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contrast comes as a shock at first, the comparison is not made on
evaluative grounds, but as affording an insight into the artist's relation
with created things. It is Mr. Tate's argument that the nature of sensi–
bility has radically changed under the impact of the Cartesian heritage.
Distrust of the sensible world and of the lower orders of knowledge has
undermined analogy, and man, aping angels, endeavors to seize things,
not by their sensible qualities, but in their essences. Some of the finest
pages in Mr. Tate's book are those in which he shows how this dis–
astrous bent has led to a modern misunderstanding of Canto XXXIII
in the
Paradiso.
Dante's progress toward the Beatific Vision has been
shown us by way of analogy, but analogy necessarily ceases in the
presence of the Plenitude of Being. Only men with pretensions to angelic
intelligence-Cartesians, let us say-would argue that it was necessary
for Dante to succeed in giving us an adequate image of the Godhead.
The only remaining essay I shall have space to mention is the one
on Longinus, which is a much needed rehabilitation of a critic who has
been unfairly neglected. I remember that I once copied out Longinus's
analysis of Sappho's Ode to Anactoria, which Mr. Tate discusses, and
asked a boy who was reading literature if he knew where it came from.
He believed it was Coleridge, but on second thought decided it was
Richards. He was right about one thing: Longinus has an unusual note
of modernity that still comes through the successive degradations of
romantic interpretation to which he has been submitted. But if Mr.
Tate deals with Longinus as a kind of classical 'new critic,' his interest
is related on a deeper level to the central theme I have been discussing.
If
Cartesian dualism leads, as Mr. Tate says, to the fatal hypertrophy
of man's divided facuIties, it similarly leads to a desiccating overempha–
sis on isolated aspects of art and criticism, which necessarily reflect the
conception of human nature out of which they grow. Mr. Tate finds
in
Longinus a deeper insight into the nature of unity in a work of art
than anyone else before Coleridge was to have. He interprets Longinus
as saying:
... we learn from the development of technique that stylistic autonomy
is a delusion, because style comes into existence only as it discovers
the subject; and conversely the subject exists only after it has been
fonn ed by the style ... Style reveals that which is not style in the
process of forming it. Style does not create the subject, it discovers it.
That is to say, style and subject are intrinsically dependent on each
other in a way that body and soul, the world of sense and the world of
mind, are not in Descartes's riven universe. "There
is
a reciprocal
relation ... a dynamic, shifting relation between technique and subject:
