They will have to be willing to fight for their position. Few would deny that the massive assault on the traditional aesthetic structures of British culture that had its roots before the First World War has continued ever since. What writers in the 1940s referred to as “mass” culture has produced not only irresistible waves of popular culture, but the intellectually well-drilled movements summed up by terms such as post-modernism, structuralism, cultural relativism and multi-culturalism. Writers in these movements, marked by a propensity to theorise at length, have been generally less cultured than modernists such as Eliot and Joyce who were obsessed with reinventing rather than picking over the carcase of the European literary tradition. In short, they have been Philistines, not something that would have bothered Marx, who inspired many of them, because he was a monstrous Philistine himself.

Steiner saw the greatest danger as coming from the deconstructionists, postmodernists, and post-structuralists, who flap like eager vultures around the Promethean body of Art. The school of the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has produced many an unreadable chapter with a title such as “Althusser and Foucault in English literary theory” (why are these guys messing around with our literary theory anyway?). Marxism argued that culture was a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes, and such perspectives are common in the humanities and the young schools of cultural studies. Their tracts are usually badly written. Take, at random, Culture and Citizenship, edited by Nick Stevenson:

[G. H.] Mead’s work . . . allows us to see that citizenship is necessarily rooted in the inter-subjective nexus of the lifeworld. Following Habermas (1987), however, I contend that a lifeworld perspective is not sufficient, on its own, for critical social theory. A systems perspective is also required . . .

There is a great deal of lugubrious Gallic authority. Oh for some sweetness and light! (Arnold and Epictetus, 1851.)

Multiculturalism can mean various things, some of them entirely desirable, but that it can have a doubtful effect in aesthetic terms is suggested by the shift in texts set for GCSE English, where, for the “Different cultures” paper, pupils will encounter random international poems which have value as documents, but very mixed aesthetic or intellectual merit. This is partly no doubt because the dominant culture (ours) produces lots of poems with equally little value or content, but also because we accept the fact that by and large most teenage boys and a lot of girls are going to struggle beyond the point of anybody’s endurance with anything from the “literary heritage” that isn’t about war (Wilfred Owen has always gone down pretty well).