Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-89 9781442677814

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 10

Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-1989: Unpublished Papers

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O'Grady Assistant Editor Nicholas Halmi Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis J.R. de J. Jackson Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Roseann Runte Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-1989: Unpublished Papers VOLUME 10

Edited by Robert D. Denham

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © Victoria University, University of Toronto (unpublished papers) and Robert D. Denham (preface, introduction, annotation) 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3602-3

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 Northrop Frye on literature and society, 1936-1989 : unpublished papers (Collected works of Northrop Frye; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3602-3 i. Literature and society. 2. English literature - History and criticism. 3. Criticism. I. Denham, Robert D. II. Title. III. Series. PN37.F68 2002

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02002-902649-8

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Michael Dolzani

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Contents

Preface xi Abbreviations xiii Introduction xv

I i Rencontre: The General Editor's Introduction 3

2 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 131 3 George Orwell 140

4 Shakespeare's Comedy of Humors 144

5 The Writer as Prophet: Milton, Swift, Blake, Shaw 160 6 The Literary Meaning of "Archetype" 182 7 Literature and Language 190

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Contents 8 Blake's Jerusalem 196 II

9 The Present Condition of the World 207

10 Leisure and Boredom 221 11 Criticism and Society 225

12 Articulate English 236 13 Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism 243 14 The Social Uses of Literature 253 15 Canadian Identity and Cultural Regionalism 266 16 Icons and Iconoclasm 270 17 Reviews of Television Programs for the Canadian Radio-Television Commission 273

18 Introduction to the Second Volume of Harold Innis's "A History of Communications" 302 III

19 William Butler Yeats 309

Contents

ix 20 Laurence Hyde, Southern Cross, and The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes 313

21 Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, and Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas 318 22 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History and Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations 321 23 Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture 325 IV

24 Convocation Address: Acadia University 333

25 Convocation Address: McGill University 337

26 Convocation Address: University of Bologna 340

Appendix: The Social Context of Literary Criticism 347

Notes 3*7

Index 393

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Preface

This volume of Northrop Frye's Collected Works is drawn from his previously unpublished essays, talks, reviews, papers, and, in three cases, contributions to books that were never published. They span some fifty-three years of Frye's long writing career: the earliest, a paper on The Canterbury Tales, was written during his student days at Oxford and the latest was for the occasion of his receiving his thirty-sixth honorary degree in 1989 from the University of Bologna. The Chaucer paper has been transcribed from a holograph manuscript. All of the other pieces, save one, have been reproduced from typescripts in the Northrop Frye Fonds at the Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. The copy-texts for the series of reflections Frye wrote for the Canadian RadioTelevision Commission are typescripts in the CRTC archives. The headnote to each piece gives, so far as I have been able to determine, the provenance and date of the work. I have not emended Frye's texts in any substantive ways, though I have regularized his use of quotation marks, italicized his underlinings, corrected obvious typographical mistakes, and added an occasional punctuation mark. As Frye did not intend to publish most of these papers, I have followed the general procedures I used in The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp and Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks. I have not, in other words, edited them according to the practices adopted for his previously published works. This means that, except in the case noted above, I have not changed his punctuation to make it conform to a single set of conventions; nor have I regularized his spellings according to either Canadian or U.S. practice. Frye himself was little concerned with such regularity: the reader will thus find such spellings as "centered" and "centred" within a single paper. I have incorporated the holograph

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changes that Frye made to his typescripts, such as spellings he himself corrected and individual words he cancelled, but I have not noted these. I have, however, recorded in the notes a number of cancelled passages, most of which Frye seems to have deleted in the interest of saving time for oral presentation. All editorial additions have been placed in square brackets. Frye's own square brackets have been replaced with braces: { }. I express my thanks once again to Victoria University at the University of Toronto and to the Victoria University Library for permitting me to edit Frye's unpublished papers; to Alvin Lee, the General Editor of the Collected Works project, and Jean O'Grady, Associate Editor, for their kind assistance and support; to Margaret Burgess, for her careful attention to the manner and the matter; and to Jean O'Grady for preparing the index. I continue to be indebted to Roanoke College for providing time for me to edit the Frye papers and to Pat Scott of Roanoke College's Fintel Library for her generous handling of my many interlibrary loan requests. I record my thanks also to Douglas Anderson, Scott D. Denham, Bernard F. Dukore, Nicholas Grene, Thomas E. Hart, Phillip Harth, Christopher Hodgkins, Alvin Lee, James Reaney, Christine Rees, Ian Singer, and Donald Theall for providing information for a dozen or so of the annotations. The dedication records a very special debt to a dear friend, colleague, and collaborator.

Abbreviations

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Ayre John Ayre. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Correspondence The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 193 21939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vols. 1-2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Diaries The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. EAC The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Erdman The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Hughes John Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957. MM Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. NB Notebook NF Northrop Frye NFF Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. AC

xiv NFCL

TEN

RW SE

WP WTC

Abbreviations Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964-1972: The Critical Comedy. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1975. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Northrop Frye's Student Essays, 1932-1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 3. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the "Bible and Literature." New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Introduction

i

The major essay in this collection is Frye's long introduction, which I have entitled Rencontre, to a never published anthology of English literature. I place it at the beginning because of its uniqueness in the Frye oeuvre: it represents the only example we have in his writing of a sustained, continuous encounter with an entire literary tradition. Frye wrote a number of essays, many of them on individual writers and some on historical periods, that could well take their place as chapters in a literary history of English or American literature. But even though the First Essay of Anatomy of Criticism contains his well-known theory of literary history, the actual writing of literary history was not something to which Frye devoted substantial attention. None of his books, except perhaps A Study of English Romanticism, is a literary history in any conventional sense. But writing such a history was a longstanding desire, going back to his university days in the 19305, and the urge became formalized throughout his notebooks as one of the parts of what Frye called his "ogdoad." This was the private code that Frye used, sometimes rather obliquely, to give shape to his writing projects. The ogdoad was essentially an eight-part framework, born of an ambition when Frye was quite young to write eight concerti and then, as a teenager, eight novels. When he was in his twenties, the focus became centred on eight works of criticism or scholarship. Michael Dolzani has given us a lucid account of the various permutations that the ogdoad took throughout Frye's career.1 Frye's notes called "Work in Progress," now a part of The "Third Book" Notebooks, provide a fairly succinct account of his own reflections on the status of the project in 1972. Dolzani suggests that Frye's four major books, Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code, and

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Words with Power do, in a way, constitute the first half of the eight-book project. But Dolzani's more penetrating observation is that each of the eight books represents for Frye "an abiding preoccupation or focus of vision, not a subject matter; put another way, they are mental configurations that informed his writing, but not, or not necessarily, the actual content of specific volumes."2 What can be said about the ogdoad in the present context is that its fourth octant, which Frye called Rencontre, was for many years associated in his mind with the historical displacement of myth. It grew out of his fascination with Spengler's Decline of the West, which was one of the two or three most influential books Frye read as an undergraduate, and it was related to the essay on Romanticism he wrote during his fourth year at Victoria College.3 When he was immersed in Blake in the 19405, he conceived of Rencontre as a study of Romanticism and its after-effects, Romanticism being for Frye the most revolutionary movement in all of Western cultural history. In the mid-i94os he records his reaction to reading one of the notes in Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, saying that the cornerstone of Rencontre, if he ever gets around to writing it, will be "invasion of secular literature by religious or mystic emotion, & so a secularization of the inner life."4 In Notebook 34, from about the same time, he writes: I have been recurrently seized with the ambition to make my life's work a history of all or part of English literature. I certainly have ideas about such a project, but I wonder if the passion for ideas it would entail wouldn't be part of an intellectual indolence I don't possess. I have a feeling that certain essential values in all the writers I deeply care for become staled & cheapened under historical treatment: I know how instinctively, in my fantasies of such a book, I dodge around Blake & my Rencontre ideas run up against the same thing, (par. 29)

Whatever permutations Rencontre takes in subsequent notebooks, they are almost always associated with history; and by 1972 the fourth book had become clearly focused in Frye's mind as an essay in literary history: "Rencontre, I've just realized, is to be a history of English literature, following the general outline of the sketch I'm doing for the Harcourt Brace anthology."5 At this point, then, Rencontre does appear to have settled into becoming the actual content of a specific volume. The Harcourt Brace project was a textbook survey of English litera-

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ture, for which Frye was general editor. The series was intended to replace, or at least provide an alternative to, the same publisher's twovolume anthologies of major British writers, the second edition of which had been circulating for more than a decade.6 Frye's task was to write a general introduction to the survey, the five other editors being responsible for the separate periods of English literary history. The project was aborted about five years after its conception.7 Whatever Frye had in mind for his "sketch," what he produced was a 184-page typescript. In "Work in Progress" he gives an outline for what he proposes to write: an introduction with five parts—English Poetry, English Prose, The Imagery of Space, Displaced and Conceptual Imagery, and The Imagery of Time.8 What he in fact wrote corresponds fairly closely to this plan, even though he didn't complete the manuscript. When he was well into part 4 of his general editor's introduction, "The Imagery of Space," he wrote, having already produced 179 pages, "The hell with it. I'm getting bored." He then proceeded to give a brief summary of six additional points he wanted to develop, followed by a three-page summary of part 5, which had now become a "Retrospect." What began as a "sketch" had now expanded into a narrative of fifty thousand words, complete with subheadings for the first three parts. Had Frye finished the project he outlined, the result would have been a typescript of well over two hundred pages, sufficiently extensive for a small book in itself. Frye sent the present manuscript to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and the other editors on 12 December 1972, accompanied by this comment: Naturally [the draft] shows increasing signs of haste and impatience as it goes on. I have begun by dividing it into relatively short sections, each with a heading of its own, and in the final version I shall carry this scheme through the whole essay. This introduction may be much longer and more elaborate than anything we originally had in mind. I certainly did not realize myself when I began that it would come out in any shape like this. On the other hand, it does attempt to express what I take to be the particular gimmick of our anthology, that English literature is a linguistic and typological unity from the beginning to the present, and I think there is enough co-ordination of critical principles in it to make it of some value to the anthology as a whole, even commercially. There are of course many sketchy and breathlessly allusive references which I would hope to smooth out in rewriting.9

