Benjamin Jowett seemed to represent an exciting and dangerous force in English intellectual life in the middle of the century, but it was his younger colleague at Balliol, Thomas Hill Green (usually TH Green), whose work was to have a decisive influence on the first teachers of English in Australia. Again, though, this influence seems to have been felt in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways. When he arrived at Oxford in 1855, Green felt that

The similarity between these impressions and those of Tom Brown is perhaps not coincidental, for Green spent five years at Rugby before attending Oxford, and was an undergraduate in the years the Tom Brown novels were published. He was, therefore, younger than Jowett, although initially aligned with him in debates about the university and theology.

Jowett himself had at first been thwarted in his ambition to become master of Oxford’s Balliol College, charged with heresy because of his writings on St Paul and scriptural interpretation.1 He later became what people like to call the ‘towering figure of his age’, as master of Balliol from 1870 to 1893. But in this later period he became synonymous with resistance to reform, as he tried to block moves to diminish the power

54of the colleges relative to the university. From the many accounts of Jowett the sense emerges of an ambitious man, a consummate politician involved in heady controversy early in his life, later committed utterly to preserving and enhancing the reputation of his students and his college.2 By the time of his death, Jowett almost literally embodied the coalition between imperial ambition and tertiary education that is the subject of the next chapter. But the system entwining pedagogy and patronage that Jowett seems to have invested his life in building had, for Green, serious problems. To Green at least, it produced lives and learning that appeared grimly cyclical: cramming for examinations as a student, cramming for examinations to become a fellow (of a college), thence tutoring students preparing for exams in the hope of becoming a fellow; depth and genuine understanding were replaced by rote learning.

In explicit opposition to a system which promoted learning for material reward – cramming for firsts, fellowships and favours – Green advocated establishing positions which would allow time for research, and the teaching of advanced students, building a university hierarchy based on in-depth disciplinary knowledge. This ‘research-based’ model of a university is associated with Humboldt and early nineteenth-century Germany. To this end of promoting specialisation Green began to deliver lectures in philosophy which, although not part of the formal courses of study, nevertheless drew a keen student audience. But Jowett was one among various ‘reformers’ who valued vigour over rigour: specialisation was all very well, but what use was specialist academic knowledge for students seeking to make a career in public life? For Green’s pains he was quietly withdrawn from undergraduate teaching by his master and mentor Jowett, although at least some students seem to have embraced his ideas and been inspired by his example of valuing knowledge for its own sake. Above all, Green seems to have impressed ‘the best and brightest’ of his Oxford students with the seriousness and the constancy of his struggle to think through problems at the intersection of faith and philosophy. His ideas, and his struggle, were to influence the lives and thinking of some of the key early figures in the discipline of English in Britain and in Australia.

55

TH Green and Idealism

Melvin Richter, author of a sympathetic study of Green’s life and work, suggests that what had sparked this sense of mission was reading and study of German philosophers of theology, an interest Green developed and extended during time spent in Germany in 1860. This claim perhaps overestimates Green’s originality, for during the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain the thought of German philosophers was a staple of intellectual debate, and demonstrating familiarity with it the signature of one’s liberal position.3 It is notable that this influence does not seem to have come from Oxford but from travel and perhaps from fellow undergraduates who had studied elsewhere, notably Scotland. As a student and later as a fellow at Balliol, Green’s associates included two intellectually self-confident, older students, Edward Caird and John Nichol, both of whom had been students at Glasgow, and who had been interested in German writers before their arrival at the English university.

Nichol, winner of a ‘Snell exhibition’, a scholarship which each year brought one Glasgow graduate to Balliol, founded ‘Old Mortality’ in late 1856.4 When Caird arrived in Oxford on the same scholarship several years later, he was elected to the group; the intellectual and personal connections developed through ‘Old Mortality’ remained in evidence through the lives of its members. Although Pater, Symonds and Swinburne were to become more famous (even notorious) as writers and critics, it was Green and to a lesser extent Caird who seem to have been the intellectually dominant figures, at least at this stage

56– Caird was a year older than Green (Jones and Muirfield, 30).5 Both were absorbed in idealism, although Caird seems to have played the optimist to Green’s pessimist. And significantly for this history, both Caird and Nichol were to return to Glasgow, Nichol first, to the chair of English. Several years later he withdrew his application for the chair of mental and moral philosophy, after being told that he was unlikely to be successful in obtaining the position but that Caird might be (Jones and Muirfield, 48).

Richter suggests that in reading Kant, Fichte and Hegel in the early 1860s, Green ‘began to experience something as close to a conversion as his temperament would permit’, believing as he did that this ‘modern philosophy had arrived at a method which preserved everything he found of permanent value in Christian experience, but did so on the basis of reason alone’ (87). Just as importantly, perhaps, at a point in his academic career when he had seemed doomed to decades of giving the same lectures on church history and Aristotle to an uninterested undergraduate audience, these encounters with idealism gave Green a ‘new zest’ for conceiving problems in philosophy, politics, religion and art.

If these ideas implied a set of radical reforms to the university and a new sense of his own work, Green’s approach more broadly represents an attempt to engage with what is routinely understood as a social and intellectual crisis of faith in Victorian Britain. Green and those of similar view felt it was necessary to replace faith in revealed religion with the tenets of idealist metaphysics which would provide ‘an unassailable foundation for belief’ (Richter, 27). The hero was not he [sic] who presumed the authority of God, or separated his faith from the intellectual work of inquiry, but who, in the words of a popular novel which featured a fictionalised version of Green as its protagonist, ‘fights [his] stormy way to truth’6 by adhering to a creed ‘without dogma or miracles’ (Richter, 28). In his personal example, Green – an elected councillor in the town of Oxford, and a teacher of philosophy at the

57university – created a new model of an intellectual who did not detach themselves from the material world, but who added the obligations of citizen to those of scholar. He attempted to conceive of the struggle for intellectual and moral authority as a battle to be won with the self, rather than an institutional position to be assumed and protected.

It has generally been suggested that Green’s influence was at its height in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, but this might be because key works were published after his death in 1882, edited by AC Bradley, and RL Nettleship. At that time, the development of their own careers allowed former students to publish essays which engaged with his work, and their memoirs spread the story of his influence.7 But the impression created by these works is that Green was an intellectual inspiration to his peers while still a student. Caird, in a volume published in his own honour, asserted that ‘in Green I found one whose brotherly sympathy and inspiring example has stimulated me, more than any other single influence, in the prosecution of my philosophical work’ (Jones and Muirfield, 370). It is a lesson in the shape of reputation making: without dedicated editors to collect and arrange for the publication of his work, Green would barely be visible; with publication and associated commentary, he becomes a major figure in the history of literary criticism.

