REVIEW OF BOOKS

Hugh Lloyd-Jones on the 'classic' in modern times

Professor Kermode has taken as the starting point of his T. S. Eliot Lectures* the address 'What is a Classic?' which Eliot delivered as President of the Virgilian Society in 1944. In that lecture Eliot claimed that "our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil." He did not mean by this that Virgil was the greatest European poet; he meant that his work showed maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language and perfection of the common style to such a degree that it provided us with a criterion by which to judge our living poets.

Eliot devoted twenty-seven pages of his lecture to an argument designed to show that Virgil possessed these qualities. Only in the last five pages does he touch upon the special relation to the Roman Empire and to its spiritual continuation throughout European history enjoyed by Virgil in consequence of the subject matter of the A eneid. But Professor Kermode seems to assume that Virgil's importance for Eliot lay mainly in his significance as the propagator of an "imperialist myth" of Latin and Christian cultural continuity.

In his first lecture he gives a.learned account of Virgil's influence during the middle ages, with special reference to the imperial myth as it appeared to Dante and to others. In his second, he shows how English poets of the seventeenth century still felt the influence, but rejected the myth; he discusses Marvell and Milton, coming close to agreeing with Christopher Hill that the latter had much in common with the Muggletonians. The eighteenth century, he argues, replaced classicism with Augustanism and had no use for the imperial myth. Addison, in his Discourse of Ancient and Modern Learning, recommends the reading of Virgil, but thinks we should try to read him as his contemporaries might have done; his age did not conceive of the poet as prophet, and did not concern itself with the Christian universalist myth of Virgil. Henceforth, Professor Kermode thinks, Virgil was handed over to the philologists as an antiquity.

"The doctrine of classic as model or criterion," he writes on page fifteen (but it is really page one; the pagination of this book reminds one of wine-bottles with false bottoms), "entails, in some form, the assumption that the ancient can be more or less immediately relevant and available, in a sense contemporaneous with modern, or anyway that its nature is such that it can, by strategies of accommodation, be made so. When this assumption is rejected, the whole authority of the classic as model is being challenged, and then we have ...

*The Classic Frank Kermode (Faber and Faber £3.50)

the recurrent querelie between the ancient and modern." Eliot certainly said that Virgil should serve as a critical criterion by which our own poetry could be judged. But nowhere in his essay do I find the word "model," used twice in the paragraph I have quoted in such a way as to imply that Eliot used it. Many English poets of the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century used Virgil as a model; it might be argued that Wordsworth and Tennyson were among them. But the only poem of Eliot's time modelled on Virgil that I can think of is V. Sackville-West's poem, The Land; in an age that disliked a grand style and distrusted rhetoric, the idea of Virgil as a model would have been unthinkable. A criterion is by no means the same thing; and Virgil's importance as a criterion has, in Eliot's lecture, very little to do with Virgil as the propagator of an imperial myth.

Professor Kermode now sets out to show how certain modern authors have achieved classic quality by methods different friom those of the ancients. The early Americans, he argues in his third lecture, rejected the imperial myth and chose in the early nineteenth century a new past which was not classical but Hebraic; there is truth in this, only we must remember that they did not reject the myth of republican Rome, which was alive among them long after the epoch of the founding fathers of their own republic. The first modern author he chooses as an illustration is Hawthorne, stressing in an acute passage that writer's eagerness to leave open more than one interpretation of his characters and their behaviour. "The classic of the modern imperium," he writes, gliding from the imperial theme to that of multiplicity of meanings, "cannot be, as the Bible had been and Virgil too, a repository of certain, unchanging truths." Whether Hawthorne is a classic in the sense in which that word was used by Eliot he does not enquire; it might be argued that the characteristics of Hawthorne to which Professor Kermode draws attention disqualify him in that respect. Yet it might with better reason be contended that to be a repository of certain unchanging truths is no function of the classic; Eliot certainly never claimed that it was such.

