MODERN LITERATURE
17
selves, and tum their beneficent imperialistic gaze upon what is
called Life Itself, the feeling grows among our educated classes
that little can be experienced unless it is validated by some estab–
lished intellectual discipline, with the result that experience loses
much of its personal immediacy for us and becomes part of an
accredited societal activity. This is not entirely true and I don't
want to play the boring academic game of pretending that it
is
entirely true, that the university mind wilts and withers what–
ever it touches. I must believe, and I do believe, that the univer–
sity study of art is capable of confronting the power of a work
of
art
fully and courageously. I even believe that it can discover
and disclose power where it has not been felt before. But the
university study of
art
achieves this and chiefly with works of
art of an older period. Time has the effect of seeming to quiet
the work of
art,
domesticating it and making it into a classic,
which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely
habitual regard. University study of the right sort can reverse
this process and restore to the old work its freshness and force–
can, indeed, disclose unguessed-at power. But with the works of
art of our own present age, university study tends to accelerate
the process by which the radical and subversive work becomes
the classic work, and university study does this in the degree that
it is vivacious and responsive and what is called non-academic.
In one of his poems Yeats mocks the literary scholars, "the bald
heads forgetful of their sins," "the old, learned, respectable bald
heads," who edit the poems of the fierce and passionate young
men.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk this way?
Yeats, of course,
is
thinking of his own future fate, and no doubt
there is all the radical and comical discrepancy that he sees
between the poet's passions and the scholars' close-eyed concen–
tration on the text. Yet for my part, when I think of Catullus, I
am moved to praise the tact of
all
those old heads, from Heinsius