The wide appeal and influence of Green’s thought in Australia is discernible in newspaper criticism and reviews published in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It is also present in the critical writings of older members of the academy in the early decades of the twentieth, particularly those who were committed to social reform in the manner understood and advocated by Green. (Social improvement could be quite hard going in the colonies, though, as one young man suggested in a letter to his former tutor at Oxford: ‘This sort of soil is difficult to cultivate the Imperial ideal upon … Unless we lucky Englishmen can teach [the South Africans] a little savoir faire they’ll end in the condition that the most Colonial of all Colonies is in – Australia’.8)

58Suzy Anger argues that debates about scriptural interpretation had a generally under-recognised influence on twentieth-century literary criticism, and claims that higher criticism unsettled debates about ‘principles of the interpretation of secular literature’ in the late Victorian period (131). In her view, ‘criticism struggled to define both its rationale and its procedures’, such that

We could argue, however, that Green and his associates in Old Mortality were attempting to think through the premises of criticism a little earlier, indeed in the late 1850s and 1860s. Green’s essay An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times, read in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford in 1862 when he had not long been a fellow of Balliol, offers a rare published example of this kind of debate that we can imagine occurring in the foment of a reforming Oxford.

Green seeks to argue that the novel, as a form, is debilitated by its reliance on depicting life as it is – by what we could call its affinity with positivism (although he does not use that term). But, noting that they reach a mass readership, Green expresses the hope that novels will ultimately be refined, and present the ideal humanity that marks the great literary forms, tragedy and epic. In the opening pages of his essay Green sets out the terms for his discussion of literary form, contrasting idealism with the then dominant positivism, which he sees as methodologically and theologically inadequate because it separates questions of faith from those of scholarship (4). His particular objection is that positivism, like realism in literature (specifically, in the novel), takes refuge in belief in an ineffability ‘which cause[s] our sensations, and through sensations, our knowledge’ (5). In opposition to what is ultimately presented as a dependence on mysticism for the explanation 59of feeling which underpins the aesthetic experience, Green advances a philosophy which foregrounds the dependence of truth on perception, and which therefore demands of critics some analysis of the premises of their interpretations. Critical reflection brings, to ‘art, philosophy and religion’, a ‘latter and higher view [which] involves the absolute fusion of thought and things’ and which brings truth, goodness and beauty into harmony (5). Green does value the ideal type, but claims that this ideal needs to be substantive. Apprehending that ideal is the goal of scholarship.

What is extraordinary, at least for this history, is Green’s claim that this ideal (literary and human) form can be sought in contemporary, not just classical, literature – English, not Greek (or Latin) prose. Canvassing a wide range of early modern and modern English texts, Green concludes that the ending of George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss ‘reaches almost the tragic pitch’, although ultimately fails because ‘Instead of idealizing life’ Eliot ‘sentimentalizes it’ (24, 23). In terms of address, Green’s lecture, particularly in this part, reads like a dialogue with the author, as an encouragement to her to adopt his premises about art in order to reflect on her own.9 As such, it hints at an active or constructive relationship between literature and criticism, and a view of the critic as properly intervening in rather than simply observing literary culture. Green makes this explicit in the last pages, in which the argument takes quite a different turn. In contrast to his criticisms made earlier in the essay, Green now praises novels for what he sees as their capacity to expand the sympathies of readers. He goes so far as to claim that the novel is an agent of dissent, helping to inoculate readers against ‘that ossification into prejudices … to which all feel a tendency’:

60This extraordinary metaphor offers Green’s view of the strengths and limits of the modern novel: it can do valuable work in extending sympathies, but has not yet reached a form which can serve as a moral exemplar. Green’s radicalism is certainly on show, here, a radicalism often admired though rarely emulated by his students and colleagues. And whereas the influence of philosophy on modern criticism has driven it away from engagement in political questions (in the sense of understanding those questions as abstract rather than material ones), Green’s approach is to imply the value of engaging with the living writer, as a way of gaining traction for criticism in the social world.

To a certain extent, none of Green’s arguments makes sense unless we consider their framing within his liberal Anglicanism: like other fellows at Oxford he preached in St Mary’s church, the university’s most prestigious forum (from which Jowett was barred for many years), though he was one of few fellows who was not a clergyman. The essay is a bold attempt to reconcile theology and philosophy, still the more compelling point for students of literature is that the mechanism for this reconciliation should be the modern English novel. This makes the polemic an intervention not only in theological debates, but in arguments about the value and form of national culture and its effects on a rapidly growing class of readers. The essay is a manifesto for critical idealism’s relationship to the study of English literature because of its startling thesis that modern, secular texts might one day help to model and therefore shape an ideal humanity, and its equally passionate claim that literary criticism could play a role in that process. It would be wrong to infer from this account that Green draws distinctions between philosophy, theology and literary criticism. On the contrary, it is the bringing together of these fields that Green aimed at, making it difficult even to speak of a criticism that is separate from philosophy or theology.

The same view characterises a much later essay by William Paton Ker, contributed to a volume published in Green’s memory. Ker takes up the problem of a philosophy of art explicitly in relation to the teaching of literature, and begins by noting that ‘the view of art as an education is the natural one for enlightenment to adopt’. However, 61

Unlike Jackson Knight’s attendant in the art gallery, Ker argues that art in itself is insufficient education: both the creation and the consumption of great art demand analysis. As with Green’s essay, the work here is to formulate the ethical and intellectual tasks of criticism through reflection on the moral and theological premises of aesthetic response.

