universities, it is clear to everyone that scholarship is on the defen
Indeed, I am inclined to suppose that whenever the genetic method
sive and is ready to share the rule with its antagonist.
is attacked we ought to suspect that special interests are being de
This revision of the academic polity can be regarded only with
fended. So far is it from being true that the genetic method is in
satisfaction. The world seems to become less and less responsive to
itself inimical to the work of art, that the very opposite is so; a
literature; we can even observe that literature is becoming somework of art, or any human thing, studied in its genesis can take on thing like an object of suspicion, and it is possible to say of the
an added value. Still, the genetic method can easily be vulgarized,
historical study of literature that its very existence is an evidence of
and when it is used in its vulgar form, it can indeed reduce the
this mistrust. De Quincey's categories of knowledge and power are
value of a thing; in much genetic study the implication is clear that
most pertinent here; the traditional scholarship, in so far as it takes
to the scholar the work of art is nothing but its conditions.
literature to be chiefly an object of knowledge, denies or obscures
One of the attractions of the genetic study of art is that it seems
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to offer a high degree of certitude. Aristotle tells us that every study
they forget that the literary work is ineluctably an historical fact, and,
has its own degree of certitude and that the well-trained man acwhat is more important, that its historicity is a fact in our aeshetic cepts that degree and does not look for a greater one. We may add
experience. Literature, we may say, must in some sense always be
that there are different kinds as well as different degrees of certian historical study, for literature is an historical art. It is historical tude, and we can say that the great mistake of the scientific-hisin three separate senses.
torical scholarship is that it looks for a degree and kind of certitude
In the old days the poet was supposed to be himself an historian,
that literature does not need and cannot allow.
a reliable chronicler of events. Thucydides said that he was likely
The error that is made by literary scholars when they seek for a
to be an inaccurate historian, but Aristotle said that he was more
certitude analogous with the certitude of science has been so often
accurate, because more general, than any mere annalist; and we,
remarked that at this date little more need be said of it. Up to a
following Aristotle, suppose that a large part of literature is properly
point the scientific study of art is legitimate and fruitful; the great
historical, the recording and interpreting of personal, national,
thing is that we should recognize the terminal point and not try
and cosmological events.
to push beyond it, that we should not expect that the scientific study
Then literature is historical in the sense that it is necessarily aware
of, say, literature will necessarily assure us of the experience of
of its own past. It is not always consciously aware of this past, but
literature; and if we wish as teachers to help others to the experiit is always practically aware of it. The work of any poet exists by ence of literature, we cannot do so by imparting the fruits of our
reason of its connection with past work, both in continuation and
scientific study. What the partisans of the so-called New Criticism
in divergence, and what we call his originality is simply his special
revolted against was the scientific notion of the fact as transferred
relation to tradition. The point has been fully developed by T. S.
in a literal way to the study of literature. They wished to restore
Eliot in his well-known essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
autonomy to the work of art, to see it as the agent of power rather
And Mr. Eliot reminds us how each poet's relation to tradition
than as the object of knowledge.
changes tradition itself, so that the history of literature is never
The faults of these critics we know. Perhaps their chief fault they
quiet for long and is never merely an additive kind of growth.
share with the scientific-historical scholars themselves-they try too
Each new age makes the pattern over again, forgetting what was
hard. No less than the scholars, the critics fall into an error that
once dominant, finding new affinities; we read any work within a
Chapman denounced, the great modern illusion "that anything
kaleidoscope of historical elements.
whatever ... can be discovered through hard intellectual work
And in one more sense literature is historical, and it is with this
and concentration." We often feel of them that they make the elucisense that I am here chiefly concerned. In the existence of every dation of poetic ambiguity or irony a kind of intellectual calisthenic
work of literature of the past, its historicity, its pastness, is a factor
ritual. Still, we can forgive them their strenuousness, remembering
of great importance. In certain cultures the pastness of a work of
that something has happened to our relation with language which
art gives it an extra-aesthetic authority which is incorporated into its
seems to require that we make methodical and explicit what was
aesthetic power. But even in our own culture with its ambivalent
once immediate and unformulated.
