The fact that both Arnold and Pater occupied academic posts makes this belief in the ‘unteachability’ of criticism particularly significant. Arnold and Pater differed in a number of important respects – Arnold advocated a belief in the power of criticism to act as a disinterested force able to restore social harmony, while Pater emphasised the essential autonomy of the aesthetic experience – yet crucially, what they shared was the belief that criticism depended on skills that could neither be taught, nor reduced to the narrowness of an academic specialism. For Martin, exponents of these methods were, effectively, ‘representatives of different conceptions of knowledge’: while scholars aligned themselves with ‘canons of truth current in the natural sciences’, critics inclined towards ‘alternative models of understanding’ that privileged moral and aesthetic conceptions of ‘truth’ and an imaginative engagement with the text.26 The status given to literature by this latter group owed much to the work of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, whose critical philoso- phies can be traced in the debates about academic English that were advanced by a number of its early professors. The distinction between the differing philosophies of literary study that was becoming apparent in both general critical discourse and the early English degrees has been described by Wallace Martin in terms of the opposition between ‘scholarship’, a concern with the accumulation and analysis of knowledge along scientific lines and ‘criticism’, a more evalu- ative approach that drew on an older, humanist conception of literature.

Tremulous wisp