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What might have possessed Frye to think that the editors at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich would have permitted such an expansive essay to preface their survey? If the typescript were not entitled "General Editor's Introduction" and if we didn't have the first two paragraphs, where Frye speaks to his audience of students and teachers about the intent of his introduction, we would be inclined to think that, once the project was abandoned, Frye simply took his introductory "sketch" and expanded it into what he wanted to do all along—write Rencontre. What he produced would clearly have given the average undergraduate a typically Frygian perspective on the continuity of English literature, providing a good measure of instruction and delight along the way. But what is baffling is the sheer length of the introduction. Frye did not actually write Rencontre, just as he did not write the other five big books that are outlined in the ogdoad, but what he did write was, as he says in Notebook 10, the "core" of the book (par. 10). It was a fully developed and polished draft of what he would have written, perhaps in a somewhat expanded version, had he had world enough and time. Frye calls his introduction an effort to provide "a coordinated critical overview of the whole of English literature," to note "the transitional figures and movements that link one age with another," and "to give some notion of the unity and coherence of what has been achieved by the writers of over a thousand years." As we might expect, the overview takes its fundamental principles from those Frye had developed in Anatomy of Criticism, primarily from the Fourth Essay: genre distinctions (here they are primarily poetry and prose), rhythm and other patterns of sound, oral and rhetorical forms of writing, radicals of presentation, spatial and temporal imagery, cosmological myths and metaphors, conservative and radical literary movements, and the like. What follows from these principles is a continuous history, even though not quite complete, that is learned, far-ranging, ingenious, attentive to the significance of lesser-known writers, and more fully illustrated than anything else Frye ever wrote. II

Because all of Frye's writing had its place in his own order of words, it would be possible to organize the remaining pieces in this collection using the ogdoad scheme. "Shakespeare's Comedy of Humors," for example, could be placed in the octant Frye called Tragicomedy, his shorthand for the book that would centre on drama, especially Shake-

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speare's. "The Literary Meaning of 'Archetype'" could be seen as part of what Frye called "Liberal." The essays that treat the role of criticism and society could come under the heading of Anticlimax, all those conceptual displacements of myth that so preoccupied Frye from the mid-1960s until the end of his career. Here too we could place the pieces having to do with leisure and education and communication. But such a grouping would become overly cumbersome, so I have adopted a much simpler plan. After the anthology introduction is a group of eight pieces having to do with literature, followed by ten that in one way or another go beyond literature to engage other aspects of culture. These are followed in turn by five reviews and three convocation addresses. Within these sections the various pieces are arranged in chronological order, as best the chronology can be established. Frye's essay on The Canterbury Tales (no. 2), the earliest in the present collection, dates from his first year at Oxford, when he wrote three papers for his tutor Edmund Blunden. The other two—on Chaucer's early poems and on Troilus and Criseyde—were incorporated into "A Reconsideration of Chaucer," a talk Frye presented to the Graduate English Club at the University of Toronto in 1938, and published in Northrop Frye's Student Essays. He felt good about the tutorial with Blunden. On 3 November 1936 he wrote to Helen Kemp that "Blunden threw flowers at my feet yesterday, I think because my paper was clever, vague and short—Canterbury Tales. Told me I'd made a real contribution to criticism, etc. etc."10 The problem that Frye tries to solve in his essay is why The Canterbury Tales does not measure up to the unified vision he had discovered in Troilus and Criseyde. He first proposes that Chaucer simply got tired of his elaborate scheme and just quit. But this, as he recognizes, is hardly a satisfactory answer, so he proposes a better hypothesis—that Chaucer was unable to bring together the two chief attitudes in the poem: the irony in the separate tales (an attitude rooted in The House of Fame) and the sententiousness embodied in both The Parson's Tale and those portions of the poem that Chaucer had given to himself, including the "Retraction." It is the absence of an argument, Frye feels, that leads to the absence of a unity. Chaucer tried to provide an argument in the Retraction, but it is so unconvincing that we are left with little but a series of discrete tales. The tales are dramatic in themselves, but they lack the unifying vision. By characterizing his essay as "vague" Frye apparently meant that it lacked sufficient illustration, but his argument about unity is presented clearly enough. It is perhaps

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worth noting that the assumption Frye made throughout his career about the essential unity of form in all literature is at work in this early paper. As for cleverness, Frye does show off a bit for Blunden with his joke about the hinder part of the she-ape and the like. But for a twentyfour-year-old student who had just begun as a freshman all over again, this essay, especially when put beside Frye's other Chaucer papers, shows considerable insight into Chaucer's world. Frye's talk on Orwell (no. 3) was aired on CBC radio in 1949 or 1950. Frye had earlier reviewed Orwell's Animal Farm, which he did not find to be a very searching satire on Russian Communism.11 He had a much higher opinion of 1984, which he later wrote about on two separate occasions.12 He considered 1984 to be more successful because of the wider view it took of human folly and the incisive way it depicted the nightmare vision of a police state and satirized the tyranny of an entrenched minority. Drifting away from his position on value judgments, Frye wrote in his 1950 Diary, "George Orwell's 1984 presents a real hell, not just one we happen to be more scared of, & his book is morally an infinitely better book than the Inferno. Surely this moral superiority has some relevance to critical standards."13 In fact, Frye was so taken by the simplicity and honesty of 1984 that he called it "one of the greatest [novelsl the twentieth century has yet produced,"14 a judgment that is echoed in the opening sentence of his CBC talk. 1984 became for Frye a stock example of the dystopian vision (it is cited in Anatomy of Criticism as an illustration of sixth-phase irony, the phase of unrelieved bondage and social tyranny),15 and Orwell's "Newspeak" became for him a stock example of the perversion of language.16 Orwell struck a chord with Frye early on, and he was still calling attention to 1984 throughout the i98os.17 If a good measure of Frye's politics did not actually derive from Orwell, he at least agreed with Orwell on the nature of the enemy. One of Frye's critics, who is drawn to the opposition between criticism and creativity, sees Orwell and Frye as moving in altogether different directions, Orwell in the right direction and Frye in the wrong one.18 But such a view does not take account of what Frye has repeated over and over about the social value of both criticism and literature, one aspect of which shines through in the peroration of his little talk on Orwell: "the real value in [Orwell's] showing us how easily the world could turn into hell in our own lifetime is to give us a concentrated picture of what we don't want either for ourselves or our children. Mr. Orwell doesn't tell us what to fight for, but he gives us a terrifyingly clear impression of what we

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should fight against. And what we should fight against, according to him, is not Russia or China, not Eurasia or Eastasia, but the evil tendencies in our own minds, our own weak and gullible compromises in a contempt of law and a contempt for truth. I hope Mr. Orwell's hell-fire sermon will have the influence it deserves." "Shakespeare's Comedy of Humors" (no. 4), presented at Radcliffe College not long after Frye had arrived at Harvard in 1950 to begin his Guggenheim year, covers what in retrospect is familiar territory. A number of the ideas in this talk would find their way into his theory of comedy, "The Mythos of Spring," in Anatomy of Criticism. The paper echoes certain ideas Frye had developed two years earlier in "The Argument of Comedy,"19 and some of the material on comic characters in the humours paper appeared three years later in "Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy."20 In the present paper Frye begins his study of dramatic comedy, as he would frequently do, by placing it in the context of Roman New Comedy. But his fundamental assumption is that one cannot understand characterization in Shakespearean comedy "without relating characters to their dramatic function, and this cannot be done without some knowledge of the genres of drama, and of the structures peculiar to those structures." Most of Frye's paper, however, is devoted not to genre but to character types. He moves away from Jonson's theory of humours as a basis for his analysis, turning instead to the Tractatus Coislinianus, an obscure Greek treatise that lists in brief compass the three types of comic characters that Frye, more than anyone else, helped to popularize: the alazon (the ridiculous and self-important imposter), the eiron (the self-deprecator), and the bomolochos (the buffoon). In "The Argument of Comedy" Frye had glanced at certain character types, such as the senex iratus or heavy father (an alazon) and the tricky slave (an eiron), though without using the Greek names from the Tractatus. But "Shakespeare's Comedy of Humors" is the real blueprint for the examination of comic characters in Anatomy of Criticism, though in order to achieve the symmetrical pairs that are omnipresent in that book Frye adds a fourth character type, the agroikos (the churl or rustic), which he borrows from Aristotle's Ethics.21 Frye was not the first to draw attention to the character types in the Tractatus Coislinianus: Lane Cooper had done that thirty years before in An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy.22 But the popular acceptance of the comic character types (one can find alazon and eiron in any number of handbooks of literary terms) can be traced back to Frye's 1950 paper.

