208
PARTISAN REVIEW
beyond our reach. Good criticism is always related to what has been
said before, yet is always saying something new and creating the
possibility of later, unimagined imaginings.
I introduced these words
sensus
and
sententia
because I have
been reading an admirable essay on Dante by John Ahern : he
believes that the great lines near the end of the
Paradiso,
the vision of
all the scattered pages of the world bound up into one volume,
legato
con amore in un volume,
speaks not only of God so binding together the
substance and accidents of the universe into one, but also of the
world that is Dante's own book, issued first in parts , bound up by
readers when complete . Then they may see it , as God in the light of
eternity sees the world .
It
becomes a whole. Where they had seen
only the separate senses , they could now see the whole sentence, the
simultaneous meaning of the poem, transcending the scattered
parts : the
supreme
sense, the
supreme
fiction. And as I read Mr.
Ahern's article , I remembered that Dante too was familiar with the
concept of the
aevum,
that order between time and eternity which
was the time of the angels, but also constituted the temporal order in
which certain human institutions existed: corporations, kingship,
academies, institutions established by mortals yet sempiternal;
neither eternal nor of time . Years ago I tried to find a use for this
concept in the consideration of fictional time; now I see it as a figure
for the relationship between interpretation, which belongs to time ,
and the text interpreted, which may be , figuratively, of a different
temporal order. The book, in the form handed down to us in the
Christian tradition, is another emblem; it offers a temporal sequence
but also stability of relationship between one part and another, as if
they had existence beyond the temporal sequence. That is why
Dante used it as the great figure of the universe . And in the light of
some approximation to the
sententia,
which is all that is at any mo–
ment accessible to us, we can look afresh at the
sensus.
The tradition of letters may be thought of as such a book.
When Arnold Bennett caught the reflection of J uvenal in
Philaster
(or, as one may just as well say, of
Philaster
in J uvenal) he was
modestly assuming a tradition of this kind. When Eliot writes of the
fire that refines Arnaut he is doing the same thing in a more striking,
more allusive, more fragmentary modern way. And it is hard to
think that anyone who fails to turn the pages back and forth in some
such manner can be serious about the profession of letters. Profes–
sionals who do not want to do so, who wish the past away or under–
rate its pressure on the present , are not professionals in
letters
but in
