CHAPTER XXIX

PERMANENCE AS A CRITERION

Wherewith being crown'd,

Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight.

SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet LX.

THE permanence of poetry is a subject closely connected with the foregoing. Just as there is a prejudice in favour of work with a wide popular appeal, so there is another in favour of work which lasts, which has "stood the verdict of the centuries", or is thought likely to stand it. Both are in part due to critical timidity; if we cannot decide ourselves, let us at least count hands and go with the majority.

But circumstances which have nothing to do with value sometimes determine survival, and work which is of great value must often perish for that very reason. It never gets printed, none will look at it or listen to it. And immortality often attaches itself to the bad as firmly as to the good. Few things are worse than Hiawatha or The Black Cat, Lorna Doone or Le Crime de Silvestre Bonnard, and some of the greatest favourites1 of the anthologies figure there through their 'bad eminence'.

There are, however, reasons for connecting persistence of appeal with a certain type of structure, and, which is more interesting, instant fame with a failure to appeal to subsequent generations.

1 E.g. When lovely woman stoops to folly, Heraclitus, The Miller's Daughter, Alexander Selkirk, and (its best known parts at least) The Skylark.

Work which relies upon ready-made attitudes, without being able to reconstitute similar attitudes when they are not already existent, will often make an appeal to one generation which is a mystery to the generations with different attitudes which follow. But this disadvantage from the point of view of permanence of communication does not necessarily involve any lack of value for those to whom the experiences are accessible. Very often, of course, it will accompany low value; but this need not

be so.

The permanence of some art has often been an excuse for fantastic hypotheses. Such art has been thought to embody immortal essences, to reveal special kinds of 'eternal' truths. But such debilitating speculations here no less than elsewhere should be avoided. Those are not the terms in which the matter may best be discussed. The uniformity of the impulses from which the work of art starts is a sufficient explanation of its permanence. Where the impulses involved are only accidentally touched off through being temporarily in a heightened state of excitability, we may reasonably expect that there will be little permanence. As a catchword will work one year like magic, since certain attitudes are for social reasons ready poised on a hair-trigger adjustment, and the next year be inoperative and incomprehensible, so, on a larger scale and in less striking degree, men's special social circumstances often provide opportunities for works of art which at other times are

quite inadequate stimuli. There are fashions in the most important things as in the least, but for the artist to profit by them is usually to forgo permanence. The greater the case of communication under such conditions the greater the danger of obsolescence.

Far more of the great art of the past is actually

obsolete than certain critics pretend, who forget what a special apparatus of erudition they themselves bring to their criticism. The Divina Commedia is a representative example. It is true that for adequately equipped readers who can imaginatively reproduce the world outlook of Aquinas, and certain attitudes to woman and to chastity, which are even more inaccessible, there is no obsolescence. But this is true of the most forgotten poems. Actual obsolescence is not in general a sign of low value, but merely of the use of special circumstances for communication. That a work reflects, summarises and is penetrated by its age and period is not a ground for assigning it a low value, and yet this saturation more than anything else limits the duration of its appeal. Only so far as a work avoids the catchword type in its method, and relies upon elements likely to remain stable, formal elements for example, can it escape the touch of time. That Dante is neglected is due only indirectly to his present-day obscurity; he is still as accessible as ever through his formal side. It is the labour required from readers who are not content with a partial approach which explains why he is so little read even by the scholarly. What can be translated in him, the content, is precisely what is of least present and future interest, and at the same time most difficult to understand.

CHAPTER XXX

THE DEFINITION OF A POEM

The judicious author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language; and though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age; saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was about to trace his subject “to the highest wellspring and fountain."-Biographia Literaria.

It may be useful to collect here some of the results of the foregoing sections and consider them from the point of view of the practising critic. The most salient perhaps is the desirability of distinguishing clearly between the communicative and the value aspects of a work of art. We may praise or condemn a work on either ground or upon both, but if it fails entirely as a vehicle of communication we are, to say the least, not well placed for denying its value.

But, it may be said, it will then have no value for us and its value or disvalue for us is all that we as critics pretend or should pretend to judge. To make such a reply, however, is to abdicate as a critic. At the least a critic is concerned with the value of things for himself and for people like him. Otherwise his criticism is mere autobiography. And any critic worth attention makes a further claim, a claim to sanity. His judgment is only of general interest in so far as it is representative and reflects what happens in a mind of a certain kind, developed in a certain fashion. The services of bad critics are sometimes not less than those of good critics, but that is only because we can divine

from their responses what other people's responses are likely to be.

We must distinguish between standard or normal criticism and erratic or eccentric criticism. As critics Lamb or Coleridge are very far from normal; none the less they are of extraordinary fertility in suggestion. Their responses are often erratic even when of most revelatory character. In such cases we do not take them as standards to which we endeavour to approximate, we do not attempt to see eye to eye with them. Instead we use them as means by which to make quite different approaches ourselves to the works which they have characteristically but eccentrically interpreted.

The distinction between a personal or idiosyncratic judgment and a normative is sometimes overlooked. A critic should often be in a position to say, "I don't like this but I know it is good", or "I like this and condemn it", or "This is the effect which it produces upon me, and this quite different effect is the one it should produce." For obvious reasons he rarely makes any such statements. But many people would regard praise of a work which is actually disliked by the praiser as immoral. This is a confusion of ideas. Any honest reader knows fairly well the points at which his sensibility is distorted, at which he fails as a normal critic and in what ways. It is his duty to take these into consideration in passing judgment upon the value of a work. His rank as a critic depends at least as much upon his ability to discount these personal peculiarities as upon any hypothetical impeccability of his actual responses.

So far we have been considering those cases in which the vehicle is sufficiently adequate and the critic sufficiently representative and careful for the response to be a good index of the value of the poem. But these cases are comparatively rare.