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In his 1950 Diary, Frye wrote, "Robert Weaver at lunch: he wants me to do a series of four talks on the radio on poetry generally. I suggested Donne, Milton, Blake & Yeats just to get the range, & he seemed to think it a good idea. It's not cleared with the mighty yet, but should be soon. I'd like it, as it would be a good way to pick up some extra dough without too much work. Also it would tend to establish me as a radio personality, & I think I'd make as good a one as Roy Daniells or Art Phelps."23 As it turned out, Frye did present four talks in "The Writer as Prophet" series for CBC Radio (no. 5), though Donne and Yeats were replaced by Swift and Shaw. Frye's talks hardly installed him as a radio personality, but except for the first talk (on Milton), which he postponed writing until the last minute,24 he appears to have expended more effort on these manuscripts than he did on the papers he wrote for academic audiences. "The Literary Meaning of 'Archetype'" (no. 6) was written in 1952, the year after Frye's frequently reprinted essay, "The Archetypes of Literature," had been published in the Kenyan Review, and that essay was an early version of Frye's theory of myths, developed in the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism. The present paper is an early version of Frye's theory of symbols, developed in the Second Essay of the Anatomy.25 Archetype was, of course, a central category in Frye's thinking. His use of the word derived, by his account, not from Plato or Jung, but from a footnote in James Beattie's Minstrel, an unfinished poem in Spenserian stanzas that follows the development of a poet in a primitive age.26 In the present talk Frye is concerned with the archetype as it relates to a theory of meaning, and he begins his talk, just as he was to begin Words with Power thirty-eight years later, with Dante's conception of polysemous meaning, archetypal criticism corresponding to Dante's moral or tropological level. He goes on to outline, as he does in the Anatomy, the kinds of criticism associated with Dante's first three levels of meaning, and his talk turns out to be an abstract of the Second Essay of the Anatomy. What were to become familiar assumptions are all here: literature as total form, genre as a key principle in such a view of form, mythos and dianoia (and their attendant analogues) as essential principles for literary understanding, the relation of archetypal symbolism to ritual and dream, and universal symbols as the goal of human work. What is absent from the present talk is the anagogic level of meaning, but as Frye pencilled in "anagogic section" in the margin beside the sixth paragraph, it seems clear that he had in mind the next step to be taken. He likely had

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the present paper in front of him as wrote the Second Essay of Anatomy of Criticism. In "Literature and Language" (no. 7), a 1974 address to a comparative literature group, Frye's gambit is briefly to search for some principle that would give "comparative literature" a special place in literary study. He finds none, except "the rarefied aspect of translation," which means that comparative literature must, in practice, be reserved for graduate programs. Once he has concluded that there is no difference between a theory of comparative literature and a general theory of literature, he sets out to sketch some of the principles of the latter. These are, to begin with, the two principles involved in reading literature: its narrative movement (mythos) and its structure of images (dianoia). We then get an explanation of centripetal and centrifugal meaning. This is all territory that Frye had traversed in Anatomy of Criticism. What is less familiar, however, is his relating the Aristotelian and Platonic conceptions of language and thought to the Bible. Here we see Frye moving in the direction of The Great Code, and what we get in the concluding paragraphs is an embryonic version of the complex theory of language that appeared eight years later in the first chapter of that book. The form of the commentary on Blake's Jerusalem (no. 8) is unique in Frye's work: he never engaged in a line-by-line commentary on literary works, and even among his extensive writings on Blake there is nothing comparable to the exposition of the images in a Blake poem that we get here—all one hundred plates of Jerusalem. Of the several dozen articles Frye wrote on Blake only one, "Blake's Biblical Illustrations," is devoted to Blake's pictorial art, but even that essay is principally an exposition of Blake's mythology, the understanding of which, Frye argues implicitly, is a prerequisite for entering fully into Blake's composite art. Frye's most extensive commentary on Jerusalem is, of course, in Fearful Symmetry (chap. 11), but that is a commentary focusing on the text. In the present talk the focus is on Blake's images. Only five of Blake's plates have no text (i, 26,51,76, and 100), and none of the plates is completely devoid of illustration, even if only a marginal flourish. There are a dozen plates that have only these flourishes, and Frye does refer to these textual plates as a way of providing some connective tissue to his exposition, in addition to occasionally quoting a phrase from the text. But Frye's talk, presented at the Ontario College of Art, is largely a visual performance. The ideal way to read "Blake's Jerusalem," then, is with a facsimile edition of the poem at one's side.

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III In his preface to The Stubborn Structure (a title that comes from Blake's Jerusalem), Frye writes, "As some of those who write about me are still asserting that I ignore the social reference of literary criticism, the subtitle [Essays on Criticism and Society] calls the attention of those who read me to the fact that I have written about practically nothing else" (x). The essays in part 2 of the present collection provide further evidence for the claim. "The Present Condition of the World" (no. 9), a radical critique of American society, was written at a time (1943) when most appraisals of the world social order were directed toward Nazism. But Frye's focus is on the enemy within, and the roots of this enemy are American civil religion (a natural and rational faith that Frye calls deism), with its passivity, lack of creative power, Philistinism, self-righteous morality, utilitarian values, and latent Fascism. Nowhere else in his work does Frye adopt as prophetic a voice and attitude as he does in this essay, and the peroration, had he developed it, would have called for the revolutionary force of revealed religion to liberate a world torn by war. "Leisure and Boredom" (no. 10) is a critique of an aggressive, uncreative, acquisitive society, which produces and is produced by boredom. The proper response to such a society is leisure, the development of individual powers and interests by way of education. Leisure actually turns out to be for Frye a mental attitude that shapes an identity: Our television sets and highways are crowded on weekends with people who are not looking for leisure but are running away from it. Leisure goes to a hockey game to see a game: distraction or boredom goes to see one team trample the other into the ice. Leisure drives a car to see the country: boredom drives it to get in front of the car ahead. Leisure is not afraid of solitude, quiet, or unplanned stretches of time; boredom has to have noise, crowds, and constant panic. Leisure goes to a movie to see a play; boredom goes to get enough of a sexy or violent or sentimental shock to forget about real life for a while. Leisure doesn't feel put upon when asked to take some civic responsibilities; boredom never contributes anything to society: it can't think or create or help others; all it can do to is try to forget that job that comes back on Monday morning.

Frye distinguished servile work, or drudgery, from the kind of creative work which, because it makes a genuine social contribution, leads away

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from boredom. Creative work and leisure are practically the same thing psychologically, a point that Frye develops in his review of Joseph Pieper's book on leisure (no. 23). The development of leisure can never occur if our educational programs focus on social adjustment. In "Criticism and Society" (no. 11), Frye takes a somewhat different approach to education as social adjustment: instruction in social mythology is, he recognizes, an important part of all instruction. But he makes a further distinction between closed mythologies, the kinds of theoretical and practical structures of belief that we find in, say, Marxism, and open mythologies, which, by way of the liberal arts, reveal areas of possible belief and imaginative discussion. Frye's goal in "Criticism and Society" is to defend criticism as a social enterprise. Criticism, therefore, must provide a critique of both closed mythologies and the prefabricated ideas of open mythologies—the cliches and stock responses having to do with "the American way of life." Always the great optimist, Frye believes we may be on the brink of understanding criticism as a unified cultural activity, and he continued to develop the theses introduced here, notably in his most important work of social criticism, The Critical Path, Frye conceived of criticism, of course, as a structure of knowledge, and he spent his entire career teaching, not literature, which in his terms is an object of knowledge, but criticism, a subject of knowledge. This distinction between subjects and objects of study was one Frye introduced in the Polemical Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism. His talk on "Articulate English" (no. 12) begins with this distinction, and it contains a number of other principles that are laid out fully in the Anatomy and in The Educated Imagination, which Frye referred to as a "pocket-sized Anatomy."27 These principles include the relationship between spoken and written style, the continuity of literary education, the centrality of myth and metaphor in a coherent theory of literature, the significance of rhythm in language, the pervasive allusiveness of literature, and the displacement of archetypes. Similarly, "Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism" (no. 13) includes a number of familiar Frygian themes, beginning with the argument that criticism should be self-contained, deriving its principles from literature itself rather than from some external discipline, such as psychology or history. Frye gives a brief history of the external or deterministic view of criticism from its beginnings through Sidney's Defence, which is based on a rhetorical conception of literature, and he then argues, as he does more extensively in The Critical Path, that Shelley's

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defence takes us back to the more primitive and more adequate theory of poetry: "in criticism all change takes the form of a recovery of some aspect of tradition." But Frye's central interest here, as it was in a number of essays he wrote in the late 19605 and early 19705, is on the social function of literature, and its ultimate function is to deliver us from the anxieties of concern and belief, while at the same time revealing, through the imagination, what life can be like. This is all a part of what Frye calls in "The Social Uses of Literature" (no. 14), our "mythological conditioning," which literature, better than anything else, can make us aware of. The next three papers derive from Frye's work as a part-time commissioner for the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) from 1968 until 3 April 1976.28 He first met with the research department of the commission in December 1968 and again in July 1969, having lengthy discussion with two members of the department, Rodrigue Chiasson and Andre Martin, about the media, technology, Canadian identity, censorship, Canadian art, and a host of other topics. Part of their discussion was motivated by the archetypes of Frye's "Logos Diagram," with its Adonis, Eros, Prometheus, and Hermes quadrants.29 Frye's role on the commission, outside of being the resident intellectual, was not well defined, but in late 1970 he met with the commission again, and from that meeting emerged the two brief papers included in the present volume, one on "Canadian Identity and Cultural Regionalism" (no. 15) and the other on "Icons and Iconoclasm" (no. 16). Frye eventually assumed the responsibility of viewing television programs and writing reports on them for the research department. He went to Ottawa on 5 November 1971 to screen with members of the research staff (Martin, Chiasson, and Patrick Gossage) a wide range of television shows, including news stories, "talking heads," musical programs, and documentaries.30 Following the screenings Frye wrote his reviews of eight programs, entitled "Reflections on November 5th." Back in Toronto he continued to view programs through March 1972, sending the research department more reflections, twelve of which have been preserved in the CRTC archives. The staff prepared program notes for the viewings, referred to as "the Frye diet," and often issued memos in response to Frye's written reports.31 The twenty reflections are collected here under the title "Reviews of Television Programs" (no. 17). Martin and Chiasson were also involved with Frye in a project to edit the unfinished manuscripts of Harold Innis (1894-1952), the well-known pioneer in communications studies. The project never came to fruition, but Frye's essay on Innis (no. 18) was to have been an introduction to one of the projected volumes.

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Frye was a prolific reviewer in the 19405 and 19503, contributing scores of reviews to the Canadian Forum and to literary quarterlies, such as the Kenyan Review, for which he wrote fourteen review essays in the 19505, and the University of Toronto Quarterly, which published his extensive reviews of Canadian poetry during the same period.32 Frye was also a reviewer for CBC Radio during the early 19505. Four of his CBC reviews have been preserved, and they are included in the present volume (nos. 19-22), along with his review of Josef Pieper's book on leisure, already mentioned. The first and last of the three convocation addresses that conclude the present volume are separated by a period of twenty years. The convocation address was a familiar genre for Frye, who often delivered such talks on the occasion of his receiving honorary degrees—as was the case for all three of the addresses collected here. Frye almost always focused such talks on the ends and means of education, as he did in the addresses at Acadia (no. 24) and McGill (no. 25). But he used the occasion at the University of Bologna (no. 26) to compose an essay on the public and private forms of communication and their relation to technology, drawing many of his examples from the Italian cultural tradition. A good deal of what Frye wrote about higher education during the late 19605 and early 19705 was in reaction to the student demonstrations of the time, which he had witnessed firsthand when he was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley during the spring semester of 1969. He sympathized with a number of the goals of the student activists but he could not countenance their tactics. One of Frye's several critiques of the student movement is in his convocation address at Acadia University (no. 24), delivered in May 1969. The reason for including Frye's address on "The Social Context of Literary Criticism" in an appendix deserves a brief explanation. The argument of this essay was eventually expanded into several sections of The Critical Path. As Frye explains in the Preface to that book, The Critical Path "was a farce in the etymological sense: a fifty-minute lecture stuffed with its own implications until it swelled into the present monograph. In the spring of 1968, while visiting the Society for Humanities at Cornell University, I gave a public lecture, which in turn engendered another lecture, 'Mythos and Logos/ given at the School of Letters in Indiana University that summer. These lectures form the basis of the present third and fourth sections." Frye does not mean that the Cornell lecture expanded into section three of The Critical Path and the Indiana lecture into section four, for the two lectures are quite similar. The opening

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paragraphs of "Mythos and Logos," published by Indiana University and later reprinted,33 differ from those of "The Social Context of Literary Criticism," and the Indiana talk contains several paragraphs not in the Cornell address. But the substance and most of the wording of the two talks are essentially the same. I include it in the present volume because, even though "Mythos and Logos" will appear in one of the volumes of Frye's previously published work, "The Social Context of Literary Criticism" represents the earliest material that Frye eventually "stuffed" into The Critical Path and is therefore important in understanding the genesis of that book. In "Articulate English" (no. 12), Frye remarks, "For good writing there must be a working relationship between the spoken and the written style; otherwise what one writes is a dead language, an academic exercise with no real relationship to the writer's actual mental processes. The most natural way to learn to write is to imitate one's own speaking style, provided one has learned to talk." He adds that "rhythm is the first principle of good prose, and that such rhythm is, like one's handwriting, a distinctive expression of one's personality." One always has the impression in reading Frye that one is listening to a speaking voice and that the rhythm of Frye's prose does express his personality. The writing collected here, spanning some fifty-three years, extends our sense of that personality. Frye seeks here, as he always sought, to find the proper verbal formula for his exceptional ideas, and he expresses them with elegance, grace, and integrity.

I

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1 Rencontre: The General Editor's Introduction

This is a draft of a five-part introduction to a projected Harcourt, Brace and World (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as of 1970) textbook anthology, The Survey of British Literature, for which Frye had been appointed general editor. Other editors for the project—John Leyerle, Angus Fletcher, Paul Fussell, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller—were to prepare introductions for the various periods of English literature and to write separate author introductions. Planning for the project began in the mid-1960s, with an expected publication date of 1969. Although all of the editors completed a substantial amount of work on the project, which was to supersede the Major British Writers anthology published by Harcourt, Brace and World, the Survey never came to fruition, even though the editors continued working on it in the early 19705. After Oxford University Press published its two-volume Anthology of English Literature, Harcourt let its own project linger, and for various reasons it eventually faded away.1 Parts i through 3 of Frye's general introduction are more or less complete; part 4 is partially complete (it contains a one-page outline for the remainder of the section); and part 5 consists only of an outline. On the place of this historical essay in Frye's larger ogdoadic project, see the introduction to the present volume. The i84~page typescript, which includes Frye's holograph corrections, is in the NFF, 1988, box 57, file 3. A holograph outline for Frye's "introduction" and a draft of large portions of the typescript are in Notebook 14 (following p. 37) in the NFF, 1991, box 24.

Part One: The Language and Its Poetry This introduction is not primarily an attempt to synthesize the period introductions supplied by my colleagues and myself, or to review the choice of texts we have made. The present book aims at providing the

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university teacher and student with a representative body of texts and a coordinated critical overview of the whole of English literature from its beginnings to our own generation. But there is always a danger that a good survey book, merely because it is a good one, will suggest to the student something like "this is all you will need of English literature," and so become a substitute for literary experience instead of a medium for it. Hence if many of the works quoted or referred to here are not to be found in the present volume, the implication is that the riches of English literature are inexhaustible, and that what is given in this book represents a beginning of one's education in it, not the circumference of it. Then again, it is the function of the period introductions to present the greatest writers of each period within their historical context. A general introduction to the whole field may, and perhaps should, spend more time on the "hinges" of English literature, the transitional figures and movements that link one age with another. It should also try to give some notion of the unity and coherence of what has been achieved by the writers of over a thousand years, who nevertheless have dealt with what are essentially the same language and the same historical and cosmological structures. Success Story

For over a thousand years English was an obscure dialect in a remote corner of Europe. Before the English came to England, Virgil had spoken of "the Britons completely cut off from the world" (et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos) [Eclogue 1.5!, as the ancient Britons did not have a navy to transform isolation into insularity. The culture of the English who supplanted them also remained a provincial one for centuries, responding to influences coming mainly from Italy through France. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, when English ceased to be the language of the court, it looked for a time as though it might become a purely regional speech, like the Celtic languages. By the fourteenth century, however, it had won out over Anglo-Norman as the literary language of the country, and though the Conquest had transformed its vocabulary, it had left its structure intact. Even so, of course, Latin remained the speech of the learned world, and as such was still a formidable competitor. After the discovery of the mariner's compass, and the voyages of exploration made possible by it, had altered the power structure of Europe, the Atlantic nations, Spain, Portugal, France, and later England and Holland, became increasingly

Rencontre: The General Editor's Introduction

5

important centres of cultural influence. Yet, in the age of Shakespeare, English was still a minority language that few cultivated Continentals would be likely to learn. Even Milton, in the seventeenth century, finding that he could get a quick reputation in Italy by his Latin poems, felt that his decision to write Paradise Lost in English was something of a patriotic commitment. However, Great Britain, as England and Scotland became in 1603, and the English language with it, was already expanding into America and India, and after about 1660, Britain came increasingly to be looked on by the rest of the world as being what it really was, an autonomous cultural centre and not a provincial outpost. The turning point, perhaps, we may mark by Voltaire's visit to England (1726-29). Voltaire's views on English literature are not important, but his sense of the distinctiveness of the British ethos, its respect for reason and science, its relatively (for that age) high level of religious and intellectual toleration, led him to characterize the country as "more celebrated than the island of Atlantis." As Britain, and later English-speaking America, rose to world powers, English became first a major language, then the nearest approach to a world language that the world is likely to see. Conceivably, social conditions alone might have brought this about, even if English had not also developed one of the greatest of all literatures. But the quality of the literature ensures that the language will always be worth knowing, whatever happens to its political fortunes. It took many centuries to fulfil the great prophetic vision of Samuel Daniel's Musophilus (1599), written in the high tide of the Elizabethan flood, but fulfilment came at last: And who, in time, knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in th' yet unformed Occident May come refined with th' accents that are ours? Or who can tell for what great work in hand The greatness of our style is now ordained? [11. 338-44]

The Stubborn Structure English is a tough, sinewy, but often very obdurate language to work in—William Blake speaks of its "stubborn structure" [Jerusalem, pi. 36, 1. 59]—and it has its characteristic difficulties as well as virtues. It is a

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On Literature and Society

Teutonic language, consonantal and with a strong recessive accent. Throughout its history its consonants have remained relatively stable, though its vowel sounds have changed a good deal. If we hear English read with the heavy stress which some French critics call "the British thump," we can see how such a stress dominates its rhythm. Then again, when the English came to England, they were seafarers, accustomed to meeting people of different languages or dialects, in peace or in war. The result was that when they settled in the country, their language, which originally had been a highly inflected one, was already in an advanced state of inflectional decay. This decay was greatly speeded up by the Danish invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries as well as by the Norman Conquest in the eleventh. By the time we get to Chaucer in the fourteenth century, we are in a period of what is called "levelled" inflections where most of the original inflectional endings are reduced to a single final e. But in the spoken language even these endings were rapidly dropping out. For nearly all its history, English has been essentially an analytical and uninflected language. Such a language has two characteristics that are important for its literature. In the first place, it requires a strict word order, because there are no case endings to indicate which word is subject and which object. If we hear someone say, for instance, "when does go this train?" we know that he is not a native speaker of English, even though there is nothing illogical in the syntax. It follows that any alteration of the normal word order in English is very noticeable. Such a line as this from Milton's Lycidas, although its meaning gives no problem, hardly sounds like English at all: But the fair guerdon when we hope to find. [1. 73] And when Gray writes in his Elegy: The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'r gave, Awaits alike the inevitable hour: [11. 33-5]

the s on the end of "awaits," indicating that the word is singular, and therefore that "hour" is the subject and the first two lines an object, turns the passage into something of a verbal puzzle. When Wordsworth, in his Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), said that the

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7

language of English poetry ought to be as close as possible to the language of prose, it was partly such syntactical contortions that he had in mind. For in prose, drastic alterations of the usual word order are very rare, and usually pointless when made. The second characteristic is the loss of the unstressed syllables which we have in a language that has kept more inflections, such as German. German is capable of a delicacy and a lightness, of softly falling and caressing rhythms, that English has not been able to match since Chaucer's time. The native vocabulary of English consists very largely either of monosyllables or of short derivatives of them with a heavy stress on the root (e.g., love, loveliness, lovable). Many of the French borrowings that came in after the Conquest are also monosyllabic or nearly so. A monosyllable always means a separate accent, and the number of monosyllables in English is a continuous technical problem for a poet trying to get some lightness and spring into his lines. In his Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope warns the reader against certain errors of taste in writing English verse, and gives horrible examples of the kind of thing he means. Here is his example of the overuse of monosyllables: When ten low words oft creep in one dull line. [1. 347]

This line has no rhythm, not because it consists entirely of monosyllables—there are any number of powerful monosyllabic lines in Shakespeare—but because every monosyllable in this line is a separate and heavy accent. The example also illustrates the consonantal nature of English: "dull line" and "low words" provide collisions of sounds that slow down the movement. Elsewhere in the poem Pope suggests that a poet should try to echo in his choice of words something of the sound of his subject—this is the principle that is technically called onomatopoeia or imitative harmony. Thus, says Pope: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw The line too labours, and the words move slow. [11. 370-1]

Here again the clusters of consonants impede the movement, and the repeating of consonants, in such phrases as "weight to" and "strives some," brings it almost to a standstill. We should keep our ears open for such efforts when a skilful poet is deliberately making them. Thus in Ben Jonson:

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On Literature and Society Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears.... Since nature's pride is now a wither'd daffodil. [Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount, 11. i, 11

The last two words of each line show the same principle of repeated consonants in a slow movement. The consonantal nature of English, which is such a contrast to (for example) Italian, means that the distinctive features of poetry, notably rhyme, are more obtrusive in English than in many other languages. In Italian, the two-syllable rhyme is the normal one, but double rhymes in English call attention to themselves immediately and triple rhymes are so conspicuous as to be useful mainly to writers of comic verse. In a poem with a serious subject, such as Thomas Hood's account of a young girl drowned in a Venetian canal, it is difficult to get away with a rhyme like this: Oh! it was pitiful, In a whole city-full, Home she had none. [The Bridge of Sighs, 11. 46-8]

All through the history of English poetry there have been two methods of dealing with these difficulties. One is the method of avoiding the excesses, except for deliberate parody; the other is the method of embracing and exploiting them. We may call the first a "conservative" and the second a "radical" or experimental tendency. The word "obtrusive," applied to rhyme or rhythm throughout this essay, characterizes an experimental tendency; it is not a term of disapproval. The words conservative and radical are political metaphors, and we should of course remember that they are only metaphors. Yet there does seem to be a cyclical rhythm in English poetry in which certain conservative standards, of regularity, order, restraint and good taste become socially accepted for a time. While they are accepted, the radical poets, who deliberately do all the things that the conservatives avoid doing, are likely to be neglected, or, if noticed, ridiculed. But gradually the conservative conventions wear out, and a radical or experimental phase succeeds, sometimes becoming socially accepted in its turn, to be followed by a new conservative movement. It seems to me that we can see four major cycles of this kind in English poetry, and that they correspond, roughly, to the major divisions of this book.

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A conservative movement reaches its culmination in Chaucer, and has become radical and experimental at the end of the medieval period (ca. 1500), with Skelton and Wyatt in England, Dunbar and Douglas in Scotland. A new conservatism begins with Surrey (d. 1547) and continues through the Elizabethan period, modulating to a new radicalism with the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, and, in a very different way, with Milton. A third conservatism is established with Waller and Dryden, continues through Pope and Samuel Johnson, and has a somewhat abortive radical phase in Blake, Smart, Chatterton, and Ossian. A fourth conservatism establishes itself with Wordsworth and continues through Tennyson, Morris, Hardy, and others followed by a radical phase in the twentieth century, coming in with the early work of Eliot and Pound, along with the publication (1918) of Hopkins. By the standards of Pope or Tennyson, Blake's prophecies or Hopkins's sonnets are the work of incompetent bunglers, almost of madmen. We have to learn to incorporate Blake and Hopkins into our experience of poetry, yet without demoting Pope or Tennyson in doing so: their standards remain valid for them. This all makes the criticism of English literature very difficult. Ride a Cock Horse

In English, as in other Teutonic languages, the earliest poetic rhythm was a four-beat line, usually emphasized by alliteration on the first three beats. There is a strong pause or caesura in the middle, so that the line splits into two half-lines. Ezra Pound's rendering of the Old English poem "The Seafarer" indicates how it sounds in modern English: Chill its chains are; chafing sighs Hew my heart round and hunger begot Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not That he on dry land loveliest liveth, List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea, Weathered the winter, wretched outcast.... [11.1-15!

Several features of the style take us back to oral or pre-literate days, when the poet recited his verses to audiences independently of reading or writing. One of these features is the formulaic unit, the stock epithet or phrase that fits the metre, so that it can be thrown in anywhere by a poet

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whose creative processes are always very close to improvisation. In Old English one type of such units was called the kenning, the oblique description of an object, such as "whale-road" for sea or "bone-house" for body. Some poems of Hopkins, in the nineteenth century, show how these alliterative and formulaic devices can be adapted to modern verse: As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells ... [The Caged Skylark, 11.1-2]

The rhythm of the Old English line is rather like the kind of rhythm that we have in music: as in music, the beat defines a rhythmical unit or "measure," and there can be a variable number of syllables within the unit, just as there can be a variable number of notes in a measure of music. In any case this four-beat line, with or without alliteration, has remained the fundamental rhythm of popular English poetry ever since. It is the rhythm of most nursery rhymes and of most ballads (the derivation of "ballad" from ballare, to dance, shows why the ballad requires a strongly accented rhythm). The standard ballad rhythm is a continuous four-beat line in which every other line has three sounded beats and a rest: The king sits in Dumferlin toun, Drinking the bluid-reid wine: {rest} "Oh whar will I get guid sailor To sail this schip of mine?" {rest} [Sir Patrick Spens, 11.1-4!

In Middle English, under French influence, a different kind of rhythm was introduced, based on a metrical pattern regular enough to be "scanned," and on rhyme. This is the kind of schematism which we still think of as typical of poetry. In English the normal unit (or "foot") of the metre is the iambic, or short-long, unit. An uninflected, or relatively uninflected, language has to use a great many auxiliaries, and in the word order of English, where the auxiliary usually precedes the stressed word, the iambic rhythm follows the natural stresses of the spoken language (e.g., "the house," "I go," "for long," "my lord," etc.). In the earlier medieval period (ca. 1150-1300), the line employed was usually octosyllabic. In octosyllabics the metre and the native four-stress beat coincide, which makes it the simplest of metrical forms, and in good hands a light dancing rhythm that can, if the poet wishes, attain a

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11

headlong, almost breakneck, speed. Chaucer, though he uses the octosyllabic line with prodigious skill, employs, for most of his major works, the iambic pentameter that has continued to be ever since the standard English metre. If we pick up an English poem in iambic pentameter and listen carefully to its rhythm, we can still hear the old four-stress line beating against it. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in the nineteenth century, distinguished what he called "running" rhythm, based on metre, from "sprung" rhythm, where a second accentual rhythm syncopates against the metre.2 But it seems clear that all rhythm in English is more or less sprung, and always reflects some tension between stress accent and metrical accent. If there is too much stress, we get doggerel; if there is too much metre, we get singsong. Shakespeare's plays are written for the most part in iambic pentameter. But if we listen to an actor speaking the lines on a stage, we can hear very clearly the four-beat stress coming through it: To BE or NOT to be: THAT is the QUEStion. WHEther 'tis NOBler in the MIND to SUFfer The SLINGS and ARrows of outRAGeous FORtune, Or TAKE up ARMS against a SEA of TROUBles . . . [Hamlet, 3.1.56-9]

Drama, one might think, would be in a special category, but this is not really true: we can hear the four-beat line in every genre and at every stage of the pentameter's history: WHAN that APrill with his SHOURes SOOTE (Chaucer). [General Prologue, Canterbury Tales, 1. i]

Of MAN'S FIRST disoBEDience, and the FRUIT (Milton). [Paradise Lost, bk. i, 1.1]

In Pious TIMES, ere PRIESTcraft did beGIN (Dryden). [Absalom and Achitophel, 1.1]

But DO not LET us QUARrel any MORE (Browning). [Andrea del Sarto, 1.1]

I am not saying that the "real" rhythm is the four-stress one: I am saying that the real rhythm is contrapuntal, a tension between four stresses and five feet. In the pentameter, in contrast to the octosyllabic, the number of

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feet and of stresses do not coincide: this allows of a very subtle and flexible rhythmical pattern, and helps to explain why the pentameter has always been the standard unit of English poetry. The Craft So Long to Lerne* Chaucer, like most of the great conservatives, avoids the peculiar cacophonies of sound and rhythm that English can produce. He avoids alliterative verse in particular, because alliteration would give him a more strongly accented pattern than he wants, and he parodies the jingle of one of the standard ballad stanzas in his rhyme of Sir Thopas. Again like most conservatives, his themes are outward directed: although he writes some charming lyrics, he is primarily a narrative poet, a storyteller. Like other medieval storytellers, he has one major asset, the sounded e, which provides a lightness and a clean crisp delicacy that cannot be attained in modern English in anything like the same way. Take such a line as And wel we weren esed atte beste. [General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, 1. 29] This particular line is not literally translatable into modern English, but if it were, we should get something like "and when we were eased at the best"—the increase of weight is immediately obvious. Another example would be the line: Bot trewely to tellen atte laste [General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, 1. 707 A line so light is perfect for narrative, because it can travel at such a speed that even doggerel can be carried along by it. There is not much doggerel in Chaucer, except by way of parody, but we may find a couplet like this in his contemporary Gower: A stille water, for the nones, Rennende upon the smale stones. [Confessio Amantis, 11. 3010-11] "For the nones" means nothing: it is simply a piece of metrical putty, and yet the couplet has its own genuine charm.

