H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 8 4meanings over time. It is, so to speak, a slow- burning affair. It
gathers different interpretations as it evolves. Like an ageing rock
star, it can adapt itself to new audiences. Even so, we should
not assume that such classics are up and running all the time. Like
business enterprises, they can close down and start up again.
Works may pass in and out of favour according to changing histor-
ical circumstances. Some eighteenth- century critics were far less
enraptured by Shakespeare or Donne than we are today. Quite a
few of them would not have counted drama as literature at all, not
even bad literature. They would probably have had similar reserva-
tions about the vulgar, upstart, mongrelised form known as the
novel. Samuel Johnson wrote of Milton’s Lycidas, the opening of
which we glanced at in the first chapter, that ‘the diction is harsh,
the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing... In this
poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for
there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and
therefore disgusting.’ Yet Johnson is generally agreed to be a
supremely capable critic.
Changes of historical circumstance may result in works falling
into disfavour. There could be no valuable Jewish writing for the
Nazis. A general shift of sensibility means that we no longer prize
didactic writing very highly, though the sermon was once a major
genre. There is, in fact, no reason to suppose, as modern readers
often do, that literature which tries to teach us something is likely
to be tedious. We moderns tend to be averse to ‘doctrinal’ litera-
ture, but The Divine Comedy is exactly that. The doctrinal need not
be dogmatic. Our own heartfelt convictions may appear like arid
doctrines to someone else. Novels and poems may deal with
subjects that were of pressing concern when they were written but
no longer strike us as of earth- shattering importance. Tennyson’s In