Raymond Williams

Was there ever, in fact, a ‘Cambridge English’? Not as in ‘Oxford English’, which refers in its most general use to a manner of speaking: but in the sense of a distinctive and coherent course and method of study. There has been an English Tripos in Cambridge since 1917, and an independent Tripos and Faculty since 1926. I realised recently that I had been in contact with English at Cambridge for two-thirds of this history, since I came as an undergraduate in 1939. Moreover, for the last twenty years or so I have, in some problematic ways, been near the centre of its affairs. It is then at first sight curious that I still look at what is called ‘Cambridge English’ as a historical phenomenon: as something happening, throughout, at a certain distance.

It is still very difficult, in the English-speaking world, to focus the work of Lukacs. Any full understanding of it depends on a familiarity with classical German philosophy and with the intellectual development of Marxism which is still relatively uncommon in our language. The intricacy of the current international discussion of various phases of his thought contrasts very sharply with the few relatively general impressions which most of us have been able to register, even through careful study of those more readily accessible works which are said to be his most significant. Three of these impressions can be recorded as a measure of our distance. First, that he is one of the more interesting and tolerable Marxist critics of literature, in the breadth of his learning and in his relative freedom from dogmatism. Second, that as an opponent of Brecht and of Modernism, and a defender of classical realism, he belongs to an old and fruitless kind of Marxism and can even be fairly taken as a cultural representative of its Stalinist phase. Third, that he is a major example of the ‘humanist fallacy’ in Western Marxism, in his reliance on notions of ‘man as subject’ and more directly in his kind of socialism, which is more properly a ‘romantic anti-capitalism’.

Two truths are told, as alternative prologues to the action of modern Wales. The first draws on the continuity of Welsh language and literature: from the sixth century, it is said, and thus perhaps the oldest surviving poetic tradition in Europe. The second draws on the turbulent experience of industrial South Wales, over the last two centuries, and its powerful political and communal formations.

‘When I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s,’ Mr Hilton writes, ‘I was asked to understand that an interest in Ruskin was as foolish as an enthusiasm for modern art.’ This is incomprehensible, until it is observed from the cover note that Mr Hilton was at Oxford. Even so, either he was very unlucky or this is an example of that interesting and recurrent phenomenon in which a new generation discovers a well-known writer in its own terms and as it were originally. Mr Hilton goes on to speak – with reference to work in Oxford in the mid-1970s – of ‘the avant-garde of the new Ruskin studies’.’

Who carried a torch for August Strindberg? On his 63rd, and last, birthday, some ten thousand people, led by the Stockholm Workers’ Commune with bands and red union banners, marched past the apartment that he called the Blue Tower, after the name of a Danish prison. The ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘other anthems of liberation’ were sung. There were cheers for ‘the People’s Strindberg’ and ‘the King of Poets’.