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Then again, the storyteller, as distinct from the lyrical poet, often makes his most impressive points in the flattest and most commonplace language. What is happening is carrying the emotional weight, and the language should get out of its way. Again the clearest examples are outside Chaucer, in poets where naivete has produced a peculiar skill of its own, as in primitive painters. A Scottish contemporary of Chaucer, John Barbour, writing an epic on Robert Bruce, describes the beginning of a siege thus: On the Rude-evyn in the dawing, The Inglis host blew till assale. [The Brus, bk. 17,11. 634-5]

("At dawn on the feast of the Cross the English army gave the signal for the assault.") The language could hardly be prosier, but a striking phrase would not convey so well the authentic chill of a battle's zero hour. Meanwhile, in corners of England remote from London and the court, alliterative verse went on, and developed with it more experimental and radical forms of versification. Thus in The Pearl, written in a north-west midland dialect, we have a complicated stanza form, an intensive pattern of alliteration, and a refrain, the last line of the stanza being repeated through a sequence of stanzas, carrying its rhyme with it. One principle that emerges here is of considerable importance; The Pearl is a religious poem, an account of a mystical vision, and intensified sound-patterns are appropriate to religious poetry, where they suggest the concentration of the mind on a fixed point. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, found in the same manuscript as The Pearl, is divided into stanzas beginning with long alliterating lines and ending with short rhyming ones. However out of fashion such forms were in the cultural centre of England, they represented great potential resources of technique and expression. Every conservative development excludes whatever does not fit into it, but whatever is excluded will return sooner or later, as we shall see. Medieval to Modern Several fateful things happened to English language and literature in the fifteenth century, of which two concern us particularly at present. In the first place, the sounded e soon disappeared from poetry as well as from ordinary speech, and a good deal of metrical uncertainty resulted. By the time the first printed versions of Chaucer appeared, a century after his

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death, the secret of his metre was lost, and until his text was re-established by Tyrwhitt in the eighteenth century, he was regarded much as he himself regarded poets of the Sir Thopas persuasion, as a rough and bumpy writer of crude if often vigorous doggerel. Sidney says that he "had great wants, fit to be forgiven in so reverent antiquity/'4 which indicates the extent and importance of the change of language, for chronologically Sidney was no further removed from this "reverent antiquity" than we are from, say, William Cowper. As a result of the change in rhythm, the native four-beat line came into the foreground again. At the court of Henry VIII, John Skelton developed the "skeltonic" rhythm which has been named after him, a rhythm closer to nursery rhyme, ballad, and popular poetry of all kinds than perhaps any other equally important poet has produced. One result of this, of a type not uncommon among experimental poets, was that it was not until well on in the twentieth century that he was regarded as an important poet at all. The Old English four-beat line was, we said, split in two by a mid-line caesura; hence Old English poetry could be printed as a series of two-beat lines by a slight change in typography. The skeltonic is rhythmically the Old English half-line revived, although a clanging rhyme has been added: For though my rhyme be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rusty and moth-eaten, If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith. [Colin Clout, 11. 53-8]

Such a rhythm is a logical, if extreme, development of accentual tendencies, and is an excellent vehicle for the violent satire and grotesque realism that usually accompanied it in Skelton. A second major change in the language was a great influx of abstract Latin words, imported perhaps under the influence of the prevailing nominalist philosophy of the later Middle Ages, which threw a strong emphasis on abstraction and the categorizing of concepts. Stephen Hawes, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, writes a long didactic poem, The Pastime of Pleasure, a much less cheerful poem than such a title might suggest, in which the hero is instructed in, among other things, rhetoric:

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15

And then the third part / is elocution: When invention / hath the purpose wrought And set it in order / by disposition Without this third part / it vaileth right nought Though it be found / and in order brought: Yet elocution / with the power of Mercury The matter exorneth / right well racundiously. [bk. 11, st. i, 11. 904-10

The general principle, that ideas do not exist until one has found the right words for them, is sound enough, and will meet us again. But Hawes clearly thinks that the right words are long and learned words. Literary experience suggests that he is quite wrong as regards poetry: that poetry has a restricted tolerance for abstractions, and that the poet's vocabulary is sensational rather than conceptual, based on verbs and concrete nouns. But if we find his abstract words gray and muddy, he thinks of them as "golden rhetoric," or, as it has been called, "aureate diction." What is involved historically here is much more important than Hawes's personal taste. In its enthusiasm for abstractions and foreign words, fifteenth-century English took in perhaps more Latin than a Teutonic language should have done. If we look at Middle English, when an author could call a book on the remorse of conscience "The Ayenbite (again-bite) of Inwit," we can see that modern English has largely lost the power to form native compound words, in the way that German and other Teutonic languages can still do. We have "mouth" and "tooth," but we can form no derivatives from these other than "mouthy" or "toothy," which have a restricted range of reference: any serious derivative has to come from the Latin "oral" and "dental" roots. During the last century, several languages, for political reasons, attempted to purge their vocabularies of loan words from other languages, and there were similar tendencies in English. Some nineteenth-century writers, including William Morris and the Dorset poet William Barnes, tried to persuade us to get rid of not only Latin but French borrowings, and to call a market a "cheaping place," or a baby carriage a "pushwainling." But this came to nothing, and English has to exploit what advantages there are in having a uniquely mongrel vocabulary. However, aureate diction was a natural development of an experimental age, for while conservative poets tend to work with a restricted

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vocabulary, experimental ones reach out for new words, coinages, foreign words, whatever helps to diversify the pattern. In Skelton and Dunbar we get an aureate diction which sometimes becomes a technique of writing in two languages at once (called "macaronic" verse), reminding us that this is the age of Rabelais and his gigantic spate of words. Thus in Skelton's Speak, Parrot: Albertus De modo significandi And Donatus be driven out of school; Priscian's head broken how, handy-dandy, And Inter didascolos is reckoned for a fool; Alexander, a gander of Menander's pole, With "Da causales," is cast out of the gate. And "Da rationales" dare not show his pate.5

The theme is the driving out of scholastic philosophy by the "new learning" of sixteenth-century humanism; the tone is that of an urbane irony, very close in its emotional pitch to Byron's Don Juan of three centuries later. There are parallel effects in Dunbar: in his religious poetry particularly they help the intensifying of sound that we spoke of as congenial to religious themes. The opening of his A Ballad of Our Lady gives the effect of a clashing of church bells: Hail, sterne superne! Hail, in eterne, In Goddis sight to shine! Lucerne in derne for to discerne Be glory and grace divine; Hodiern, modern, sempitern, Angelical regine! Our tern inferne for to dispern Help, rialest rosine!6 The Tudor Poets

Wyatt and Surrey, at the court of Henry VIII, were the pioneers of a new conservatism, though this has to be qualified for Wyatt, as we shall see. Surrey in particular established for the sixteenth century a new pentameter line, based on the contemporary pronunciation of the language, heavier than Chaucer's line though lighter than the post-Miltonic ones.

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The two poets introduced the sonnet into English from Italian and French sources, mainly Petrarch. Petrarch is earlier than Chaucer, but in English (this does not apply to Italian) the sonnet has a rounded, epigrammatic, almost three-dimensional quality: like perspective painting, it belongs to the Renaissance, not to the flat narratives or the delicate pastel lyrics of medieval poetry. Wyatt followed the five-rhyme Petrarchan form, but Surrey introduced the freer structure, of three quatrains and a couplet, which is more suitable to English, and which Shakespeare also used. Surrey also brought in the major invention of blank verse, and both poets experimented with other forms, such as the so-called "poulterer's measure" of alternating six and seven-foot lines. The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy. For falsehood now doth flow and subject faith doth ebb, Which would not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web. [The Doubt of Future Foes, 11.1-4]

This is not Wyatt or Surrey but Queen Elizabeth, and a very creditable effort it is, with its vigorous alliterative pattern. But it indicates why experiments in longer metres than the pentameter were usually of short duration. There is too much bounce in the rhythm to keep it from sounding rather naive. The six-foot lines are cut in two by a heavy caesura, and the seven-foot ones seem to be gathering all their strength to aim at the final rhyme. Even two major works of the period, Drayton's Poly-Olbion, in hexameters, and Chapman's translation of the Iliad, in septenaries, are not free from these characteristics. They succeed mainly because they are so intensely objectified; a meditative theme in such a metre is more difficult to sustain. The habit of Wyatt and Surrey of using poulterer's measure for translations of the penitential Psalms doubtless helped to shorten its life. It used to be said that Wyatt, being older and further down on the evolutionary scale, was a cruder pioneer than Surrey, who did the same kind of thing much better. This view of them resulted from a historical accident. They both belonged to the courtly class of amateur poets who did not publish their poetry, and were first published in Tottel's Miscellany (1557), on the eve of Elizabeth's reign. By that time the new conservatism was in full swing, and the editor of Tottel made many alterations in Wyatt's work to bring it into line with Surrey's, under the impression,

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On Literature and Society

so common among editors, that he was improving it. Fortunately Wyatt's manuscripts have survived, and we can see from them that he is a poet of the older radicalism of Skelton and Dunbar as well as of the new age, and one of the finest experimental poets of any age: They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame and meek That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they have put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change. [They Flee from Me, 11.1-7]

In all poets we can hear a personal speaking voice, but in the typically conservative poets this voice is wholly absorbed into the poetic structure. In the above the speaking voice is beginning to form a third rhythm, close to the prose of highly articulate speech, and, especially in the second and fourth lines, making tiny and subtle alterations that neither the metre nor the stress pattern can account for. It is typical of the Tottel editor that he alters the second line to "stalking within my chamber" and the fourth line to "do not now remember"—in other words he is systematically trying to obliterate this third rhythm, which offends his ear. It is important to realize that it is there, because it is one of the most characteristic features of experimental poetry, and we find it again in Donne, in Hopkins, and in the later Yeats, among others. Its presence in this poem of Wyatt's makes it as radical a treatment of the "rhyme royal" stanza in which it is written as many of Hopkins's poems are of the sonnet form. We may compare the first quatrains of two sonnets in which the poets are translating the same Petrarchan original. The first is Wyatt, the second Surrey: The long love that in my thought doth harbor, And in mine heart doth keep his residence, Into my face presseth with bold pretence And therein campeth, spreading his banner. [11.1-4] Love, that liveth and reigneth in my thought, That built his seat within my captive breast, Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought, Oft in my face he doth his banner rest. [11.1-4, Tottel's version]

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Surrey is writing good conservative Tudor verse: Wyatt's rhythm presses boldly through a run-on third line and sits down in the middle of the fourth, giving a long pause in which to spread his banner. The suffix rhymes are another experimental touch. The "disappointment" rhyme, a rhyme so light that it cannot be heard when read aloud, is at the opposite extreme from the obtrusive rhyme, and except for Wyatt and Donne is very seldom found before the twentieth century. It is Wyatt too who exploits one of the most effective features of English metrics: the power of two strong beats coming together in the middle of a line, thus forming a spondee, to suggest something ominous and foreboding: Perchance thee lie withered and old, The winter nights that are so cold, Plaining in vain unto the moon: Thy wishes then dare not be told . . . [My Lute Awake, 11. 26-9]