Although they take different positions in relation to art and the historical – Green considers the present and looks to the future of art, Ker relocates artistic works to the past – the two idealists share a focus on English literature that has ramifications for those seeking to make claims about the foundations of the discipline. We can see that Ker is quite specifically attempting to make a place for teaching English when he uses Chaucer to claim that in writing of the people of England in the vernacular, ‘he did refuse to be bound by laws of art which were not true for him … In this refusal is the end of his apprenticeship’ (167). In referring to a writer widely regarded as the ‘founder’ of English literature, revered rather than derided for his use of the vernacular, Ker dances with the problem of ‘rigour’ and seeks a rationale for studying what seemed at the time, to some of his colleagues, mundane or self-evident. In proclaiming the significance of the moment at which writers remove themselves from convention, Ker is arguing for a philosophy or criticism which is specific to literature, but which likewise withdraws from convention. This echoes but alters Green, who seeks an exemplar as well as insisting that the critic and the writer are in society. But Ker’s position is complicated by his counter claim that Chaucer had to remove himself from his fellows to write about them, notwithstanding his endorsement of the value of particularity (172; 172): ‘Part of [a great writer’s] individuality is their relation to particular times and seasons 62in the actual history of the world’ (179). In Ker’s view, the task for a philosophy of art will be to explain literature in relation to human thought of specific times and places, and thus in the end his criticism will seek to historicise, rather than to identify the ideal. The essay is a valuable source in showing how those teachers of literature who were influenced by Green might understand the relationship between literature and criticism. But we should also note some important differences: because Ker locates great art in the past, he does not envisage the dynamic relationship between literature and literary criticism that Green does.

The existence of essays such as those by Green and Ker challenges the notion that literary study ‘grew out of’ classics, or language study, or even class war or colonialism. Instead, we can see an (agonistic) relationship between criticism of sacred and of secular texts, as well as a volatile intellectual relationship between philosophy and literary study. For although he regarded himself as a philosopher, Green was at the centre of the intellectual circles in which debates about literature in Victorian Oxford could take their most interesting forms. Whether we mention the most outspoken advocate for the study of English at Oxford, John Churton Collins, critics and writers like AC Bradley or AC Swinburne, Walter Pater or John Addington Symonds, philosophers like Edward Caird or John Ruskin, we are naming associates of Green who are known to have engaged with his thought. It is also important to reiterate the significance of Green’s attention to the contemporary, for those debates were influenced by the fact that, as Anger claims, the most consciously ‘literary’ Victorian writers, notably Robert Browning, George Eliot and George Meredith, were especially concerned with problems of meaning and interpretation. Green’s choice of Eliot’s novels as exemplary is especially significant, for although her work was less likely to find full favour with teachers in terms of books studied at Australian universities, she was central to debates about philosophy, critical method, morality and society in her own time.10

63

‘The same under different skies’

Although the transportation of convicts to New South Wales ceased formally in 1848, another shipment of prisoners was due to arrive in 1849. That fact, combined with the European ‘revolutions of 1848’, which were anxiously alluded to in speeches at the inauguration, helped to contribute to a sense of crisis evident during the founding of Sydney, as forces advocating change and those demanding continuity collided in Britain and in Europe, as well as locally. The desire to establish the university strictly along the lines of Oxford and Cambridge, with no concession to new or colonial universities, was perhaps most clearly manifested in the architecture of the new institution.11 Stained glass windows had portraits of English monarchs, and there were portraits of writers including the almost mythical Caedmon, Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Pope, Dryden and Shakespeare, much as at the libraries and colleges of Oxford. These sentiments remained strong at Sydney: when the original Fisher Library building, now the professorial board room, was constructed (1915–21), the corbels were carved with the portraits of European scholars. This reflected, in the words of the official history, ‘the conscious desire to embody and receive the best in the ancient culture and scholastic tradition of Europe’ (University of Sydney, 12). But photographs of the university in the nineteenth century show an imposing building starkly isolated in bare paddocks, an apt metaphor for the institution’s position in New South Wales society. The Great Hall, opened on 18 July 1859 and based on Westminster Hall, came to be known as ‘Blacket’s Folly’ after architect Edmund Blacket.12 For many years, student numbers were in single figures.

64It might seem natural to have looked to Oxford as a model, but we might also recall the state of Oxford during this period, notably the heated debates about proper governance and academic standards. Rather than building ‘secondariness’ to Oxbridge into Sydney, there were other precedents that might have been followed. A number of universities had been established in North America before the enabling legislation for Sydney was passed, and debates about the founding of universities in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta occurred at around the same time.13 WJ Gardner observes that in his first speech to the Legislative Council about the proposal, WC Wentworth – who had attended Cambridge – did look to colonial precedents, and to London (49). But these models, and the points raised by Wentworth, soon slipped out of sight. So completely did the rest of the world disappear that by the time John Woolley delivered the principal’s address at the opening ceremony in 1852, he could declare that Sydney was the first university to be founded in what he called ‘English-speaking Christendom’. Woolley moved quickly to do away with the governing structure copied from London, and replaced it with one derived from the reformed Oxford (Gardner, 46–47).

A graduate of Oxford with a first in classics, Woolley had been headmaster of King Edward’s Grammar at Norwich when appointed to Sydney, taking a position that offered something like half the salary. He is described as a scholar who combined ‘liberalism in religion, brilliance in classical scholarship, some reputation in logic, and a record of introducing “modern” subjects into his schools’; he ‘brought with him a reasonably coherent philosophy of religion and education, based on a liberal Christianity of the Arnold mould and on the idealism of Plato’ (Gardner, 46). The ‘Arnold’ here is Thomas, not Matthew, for Woolley was an idealist in the older sense.14 In his own words, he yielded his ‘heartiest assent to that genial philosophy that teaches that

65the Beautiful, the Good, and the True are equally emanations from Him who is the fountain of all perfection and the object of all love’ (Woolley, Idylls, 1). It is noticeable that Woolley invokes an ahistorical notion of universal knowledge and his own faith in a transcendent divine. Did coming to Sydney, a small unruly town with no tradition of education that he could recognise, weaken or strengthen such faith? Certainly his address at the inauguration ceremony at Sydney likened the mission of the scholar to that of the Christian crusader in the wilderness; he concluded his speech with this exhortation to students:

We can forgive such rhetoric given an occasion that might have seemed to demand it; the point is that Woolley managed to combine a concern for the kind of reforms to administrative practice taking effect at Oxford with intellectual habits of mind that conceded little to critical reason of the kind that would be demanded by Green.

