THE SENSE OF THE PAST
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whether or not it is made conscious, the historical sense is one of
the aesthetic and critical faculties.
But if the historical sense is always with us, it must, for that
reason, be refined and made more exact. Above all, it must be
kept complicated. History, like science and art, implies abstrac·
tion: we abstract certain events from others and we make this
abstraction for a purpose. Try as we will, we cannot, as we write
history, escape purpose; nor should we, for purpose and meaning
are the same thing. But in making our abstraction, we ought to be
aware of what we are doing; we ought to remember that our
abstraction is not equivalent to the infinite complication of event
from which we have abstracted. The historian, or the critic who
makes conscious his ingrained historical• sense, should always be
hUmbly aware of the limits of his abstraction and be willing to
complicate it. I should like to suggest a few ways in which we
can complicate our sense of the past.
l.
One question we ought to raise is whether, and in what
way, human nature is always the same. I do not mean that we
ought to settle this question before we get to work, but it ought to
be always a real question for us. A thing which we know does
change is the
expression
of human nature and we have to keep
before our minds the problem of what relation expression has to
feeling. A well-known Shakespearean scholar, Professor Stoll, has
settled the problem out of hand by announcing a deep difference
between what he calls "convention" and what he calls "life" and he
insists that the two have no truck with each other, that we cannot
say
of Shakespeare that he is psychologically or philosophically
acute because these are terms we use for "life" whereas Shakes–
peare was dealing only with "convention." This has the virtue of
stating the problem, but of course it misses the point that "life" is
always expressed through "convention" and in a sense always
is
"convention" and that convention has meaning only because of the
intentions of life. Professor Stoll seems to go on the assumption
that Shakespeare's audiences were conscious of convention; they
were aware of it but certainly not conscious of it; what they were
conscious of was life, into which they made an instantaneous trans–
lation of all that went on on the stage. The problem of the inter–
play between the emotion and the available convention for it, the
reciprocal influence they exert, is a very difficult one, and I scarcely