Auld Lang Syne Spenser is the greatest non-dramatic poet of the Tudor period, and a conservative poet, gradually working his way toward the complex stanza form which he invented for his gigantic epic The Faerie Queene. He began, however, as an experimental poet in several directions and those directions are of considerable historical significance. A society like that of the Middle Ages, where most people do not move very far from their homes during their lives, will produce marked differences of dialect in its language. Caxton, towards the end of the fifteenth century, complained that, what with northern England saying "eggs" and southern England saying "eiren," the two parts of the kingdom were becoming unintelligible to each other.7 But with the centralizing of authority that the Tudors brought in, London English, which was essentially East Midland in its dialect, became standard English for the whole country. Our standard English is directly descended from East Midland, which is why we find the East Midland of Chaucer so much easier to read than, say, the West Midland of Langland. Still, the variety of sound and expression that different dialects can produce is a major reward of studying Middle English. By Spenser's time all the other dialects, with one exception, lost their literary autonomy and had come to be thought of as substandard English. The exception is the Northern dialect, which remained a literary vehicle because of the political independence of Scotland. Except for a

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few works here and there, such as Tennyson's "Northern Farmer" poems and the Dorset-dialect poems of William Barnes in the nineteenth century, Lowland Scottish has been the main contributor to dialect literature since the Middle Ages. If we look first at Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night," and then at his "Tarn o' Shanter," we should note, first, that the latter poem is written in quite as pure an English as the former, and, secondly, that it is a considerably livelier poem. This is not entirely the result of the theme: the dialect poem is less corseted in syntax, less concerned to compete with the formal essay in its vocabulary. In Hugh MacDiarmid Scottish poetry continues to be an eloquent medium in the twentieth century. Spenser wanted a "rustic" language for his first major work, The Shepheardes Calender, because, first, it was in the pastoral genre, where the speakers are assumed to be rural, and, second, because the pastoral tradition had been established in literature by Theocritus of Sicily, who wrote in the Doric dialect of Greek, not in the standard Attic. The language of The Shepheardes Calender includes dialect forms from all over England, obsolete words found in Middle English poets, coinages, and a few foreign and slang terms. The experiment was not unanimously approved by the conservatives, for whom a dialect was essentially clown's English: Sidney condemned it, and Ben Jonson grumbled that Spenser "writ no language,"8 which in one sense was true. Still, this was the first large-scale effort in English literature to exploit the varieties of speech in dialect. Grace and Authority

Grace and authority were what the strange language of The Shepheardes Calender brought to the verse, according to the editor of the book, whom we know only by the initials E.K.9 Authority, of course, has a special meaning in the Renaissance. For Renaissance humanism, modern writers could only produce major work if they modelled themselves on Greek or, more particularly, Latin literature. This meant Latin literature of its great period, the Augustan period of Virgil and Ovid, when poetry was written in quantitative metre, depending on vowel length and pitch accent. Centuries later, in the period of barbarism and superstition, Latin verse had degenerated into rhyme and stress accent, and the same developments in the vernacular languages indicated a similar level of culture in them—or so at least the die-hard humanists urged. For really major work, the poet, if he would not actually write in Latin, should write as

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closely to Latin models as possible, which implies that English poets ought to try to experiment with quantitative metres. The humanist prejudice against rhyme is reflected, humorously, in Ben Jonson's "A Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme," and, more seriously, in Campion's essay, Observations in the Art of English Poesy, a manifesto for quantitative verse curiously at odds with Campion's practice. It is more comprehensible when we remember that Campion was a composer, looking for a rhythm that would merge most completely with the rhythm of music. Spenser's struggles with quantitative experiments are recorded in a fascinating correspondence with his friend Gabriel Harvey. A skilful and scholarly poet, like Tennyson or Robert Bridges, can produce interesting results with quantitative verse, but the resulting rhythm cuts so sharply across the natural stresses of English that it is always likely to sound rather broken-winded. In any case Spenser had no luck with it at all, and the first line of an effort entitled "lambicum Trimetrum" is a sufficient commentary on it: Unhappy verse! witness of my unhappy state.

What is important is not the experiments, but the direction that Spenser's reaction against them took. It is a peculiarity of English literature that, down to the eighteenth century, it drew relatively little from its own earlier traditions. The fertile influences were foreign, Classical, Italian, French, and the attitude of humanism to the Middle Ages, or of the age of Pope to the age of Spenser, was touched with amused condescension. There are some striking exceptions to this. Campion's essay was answered by Samuel Daniel in his Defence of Rhyme: Daniel recognized the underlying historical fallacy in the humanist argument, and his essay expands from a defence of rhyme into a defence of medieval culture. Spenser has no comparable essay, but The Faerie Queene is loaded down with the richest brocade of rhyme, inter-rhyme, assonance, and alliteration of any major poem in English literature. Its technique is not really medieval, but its self-contained world of "faerie" has the wonder and mystery, the lush sensuousness, the naive romance figures of dragons and wizards and enchantments, of that "Gothic" world of imagination which has never existed but is continually being revived. It deserts the Olympian gods of humanism for the haunted forests of elves and fays: it is, as Gabriel Harvey complained, "Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo."10

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We open The Faerie Queene and are plunged into a dark forest, where the catalogue of trees, a compulsory feature of this sort of poem, at once makes its appearance: The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry: The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral. [bk. i, canto i, st. 8,11. 6-9]

Alliteration fell under much stronger humanist disapproval than rhyme, but look at the complexity of alliteration here! We have, first, s, p, s, p; then v, pop, pop, v; then o, k, o, k; and finally a ghostly repetition of s, p, s, p in the names of the two trees of the last line. In the next stanza come the devices of imitative harmony: The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepeth still, The willow worn of forlorn paramours, The yew obedient to the bender's will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill...

[bk. i, canto i, st. 9,11.1-5]

In the first line the consonants /, /, m, m, k, k, r, r march along two by two in procession; the third line wails with anguish of all the Elizabethan willow songs; the fourth has, between the alliteration of "bed" and "bend," four unstressed syllables which cause the line to sag out in the shape of a yew bow; the fifth line stops dead in the middle with its "shafts" sticking up. This sort of thing goes on for thirty thousand lines. We noticed earlier that intensification of sound is appropriate to religious poetry, where it suggests the fixity of a contemplative mind. The Faerie Queene is implicitly a religious poem, but it is more centrally a poem about a dream world which is also a world of moral realization. Intensified sound also goes with dream imagery and with the kind of lush erotic sensuousness that is closely related to it. In most Old English poetry, for example, rhyme would be in bad taste, but when a poet, as in "The Phoenix," is describing a dreamlike earthly paradise free of the grip of frost, the blast of fire, and the falling of hail and sleet, rhyme is added to the alliteration:

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ne forstes fnaest / ne fyres blaest ne haegles hryre / ne hrimes dryre ... [11.15-16]

It is for much the same reason that the sound patterns in The Faerie Queene are so intense, and they are nowhere more intense than in passages of erotic or drowsy temptation, like the speech of Despair in Book One or the song of the siren Acrasia in Book Two. Discordia Concors11

Even as Spenser was composing The Faerie Queene, however, Donne was writing his Songs and Sonnets, and introducing another radical and experimental phase of writing. We noticed how in Wyatt a rhythm of direct speech, distinct from the stress pattern, emerges from the texture, and in Donne's explosive openings: "Busy old fool, unruly sun," "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,"12 the same kind of rhythm is emerging again. Conservative verse is normally fairly regular, not only in its metre but in its tempo: a beautifully sustained rallentando like this is a mark of experimental poetry: Sweetest love, I do not go For weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show A fitter love for me: But since that I Must die at last, 'tis best To use my self in jest, Thus by fain'd deaths to die. [Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go, st. i]

So is the violently syncopated rhythm of Donne's satires, as in this passage where the loss of direction is imitated in the heavy mid-line stresses, while the final rhymes are enjambed to the point of disappearance from the sound-pattern: To adore, or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong is. On a huge hill,

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On Literature and Society dragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go; And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so. [Satire 3,11. 76-82]

The conservative view of such verse is again Ben Jonson's, that "Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging."13 Donne is even more famous, of course, for introducing the type of deliberately strained "metaphysical" conceit which, according to Eliot, expresses at once the power of imaginative synthesis and the difficulty of making one in such an age, when Donne can survey the ruins of the medieval cosmos and say that it is "all in pieces, all coherence gone" [An Anatomy of the World, 1. 213]. Eliot is using an experimental poet of the past to justify the techniques of a later experimental age, which is fair enough, and even fair to Donne, who certainly took such a view of his own time.14 It is significant that the metaphysical conceit is a very difficult one to estimate by the canons of conservative good taste: like other forms of radical writing, it deliberately breaks with such canons, and even if it seems self-evident that it has "gone too far," we still have to reckon with the possibility that we are not going far enough. Thus Crashaw on the tears of St. Mary Magdalene: Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans. [The Weeper, 11. 113-14]

or Vaughan on the "comely spacious whale" [Psalm 104,1.72]; or Marvell on portaging: Or like antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes. [Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax, st. 97]

We have to recognize a quality of imaginative exploration in such writing, and it is more adventurous to participate in the exploring than merely to complain that this is unfamiliar territory. In such conceits, as Samuel Johnson quite correctly said, the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.15 The violence implies a forcing or straining which is serious and comic at the same time. Donne, absent from his wife on the Continent, compares his feeling for her to the legs of a pair of compasses, the fixed foot remaining in the centre, the moving one re-

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volving around it [A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, 11. 21-36]. Th image expresses a genuine affection, along with the incongruity of applying the circles and lines of a Euclidean universe to ordinary human activities. In religious poetry, the fact that Herbert is a deeply serious religious poet does not prevent him from saying: All things are big with jest: nothing that's plain But may be witty, if thou hast the vein. [The Church Porch, 11. 239-40