feeling about tradition, there inheres in a work of art of the past
But there is another fault of the New Critics of which we must
a certain quality, an element of its aesthetic existence, which we can
take notice. It is that in their reaction from the historical method
identify as its pastness. Side by side with the formal elements of the
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work, and modifying these elements, there is the element of history,
tween Now and Then there is any essential difference, the spirit of
which, in any complete aesthetic analysis, must be taken into
man being one and continuous. But it is only if we are aware of the
account.
reality of the past as past that we can feel it as alive and present. If,
The New Critics exercised their early characteristic method alfor example, we try to make Shakespeare literally contemporaneous, most exclusively upon lyric poetry, a genre in which the historical
we make him monstrous. He is contemporaneous only if we know
element, although of course present, is less obtrusive than in the long
how much a man of his own age he was; he is relevant to us only
poem, the novel, and the drama. But eve� in the lyric
_
�oe� the
if we see his distance from us. Or to take a poet closer to us in actual
factor of
historicity is part of the aesthetic expenence; 1t 1s not
time, Wordsworth's Immortality Ode is acceptable to us only when
merely a negative condition of the other elements, such as prosody
it is understood to have been written at a certain past moment; if it
or diction, which, if they are old enough, are likely to be insuffihad appeared much later than it did, if it were offered to us now ciently understood-it is itself a positive aesthetic factor with posias a contemporary work, we would not admire it; and the same is tive and pleasurable relations to the other aesthetic factors. It is a
true of The Prelude, which of all works of the Romantic Movepart of the given of the work, which we cannot help but r�spond t�.
ment is closest to our present interest. In the pastness of these works
The New Critics imply that this situation should not exist, but it
lies the assurance of their validity and relevance.
cannot help existing, and we have to take it into account.
The question is always arising: What is the real poem? Is it the
We are creatures of time, we are creatures of the historical sense,
poem we now perceive? Is it the poem the author consciously innot only as men have always been but in a new way since the tended? Is it the poem the author intended and his first readers
time of Walter Scott. Possibly this may be for the worse; we would
read? Well, it is all these things, depending on the state of our
perhaps be stronger if we believed that Now contained all things,
knowledge. But in addition the poem is the poem as it existed in
and that we in our barbarian moment were all that had ever been.
history, as it has lived its life from Then to Now, as it is a thing
Without the sense of the past we might be more certain, less
which submits itself to one kind of perception in one age and anweighted down and apprehensive. We might also be less generous, other kind of perception in another age, as it exerts in each age a
and certainly we would be less aware. In any case, we have the sense
different kind of power. This makes it a thing we can never wholly
of the past and must live with it, and by it.
understand-other things too, of course, help to make it that-and
And we must read our literature by it. Try as we will, we cannot
the mystery, the unreachable part of the poem, is one of its aesthetic
be like Partridge at the play, wholly without the historical sense.
elements.
The leap of the imagination which an audience makes when it re
To suppose that we can think like men of another time is as much
sponds to Hamlet is enormous, and it requires a comprehensive,
of an illusion as to suppose that we can think in a wholly different
although not necessarily a highly instructed, sense of the past. This
way. But it is the first illusion that is exemplified in the attitude of
sense does not, for most artistic purposes, need to be highly inthe anti-historical critics. In the admirable poetry textbook of structed; it can consist largely of the firm belief that there really is
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the authors disclaim all
such a thing as the past.
