Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing
but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else,
and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of
reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any
service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own
children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.
Thomas Gradgrind, Sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and
calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and
two are four and nothing over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir - peremptorily
Thomas - Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales and the
multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure
any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.
No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in
the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever
learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle twinkle little star; how I wonder what
you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject
. . . No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that
famous cow with the crumpled horn, who tossed the dog, who worried
the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that more famous
cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities,
and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating
quadruped with several stomachs.
So Dickens wrote in Hard Times of the damaging philistinism of such a view of ‘education’. And one is tempted to assume that the Brylcreamed Kenneth Baker (now Lorded) who was Secretary of State for Education from 1986 to 1989, must have been mentored by Gradgrind in his views then, and now, that the traditional academic curriculum is useless, and that the only purpose of education is nothing more than to provide ‘skills’ for employment. These days of course, under the Labour regime, ‘education’, already eroded, is being replaced by political indoctrination - a process which began years ago when the neo-Marxists began the ‘long march through the institutions’ , not least into education. The idea of education being the passing on of a literary heritage, or any other kind of heritage, was in terminal decline since the late 1960s.
My own travel into the power of good literature was quite a journey. As a young lad from a working-class background, I was an eleven-plus ‘failure’ who for five years attended a very rough secondary modern school for boys. We were all considered, even by our own teachers, as destined for a life of manual labour or as factory workers who should not set our sights on anything other than that. (And just in case anyone thinks I am being snobbish about those occupations, I am not. My criticism is that it is wrong to predetermine the future of school pupils.) The curriculum was nothing like the one offered to Grammar School pupils and was heavily biased towards ‘practical ‘subjects. Little or no teaching of history, foreign languages, or English Literature, none of which were offered at ‘O’ level GCE (and English was restricted to ’O’ level English Language). So apart from a few token lessons in literature, my only experience was restricted to my own private reading, which at that time I only regarded as entertainment. I was not a complete philistine. At the age of ten, I started to take private lessons on the clarinet (out of school) and before too long I was taking part in adult orchestras and ensembles in my local town. My ambition at that time was to become a professional musician, something my Headmaster talked me out of, and said it would be more sensible to set my sights on working as a commercial apprentice in a local factory, where he had ‘connections’. (‘Now look Palmer. I will give you the advice I always give to boys who say they want to be artists …’) So I remained an amateur player for the rest of my life, though a very active one. Last year I wrote an article for TCW on my musical life and what it has meant to me. If you are interested you can look it up (‘Music - the Glorious Soundtrack of my life ‘September 24 2023).
When we were midway through our schooling our English teacher took us through a cursory reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which bored me to tears and didn’t lift me out of the philistinism imposed by the school’s ethos. So for some time I remained hostile to the very name Shakespeare, which to me connoted airy fairy rubbish. But at the age of fourteen there was a sudden development. Dragged on a school trip to the cinema to see Henry V (which we never read in school) I was virtually asleep with boredom until Act iv scene 1. Halfway through Laurence Olivier’s soliloquy I was stirred by the following speech:
‘Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running ‘fore the King,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world, -
No, not all these, thrice gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave
Who, with a body fill’d and vacant mind,
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread.
I had no firm intellectual grasp of what those words meant, and certainly nothing which would be good enough to pass an examination, but the poetry seemed to speak, or rather sing, as it was meant to sing, of some hidden gold behind the fool’s gold of appearance. I was dimly aware, though not sufficiently so to articulate the thought in this way, that the King was standing outside the immediate action, and the role imposed upon him, questioning the hollowness of ‘ceremony’ and the accident of birth that confers the crown, thus setting the King apart from the strange comfort of the routine labours of those who merely serve. Had that thought been expressed in prose I should not have listened, for I was not interested in that thought, as such, but in the King’s act of contemplation. The magic of the poetry through Olivier’s delivery of it, the impossibility of escape from the onward flow of the lines, seemed to lift me out of the everyday world while looking back upon it. It had an intensity about it, almost akin to a religious experience, and no ‘analysis’ of the lines could have induced that. W. H. Auden has said, ‘One cannot be taught to recognise a sacred being, one has to be converted’. A conversion of this kind does not merely pull one towards something, it pushes something else away: a content, perhaps, with wilful ignorance or prejudice - a smaller world.
Even in such an unintellectual and inchoate form, the experience of great art can have an impact that puts one in touch with something that can only be called spiritual, with something that not only transcends the little world of the self, but the humdrum experience of everyday life. So I am drawn to sympathise with the philosopher Roy Holland, who claims that poetry and music, if of the right quality, have the capacity to ‘breathe spiritual dispositions into people’, and with another philosopher, R. K. Elliot, who speaks of imagination in art taking us out of the body:
If we find ourselves wandering in a picture of Corot’s , for example, then it is as if the self has suddenly been set free from its imprisonment in the body, and in our naive depth we do not fail to take the hint that the given world of ordinary perception may not be the only one in which we can live and move and have our being. Thus the second import of imaginal experience is of the existence of a separate soul, and not far beyond that is an intimation of immortality.
