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Yet it is on none of these methods, with their apparent objectivity, that the claim of literature to be the central human study has rested. It has been on ‘practical criticism’, which deserves attention both in itself and because it is from this, paradoxically, that much of the English work in literary sociology has come. I know Goldmann would have been surprised—every visitor is surprised—to meet the full intensity, the extraordinary human commitment, of this particular and local allegiance. In his attack on ‘scientism’ he might for a moment have assumed that there were Cambridge allies, who had attacked the same thing in the same word. But this wouldn’t have lasted long. Goldmann’s attack on scientism—the uncritical transfer of method from the physical to the human sciences—was above all in the name of a critical sociology; whereas that word ‘sociology’ has only to be mentioned, in practical-critical circles, to provoke the last sad look at the voluntarily damned. And I would give it about fifteen minutes, as Goldmann began to describe his own methodology, for that crushing quotation to be brought out from Lawrence: ‘We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotions and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.’ So no methodology here, thank you; only sincere and vital emotion. But who decides the sincerity and vitality? If you need to ask that you couldn’t begin to understand the answer. People decide it, in themselves and in an active and collaborative critical process.

But which people, in what social relationships, with each other and with others? That, at whatever risk of damnation, is the necessary question of the sociologist. Practical criticism is vulnerable at several points: in its hardening into an apparently objective method which is based, even defiantly, on subjective principles; in its isolation of texts from contexts; in its contemplative aspects, which have often made it hostile to new literary work. But all these weaknesses are most apparent, we say, when it is badly done: well or badly being again an internal criterion. In fact, however, all these weaknesses, or potential weaknesses, follow from the specific social situation of its practitioners. The real answer to that question—which people, in what social relationships?—was, as we know, precise and even principled: the informed critical minority. What began as the most general kind of claim, a visibly human process centred on the apparently absolute qualities of sincerity and vitality, ended, under real pressures, as a self-defining group. But then, because the critical activity was real, very different social relations—a sense of isolation from the main currents of a civilization in which sincerity and vitality were being limited or destroyed, an implacable opposition to all agents of this limitation or destruction—emerged and forced a generalization of the original position. English literary sociology began, in effect, from this need of a radical critical group to locate and justify its own activity and identity: the practical distinction of good literature from the mediocre and the bad extending to studies of the cultural conditions underlying these differences of value—a critical history of literature and of culture; and then further extending, from its starting-point in critical activity, to one major element of these conditions, the nature of the reading public. The particular interpretation then given was of course one of cultural decline; the radical isolation of the critical minority was in that sense both starting-point and conclusion. But any theory of cultural decline, or to put it more neutrally, of cultural crisis—and the practical critics had little difficulty in establishing that—acquires, inevitably, wider social explanation: in this case the destruction of an organic society by industrialism and by mass civilization.

In the 1930s this kind of diagnosis overlapped, or seemed to overlap, with other radical interpretations, and especially perhaps, with the Marxist interpretation of the effects of capitalism. Yet almost at once there was a fundamental hostility between these two groups: a critical engagement between Scrutiny and the English Marxists, which we can have little doubt, looking back, Scrutiny won. But why was this so? That the Scrutiny critics were much closer to literature, were not just fitting it in, rather hastily, to a theory conceived from other kinds, mainly economic kinds, of evidence? I believe this was so, but the real reason was more fundamental. Marxism, as then commonly understood, was weak in just the decisive area where practical criticism was strong: in its capacity to give precise and detailed and reasonably adequate accounts of actual consciousness: not just a scheme or a generalization but actual works, full of rich and significant and specific experience. And the reason for the corresponding weakness in Marxism is not difficult to find: it lay in the received formula of base and superstructure, which in ordinary hands converted very quickly to an interpretation of superstructure as simple reflection, representation, ideological expression—simplicities which just will not survive any prolonged experience of actual works. It was the theory and practice of reductionism—the specific human experiences and acts of creation converted so quickly and mechanically into classifications which always found their ultimate reality and significance elsewhere—which in practice left the field open to anybody who could give an account of art which in its closeness and intensity at all corresponded to the real human dimension in which works of art are made and valued.

I have said there was a victory, and it was indeed so crushing that in England, for a generation, even the original questions could hardly be raised. Teachers and students already knew, or thought they knew, the answers. Still today, I have no doubt, the work of Lukács or of Goldmann can be quickly referred to that abandoned battlefield. What have these neo-Marxists got, after all, but a slightly updated vocabulary and a new political lease of life? I think they have more, much more, but I am sure we must remember that decisive engagement, for certain real things were learned in it, which make the specifically English contribution to the continuing inquiry still relevant, still active, however much any of us might want to join in the run from the English consensus to a quite other consciousness and vocabulary.