A sense of distinctive institutional mission such as we see here did shape the selection of courses of study and of staff at each of the Australian universities, all of which offered an Arts degree albeit in different forms. An undergraduate degree in classics was thought sufficient to equip what might be a single professor to teach across a humanities curriculum that might add modern languages, philosophy, history, or political economy to the ‘core’ of Latin and Greek. No Australian university commenced operation in the nineteenth century with English as an independent discipline, but academics as diverse as John Davidson, EV Boulger and William Mitchell at Adelaide, Mungo MacCallum at Sydney, HA Strong, EE Morris and TG Tucker at Melbourne, and WH Williams at Tasmania taught in the area at some time in their career. Still none were appointed only to that role, and (arguably) only MacCallum, Morris and Williams could claim to be specialists in English. Of these three it is MacCallum, 66foundation professor of Modern Language and Literature at Sydney from 1887 to 1920, who is the dominant figure in the discipline of English for its first four decades. His pre-eminence was based in part on his reputation as a scholar, and in part on his longevity and influence at Sydney as he mentored students into academic positions. MacCallum himself claimed Edward Caird as his formative intellectual and moral influence.

Caird was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow when MacCallum studied there, but in 1893 he succeeded Jowett as master of Balliol. He had attended Glasgow and Aberdeen universities at various times during the 1850s, his studies interrupted by ill health, so that he was significantly older than his fellow undergraduates by the time he went to Oxford (Jones and Muirfield, 14, 15). Caird noted that his ‘pointer’ to the value and significance of German thought and literature came from his fellow Scot Thomas Carlyle, whose work he was familiar with long before he attended university in England: ‘Carlyle was the first in this country who discovered the full significance of the great revival of German literature, and the enormous reinforcement which its poetic and philosophic idealism had brought to the failing faith of man’.15 Caird wrote several books on Immanuel Kant and also published essays on TH Green, and theology. For Mungo MacCallum, Green and Caird were, in his words, continuing sources of ‘light and courage’ (Jottings, 102). In late old age, he wrote that studying with Caird was ‘the grand event in the lives of all Glasgow undergraduates in the Faculty of Arts’, claiming that he was ‘perhaps the first exponent of the critical idealism of Germany in a Scottish university, and the novelty and scope of this new view of things … made an indelible impression on all who heard him’ (Jottings, 52).

Each of these scholars claims a mentor as originator: as MacCallum claims Caird, Caird claims Carlyle, Richter claims Green. The truth of such claims is less important than their frequency, a frequency which signals the importance of claiming originality in academic culture. To be ‘the first’ is to set the terms for the field or discipline, a pre-eminence

67maintained across generations by the convention of citation. On the other hand, academic cultures also revere ‘tradition’, as we saw in the discussion of the founding of Sydney. This struggle between the valuing of tradition and the valuing of originality is often reframed as a struggle between preservation and change, conservatism and radicalism, and preparedness to make a claim to originality is a useful signal of the writer’s attitude to these things. On the other hand, it is possible to alter one’s position, whether from radicalism to conservatism (as we saw with Jowett) or from conservatism to iconoclasm (as we will see with Vincent Buckley).

To one of the compilers of Caird’s biography, MacCallum wrote of his struggle to define the nature and quality of his mentor’s influence, suggesting that it was ‘pervasive like air’ rather than being tied to specific moments. Fascinatingly, MacCallum was driven to quote Goethe’s Faust to describe his feelings when hearing Caird’s lectures, which emphasised the divine in the quotidian, and the relationship between part and whole:

68Goethe was a favoured writer, and MacCallum’s use of a literary text to explain his own deep feelings about a teacher whose influence guided his professional life shows the distinctively ‘literary’ basis of his subjectivity. Also it illustrates that interconnectedness of critical and creative writing in the formation of ideas about literary value and the vocation of teaching that Green appeared to be formulating in his prizewinning essay. To Ernest Jones, MacCallum remarked rather wistfully that

The lasting effect of that example is described by another former student: ‘He was the champion of the “critical” school; yet, somehow, he never seemed to criticise! … If there was one thing he made us ashamed of it was of any petty or conceited critical spirit’ (quoted in Jones and Muirfield, 73). Late in his career, MacCallum suggested to a former colleague that, ‘though it needed many modifications I don’t think the critical Idealism of my young days superseded’ (quoted in Wilson, 10).

In 1887 MacCallum, then teaching at University College Wales, was selected from an exceptionally large field of 45 applicants for the newly created chair at Sydney. The selection committee, which sat in England, included Charles Nicholson, Max Müller, Henry Morley, Matthew Arnold, and Leslie Stephen.17 In an interview recorded in 1934, MacCallum suggested that there were two main reasons for his decision to accept the offer to come to Australia. The first was reading JA Froude’s Oceania, which, ‘whatever its defects, certainly did good service in awakening the British public to the present importance as well as the brilliant promise of the Australian Colonies’. The second was the despatch of the New South Wales forces to the war in the

69Sudan, which reassured MacCallum that ‘coming to this far-off land would not mean anything like exile … In my case it has abundantly verified our University motto, Sidere mens eadem mutato’, or ‘the same under different skies’ (Some University Luminaries, 40–41).18 There is competing evidence about these apparently patriotic motives, supplied by MacCallum himself. In his draft of a speech delivered in the Great Hall on 22 October 1920, possibly marking his retirement from the chair, MacCallum commented that on hearing he would be offered a position at a university on the other side of the world he ‘went out into the bleak November evening to walk for several hours up and down the streets of Westminster … feeling as miserable as I have ever done’.19 His account captures what Judith Wright would later identify, in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, as the ‘double aspect’ of Australian poetry, and indeed colonial society: the dream of newness and freedom, in tension with a deeply felt sense of exile and alienation. But he might also have been playing for laughs to an audience reassured that such forebodings would prove groundless.

As head of Modern Language and Literature MacCallum was responsible for most of the teaching when he first arrived in Sydney, but responsibilities for French and German were eventually delegated to GG Nicholson and Christopher Brennan respectively. MacCallum also held a number of senior university posts after leaving English, including the vice-chancellorship from 1924 to 1927, and the chancellorship from 1934 to 1936. Despite the student satire, MacCallum did not cease giving lectures until he was in his early eighties. He died in 1942, and is remembered in a special MacCallum Memorial Number of Southerly, edited by his former student and colleague ER Holme. MacCallum is also memorialised by a plaque in Sydney’s Anglican cathedral:

A much longer draft of this inscription, possibly by Holme, refers specifically to the service to empire rendered by MacCallum in his teaching and scholarship, which adhered to an idealised ‘humane’ culture.

