systematic form, what better medium of such enlightenment could there be but literature? And where then does that leave the critic?

Critical partisanship is in general less ferocious in mid-century than it had been in the earlier decades; but it still poses an obstacle to the consensual task which criticism must set itself, whether in the militant Utilitarianism of the Westminster, the radical free thought of the Fortnightly or the Toryism of the Quarterly. How was a middle-class readership to be ideologically primed and homogenized when the intellectuals to whom they anxiously turned could be observed publicly scrapping with each other over the most fundamental issues? The Fortnightly had tried to break with the rampant sectarianism of the older journals, offering itself as a ‘platform for the discussion of all questions by the light of pure reason, on lines agreeable to impartial intellect alone.’²⁰ Another attempt at ‘disinterestedness’ arrived with the establishment of the Saturday Review, in which criticism strove to sever itself once and for all from the public realm. Run as a hobby by its editor Beresford Hope, the Saturday was an organ of Oxford high culture, given to snobbish contempt for such popular authors as Dickens. Its contributors, in the words of its historian, ‘assumed a pose of lofty condescension and infallibility which gave their utterances an oracular rather than argumentative tone’.²¹ Characterized by a ‘dry and ungenerous negativism’, the Saturday poured scorn upon popular taste and the mass literary market; it reverted to an ‘eighteenth-century aristocratic attitude towards literary men’, regretting the growth of a professional layer of writers with no significant role in the sphere of public affairs. It was a prime example of that ‘higher journalism’ which, as Christopher Kent has argued, provided ‘an ideal medium of cultural authority ready to serve the newly awakened ambitions of the universities’.²² At the turn of the century journalism had been in low repute, and Jeffrey had hesitated before accepting the editorial chair of the Edinburgh; later on, as Kent comments, ‘journalism was one of the obvious means by which the universities might speak to the nation.’²³ What they told the nation, however, was for the most part insolently reproving; in this sense the pulling of some periodical journalism into the orbit of an aloof, socially alienated academia represents another stage in the dissolution of the classical public sphere. The ‘higher journalism’ signifies less a renewal of that sphere, than a partial annexation of it by a sullenly anti-social criticism.

The Saturday's dignified retreat to traditionalist culture in the face of mass literature and the professional writer was one drastic response to the crisis of Victorian criticism. Like the role of the man of letters, however, it was a strategy doomed to failure. The dilemma of Victorian criticism is that the two paths open to it—roughly speaking, those of hack and sage—were both cul-de-sacs. The man of letters, as we have seen, is on the point of being overtaken by intellectual specialization and the unpalatable truth that the public taste he seeks to form is now decisively determined by the market. The sage, partly in reaction to this dismal condition, removes himself from the social arena to less contaminated heights, but in doing so merely lapses into ineffectual idealism. This is nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the work of Matthew Arnold. If the Saturday viewed itself, deludedly enough, as disinterested, it was still not disinterested enough for Arnold, who considered its tone too assertive, its views too provincial, for it to serve as a true bastion of unbiased intelligence.²⁴ Arnold himself desires a criticism so supremely objective and non-partisan that it will transcend all particular social classes and interests, seeing the object as it really is. For this purpose, criticism must steadfastly refuse to enter upon the realm of social practice, which is quite distinct from the sphere of ideas; it must seek to establish what is best in human thought ‘irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind’.²⁵ The politicization of criticism in the sectarian polemics of the journals is an obstacle to the free play of the mind; criticism, accordingly, must withdraw—for a while, at least—into the academic sphere, encircled as it is by a society incapable of fine discrimination. From this serene vantage-point it will equably survey all interests, innocent of any tendentiousness itself beyond the will to truth; but the more capaciously universal its discourse thus becomes (‘perfection’, ‘sweetness and light’, ‘the best that has been thought and said’), the more it will lapse into utter vacuousness. Criticism, or Culture, will be able to address itself to every sector of social experience only by a kenosis so complete that it loses all definitive identity and thus addresses each sector with absolutely nothing to say. Its identity will be entirely negative: whatever is the other of any specific social interest. Its superiority and invulnerability as a (non-) concept will thus be in direct proportion to its impotence. Culture is the negation of all particular claims in the name of the totality—a totality which is therefore purely void because it is no more than a totalization of negated moments. In order to preserve its effectiveness, criticism must divorce itself so radically from the region into which it intervenes that it consumes itself in its own luminous purity and so has no effectiveness whatsoever. The purity of its disinterestedness is the blankness of a cypher; only by a drastic estrangement from social life can it hope to engage fruitfully with it. Culture, like God or the oriental neti neti (not this, nor that), is at once everywhere and nowhere—that which, transcendent of all articulate interests, is ineffable and without extension, discernible only in the mournful resonance of the celebrated ‘touchstones’, a rich interiority of life which finally eludes discourse altogether.

