FRANK KERMODE
207
whole, it need somehow be a historical activity. The practitioner,
doubtless with a very modern awareness of the discomforts of his
position, must reenact the texts of another time in his very modern
(and so consciously restricted, historically limited) minJ; and he
must do so with as much respect as possible for the original cir–
cumstances of that text. When Symons wrote on the
J
acobeans and
on Blake and Wagner, when Eliot studied Dante and Marvell and
Laforgue, they were doing exactly that, and they were doing it as
part of the necessary program of the modern. Of course they did the
work, each in his degree, with the assurance of artists; and so, in his
degree, did Bennett.
It
is taken for granted among such people that
the truth of art and the truth of criticism depend upon just such a
confluence of horizons. One emblem of this confidence might be the
aging Yeats passionately reading Berkeley and Plotinus, and writing
A Vision .
I suppose academic historians find it difficult to take that
book seriously, hardly knowing what to do with a universal history
that is meant to provide "metaphors for poetry." And yet in art it is
just such visionary history that best preserves the past alive in the
present: we have our examples in Eliot, in Picasso, in the quotations
and transformations of much modern music.
The critic may not make so free. His contribution to our sense
of the original plenitude of a text takes the form not of new text but
of comment. There are, or there ought to be, hermeneutical rules
governing comment. I do not mean the one that says that critics can
use a sort of time machine and confront the text as it was in its begin–
ning. That rule won't work. The encounter with an old text must be
made by a critic who breathes his own air and knows what it is that
debars him from replicating the original experience. He may of
course think of the experience as his frankly unattainable goal. Be–
tween the original and his word there stretches the tradition in which
he was formed . Sometimes it is fallacious, purblind, provincial; but
it is by imaginatively taking note of his descent from it, and
recognizing the impermanence and temporal provinciality of his
own position , that the critic should pay his tribute to past and
present. Wallace Stevens thought of poems , even the best, as
ephemeral, as way stations on the road to an unattainable Supreme
Fiction . Criticism might learn from that, and think of itself as notes
toward an unattainable supreme interpretation . Or, to put it
another way , placed as we are in time, we have to make do with the
sensus
as we perceive it, and merely conjecture a
sententia
always