MacCallum’s position as professor of Modern Language and Literature in some sense was in tension with his own training in critical idealism, at least that version of it (espoused by Ker) which sought to find a rationale for study of literature that paid attention to context and interpretation (see MacCallum’s WP Ker: A Great English Scholar). We can see this split or collision in his views: while his published scholarship shows attention to modern contexts and cultures, his actions as an administrator suggest and perhaps his most private feeling was that classics remained the senior discipline. Arguing for the retention of Latin and Greek as prerequisites for matriculation, MacCallum declared that

The ‘intimacy’ that MacCallum praises and the aversion to ‘modern sins’ that he condemns are inculcated not by the texts themselves – which is to say, they are not intrinsic – but by classics as a literal, physical and intellectual discipline. By implication, this study is most fruitful when conducted by a teacher who exemplifies a life of virtue.

71MacCallum’s lifelong espousal of an idealist program of literary education, one that aimed to produce a student who fulfils his [sic] destiny by service to Empire, runs through texts as apparently divergent in their purpose as an argument about the curriculum of New South Wales high schools, and his memorial plaque in Sydney Cathedral. We can see no ‘progression’ here, towards valuing English literature, if we contrast MacCallum’s views with those of Green expressed seventy years earlier – crucially, while it is likely that his philosophy teacher Caird knew Green’s essay, it is much less likely MacCallum, a specialist in English literature, did.21 Indeed, one might ask whether his position at the edge of the world of scholarship as he would have mapped it actually strengthened MacCallum’s sense of the need to preserve rather than critique what he understood as the aims and methods of his discipline. More generally, it would seem that a position at the centre or on the periphery, geographically or institutionally, cannot of itself intrinsically strengthen or weaken an individual’s adherence to certain forms of scholarship. Being at ‘the centre’ might offer the self-confidence to present new and challenging ideas; equally, it might strengthen the rewards made available by conformity. A position on the periphery might be experienced as freedom, or, alternately, as a kind of subordination or lack that makes conformity to a real or imagined centre all the more necessary.

Proposing such a model allows us to put some ‘flex’ into Bourdieu’s account of institutional transmission of ideas: without detail, and ideally a mix of public, private, institutional and scholarly records, we cannot know where and when individual academics might break with or ‘enforce’ the protocols of their institution or discipline, a point developed in the following section of this chapter. Put another way, one of the reasons it is possible to develop a more nuanced account

72of MacCallum’s position(s) is that he has left us with a rich range of published and archival sources. Thus we see evidence of contradictory positions, for in addition to offering sustained institutional support for classics, MacCallum also turned his scholarly attention to contemporary English literature.

In 1892 he wrote an enthusiastic appreciation of the poetry and prose of George Meredith, a substantial piece originally delivered as a lecture. Like Green, he engaged first with the problem that readers do not expect to encounter serious issues in a novel, and against such views seeks to argue, in a manner in keeping with Ker’s views discussed above, that ‘there is no reason why the novel should not be a serious work of art’ (35). MacCallum compares Meredith to George Eliot in favour of the former, suggesting that the male novelist has the gift of revealing the essence of character in action, whereas in Eliot’s novels the prose halts, to ‘dissect’, ‘while the narrative is motionless too’ (24, 25). But Meredith’s characters refuse to find a popular audience, a point on which MacCallum quotes Meredith himself, adding the emphasis: ‘My people conquer nothing, win none; they are actual, yet uncommon’ – it is ‘the conscience residing in thoughtfulness they would appeal to’ (25). These are claims that allow us to see MacCallum’s particular version of idealism in action, in the prioritising of conscience over ideal form; they also demonstrate the intertwining of aesthetics and method, in valuing a text on the basis of its complexity. The commentary makes Meredith’s novels into idealist, optimistic ones that present work for the critic. In MacCallum’s view, this is a writer who ‘is trustful and joyous, not through temperament but conviction’ (45).

It is this capacity to reconcile reason with faith, criticism with affirmation, optimism with realism, which Caird’s biographers insist was his best quality as a teacher, inspiring his students into a quiet certitude. That it emerges, here, in MacCallum’s preferences for a certain kind of book, and that it so obviously shapes his interpretation of that text, shows the complexity and subtlety of the very idea of ‘influence’. It is not that he offers a Hegelian reading; far from it. But when he contends that ‘In a certain sense [Meredith’s] fundamental ideas are even commonplace, as the fundamental ideas of Shakespeare and Hegel are 73commonplace; that is, they are in agreement with the instincts of right-minded simple folk’ he is reconciling idealist criticism with English literature, and demonstrating the ways in which the ideas encountered in his own undergraduate study have come to infuse and inform his reading and his life (44). The assertion about Hegel and Shakespeare comes after a relatively long defence of Meredith’s focus on noble characters and scenes. From this piece of criticism and other evidence, one senses that while MacCallum’s training might have inclined him to a kind of broadness of mind, which he says is valuable, unlike Green, his instinctive sympathies were with the great. He praises Meredith for novels which, like Shakespeare’s plays, reserve ‘the foreground … for the notables’ (33), and his final advice for critics of Meredith is this: ‘He must be read slowly if we are to understand him in detail, he must be read rapidly to see the connection of the whole; therefore … the only advice is to read him often’ (55). This is, in beautiful essence, the hermeneutical method, which aims to reconcile part and whole.

A generous and constructive scholar like MacCallum could be strongly committed to ideals of charity and tolerance whilst at the same time expressing unforgiving prejudice. One of the issues raised early in his tenure at Sydney was the admission of female students, perhaps more for reasons of economy than equity, as the university was struggling to recruit sufficient numbers to justify its existence. Queensland academic FW Robinson later recalled MacCallum’s ‘welcome’:

MacCallum’s contempt and Robinson’s relish do neither credit, but the sentiment pervaded academic culture. Sixty years later HM Green could admit that Sydney was still ‘definitely anti-feminist’ (i.e. hostile to women), and unlikely to take up his recommendation of Nettie Palmer for a Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) lectureship (quoted in Heath, 4). 74

ER Holme was probably correct to suggest that his mentor’s decision to accept the job in Sydney was ultimately detrimental to his international reputation as a scholar, as MacCallum himself knew on that ‘bleak November evening’ in London.22 Some reviewers of MacCallum’s criticism were to respond to his work by placing cruel emphasis on his isolation. In 1894 he published a study of Tennyson, a bold venture notwithstanding Tennyson’s status as Poet Laureate. The more hostile writers hint at MacCallum’s ‘colonial’ status, the most negative doing so explicitly: the reviewer in the National Observer comments that

The positive reviews did MacCallum the ‘favour’ of not mentioning that he worked in Australia – the double cut of distance.

