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Frank Kermode's new epilogue

Romantic Image was written in the summer of 1955. It was virtually unplanned; I was trying to write something quite different when the idea for this book lodged itself in my head, already, it seemed, in a pretty advanced state of development, and the labour preceding its birth was the least painful I have ever suffered. It would be hard to say why this was so. Certainly I was indebted to the conversation of learned and sprightly colleagues who had an informed interest in the 'decadent' literature of the late Victorian era. And I had a long-standing interest in Yeats. In the late winter or early spring of 1955 I had been asked to take part in a series of public lectures, each about a single poem, and I chose 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory'. This lecture, as it turned out, was the germ of the book.

It was Yeats who awakened my interest in the image of the dancer, and in one particular dancer, Loïe Fuller. When Romantic Image was finished, I went in search of this remarkable woman, found out at least as much about her as I wished to know, and wrote it up in a long essay called 'Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev', which was included in a collection called Puzzles and Epiphanies, published by Routledge in 1962. That piece develops the material and, I hope, adds to the interest of the fourth chapter of the present book, especially in the form in which it appeared in an American theatrical magazine (Theatre Arts, September, 1962), where it was accompanied by some slightly disconcerting photographs of Fuller in action. In respect of popular fame or notoriety she had always taken second place to her rival Isidora Duncan, who had the advantage of a more spectacular private life; but Fuller was the true innovator and the finer source of poetic inspiration (few performers, and certainly not Isidora, have earned the accolade of an ecstatically obscure tribute from Mallarmé) and of recent years the balance has been to some degree corrected. In the eighties a large exhibition, mounted in California and shown also in Paris, though not, unfortunately, in London, exploited quantities of surviving material - paintings and films and music - and did much to re-establish Fuller's importance.

A book of literary criticism or literary history that is almost half a century old is bound to seem in some ways, if only superficially, a bit old-fashioned, and I was struck, as I read through it for the first time in many years, by the obsolete punctilio with which one then addressed living writers: Mr. this, Professor that, Miss so-and-so. Everybody had to be addressed in this way until they died, when the courtesies immediately ceased. Nowadays women writers are called simply by their surnames, which no doubt seems to young persons natural and proper, but the practice always strikes me as a bit chilling, and perhaps in its way just as odd or awkward as constant reference to Mr. Eliot or Miss Tuve. And I also notice - though this fault may have been peculiar to me, and if it is so I hope I've corrected it - a certain weightiness, an orotundity of manner, an avoidance of the colloquial, that persisted among men of letters into the first half of the twentieth century. Eliot used it most effectively in his literary journalism; it passed as the culture changed and posh prose went down-market. If one had to name its most potent destroyer one would have to cite William Empson, whose carefully cultivated squirearchical breeziness did much to blow away the mandarin solemnities of the professors. That high horse, as Yeats remarked with regret, is now riderless. For my part I'm glad it is, but as I read through this book I occasionally notice, with a twinge of embarrassment, my attempts, as a much younger writer, to mount it.

Romantic Image has often been reprinted, and seems to have had some influence on later criticism. It would be difficult to name names; the torrent of academic books, critical, historical, theoretical, that was soon to be unleashed and which continues to this day makes it fairly certain, as is the way with these things, that some aspects of the general idea of the book got into circulation, even among critics who hadn't actually read it. The argument for the historical continuity of certain aesthetic assumptions from the Romantics to Symbolists (Decadents), and so into the mid-twentieth century, is still commonplace and has probably been reinforced by the great revival of scholarly interest in the art of the late nineteenth century but also in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats. It is of course expressed differently, often with more energetic scholarship, and usually, after the theoretical revolution of the sixties - a long revolution, still in progress - much more obscurely.

I have to admit that the foolhardy advice offered in the closing passages of the book has generally been ignored. Although the professors are far from having neglected him, no great number of poets have returned to Milton, despite my willing them to do so, and urging the point in another collection published by Routledge (The Living Milton, 1960). And if they ever do, it will certainly not be because I advised it.

