Kermode points to the debt Yeats clearly owed to Blake, and says with
a characteristic sly reasonableness that "'movements'' are never as new as
they look: it is one of the duller laws of literary history' .33 His work doesn't
actually suggest though that the cost of the image is always counted-he
says it is distinctly not counted in the 'paradise life' of Yeats 's poems, for
example, and Yeats is the book's primary image-n1aker. Pound and Eliot
did not calculate their image-expenses very carefully either, and if
T. E. Hulme did the sums he decided the price was right. So Kern1ode's 'is
never for long' in the quotation above means something like 'really ought
not to be at all'. One of the most subtle arguments of Ro,nantic l,nage
concerns not the poetic escape from reason but the baffled atte1npt to get
around it. Much depends on the interesting ambiguity of the topic: is it
the poetic image or the image of poetry? Kermode suggests that in
Modernism the two pictures become the same, and he uses both phrases
to highlight his subject. If art for Pater was to aspire to the condition of
n1usic, for Mallarme and Yeats it consistently yearned to be dance or,
more precisely perhaps, a composite icon of dance and dancer. This is
where Mallarn1e's wonderful essay on the dancer Loie Fuller leads us, as
does Yeats's poem 'Among School Children', with its n1uch quoted last
lines:
0 body swayed to music. 0 brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from t11e dance?
Here again Kermode reminds us of the cost. Thinking of the many writers
and artists fixated at the nineteenth century's end on the figure of Salome,
he writes that she 'is the Dancer in the special role of the Image that costs
the artist personal happiness, indeed life itself' .34 The Image, or art con-
structed as an image rather than any kind of assertion or discursive
31
F. Kermode, Romantic Image (London, 1957), p. 43.
12
Ibid., p. 73.
33
Ibid., p. 107.
34 lbid .• p. 73
Throughout his career Kermode reverted to a famous declaration by
Yeats as an aid to negotiating these oscillating possibilities. Asked if he
believed in 'the actual existence' of the divisions of histo ry proposed to
him by the spirits who spoke to him, Yeats was loyal both to his other-
worldly vision a nd to his sense of the facts. 'To such a question', he said,
'I can but a nswer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men
must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my
reason has soon recovered ; and now that the system stands out clearly in
my imagination I regard them as stylistic a rra ngements of experience ...
They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.' As
Kermode very well says in Romantic Image, Yeats 'did not walk out o f his
dream, but simply extended it to include everything' .45 Yeats saw the
resolu tion of contradiction as a matter of style rather tha n of fact, but
style still took account of the fact.
Sometimes Kermode tilts his thought towards the fact. 'The critic's
first qualification', he says, is 'a scepticism, a n interest in things as they a re
in inhuman reality as well as in human justice.'46 E lsewhere he seems to
stress our tendency to fa ntasy: 'justice is a ma nner of thinking abo ut the
41
lbid., p. 17.
44
Ker mode, The Genesis of Secrecy, p. 72.
4
s Ker rnode, Romantic Image, p. 19.
46
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 64.
340 Michael Wood
world that is congenial to the thinker, and likely to sustain his project
when reality of itself is not' .47 And in The Sense of an Ending again, he
says, 'Rea lity is ... the sense we have o f a world irreducible to huma n plot
a nd huma n desire for order; justice is the human order we find o r impose
upon it.'48 The logic of the latter fo rmulation comes directly from Stevens's
poem 'Notes towards a supreme fiction':
He imposes o rders as he thinks of lhem,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affai r....
But to impose is not
To discover...
It is not, and in spite of his recurring use of Yeats's notions o f reality and
justice, Kermode cannot hold them in a single thought, a nd it is signifi-
cant that he regards reality as inhuma n. This stance confers an a lmost
poetic pathos on the prose of The Sense of an Ending. There was once a
literature that believed in its own fictions, Kermode suggests, one which
'assumed that it was imitating an order', but we have onJy 'a literature
which assumes that it has to create an order' .49 'We' a re the inhabitants of