Responses to MacCallum’s next and major work of criticism, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background (1910), were much more positive, but might also reflect the fact that MacCallum was most comfortable when drawing together the classical and the English.24 For a modern reader accustomed to presuming the lack of sophistication of colonial and provincial culture in this period, one of the most noticeable aspects of these reviews is the variety of publications in which they appeared: the study of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony

75and Cleopatra was reviewed more than 50 times, not only in journals and major metropolitan newspapers, but in regional newspapers in Australia and in Great Britain. The book offers a close examination of the relationship between the three plays and their sources in Plutarch’s Lives, mediated through Jacques Amyot’s French translation of the original Greek, and Sir Thomas North’s further translation into English. It is not surprising that the Glasgow Herald should sing the praises of a local son for this kind of scholarship, but acclamation was more widespread than that.25

Only six negative or non-committal reviews were published, one of the worst being a derisory paragraph in The Times of India headed ‘An Australian on Shakespeare’ (a title no doubt intended to prompt sniggers).26 A different kind of criticism was made by the anonymous reviewer in the Australasian World, who was not without praise. But the reviewer wondered

MacCallum might have agreed with the premise of this argument about the responsibility to the local, but would have argued that local culture

76and local students were best served by teachers who reinforced connections with England and its version of ‘the classical heritage’.

In contrast the reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette received MacCallum’s work as a fitting tribute. It concluded that ‘the whole book comes as an interesting reminder from across the seas of the power of the golden tie of English Literature as one of the links of Empire, and by no means the least of them’ – thereby reiterating the book’s own sentiments.28 The longest of the published reviews pursued this imperial theme, raising the question of the example that Athens and Rome had provided for Shakespeare and England itself. The Western Mail claimed that Shakespeare had created a Caesar who would ‘fulfil and embody that spirit of imperialism which is working to erect a vaster and grander Rome’, amplifying the imperial theme of Plutarch’s Lives.29 The writer paid MacCallum the compliment of suggesting that he had in common with Shakespeare that ‘largeness, breadth and abundance of life force’ that accepted diversity and difference, and ‘refrained from making hasty condemnations of human frailty’.

But MacCallum might have been gratified most by the letter he received from AC Bradley, perhaps the most renowned Shakespeare scholar of his time. Wisely, MacCallum had sent Bradley a copy of his new book; it remains a practice to send work to leading scholars for their notice, and hopefully for their approval. Such an exchange is more likely to occur when there are personal and institutional connections, as was the case here: MacCallum and Bradley were associates or followers of Green and Caird and each, in different ways, moved between the centre and periphery of the discipline, and both were connected with Glasgow.30 Like MacCallum’s, Bradley’s career shows the complexity of influence. When he argues that the aim of education is the cultivation of

77‘an eye that sees, an ear that hears and a heart that understands’, Bradley formulates a kind of criticism which has the old Platonic idealism at its heart.31 Still by 1900, as his election to the chair of poetry at Oxford loomed, he was writing to his close friend Gilbert Murray that ‘In my heart I don’t want it; I want the money and pleasure of being at Oxford again. But I feel as if I had no message about literature and as if all the talk about it were mere idle voluptuousness’ (quoted in Cooke, 37–38). As with MacCallum’s private comments, there is a sense of the fragility of a method based on faith, precisely that vulnerability which Green aimed to combat.

MacCallum’s Mentees

When MacCallum retired as professor of modern languages at Sydney in 1920, his chair was divided into four positions of equivalent status – something made possible in part by the University giving priority to English language, French and German, and mainly by the death of an Irish immigrant who left half of his sheep farming fortune to the universities of Sydney and Queensland (see ‘McCaughey Bequest’). MacCallum commented at the time that the amount of teaching done was so great that it had made ‘original work of the standard that justifies publication next to impossible’, and had even ‘prevented the teaching from being all that it might be’.32 He went on to note that while Manchester had 500 students taught by 13 lecturers in modern languages, five of whom were in English, at Sydney in 1920 nearly 550 students were being taught by 2 2/3 staff members (although it is not clear whether course structure and teaching mode make this a valid comparison). But from the academics’ point of view it was considerable progress when separate chairs were created in English Language and in English Literature, along with chairs in French and German.

This splitting of the English chairs into ‘literature’ and ‘language’ reflected both the association with modern language and the strengths

78of prospective local candidates, although this arrangement continues nearly a century later at Sydney. The arbitrariness of the division is emphasised by the way in which the appointments played out, with MacCallum’s keen interest in who would be his successor(s) being decisive in the outcome. ER Holme obtained the McCaughey Chair of Early English Literature and Language, and John le Gay Brereton took up the Challis Chair of English Literature. These appointments are significant because Holme and Brereton were the first Australian-born and Australian-educated appointees to chairs of English in Australia; Brereton’s replacement, AJA Waldock, was also born and educated in Australia, and all were students of MacCallum. In considering why it was possible for the preference for English graduates to be overturned at a self-consciously venerable institution, the key factor seems to have been patronage, interacting with the distinctive self-confidence that characterises Sydney in comparison with other Australian institutions.

ER Holme was born in Melbourne but moved to Sydney with his family when his father was appointed Rector at All Souls Church in Leichhardt in 1882. He attended the King’s School in Parramatta and then Sydney University, graduating in 1891 with a first in Latin and English, after which he became a teacher. Holme’s main publications were two studies of education overseas, an edited collection of English poetry (with MacCallum) and, with Emile Saillens, a book on French pronunciation, a slender output set against that of many contemporaries.33 Holme was appointed to a lectureship at Sydney in 1894 and then became assistant professor, a position he held from 1908 to 1920. Heavily committed to Australia’s involvement in the First World War, Holme’s formal duties included censoring foreign mail. He was awarded an OBE, the Order of Leopold II of Belgium, the Order of the Three Stars of Latvia, and an honorary LittD from Sydney. In his article on Holme for the ADB, AG Price records that as ‘a strongly conservative force … he disapproved of radical tendencies in the 1930s, while remaining a stern upholder of the university’s autonomy. An ardent patriot, he was a driving force behind

79the development of the university’s war memorials’. (In this he differed from MacCallum, who felt that the university could not afford them.) In his family history, MacCallum notes that, of all his former students who became members of the university community, it was Holme who ‘has been intimate with me for the longest time and has always proved the most faithful, devoted and energetic of friends’ (Jottings, 155), phrasing which delicately suggests or gives away a certain assiduity on Holme’s part. The tone contrasts with the tender affection MacCallum expresses for the more overtly bohemian Brereton.