In the fourth lecture Professor Kermode examines Wuthering Heights, certainly a work of genius, but perhaps not one which Eliot: would have called a classic. Q. D. Leavis, in a penetrating essay has ascribed the inconsis

tencies, which a close examination of the text seems to her and to Professor Kermode to reveal, to the author's failure to eliminate the traces of different earlier versions of the novel Which had different artistic aims. Professor

Kermode prefers to explain the book's "recalcitrant elements" as being due to the coexistence of a plurality of significances. Did EmIlY Bronth mean them all? Professor Kermode's view "supposes that the reader's -share in the novel is not so much a matter of knowing, by heroic efforts of intelligence and divination, what Emily Bront really meant—and knowing it. . better than she did — as of responding creatively to indeterminacies of meaning inherent in the text and possibly enlarged by the action of time." (Professor Kermode makes it quite explicit that this last phrase means that the passage of time between the writing of the book and its reading by the modern reader may have changed the situation.) He ends by pleading with us to recognise that "multiplicity of reading may result from a work's constructive ambiguity," this last being an expression borrowed from the linguist Roman Jakobson by the fashionable French critic Roland Barthes, who has made of Racine's dramas, Professor Kermode tells us, "something unashamedly sexual." "If, finally," he writes, "we compare this sketch of a modern version of the classic with the imperial classic that occupied me earlier, we see on the one hand that the modern view is necessarily tolerant of change and plurality whereas the older, regarding most forms of plurality as heretical, holds fast to the time-transcending idea of Empire."

First of all, the "imperial myth" has nothing whatever to do with the question of whether the reader should allow for "constructive ambiguities" and other agents of multiplicity of meaning in his author's text; it seems to have been dragged in simply to discredit in the eyes of the speaker's audience the old-fashioned view that a literary text means one thing and one only, which is what the author intended it to mean. It would be most unwise to assert that view in an unqualified form; even E. B. Hirsch, whom Professor Kermode cites as its main proponent in modern times, states it only with qualifying clauses. A work of literary art is not commonly designed, as Professor Kermode seems to imagine Virgil's work to have been, as "a repository of certain, unchanging truths;" far more often it presents a conflict between different forces or ideas about which different readers will feel differently according to their point of view, and between which even the author may be torn or give the appearance of being torn.

Virgil himself will furnish an example. According to orthodox Roman belief, Aeneas was right to leave Dido, and Virgil knows it; anyone who doubts it should consult an admirable lecture lately published by Mr John Sparrow. But Aeneas did so at great cost to his personal happiness and even to his personal honour. He found himself in a tragic situation, from which there was no satisfactory escape; and there will always be many who like Fox feel that he chose wrongly. Virgil had to celebrate The Roman empire and The Augustan settlement, and we have no reason for doubting that he did so willingly. But Auden's reproach that he did not include the empire's fall in the prophecy of Anchises is misdirected; no poet was ever more constantly aware of the fragility and evanescence of all human things. This kind of ambiguity is a constant feature of great art, and it is the stock-in-trade of tragedy.

But this is only one kind of multiplicity of meaning. What kind of multiplicity of meaning may legitimately be attributed to an author is not a matter to be settled by a priori generalisation. It must depend on the time, the place, the language, the genre and the individual nature of the author, as well as on the character of the multiplicity of meanings that is in question. Any critic wishing to prove a multiplicity of meaning will have to make good his claim by detailed argument, which will need to be subjected to most careful scrutiny. Even the greatest scholars find it difficult to read dead authors without havingtheir reading coloured by the atmosphere of their own time No Greek scholar of his day was more tempted than Wilamowitz, yet it is now easy to perceive that he saw Euripides in terms of Ibsen. In our efforts to understand the past, we should carry no more of our own age back with us than we can help carrying.

Being only a philologist I will be mean enough to point out that almost every time Professor Kermode quotes a Latin author he misquotes him (see pp. 24, 115, 117, 133, and note the omission of tantum on p. 13). The lectures are attractively presented, and contain a wealth of information. The best thing in them is the treatment of Hawthorne, and the detection of the influence exercised on his work by the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz; did Hawthorne know of the use made by Balzac of the work of Geoffroy de St Hilaire?

Professor Kermode reminds us that Eliot's claim for Virgil had been anticipated by Sainte-Beuve, and rejected in favour of Homer by Arnold in his Oxford inaugural lecture of 1860. 1 wish I had space to show why I agree with Arnold that 'the classic of European literature' is not Virgil but Homer — at any rate, the Homer of the Iliad.