THE SENSE OF THE PAST
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well-trained man accepts that degree aria does not look for more;
we may add that there are different kinds of certainty and say that
the great mistake of the scientific-historical student of literature
is that he searches for a degree and kind of certainty that litera–
ture does not need and cannot allow.
The error of the scientific analogy made by literary scholars
has of late been so often pointed out that the denunciation has
become cliche. It is a denunciation that needs to be made with
care. Anything, art included, may legitimately be made a subject
of scientific study and insight gained by it. The great point is that
we should not expect that the scientific study of, say, literature will
necessarily assure us of the experience of literature; and if we
wish to help others to the experience of literature we cannot do so
by imparting the fruits of our scientific study. What the embattled
critics revolted against was the scientific ideal of the Fact. They
wished to restore autonomy to the work of art, to see it as a source
of pleasure rather than as the mere object of knowledge.
The faults of these critics we know. Perhaps their chief fault
they share with the historical scholars-they try too hard; no less
than the historical scholars they fall into the error that Chapman
denounced, "the great illusion . . . that anything whatever . . .
could be discovered through hard intellectual work and concentra–
tion." We often feel of them that they make the elucidation of
poetic ambiguity a kind· of intellectual calisthenic ritual. Still, we
can forgive them for their strenuousness, remembering that some–
thing has happened to our relation with language which seems to
.require that we make explicit and methodical what was once
unconsciOus.
But there is another fault of the scholarly critics of which I
should like to speak. It is that in their reaction against the histori–
cal method they make an almost conscious effort to forget that the
literary work is ineluctably an historical fact and, what is more
important, that its historicity is a fact in our aesthetic experience.
Literature, we may say, must always be an historical study fot
literature is an historical art. It is historical in three separate
senses.
1.
In the old days the poet was supposed to be himself an
historian, a reliable chronicler of events. Thucydides, of course,
said that he was an inaccurate historian, but Aristotle said that