The part MacCallum played in Holme’s appointment to the chair is made clear in letters written in the period leading up to the creation of the positions. The first of these, from May 1919, advised Holme that the chancellor was putting to the university’s senate a proposal for the appointment of three staff, including Holme, to positions in English, German and French.34 Several months later MacCallum wrote again to Holme, then still overseas, urging him to return home before the start of the next academic year. MacCallum commented then, and again in a later letter, that his health was failing, but that he was continuing in order to ensure that the position in English would still be open on Holme’s return. He also discussed with Holme the makeup of the selection committee, noting – with a frankness uncharacteristic of sources about appointments – that ‘If only Piddington is kept out, the back of the opposition will be broken’.35 As this comment implies, there was competition for the chair, and the result was by no means assured. By the middle of 1920 the question was still not decided and MacCallum wrote again to Holme, now back in Australia, speculating on the views of members of the selection committee and describing his own intervention:

80

Holme’s appointment was announced in the press about one month later; he held the position until he retired in 1940.

During nearly two decades in the McCaughey (or ‘language’) chair, Holme emphasised Old English, although he also gave lectures on Victorian literature. The mentoring continued at Sydney, through Holme in particular. Harold Oliver, a graduate of Sydney who taught for over two decades in the department before spending a further twenty years as professor and head of English at New South Wales, suggested that

The debt that Holme felt he owed his own mentor is measured in the sheer volume of correspondence he entered into in compiling the Memorial issue of Southerly. In a letter written soon after MacCallum’s death, Holme expressed his belief that a biography would be written because MacCallum

81Given his preparedness to acknowledge such views, it is not surprising to find Holme advocating, in a document outlining curriculum for 1924, increased attention to the ‘hard language study’, ‘of the kind once obtained through the study of Latin and Greek’.38

Some sense of Holme’s tastes in literature can be gained from Oliver’s comment that many students ‘were imbued by Professor Holme with a lifelong feeling for Beowulf, for Chaucer, for Dryden and certain eighteenth-century writers on whom he contributed to the Literature courses in the University’ (155). But his austere views and reputation were perhaps not always accurate reflections of his feelings. A note from MacCallum to Holme, from late 1914, consoles Holme on ‘private troubles, nervous and spiritual, in addition to the great public calamity’, the latter a reference to the war about which MacCallum presumes he is distressed.39 MacCallum himself was not free from depression brought about by cuts to university funding, and heavy teaching loads. And a confidential report by Holme, sent after the end of the War in his capacity as supervisor of the entry of Australian students into British and French universities, whilst congratulating British institutions for their ‘splendid efforts’ in accommodating demobilised servicemen from the dominions and the United States, spoke of difficulties. He noted that, bearing in mind their limited capacity, the British universities had been ‘extremely generous’, although they were obviously reluctant to accept ‘colonial’ credentials. Holme noted that he and his colleagues were

Holme described a ‘long array of Vice-Chancellors and other University leaders who spoke against his proposals’ to give ex-servicemen credit for study they had already completed in Australia. All regarded him as

82‘the exponent of dangerous ideas which should be overwhelmed by the highest authority’ (Administrative Committee 2); he noted in peeved tones that ‘if this continues, it surely must be a hindrance to Imperial Unity’ (5).

The irony that Holme, a dedicated servant of empire, was regarded as a dangerous radical by colleagues in England demonstrates the extent to which individuals could shift, or rather, be seen as shifting, their position in any given circumstance. In public, though, Holme had only praise for those universities he claimed had given his Committee ‘all the help that it asked of them’ (The American University, 23). He declared that they had shown ‘much interest in the methods whereby a larger intercourse between themselves and the Australian Universities might be brought about in after years’, flatly contradicting the claims he had made in private correspondence (The American University, 23). A significant aspect of Oxford’s reluctance to take on students who had graduated from colonial universities was the fear that ‘to become a great Imperial University would open the door to vocational education’ (Symonds 19). In other words, it was believed that admitting colonials would lower the institution’s tone, because such students would not be engaged in scholarship for its own sake but would seek to gain professional qualifications. Similar reservations had been expressed about the Rhodes scholarship scheme when it was introduced twenty years earlier (Symonds, 22). It was not until these colonial scholars began to distinguish themselves in Oxford’s most important sporting contests – in cricket, rugby, and rowing – that attitudes began to change; acceptance increased when some of the most outstanding remained in Oxford, becoming distinguished contributors to academic life.40

The most extensive published statement of Holme’s ideas about the connections between Australia, education and Britishness can be found in his paper and participation in discussion at the third congress of the universities of Empire, held at Cambridge in 1926. Like John Woolley, Holme located Sydney ‘in the British University tradition’, and

83gave thanks, postwar and quite disingenuously, that ‘there [had] been practically no foreign influence such as the American University felt so long from Germany’ (14–15). His paper summarises and exemplifies the ways in which the idea of a university, as it was understood by an academic educated entirely in the colonies, could be pervaded by ideals of Britishness. It also expresses the excruciating anxieties of the self-identified colonial:

While his feelings are clearly exaggerated for the benefit of the British members of his audience – this cringing oration is the academic equivalent of Menzies’ ‘I did but see her passing by’ – Holme’s declarations reflect the crisis that could be experienced by the colonial authority on ‘returning’ to the cultural and intellectual ‘centre’ of their world, a place they had hitherto seen only in imagination. This crisis is generated in part by the ruthless enforcement of hierarchies by English academics, and in part by the vulnerability of Australian academics to English opinion, a fear encapsulated in Holme’s concern that Oxford and Cambridge might refuse ‘to act as a mother of Universities overseas’ (Comment, 154). But we cannot know whether Holme oscillated between the irritation he expressed in private and the humility he expressed in public, or whether one of these emotions was closer to his ‘true’ feeling. 84

Holme had long been a member of the modern language department prior to his appointment to the chair. In contrast, John le Gay Brereton had only taught in university extension, having obtained a position at the university library in 1902 through MacCallum’s intervention.41 While working in the library he published Elizabethan Drama: Notes and Studies, a collection of textual commentaries that ‘proclaimed him a scholar of unusual ability’ in the eyes of Percival Serle, author of the entry on Brereton in the ADB. Brereton is probably best known now for his poetry, although Terry Sturm has claimed that he had an international reputation for his studies of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Sturmn 397). His own essays in Knocking Round, the letters to him from the renowned eccentric Christopher Brennan, and the memoir by his nephew RD FitzGerald all suggest that he was, as FitzGerald termed it in his title, ‘A Vagabond at Heart’.

