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Evaluation 259
tion. They seem not, however, to be many. Thirty years ago,
Skelton might seem a parallel case, but not now; we find him
brilliant, "sincere," modern. Meanwhile, the largest reputations
survive generational tastes : Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton—even
Dryden and Pope and Wordsworth and Tennyson
have a permanent, though not a "fixed" position.
The aesthetic structures of such poets seem so complex and
rich that they can satisfy the sensibility of successive ages : there
is the Neo-Classical Milton admired by Addison in his Spectator
essays and by Pope, and the Romantic Milton or Miltons of
Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley. There was the Shakespeare
of Coleridge, and now we have the Shakespeare of Wilson
Knight. Each generation leaves elements in the great work of
art unappropriated, finds levels or strata lacking in "beauty" or
even positively ugly (as the Neo-Classicists did Shakespeare's
puns), yet finds the whole aesthetically satisfying.
We seem thus far arrived at a kind of generationism which
denies the relativity of taste viewed as the individual's but finds
alternations in literary history of more or less contrary sets of
aesthetic criteria (as in Wolfflin's contrast of Renaissance and
Baroque) and suggests no getting behind or beyond these alter-
nations to common principles; we seem also arrived at "multiva-
lence," 23 the view that enduring works of art appeal to different
admiring generations for different reasons or, to push the two
conclusions together, that major works, the "classics," keep their
place but keep it by a series of changing appeals or "causes,"
while original, highly special works (e.g., Donne) and minor
works (good in the style of the period, e.g., Prior or Churchill)
gain in reputation when the literature of the day bears some
kind of sympathetic relation to that of their day, lose when that
relation is adverse. 24
We move with difficulty, perhaps, beyond this position, but
move beyond it we can. For one thing, we need not limit the
appreciation earlier ages had for their classics (Homer, Virgil,
Milton, et al.) by the arguments their critics mustered up. We
can deny that earlier criticism was able to do justice to the crea-
tive work of its own day or indeed to its own aesthetic experi-
ence. 25 We can also affirm that a really adequate literary theory
can avoid the either-or of generationalism : thus George Wil-
—