Seamus Perry on why too much knowledge can impede learning

William Empson, my favourite critic, once said that life was largely a matter of “maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis”.

Scott Fitzgerald famously said something similar: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

That seems to me a rather snob remark, and Empson’s much the better: it is not a matter of being first-rate, but doing what everyone has to do in order to keep on keeping on.

Such reflections naturally occur to the don at this time of year, full term done and the fresh woods of the summer stretching ahead.

A subtle metamorphosis overtakes the donnish soul, as a life dominated by teaching is supplanted by one preoccupied by the obligations of research.

For some, this is a reversion to what they wished they had been doing all along: they lapse into research with all the relief of an exile who, after long years, suddenly finds himself once again among speakers of his native tongue.

For others, it is a less happy matter, as they pick up the magnum opus where it had been abandoned after that uncharacteristic burst of activity at Easter.

Surely there was more than this? Was that dazzling chapter about T.S. Eliot, which you could have sworn was all but finished, really only ever the impenetrable scribble on these three Post-It notes?

This is a contradiction of donnish identity that cannot be solved by analysis. People higher up in the world of universities occasionally try to square the circle by enthusing about something called ‘research-led teaching’.

It sounds a good idea, and carries with it the flattering fiction that young people would enjoy nothing less than hearing you talk about ‘your own work’.

I have long had my doubts about the general plausibility of the notion, however, which are based on my own experience.

Ask me to give you a tutorial about, oh, George Herbert or Henry Fielding, Montesquieu or Alexis de Tocqueville, and I’ll do you a killer-diller. But ask me for one on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on whom I cut my teeth as a young academic, and I know what will happen.

The happy facility that characterises my normal discourse will disappear into endless qualification and self-correction: “Well, yes and no; it depends what you mean by ‘nature’; so more yes than no, possibly; but then again ‘imagination’ is a tricky concept in many ways; mmm, so more no than yes, on reflection, perhaps.”

A story is told of Lord Quinton leaving the front gate of Trinity. He is hailed by a colleague who, earlier that morning, had spotted in the Times Literary Supplement an advertisement for his forthcoming introduction to the philosophy of Francis Bacon.

“Tony,” says the colleague, “I didn’t know you knew about Bacon.” Quinton fixed his eye and answered coolly, “I know enough”.

Knowing enough is just what you need to be a good tutor.

The demands of research are something altogether different.