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Theory of Literature
classics who "always have been and always will be admired."
The chief instances cited would naturally be the ancient Greek
and Roman authors, whose apotheosis came with the Renaissance.
By the nineteenth century, a wider knowledge of such literary
sequences as the medieval, the Celtic, the Norse, the Hindu,
and the Chinese had made such earlier "classicism" obsolete. We
are aware of works which disappear from view and then re-
appear, and of works which lose for a time their aesthetic effi-
cacy but regain it, e.g., Donne, Langland, and Pope, Maurice
Sceve and Gryphius. By reaction to authoritarianism and its ca-
nonical list, the modern view is inclined to excessive, unnecessary
relativism, to talk of the "whirligig of taste," as earlier skeptics
murmured, de gustibus non est disfutandum.
The case is more complicated than humanist or skeptic would
make it out.
The desire to affirm in some form the objectivity of literary
values does not require commitment to some static canon, to
which no new names are added and within which no shifts of
rank may occur. Allen Tate rightly challenges, as "illusion," the
assumption that "the reputation of any writer is ever fixed," to-
gether with the correlative "curious belief" that "the chief func-
tion of criticism is the ranking of authors rather than their use." 21
Like Eliot, whose dictum about the past's alteration by the
present he is remembering, Tate is a creative writer who must
believe in the present and future as well as the past of English
poetry. But we may suppose also that he thinks use as important
an objectivity as "fixed rank." And the "objectivity" of value
lies in the criteria, not in the art objects. Rank in a class is always,
so to speak, competitive and relative. So long as new entries
continue to be made, there is always the chance of a new best;
but any entry made will alter, however slightly, the rank of the
other works. Waller and Denham at once acquired and lost rank
when Pope had made his position—they were that ambivalent
thing, forerunners; they led up to Pope, but they were also
scaled down by him.
There is an opposite desire on the part of anti-academics
within and without the universities to affirm the tyranny of flux,
the "whirligig of taste." 22 Cases there are—like that of Cowley
—of generational tastes never ratified by a subsequent genera-