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The test of time
Zachary Sachs · 11 December 2007

Robert Philen took up a version of the hoary but eternally popular “test of time” on his blog in July, arguing that great art is great at least in part because it stands it. Though these are common enough sentiments, I think this example is admirable in its clarity and concision. “Great Art, Timeliness, and Timelessness”:

Great art always has two qualities with relation to temporality. It is of its moment – any art cannot help but be shaped by the realities of the era, but great art also reflects and shapes its moment, and does so in a different manner than equally great art of an earlier era. It is timely. Simultaneously, great art transcends its moment, it communicates powerfully well after its creation. It is timeless.

It is possible to have the first quality without the second, that is, to be timely without being timeless. This is, in fact, common. Most art quickly appears “dated,” occasionally literally, e.g. Gold Diggers of 1935; Airport 1975; Dracula 2000. (This quality of most art to become dated might not appear so from a view of any standard history of art, but that’s because the works that tend to be included for consideration are not the numerically more common works that do appear dated from any cultural and historical context) ...

While timely art without timelessness is a clear possibility, I’m not convinced that the second quality of great art, timelessness, is possible without the first, timeliness. Part of what allows for transcendence is the artist’s tapping into a universal human experience, that of grappling with reality, attempting to understand one’s surroundings and reality and attempting to shape that reality, and presenting this in artistic form requires a grappling with and groundedness in contemporary reality. In great art, we see a union of the concrete and timely and the universal and timeless.

I’m sure some noses turned up when “universal human exprerience” appeared at the party. For you, here is an excerpt from Principles of Literary Criticism in which I.A. Richards gives three pages to a summary demolition of the notion of “timelessness”. I don’t think this will be to every reader’s satisfaction, especially those secretly harboring romantic notions about Great Authors, but it is, as always, worth muttering about to oneself. “Permanence As A Criterion” (1925):

The permanence of poetry is a subject closely connected with the foregoing. Just as there is a prejudice in favour of work with a wide popular appeal, so there is another in favour of work which lasts, which has ‘stood the verdict of the centuries’, or is thought likely to stand it. Both are in part due to critical timidity; if we cannot decide ourselves, let us at least count hands and go with the majority.

But circumstances which have nothing to do with value sometimes determine survival, and work which is of great value must often perish for that very reason. It never gets printed, no one with look at it or listen to it. And immortality often attaches itself to the bad as firmly as the good. Few things are worse than Hiawatha or The Black Cat, Lorna Doone or Le Crime de Silvestre Bonnard, and some of the greatest favourites of the anthologies feature there through their ‘bad eminence’.

There are, however, reasons for connecting persistence of appeal with a certain type of structure, and which is more interesting, instant fame with a failure to appeal to subsequent generations. Work which relies upon ready-made attitudes, without being able to reconstitute similar attitudes when they are not already existent, will often make an appeal to one generation which is a mystery to the generations with different attitudes which follow. But this disadvantage from the point of view of permanence of communication does not necessarily involve any lack of value for those to whom the experiences are accessible. Very often, of course, it will accompany low value; but this need not be so.

The permanence of some art has often been an excuse for fantastic hypothesis. Such art has been thought to embody immortal essences, to reveal special kinds of ‘eternal’ truths. But such debilitating speculations here no less than elsewhere should be avoided. Those are not the terms in which the matter may best be discussed. The uniformity of the impulses from which the work of art starts is a sufficient explanation of its permanence. Where the impulses involved are only accidentally touched off through temporarily being in a heightened state of excitability, we may reasonably expect that there will be little permanence. As a catchword will work one year like magic, since certain attitudes are for social reasons ready poised on a hair-trigger adjustment, and the next year be inoperative and incomprehensible, so, on a larger scale and in less striking degree, men’s special social circumstances often provide opportunities for works of art which at other times are quite inadequate stimuli. There are fashions in the most important things at least, but for the artist to profit by them is usually to forgo permanence. The greater the ease of communication under such conditions the greater the danger of obsolescence.

Far more of the great art of the past is actually obsolete than certain critics pretend, who forget what a special apparatus of erudition they themselves bring to their criticism. The Divina Comedia is a representative example. It is true that for adequately equipped readers who can imaginatively reproduce the world outlook of Aquinas, and certain attitudes to woman and to chastity, which are even more inaccessible, there is no obsolescence. But this is true of the most forgotten poems. Actual obsolescence is not in general a sign of low value, but merely of the use of special circumstances for communication. That a work reflects, summarises and is penetrated by its age and period is not a ground for assigning it a low value, and yet this saturation more than anything else limits the duration of its appeal. Only so far as a work avoids the catchword type in its method and relies upon elements likely to remain stable, formal elements for example, can it escape the touch of time.

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