Yet at the same time culture, or criticism, cannot be this at all. Culture, once confronted with anarchy, must be no mere pious abstraction but a strenuous social force, a programme of social practice and educational reform, a transformative project which will weld the East End into unity with Whitehall. For Arnold as much as for Addison and Steele, criticism is directed towards class solidarity, the creation of a society of enlightened equals. The critic, as Walter Benjamin put it, is a ‘strategist in the literary battle’,²⁶ and Arnold, through the apparatus of state schools, wishes urgently to reinvent for the nineteenth century that osmosis of bourgeois and aristocratic values to which the early eighteenth-century periodicals had also dedicated their energy. Leslie Stephen refers to Addison as ‘a genuine prophet of what we now call Culture’,²⁷ reading back this allusive Arnoldian term into the earlier period; but though for both writers culture involves class solidarity, the fact that Arnold is dealing with social classes whose interests are historically irreconcilable drives his notion of culture into a transcendentalism quite foreign to the Spectator. The vital difference, at this later stage of bourgeois society, is that cultural collaboration within the hegemonic social bloc has become neurotically defensive: its major aim is to incorporate an unruly proletariat, as Arnold makes sufficiently clear:

It is itself a serious calamity for a nation that its tone of feeling and grandeur of spirit should be lowered or dulled. But the calamity appears far more serious still when we consider that the middle classes, remaining as they are now, with their narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive spirit and culture, will almost certainly fail to mould or assimilate the masses below them, whose sympathies are at the present moment actually wider and more liberal than theirs. They arrive, these masses, eager to enter into possession of the world, to gain a more vivid sense of their own life and activity. In this their irrepressible development, their natural educators and initiators are those immediately above them, the middle classes. If these classes cannot win their sympathy or give them their direction, society is in danger of falling into anarchy.²⁸

For Arnold, unlike Addison and Steele, there now exist organized interests beyond the bourgeois sphere; and the drive to consolidate that sphere is inseparable from the will to break and integrate them. Culture must be ‘classless’, and ‘the men of Culture the true apostles of equality’, because the proletariat now exists; and the language of criticism must be ill-defined enough to encompass them. Ruling-class values must be modulated into metaphors open-textured enough to conceal their class-roots and take effect as much in the East End as in the West. It is the very urgency of the political situation which forces Arnold into his vague poeticism, the depth of his anxiety which breeds his apparent blandness. The Populace are an alien class who must but cannot be incorporated into civilized discourse; accordingly, Arnold must either stretch that discourse to the point where it purges itself of all class idiom but, along with it, of all political substance, or speak a more identifiable class-language which is sharp and substantial only at the price of potentially alienating the Populace. It is clear in any case that criticism still has no alternative between a disreputable collusion in class interests and a bankrupt ‘transcendence’ of them; it is not for nothing that the Arnold of the poetry is always either suffocating among city crowds or stifling for lack of air on a mountain top.²⁹ Criticism, he believes, must be ‘urbane’ rather than ponderously moralistic; but this urbanity is far removed from the metropolitan bustle which fascinated Addison and Steele. Arnold desires to re-create the bland tones of such writing in divorce from its material basis, carry culture into the East End while simultaneously ensconcing it in the academies. An academy of the French kind, were it possible in England, would establish a ‘force of educated opinion’;³⁰ the classical public sphere might be reinvented in the form of a clerisy, which would then doubtless radiate its influence into society as a whole. Yet the ideologies of public sphere and clerisy are in fact at odds: the clerisy, from Coleridge onwards, arises on the ruins of the classical public sphere, as a ‘vertical’ reorganizing of that sphere's ‘horizontal’ power relations. Arnold's academy is not the public sphere, but a means of defence against the actual Victorian public. His appeals for state intervention in questions of culture—to the state as embodiment of right reason—reflect the passing of the classical liberal capitalist economy, as the state begins to reach far into the sphere of commodity exchange in the economically depressed closing decades of the nineteenth century. Such state intervention, as Habermas argues, is fatal to the classical public sphere, which thrived precisely upon a separation between the state and civil society. With the modern ‘statification’ of society and socialization of the state, with the transgression of traditional boundaries between private and public, the space of the classical public sphere rapidly dwindles.

Criticism, then, has the unwelcome choice of preserving a political content, thus gaining in social relevance what it loses in a partiality disruptive of the very public sphere it seeks to construct; or of assuming a transcendental standpoint beyond that sphere, thus safeguarding its integrity at the price of social marginality and intellectual nullity. The man of letters represents an awkward hesitation between these options. What actually happened in the course of the nineteenth century was that criticism entered those institutions to which Arnold had looked for the harmonious culture lacking in the periodicals: the universities. I have argued elsewhere that the constitution of ‘English literature’ as an academic subject in Victorian England fulfilled a number of ideological purposes. ‘English’ was, among other things, a project designed to pacify and incorporate the proletariat, generate sympathetic solidarity between the social classes, and construct a national cultural heritage which might serve to undergird ruling-class hegemony in a period of social instability.³¹ In this sense, the emergence of ‘English’ brought to fruition the enterprise of the sages, establishing literature as a transcendental object of enquiry. But the founding of English as a university ‘discipline’ also entailed a professionalization of literary studies which was quite alien to the sage's ‘amateur’ outlook, and more resolutely specialist than the man of letters could afford to be. The man of letters was, so to speak, an academic without a university, an ‘extra-mural’ scholar responsive to the demands of the public world. The academicization of criticism provided it with an institutional basis and professional structure; but by the same token it signalled its final sequestration from the public realm. Criticism achieved security by committing political suicide; its moment of academic institutionalization is also the moment of its effective demise as a socially active force. Within academic English, the conflict between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ was to continue, transposed into a quarrel between ‘criticism’ and ‘scholarship’: academic literary scholarship develops apace from the Victorian period onwards as a technical specialism, while academic criticism retains some nebulous preoccupation with ‘life’ as well as ‘letters’. The dispute, however, is for the most part a domestic one, conducted within an institution which permits the critic's voice to be ‘disinterested’ to the precise extent that it is effectively inaudible to society as a whole.

