Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944)

Not, as one might think from the title, a monograph on Berkshire biscuit-tin decoration, but Q's second series of lectures as Cambridge professor of English Literature. They were delivered during what must have been some of the bleakest and most depressing years in the history of the university, a time when many people would have been wondering whether we would ever again have room in our lives for educating young people in the humanities. Despite this, Q is unflaggingly positive in his show more conviction that it is possible to study "English literature" as an academic discipline (something that was by no means universally accepted in Cambridge in his day). In a fairly random-seeming progression, he sets out his thoughts on how literature should — and should not — be taught; how exams are a necessary evil; why the Latin and Greek heritage matters at least as much as (if not more than) Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse; how we as readers can cope with the sheer number of books that exist; how children's books should be directed at stretching the imagination, not at creating model citizens (two lectures); why the Authorised Version of the Bible should be treated as a key text of English literature (three magnificent lectures, concluding in a virtuoso exposition of Job); and tentatively explores the idea of a canon, first rubbishing the idea of "100 best books" and then accepting that there might be some sort of merit in it.

Whilst the battles he engages in were mostly won or lost the best part of a century ago, it's still a great pleasure to read his wonderful, clear prose and reflect on how and why we enjoy books. There's even a sort of guilty thrill for those of us brought up on feminist and post-colonial criticism to see that he unashamedly and routinely opens his lectures with "Gentlemen, ...". He does accept that women will be playing a big part in post-war society and will need full access to education, but he undermines this positive comment with a footnote quoting a Victorian young lady's summing up of her educational attainments.

I found myself wondering about what doors more recent ways of teaching literature have opened and closed for us. I'm sure Q would have welcomed the extension of the subject to cover very recent literature (in his day, and until at least the 1950s, Eng. Lit., as far as Oxford and Cambridge were concerned, was held to end in 1835), but I'm not sure that he would have been as happy about the way whole chunks of literary history fell off the syllabus in the process: the courses I took left rather an alarming gap between Shakespeare and Dickens, for instance. He does accept, though, that choices have to be made and no undergraduate can be expected to read through the entire canon from Chaucer to Byron in two years. show less

I decided to read these century-old lectures because I was curious to check out the source of the dictum “murder your darlings,” made famous by Stephen King. The lectures contained some interesting insights mixed with stretches of what struck me as benign babbling.
Most jarring is Quiller-Couch’s invariable address to his listeners as “gentlemen.” A stark reminder that, although Cambridge had begun to permit women to attend lectures a decade or two previously, they were not allowed show more to sit for exams or take a degree. So they are not among Quiller-Couch’s addressees. No, he speaks to elite males in the making, whom Quiller-Couch will form by exposure to the “masculine, objective writers” he admires.
Not that I have much to quibble about with the authors he holds up for admiration and emulation, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Thomas Wyatt (which Quiller-Couch spells with one “t”). There are others he admires less, for example, Samuel Johnson and Wordsworth, but Jane Austen rates no mention and George Eliot but one, a passing mention not as an author but as a responsive reader.
Equally risible is his survey, spread over two lectures, of the lineage of English literature. He is as allergic to the notion that Chaucer owed anything to Beowulf or other Anglo-Saxon poetry (other than the language, no small matter!) as he is to the suggestion that Great Britain should be reckoned among the Teutonic nations. Context, I remind myself. He gave these lectures in 1913, when the sound of saber-rattling filled the air. And he is reacting to the equally suspect Romantic Nationalism of the generation before him.
Nevertheless, it strikes me as nothing less than cranky that he devotes a lengthy portion of one of twelve lectures to speculation that some Romans who settled in Britain may still have descendants. The fact that newest DNA evidence confirms this suspicion doesn’t change Quiller-Couch’s lack of demonstration that this has anything to do with the influence of the Greek-Roman tradition on English literature.
Balanced against these oddities are other things I did like. These include Quiller-Couch's instinctive mistrust of the “-isms” often used to lump writers into categories and his emphasis that language is living, ever-changing, and that therefore good style can’t be reduced to rules. On the other hand, it is a bit of a letdown to hear in the final lecture that good style is merely a matter of politeness toward your reader.
From the outset, he declares that he will aim to have students read great literature “absolutely,” by which he means the texts themselves in preference to commentary and other secondary literature. He does allow that, with certain highly allusive writers such as Milton, notes on the references might be necessary for beginning students.
Quiller-Couch seems confident that in this “absolute” encounter with the texts it will be possible to discern authorial intent. A century on, we are less sure, but he also seems to recognize the role of what is now called reader-response: “the success of [literature] depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author’s skill to give as on ours to receive.”
Quiller-Couch’s aim is not only that his students will learn to appreciate great literature, but that they will become, if not great, at least good writers. Although chary of rules, he does set out four hallmarks of good writing. Aim to write, he urges, with accuracy, perspicuity, persuasion, and appropriateness. He might have helped his case had he said “lucidity” or “clarity” instead of perspicuity. Perhaps he thought his formula would be more memorable if two words began with the prefix “per-” alongside two that began with “a.”
I also liked his suggestion that the key to the Dark Ages was the suppression of literature. This was not done because the church had something against it as literature, nor—at first—because it was voluptuous, but because it was imbued with the polytheistic religion of the Greeks and Romans, something the church had only recently and narrowly overcome.
His fifth lecture, on jargon, is lamentably as relevant now as it was then. He decries it not because it is ugly, but because it is “a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught. There is wickedness in human speech, sometimes. You will detect it all the better for having ruled out all that it naughty.”
One of the things I liked most about these lectures: although Quiller-Couch has his favorites, as well as writers he doesn’t admire, he is charitable toward all. It is not easy to write, he stresses, and all struggled to express themselves in language. This earns his respect and merits ours. In spite of my criticisms of parts of this book, this respect is something I’m glad to accord Quiller-Couch as well.
He seems to bristle that Chesterton, in a review of one of Quiller-Couch’s books, calls his tone “avuncular.” I smiled when I read this since that’s an adjective that already crossed my mind before I reached that point. But that’s not all bad. I think I would have enjoyed an evening and a sherry with him. These lectures, however, because of their unevenness, can be passed over in favor of other good books on writing. It’s not a bad book—I enjoyed much of it—but it’s not essential. show less

