23:!
PARTISAN REVIEW
he was a philosophic historian; and we, following Aristotle, sup·
pose that a large part of literary activity is properly historical–
the recording of personal, national and cosmological events.
2. Then too, the poet is historical in the sense that he is
necessarily aware of the past of his own art. He is not always
consciously aware of the past but he is always practically aware.
His own work exists only in connection with past work, both in
continuation and divergence and what we call his originality is
simply his special relation to his tradition. I shall not linger over
a point that has been fully developed by T. S. Eliot in his essay,
"Tradition and the Individual Talent." And Mr. Eliot reminds us
how each poet's relation to tradition changes tradition itself, so
that the history of literature is never quiet for long and is never
merely an additive kind of growth. Each new age makes the pat·
tern over again, forgetting what was once dominant, reviving what
was forgotten, finding new affinities; we read any work within a
kaleidoscope.
3. And in one more sense literature is historical. In the
existence of every work of literature, its historicity, its pastness, is
a factor of great importance. In certain cultures the pastness of a
work of art gives it an extra-aesthetic authority. But even in our
own culture with its ambivalent feeling about tradition, there
inheres in a work of art of the past a certain quality, a fact of
aesthetic perception. Side by side with the formal elements of the
work and modifying these elements is the "tone of time," which,
in any complete aesthetic analysis must be taken into account.
It is significant that the critics have concentrated their art on
lyric poetry in which the historical element, though of course pres·
ent, is less obtrusive than in the long poem, the novel and the
drama. But even in the lyric the factor of historicity is part of
the aesthetic experience, not merely a negative condition of the
other elements, such as prosody or diction (though insofar as it
is ignorance it is a limitation) ; it is itself a positive factor with
positive and pleasurable relation to the other factors. The critics
imply that this situation
should
not exist, but it cannot help existing
and we have to take it into account.
Let me give an example: I once came late to a concert and
took my seat after the first piece had begun. I had only time to
glance at my program to discover that it was by
J.
C. Smith.
It