The final quarter of the nineteenth century witnesses the establishment of the specialized intellectual journal—Mind, Notes and Queries, the English Historical Review—in which the growing professionalization and compartmentalization of knowledges is directly reflected. The traditional man of letters, his authority diminished by the universities as centres of specialized research, is also effectively ignored by a mass readership. Intellectual rather than ‘intellectual-cum-moral’ leadership takes over, as Heyck comments, and the man of letters is despised by late nineteenth-century academics for his shallow eclecticism, partisanship and moral pretensions.³² Leslie Stephen had been editor of the Cornhill magazine, which published such ‘high’ literary art as Henry James alongside popular romantic fiction; as the journal's readership steadily fell, its middle-brow tastes at odds with Stephen's own intellectual interests, the editorship was taken over by a popular novelist and Stephen turned his attention instead to the Dictionary of National Biography. He fell victim, that is to say, to the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere, squeezed out of existence as it was between university and market, the academicization and commercialization of letters. ‘The disintegration of the reading public into the broad masses and the “educated class”,’ writes Peter Hohendahl, ‘prevents the critic from identifying with any general consensus and defining his role in that context.’³³ The fin-de-siècle also saw a proliferation of purely ‘literary’ reviews such as the Savoy—precious, exotic, hothouse growths which in their own way marked the dissevering of literature from social concerns. The twentieth century was to see the replacement of the Victorian periodical with the ‘little magazine’, which as with Eliot's Criterion was often enough self-consciously the organ of an elite. It is, ironically, in the modern age that criticism is able to rediscover one of its traditional roles; for the difficulty of the modernist writing associated with such reviews as the Criterion and the Egoist demands a labour of mediation and interpretation, the shaping of a readerly sensibility to receive such works, as the writing of a Dickens or Trollope did not. That mediation, however, is no longer to a broad middle-class readership, through journals which might exert influence on a majority of the ruling class; it remains more a transaction within academia than one between academy and society.

Notes

1. See T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, London 1982, p. 13.

2. See Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, London 1841.

3. Heyck, p. 42.

4. ibid., pp. 36-7.

5. Stephen [, Leslie. English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, London 1963], p. 56.

6. Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, vol. 2, London 1892, p. 257.

7. Heyck, pp. 37-8.

8. Quoted in Clive [, John. Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review 1802-1815, London 1957], p. 128.

9. The National Review, October 1855; reprinted in Walter Bagehot: Literary Studies, ed. R. H. Hutton, vol. 1, London 1902, pp. 146-7.

10. John Morley, Recollections, vol. 1, London 1917, p. 100.

11. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, vol. 2, Oxford 1945, p. 132.

12. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, London 1901, pp. 138-9.

13. John Stuart Mill, ‘Bentham’, in Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F. R. Leavis, London 1950, p. 89.

14. Quoted by Gross [, John. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, London 1969], p. 74.

15. Stephen, p. 115.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 43.

18. See Guinevere Griest, Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, Bloomington, Ind. 1970.

19. Quoted in Heyck, p. 38.

20. John Morley, quoted by Walter Houghton, ‘Periodical Literature and the Articulate Classes’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. J. Shattock and M. Wolff, Leicester 1982, p. 13.

21. M. M. Bevington, The Saturday Review 1855-1868, New York 1941, p. 47.

22. Christopher Kent, ‘Higher Journalism and the Mid-Victorian Clerisy’, Victorian Studies XIII (1969), p. 181.

23. Ibid., p. 183.

24. See Arnold's comments on the Saturday Review in ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’.

25. ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in John Bryson (ed), Matthew Arnold: Poetry and Prose, London 1954, pp. 359-60.

26. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Essays, London 1979, p. 66.

27. Stephen, p. 44.

28. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Popular Education of France’, in Democratic Education, ed. R. H. Super, Ann Arbor 1962, p. 26.

29. See J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God, New York 1965, p. 257.

30. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’, p. 252.

31. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford 1983, Chapter 1.

32. Heyck, p. 228.

33. Hohendahl [, Peter Uwe], The Institution of Criticism, Ithaca and London 1982], p. 55.