It is probably fair to say, as bell7 does in one of the other reviews here, that these lectures are seriously out of date and contain little actual useful advice. Reading them won't necessarily help you to become a better writer. But to condemn them for that is to miss their point seriously. Anyone who can read these lectures without being infected by Q's enthusiasm for the subject is probably immune to the pleasures of English literature. And pace bell7, Miss Hanff's evident pleasure at show more discovering this little book is a strong indication that you don't have to be an Edwardian undergraduate, or even British, to get something out of it.

Unlike many published sets of lectures, these are really written as lectures, not as essays to be read out. There are jokes in the right places to wake the audience up and plenty of topical references to Cambridge life. When he is illustrating the difference between verse and prose, it is a chunk of exam regulations from the Cambridge handbook that he mischievously converts into iambic pentameters; when he is talking about Romano-British culture, he reminds the audience that they will have passed the archaeological site in question on their way to Newmarket races. And so on. Anyone who's been a student knows that the most entertaining, imaginative lectures you attend are likely to be the least useful in passing exams. Examiners don't give many marks for originality. But those are precisely the lectures you remember decades later, when the finer points of the Greek aorist, Cauchy-Riemann equations, or whatever it was you were studying, have faded completely (after thirty years, I only have the vaguest notion of what a Cauchy-Riemann equation might be, but I remember very clearly that the lecturer on that subject wore galoshes). I'm sure that the undergraduates who attended Q's lectures the year before the outbreak of the Great War must have remembered them with great affection — those who survived, that is.

The pretence that Q is teaching undergraduates "the art of writing" is his little joke against pedantic notions of what the study of English literature should involve. He does issue Fowlerish warnings against some bad habits. As with Fowler, some is sensible and universally applicable, some (e.g. his warnings against mixing elements from different languages, as in "antibody") has been overtaken by the evolution of the English language in the last hundred years. He makes it clear in his final lecture that good writing depends on the writer having something original to say and finding an appropriate, personal style to say it in. Anyone who has listened to him carefully should find it a bit easier to criticise their own writing, but will still have to find something to say first.

Similarly, a modern literary theorist won't find all that much to agree with in Q's analysis of how literature works (some of which is actually just polemic against the academic obsessions of the time, like the excessive focus on philology of the Germanic languages in the Oxford and Cambridge English courses). But the amateur can take a lot of pleasure in his off-the-cuff summings-up of great and not so great writers. And there are lots of interesting little pointers to writers we might not know much about. Many of whom, coincidentally enough, feature in Q's Oxford Book of English Verse.... show less

I hope I can cultivate in my children an appreciation for prose such as this: slow, careful, with humour but very few exclamations, and punctuated with dependent clauses. Prose which is modern but certainly not contemporary, scholarly but never pedantic. If writing style varies with different ways of thinking, as I believe it does, comfort with different prose styles helps individuals gain perspective they might not otherwise have.

Quiller-Couch's lectures are addressed to Oxford students, show more practically aimed at answering the question of what use is a canon of British literature, and how to defend that a canon exists. It grew out of political arguments he mounted at Oxford to defend a new curriculum and, indeed, pedagogy -- arguments which, apparently, were successful. For all of that, Quiller-Couch makes for solid liberal arts reading, and I now understand why Helene Hanff wrote so highly of him in her books.

The three lectures on how to read the Bible, from the perspective of a literary accomplishment, are noble and arresting. His defense of Job as a literary triumph helped me see that story in a new light. I am struck by his contention that the Bible uniquely lends itself to translation for the key to Biblical prose lies not in the language but in how ideas are arranged, which translates well in terms of content as well as metre or cadence. show less