Art vs. Criticism
In reading Northrup Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy of Criticism, I came across this interesting assertion:
In Shakespearean criticism we have a fine monument of Augustan taste in Johnson, of Romantic taste in Coleridge, of Victorian taste in Bradley. The ideal critic of Shakespeare, we feel, would avoid the Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian limitations and prejudices respectively of Johnson, Coleridge, and Bradley. But we have no clear notion of progress in the criticism of Shakespeare, or of how a critic who read all his predecessors could, as a result, become anything better than a monument of contemporary taste, with all its limitations and prejudices.
Or perhaps that's an important difference between art and criticism. Whereas literary criticism is essentially temporal, literature is out of time.
Addendum: [thinking out loud really] Literature is out of time, therefore it is eternal. The eternal is, like the Tetragrammaton, ineffable. Criticism cannot escape time, because it involves direct speech. Literature, on the other hand, is indirect: metaphorical, symbolic, representative.