Brereton differed from Holme and MacCallum in that he was apparently less militaristic, although his book of poems, The Burning Marl, was dedicated to ‘all who have fought nobly’.42 Perhaps surprisingly, given Holme’s ostensible enthusiasm for the war, Brereton seems to have felt comfortable about expressing his reservations about militarism in another colleague to Holme. After lunching with Holme and AB Taylor from Tasmania – perhaps the Taylor who had applied for the chair? – Brereton wrote the next day in terms that imply a close relationship between the Sydney colleagues (or were perhaps a gentle hint?):

85Brereton reiterated the point in a letter to Duncan Hall, but there noted that Taylor’s preferred topic was ginger ale, on which he talked ‘incessantly’.44

Brereton was more sympathetic towards Australian literature than either Holme or MacCallum, and Lesley Heath realistically speculates that the first two theses on the subject, written in 1922, were completed under his direction. But several items in Brereton’s papers suggest that his views on women and women writers, notwithstanding his friendship with Zora Cross and his reputation for encouraging women students, resembled those of most colleagues. A draft of a lecture evinces a determination to include a mellifluously misogynist appraisal of his female contemporaries:

The same willingness to judge appears in Brereton’s student notes, taken from the lectures on English literature given by Piddington during MacCallum’s first absence from Australia on study leave in 1893. He included the annotations that ‘The “grammatical” constructions employed by the lecturer have in very many cases been altered that they may approximate correctness’, and ‘For the sake of brevity, unnecessary interjections will be omitted from these notes forthwith’, the sentence just transcribed having contained five ‘er’s.46 But Piddington was not the only person with idiosyncrasies.

86TA Coghlan, acting agent-general for New South Wales, and in that capacity chair of the London selection committee for the Challis professorship of English literature, wrote to Brereton giving highly confidential news of the committee’s deliberations, informing him that

In a later letter Coghlan let Brereton know that he was the London committee’s recommended appointee and expressed his hope that the decision would be confirmed in Sydney. He noted that Brereton’s lack of a background in classics had counted against him in the deliberations.

This account could suggest that – notwithstanding their friendship – MacCallum did not intervene directly with his fellow Glaswegian WP Ker in the matter of selection, although it also suggests that Coghlan did intervene, and precisely on the basis of friendship: Brereton, as a young man, had been a clerk in the New South Wales statistician’s office, headed by Coghlan. Although Coghlan was interested in literary

87matters, it seems unlikely he had expertise that would have allowed him to make a judgement about Brereton’s academic qualifications in relation to those of other candidates.49

MacCallum’s friendship with Brereton was particularly warm; although the older man worried about being unable to help his student and protégé, in fact he did so in various ways. The most decisive of these was in the matter of the Challis chair, as Lesley Heath has shown – although Coghlan’s letter surely seeks to imply that his interventions in the meeting of the London selection committee were crucial. MacCallum encouraged Brereton to apply for the position, and when his application was successful, wrote to him on Boxing Day 1920 to explain his reaction:

The letters between MacCallum and the candidates, along with Coghlan’s to Brereton, demonstrate the very direct ways in which mentoring could be decisive. One senses that MacCallum intervened not at all because he was determined to break the stranglehold of English-educated candidates, but because of his felt obligation towards Holme, and his intense affection for Brereton.

88Ironically enough, it was during Brereton’s and Holme’s time that Sydney was to feel the effects of another charismatic Scot. During his last year at the university before his sudden death in 1933, Brereton was conscious of the impact that the advocacy of ‘free thought’ by philosopher John Anderson was having upon students. Anderson, like MacCallum, was a product of Glasgow, though of a later generation, and his approach to critique took a radically different form to MacCallum’s: he preferred to question precisely those institutions critical idealism sought to preserve. MacCallum recorded his misgivings about the fact that ‘the untrained minds of our junior alumni are subjected to the Professor’s very able but unsettling lectures without any counteracting influence’ (Jottings, 164). Brereton likewise was concerned. Writing to Duncan Hall in 1932, he referred to Anderson as the ‘professor of atheism’, and glumly noted that

Brereton goes on to describe a clash between one of Anderson’s students and Holme, Holme objecting to the student’s failure to show respect during the playing of the American national anthem. But the irony lies in the fact that if anyone might have served as a conduit for the ideas of TH Green at Sydney it would have been Anderson, who lectured on Green and his work albeit whilst being critical of his views.52 In the end Anderson’s impact on the institution, and particularly on its Arts graduates, was profound, and might well have played a part in the retreat from ‘everything that is idealistic and romantic’ in the English department.

89If we wish to categorise Brereton and Holme in terms of the intellectual influence of their mentor Mungo MacCallum, some obvious difficulties emerge. Brereton was the idealist of the two, that is certain, although there is less sense, at least from his published work and his lectures, that he aimed to revivify and transmit that critical spirit that was so fundamental to Green’s intellectual life, notwithstanding Green’s influence on MacCallum. There is a noticeably, even successively, gentler spirit at work in each of Caird, MacCallum, and Brereton, but did MacCallum ever discuss Green’s ideas at any length with Brereton, or make them central to his lectures to undergraduates? Holme, one senses the less imaginative of the two successors, was also intellectually less self-confident, more serious, and perhaps incapable of the laconic, self-deprecating tone of Brereton. It might have been more for reasons of temperament than intellect that he did not follow his mentor’s example of idealism, seeking refuge in the apparent certainties of ‘language’ study, which seemed to provide proof of academic rigour. Thus it was he who applied for the McCaughey chair. Nevertheless, and crucially for my argument, a sense of the usefulness of such study for inculcating cultural values via the supposedly ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ stream of English study remained strong for him. Donald Horne, a former student, described him as using Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer ‘as a text for a series of sermons on the virtues of Empire’ (10).53 That ‘hard study’ which Holme saw as proof of intellectual rigour did not disconnect him from cultural values, but in fact allowed them to be emphasised. As in the previous chapter, the lines between literature and language, this time within a discipline rather than between two apparently separate ones, blur when we attend to individual cases; commensurately, attempts to label the methods and values which structure scholarship and teaching fracture somewhat when applied to a range of evidence.