Modern academic criticism is, as I've already remarked, so abundant that it would not be easy to provide a general account of how attitudes to the themes discussed in Romantic Image, and the ways they are talked about, have changed. Over the past thirty or forty years criticism, as expounded, for instance, in the eighth volume of Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, has concerned itself for the most part with varieties of structuralism and post-structuralism, with hermeneutics and phenomenology and speech-act theory. Traditional criticism has been subjected to what a contributor to that volume describes as a 'relentless destabilization' induced by various kinds of structural analysis. For example, the notion of organic unity, so essential to Romantic thought, is transformed into something more like an assumption that works of literature possess internal regularities, and is thought of as 'a unity of devices' rather than the imaginative product Coleridge had in mind; so that, although some are still willing to accept a fainter biological analogy between works of art and the integrity of living creatures, the organism is now thought of as in essential respects quite like a machine, which is for the Romantics the antithesis of the organism. Little credibility now attaches to the once exciting notion of A. W. Schlegel that art, 'creating autonomously like nature, both organized and organizing, must form living works, which are first set in motion, not by an outside mechanism like a pendulum, but by an indwelling power like the solar system'; or to Pater's belief that 'thought and its sensible embodiment could be completely fused'.

These are not formulae to trouble the mind of the modern academic critic. That the figure of the dancer, which summed up the Paterian idea, could send serious men hunting for living examples, which they claimed to find in the High Mass as celebrated at the Madeleine in Paris, or in the Japanese No¯ dancers, or in those performers so captivating to the Symbolists of Paris - Loïe Fuller, Jane Avril and the rest - must seem either baffling, quaint, or simply without interest except as a curiosity, a fashion now defunct but worth an occasional indulgent nod. Yet in their day these manifestations could inspire scholars to lengthy studies in the history of religious dancing, and impel clergymen like Stewart Headlam, self-proclaimed advocate of 'the Mass, the Ballet, and the Single Tax', to cultivate the acquaintance of dancing girls as earnestly as poets like Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson, haunters of the stage doors of the nineties music halls. It might perhaps be claimed that this complex of fact is susceptible to what is nowadays called 'thick description', after the anthropological method of Clifford Geertz: if you study a Balinese cockfight you need to do so 'all the way down', to see it in the whole complex of the culture. But that is not what one was consciously attempting at the time.

Although the question seems incapable of ever being convincingly answered, these newer critical methods are wary of or indifferent to the old, heated debate about the relevance of the author's intention. The question remains as to whether all speculation on the subject is illicit, or whether that brusque conclusion should be rejected or subtly modified; but the issue no longer seems of prime importance, as it always did to Empson. The main interest is more in texts than in artists, or in the processes of creation. The professional critics resign the biographies of artists to the general public, which appears to have more appetite for them than for any form of literary criticism. Animating this interest in such biographies, there may be a faint recollection of the Romantic idea that although the poet is, in Wordsworth's expression, a man speaking to men (and women: or a woman speaking to women and men), he or she is endowed with a higher degree of sensibility, of sensory organisation; yet in spite of his or her unique endowment the poet is made of the same stuff as everybody else. Artists feel what everybody feels only more intensely; this power of feeling will affect their work, and it is something the ordinary reader cannot hope to match, so that one falls back on the identity of the fundamental endowment of sensibility as more manageable, and, given the reader's inferior equipment, the life is more interesting than the work. And one may, with a justifiable highhandedness, deplore this choice of life over art, this preference for biographical prying, this exploration of the vicissitudes and passions to be detected in the lives of creative personalities, condemning it because it diverts the attention that should be given to the only important subject, the subject in the absence of which the lives of artists would have no particular appeal, namely the product, the work of art. Yet one cannot help thinking that to do so is probably a form of critical snobbery, for in our ordinary behaviour we tend to believe that the patterns and crises even of lives that seem ordinary are probably not really so - most lives being found on examination or inquiry to be marked by mute sufferings and silent eccentricities that may present themselves more vividly, and more pleasantly, to the mind when considered in relation to the pains and passions of a Keats or a Van Gogh. These characteristics are the matter of our daily, habitual observation and concern and gossip, and it seems hard to insist that this strong habit must be given up when attention is directed to extraordinary persons, persons of acknowledged celebrity.