I should stress that this is not a metaphysical claim, meant to be taken literally; it is what is known as a phenomenological observation (what the experience feels like). There is of course no necessary connection between such rapture or exultation and our subsequent conduct as moral beings. It is utterly baffling that a man of fine artistic sensibilities may, in other respects, remain a swine: so in words to that effect remarked Fenby of the composer Delius. Perhaps a better example is Tolstoy, whose sensitive and sophisticated moral insights are at odds with the man he actually was (I am not the first to observe that great artists create works that are better than themselves). But for all that it still seems reasonable to say that to be moved in the way that great art can move us is to be put in touch with something that in a way dwarfs our own little concerns , which is a step nearer to being sensitive to the ‘reality’ of other people (something that didn’t happen in the Gradgrind school where children were known by numbers - ‘Girl number twenty’ - and indeed these days our politicians, our NHS hospitals, and our utility companies only regard us as digits).
But I am getting ahead of myself, touching on matters to be explored in future articles. So back to the ‘journey’ I was describing. After finishing my ‘O’ levels I was persuaded to follow the Headmaster’s advice that I shouldn’t set my sights too far, and so I became a commercial apprentice in that local factory. Before long I felt stifled, and my father noticed the deterioration in my spoken English. With his encouragement I joined the sixth form of the local Grammar School to study for ‘A’ Levels. I immediately felt this was the right decision, and the awakening I experienced, as described above, made me choose English Literature as one of my ‘A’ level subjects. Chaucer, studied in the original middle-English, was a fascinating journey into our historical roots, not only linguistically, but in the portrayal of the values and social customs of our forebears. Milton’s Paradise Lost led me to absorb the classical references to Ancient Greek mythologies. The flame and brilliance of the satires of Alexander Pope gave me insights into the follies and corruption he railed against, in fiery verse that showed ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’. The work of Jane Austen (which in my ignorance I had thought of as ‘chick lit’) gave me deeper moral insights into the faults and foibles of her characters which she revealed with her subtle use of irony, and the deeper cultural matters they represented. The course in practical criticism (which was then called ‘appreciation’) was not a mere technical exercise but, among other things, helped one to distinguish between genuine and sentimental expressions of emotion. And then there was Shakespeare. Two of his plays were studied in depth, one of his comedies and one of his tragedies. This aspect of the course was the most intensely absorbing for me. I was already ‘converted’, but I came to see in Shakespearean tragedy such depth of vision. The dazzling poetic drama put me in touch with some deep-rooted truths and insights into human folly, good and evil, and the constancies in human nature that gave his works universal significance. All this was not mere ‘aestheticism’ but felt more like an initiation into collective wisdom.
From there I did a three-year course at Trent Park college, Hertfordshire, where I specialised in English Literature. I gradually discovered that some of my interest in that field came from deep philosophical questions raised by literary works I studied. Up till then I had no real idea what philosophy was, although it became evident that the impetus to ask deep philosophical questions had always been inside me, however primitive. When I started reading works in ‘pure’ philosophy I immediately knew what I must do. After a few years teaching English (and philosophy to sixth forms) in the years that followed I did two university degrees in philosophy. Obviously, that covered all the different ‘branches’ of the subject, but I still saw an overlap between philosophy and literature.
My first PhD supervisor at London University was the neo-Wittgensteinian philosopher, Professor Peter Winch who was fond of using examples from literature to give substance to his approach to ethics (he felt that some moral philosophers used arguments that were too abstract). That inspired me further to link my interest in philosophy with my passion for literature, and I switched my research to follow that direction. When Peter left London to teach in America, I changed my supervisor to Roger Scruton who oversaw the remainder of my research for my doctoral dissertation. Unlike some academic supervisors, he didn’t impose his own ideas on me but guided me in the direction I was already taking. Though of course with his erudition and his mastery of philosophy, especially the ‘humane’ side of that activity, he was an inspirational figure - and, despite the fact he is no longer with us, he still is a source of inspiration.
In this article I have described my journey. But there are further philosophical questions. How is it that we can be moved by the fates of fictional characters? (As Hamlet put it, ‘what’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba / That he should weep for her?’). How far should our estimate of the value of a fictional work, or poem, be affected by the moral view lying behind, or implicit in, the work? What can we say about a work that contains an evil vision? If good art is good for us, is bad art bad for us? What does ‘high’ culture contribute to our civilisation? I hope to write further articles on here that deal with these, or other questions about literary art.
Dr Frank Palmer is a philosopher and author. He has published many articles, and his last book was Literature and Moral Understanding (Oxford University Press)