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, none will look at it or listen to it. And immortality often attaches itself to the bad as firmly as to 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[74] of the anthologies figure 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 hypotheses. 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 being temporarily 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 as in the 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.