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 favourites[74] 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.
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 ease 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.
[74] E.g. ‘_When lovely woman stoops to folly,’ Heraclitus,
The Millers Daughter, Alexander Selkirk_, and (its best known
parts at least) _The Skylark_.