historical intention. Their purpose being what it is, they are right
In the New Critics' refusal to take critical account of the histo do so, but I wonder if they are right in never asking in their toricity of a work there is, one understands, the impulse to make the
aesthetic analysis the question: What effect is created by our knowlwork of the past more immediate and more real, to deny that be-edge that the language of a particular poem is not such as would
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The Sense of the Past
179
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...,_
be uttered by a poet writing now? To read a poem of even a hunone fact, he continues, which gives us the license to speculate-this dred years ago requires as much translation of its historical ciris the fact that the choice spirits arise from and are related to the cumstance as of its metaphors. This the trained and gifted critic is
mass of the people of their time. "The question, therefore, is not
likely to forget; his own historical sense is often so deeply ingrained
altogether concerning the taste, genius, and spirit of a few, but conthat he is not wholly conscious of it, and sometimes, for reasons of cerning those of a whole people; and may, therefore, be accounted
his own, he prefers to keep it merely implicit. Yet whether or not it
for, in some measure, by general causes and principles." This gives
is made conscious and explicit, the historical sense is one of the
us our charter to engage in cultural history and cultural criticism,
aesthetic and critical faculties.
but we must see that it is a charter to deal with a mystery.
What more apposite reminder of this can we have than the early
The refinement of our historical sense chiefly means that we
impulse of the New Critics themselves to discover all poetic virtue
keep it properly complicated. History, like science and art, involves
in the poetry of the seventeenth century, the impulse, only lately
abstraction: we abstract certain events from others and we make
modified, to find the essence of poetic error in the poetry of Rothis particular abstraction with an end in view, we make it to manticism? Their having given rein to this impulse is certainly not
serve some purpose of our will. Try as we may, we cannot, as we
illegitimate. They were doing what we all do, what we all must and
write history, escape our purposiveness. Nor, indeed, should we try
even should do: they were involving their aesthetics with certain
to escape, for purpose and meaning are the same thing. But in
cultural preferences, they were implying choices in religion, metapursuing our purpose, in making our abstractions, we must be physics, politics, manners. And in so far as they were doing this by
aware of what we are doing; we ought to have it fully in mind that
showing a preference for a particular period of the past, which they
our abstraction is not perfectly equivalent to the infinite complicabrought into comparison with the present, they were exercising their tion of events from which we have abstracted. I should like to sughistorical sense. We cannot question their preference itself; we can gest a few ways in which those of us who are literary scholars can
only question the mere implicitness of their historical sense, their
give to our notion of history an appropriate complication.
attitude of making the historical sense irrelevent to their aesthetic.
It ought to be for us a real question whether, and in what way,
But if the historical sense is always with us, it must, for just that
human nature is always the same. I do not mean that we ought to
reason, be refined and made more exact. We have, that is, to open
settle this question before we get to work, but only that we insist
our minds to the whole question of what we mean when we speak
to ourselves that the question is a real one. What we certainly know
of causation in culture. Hume, who so shook our notions of causahas changed is the expression of human nature, and we must keep tion in the physical sciences, raises some interesting questions of
before our minds the problem of the relation which expression
causation in culture. "There is no subject," he
says, "in which we
bears to feeling. E. E. Stoll, the well-known Shakespearean critic,
must proceed with more caution than in tracing the history of the
has settled the matter out of hand by announcing the essential differarts and sciences; lest we assign causes which never existed and ence between what he calls "convention" and what he calls "life "
reduce what is merely contingent to stable and universal principles."
and he insists that the two may have no truck with each other, that
The cultivators of the arts, he goes on to say, are always few in
we cannot say of Shakespeare that he is psychologically or philonumber and their minds are delicate and "easily perverted."
sophically acute because these are terms we use of "life," whereas
"Chance, therefore, or secret and unknown causes must have great
Shakespeare was dealing only with "convention." This has the
influence on the rise and progress of all refined arts." But there is
virtue of suggesting how important is the relation of "convention"
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to "life," but it misses the point that "life" is always expressed
is no less a cause. He may be used as the barometer, but let us not
through "convention" and in a sense always is "convention," and
forget that he is also part of the weather. We have been too easily
that convention has meaning only because of the intentions of life.
satisfied by a merely elementary meaning of environment; we have
Professor Stoll seems to go on the assumption that Shakespeare's
been content with a simple quantitative implication of the word,
audiences were conscious of convention; they were aware of it, but
taking a large and literally environing thing to be always the encertainly not conscious of it; what they were conscious of was life, vironment of a smaller thing. In a concert room the audience and
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