The question of history is also difficult. The flourishing doctrines or attitudes of the New Historicism make little allowance for the sort of historical narrative sketched in Romantic Image or in that more remarkable book, Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony. They would suffer under the description 'Old Historicism'. The New Historicism is opposed to such narratives, having as its aim the elucidation of historical cultures by means expressly opposed to the conventional assumption that the right assumption is that one thing can be shown to lead to another - that there is, for example, a continuity worthy of notice between the full Romantic idea of organicism and the Lilith of Rossetti or the Jane Avril of Arthur Symons or Yeats's various dancers. (One might also include in the list Eliot's Nijinsky, and even suggest that the totally impassive face of the dancer image is historically related to his idea of the necessary impersonality of art.)

The related notion of cost, of the price paid by the artist who, as a man, suffers so that it may become possible for him, as artist, to create, may nowadays surface here and there, but it is not of primary interest. It is, one sees, an idea that is itself part of the Romantic tradition, vulnerable to satire or simply to neglect, and liable to be coarsened by reduction to tales of starving bohemians, beats or hippies. And yet it still has some merit, even as a vague, unformulated assumption in the popular mind, even when assigned more or less exclusively to certain artists - Beethoven, Schubert, Rothko, Sylvia Plath. It may well be that we have altered the contours of our thinking about suffering, so that the suffering of artists is no longer distinguishable as the result of a way of life that separates them from people more generally - opium, alcohol, sexual disease, suicide, and so on. Intelligent people probably now have a clearer and more painful idea of psychic pain; where you seek it you may well find it, whether or not the subject has the privilege of being an artist.

I am coming close to saying that Romantic Image, written in a dialect of literary-critical English that is no longer current, nevertheless continues to treat of matters not yet entirely outside our range of legitimate interests. But that raises the question as to whose interests are legitimate. The relations between the general literary public and the academic critic have changed drastically since 1957. In those days there were publishers actively seeking to publish critical volumes by young academics, who shared their confidence that there was an educated public for criticism and that what they wrote would seem interesting and important to that public.

In America there was the exemplary figure of Lionel Trilling, a very serious writer, a moralist in whose thought the advocacy of literature was a necessary contribution to the health of society. In Britain Dr. Leavis found the scrutiny of texts an activity continuous with the work of promoting the welfare, or retarding the decadence, of the national culture. Neither of these twentieth- century sages is now as highly esteemed as formerly, and the old Arnoldian tradition, which fostered the notion that criticism (including literary criticism) was a force for civilisation, a prime cultural necessity, is pretty well dead. In Britain the efforts of I. A. Richards to teach intensive, high-level reading still have a sort of afterlife, but his conviction that the whole world could be improved if everybody would listen to him and learn to read well no longer animates the labours of university teachers who are passionate about theory but not about poetry. And the general educated public has not taken enthusiastically to theory.

In short, the assumptions of the fifties concerning the scope and reach of literary criticism are no longer valid. Romantic Image was very much of its time, and one sees everywhere in it evidence of what must now seem a naive confidence that this kind of study was worth making, that there would be, out there among a reasonably large constituency of educated readers, a sufficient number of men and women who would share the author's belief or delusion. And it may be that the tone of this Epilogue is too pessimistic. It may be that the older ways of doing things still have a nostalgic appeal, that there are readers who care not only for the pre-history of modern poetry, but for poems and poets - as students often are before confronted or disillusioned by the melancholy novelties of the modern graduate school. That there has been, over the years, such a potential audience, not a mere remnant but a body of readers who care about such matters, is encouraging. Some books have not been allowed to die. Romantic Image, by no means the best of them, is now in its forty-sixth year of life, and there must be those who, by reading it along with those others, keep it alive. I owe such readers a debt of gratitude, but that is a small matter. Preserving the idea of criticism as a civilised and civilising force is much more important, and they are doing that, too.