And Donne can write an impassioned hymn to God the Father which says: When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, For I have more [A Hymn to God the Father, 11. 5-6

where he puns on his own name (and perhaps on that of his wife Ann More, a descendant of Sir Thomas More: compare Eliot's line in "Little Gidding": "Three men, and more, on the scaffold" [sec. 3,1. 27]). We saw that while conservative poetry relies mainly on metre, experimental poetry tends to escape from strict metrical patterns and build up larger and longer units. This means that obtrusive rhythm is a frequent feature of experimental poetry as well as obtrusive rhyme, as we noticed in Skelton. Such rhythm is likely to show the influence of music, with its continuous tactus or stress and its variable number of notes within a measure. Among the metaphysical poets, Crashaw in particular developed a remarkable free ode form, irregular in rhyme and length of line, with a heavy emphasis on certain thematic words, which gathers speed and power as it proceeds and explodes in a crashing finale, as in an ode to St. Teresa: O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires, By all the eagle in thee, all the dove, By all thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they ... [The Flaming Heart, 11. 93-4]

Cowley, still a greatly underestimated poet, comes at the end of this experimental period, as a new conservatism was coming in. In his intel-

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lectual attitude he was of the new age; in his techniques he was of the older age. Cowley was a great admirer of Crashaw, and it was probably under Crashaw's influence that he developed, on the model of Pindar, a kind of rhymed free-verse ode form, in which, as he says, "The numbers are various and irregular, and sometimes... seem harsh and uncouth So that almost all their sweetness... lies in a manner wholly at the mercy of the reader."16 The reader, especially the conservative reader, has not always been merciful: Samuel Johnson stigmatizes the slight vogue which this type of poem had as "the Pindarick madness."17 His Lives of the Poets, all of whom except Milton belonged to the new conservative age, begins with Cowley and a discussion of metaphysical techniques which was designed to show what was wrong with the other type of poetry which the age of Dryden and Pope had displaced. Pope, a generation or two after Cowley's death, asked "Who now reads Cowley?" [The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, 1. 75]. Cowley had no more luck with the Romantic conservatives: when Coleridge drew his distinction between imagination and the inferior quality of fancy, he remarked that "Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind."18 Cowley is also one of the most assiduous users of imitative harmony, sometimes with remarkable results, as in this paraphrase of Isaiah, which reminds us of a famous passage in the first book of Paradise Lost: Like fearful troops in some strong ambush ta'en, Shall some fly routed, and some fall slain, Thick as ripe fruit, or yellow leaves in autumn fall, With such a violent storm as blows down tree and all. [The 34. Chapter of the Prophet Isaiah, st 3,11.18-21] True Musical Delight

When Hopkins drew his distinction between running metrical rhythm and sprung syncopated rhythm, he mentioned the Elizabethan poet Robert Greene as the last poet to have recognized sprung rhythm. The word "last" indicates that he was trying to attach the idea to a butterslide theory of history which will meet us later. He may have been thinking of such a little song as this ("Doron's jig"): Through the shrubs as I can crack For my lambs, little ones, 'Mongst many pretty ones—

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Nymphs, I mean,—whose hair was black As the crow, Like the snow Her face and brows shined, I ween; I saw a little one, A bonny pretty one, As bright, buxom, and as sheen As was she .. .19

We have emphasized the importance of the influence of music, and the close association of Elizabethan poetry with music certainly helps to account for the dancing rhythm of this "jig-" In the 15905 there came a vogue for the madrigal, an elaborate contrapuntal setting for songs which the poets on the whole disliked, because the musical intricacies did not give enough prominence to their words. Besides, some madrigal composers, Thomas Morley in particular, were apt to take liberties with their words. The poets preferred the "ayre," where there is a single line of melody and an accompaniment, often vocal, more frequently instrumental in the seventeenth century. But, as we see, poetry was also responding to the influence of music by imitating its continuous rhythm, and this was one of the factors in the emergence of a more experimental type of poetry. Another factor was the influence of drama, and the necessity to accommodate the speech rhythms of poetry to the needs of the theatre. There was an eighteenth-century critic of Shakespeare who decided, on internal evidence, that The Winter's Tale was a very early play of Shakespeare, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona a very late one. His taste, founded on conservative eighteenth-century practice, assumed that of course a poet would develop from roughness to smoothness, from irregularity to regularity. We know that Shakespeare's development was exactly the reverse of this. Here is a passage from an early play (Love's Labor's Lost): And I to sigh for her! to watch for her! To pray for her! Go to; it is a plague That Cupid will impose for my neglect Of his almighty dreadful little might. Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan: Some men must love my lady, and some Joan. [3.1.202-7]

The rhythm is closely bound to the individual line, each of which is a

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clearly marked iambic five-foot line. A line-bound rhythm cries out for rhyme, and the speech collapses with relief into the rhyming couplet which marks the end of a scene. Here is a passage from a late play (The Winter's Tale): Whilst I remember Her and her virtues, I cannot forget My blemishes in them; and so still think of The wrong I did myself: which was so much, That heirless it hath made my kingdom; and Destroy'd the sweet'st companion that e'r man Bred his hopes out of. [5.1.6-12]

Here one could hardly reconstruct the blank verse lines merely by hearing them spoken: lines ending with "of" or "and" are not easily felt as iambic pentameter. The pauses tend to come in the middle of a line rather than at the end, and the whole speech is intricately welded into a rhythmical unit of its own. What is true of Shakespeare is true of all the drama of his time, as we can see if we compare Marlowe, for instance, with Webster or Tourneur. Milton's development is similar to Shakespeare's in many ways. He begins with the elaborate stanza pattern of the Nativity Ode, but abandons rhyme for Paradise Lost, by which time rhyme had come into fashion again. Hence Milton's printer asked him to write a prefatory statement explaining "why the poem rhymes not."20 Milton's answer is based on the authority of humanism and its view that rhyme signalized the degeneration of Latin poetry, which we have already met. More significant however is the political metaphor in his defence: "the modern bondage of rhyming" is contrasted with the "ancient liberty" of not doing so.21 That is, he associates what we have been calling conservative poetry with such political developments as the Restoration, and his own practice with the kind of liberty that he had dedicated his life to defending. Let us look at a representative passage from Paradise Lost: They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprung Upon the wing; as when men wont to watch On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread, Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake. Nor did they not perceive the evil plight

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In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel; Yet to their generals voice they soon obey'd Innumerable, [bk. i, 11. 331-8]

Here again, as in late Shakespeare, many of the lines are run-on, with the strong pauses frequently in the middle of the line, and a large paragraphlike unit of rhythm emerges as the organizing rhythm to which the individual line is subordinate. We notice, however, that the line is still there, much more prominent in the rhythmical texture than it is in late Shakespeare. The reason for this is the genre: in drama every speech is a unit in itself, but epic has a single speaker, and preserves the convention of the poet as singer, marking the beat on his harp or lyre. When Milton turns to drama in Samson Agonistes, he gives speeches to the chorus that, although they usually take off from and return to iambic pentameter, contain passages of free verse of the most radical kind seen in English literature until our own century: But who is this? what thing of sea or land? Female of sex it seems, That, so bedecked, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing, Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for the isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails filled, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play... [11.710-19]

Brick to Marble22 Another conservative cycle begins with the Restoration in 1660, born of the union of two aspects of anti-Puritan sentiment, a reactionary political movement and a liberal cultural one. For the first time since before Chaucer, the main foreign influences were French rather than Italian, and the "Classical" way in which French accommodated itself to the absolutism of Louis XIV became something of a model in England. Two minor poets of the period, Denham and Waller, more particularly Waller, set the new fashion. "Methought," said Waller, "I never saw a good copy of English verses: they wanted smoothness: then I began to essay."23

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What he essayed was developed by Dryden and Pope as a poetic structure founded on the stopped couplet, where there is in each couplet a sense of an antithesis completing itself, along with the clear full ring of rhyme and echoing rhyme. The four-stress counterpoint is still there, but the metrical rhythm predominates; hence the sense of "smoothness." Such a form was, in English, the inevitable vehicle for a type of poetry that had sharply limited its objectives to the human scene, and for an age that closely associated the rational and imaginative faculties. The pattern is a relatively predictable one: we know that the line we are going to hear next will be a pentameter and half of a couplet, and, if the second half, we know the sound of the rhyme. The poetic experience involved is rather like a game, where, as in chess, or the card game so brilliantly described in The Rape of the Lock, the conditions within which each game is played do not change. The effect of disciplined words stepping along in prescribed pattern is that of wit, in the sense that the word then bore, of conscious control and alert intelligence. This is also true of all conservative verse: of Sidney's in the sixteenth century and of A.E. Housman's in the twentieth; but there are many varieties of such writing. Light or broadly comic verse is consciously clever: it uses deliberately over-ingenious rhymes and fixed metrical schemes, ranging from the ballade or villanelle to the limerick. Light verse is more elaborately contrived than serious verse, just as detective and adventure stories are more elaborately contrived than "serious" novels. The poetry of Dryden and Pope is neither light nor serious in this sense: it has a quality of urbanity that comes somewhere in between. Its rhymes are perfect and almost never obtrusive: we may read for dozens of pages in Dryden before we find even so ordinary a two-syllable rhyme, as in this prophetic vision of the hippie cult: But gesture, pose, grimace and affectation Though foes to sense, are harmless to the nation.24

The most famous and typical poetry of this age is in satire, but we notice how much the diction of satire has changed. For Donne or Milton, satire involved a certain parody of poetic craftsmanship itself: the metre was deliberately roughened and the rhymes deliberately forced. Thus Milton's sonnet on his divorce tract Tetrachordon: Cries the stall-reader, "Bless us! what a word on A title-page is this!" and some in file

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Stand spelling false, while one might walk to MileEnd Green. [On the Detraction ... Treatises (Sonnet 11), 11. 5-8]

Samuel Johnson speaks of this sonnet as "contemptible,"25 but it is written in what for Milton was the appropriate idiom for satire in his day. In the next age there are two main levels of satire. The lower and more informal level, usually in octosyllabics, continues the earlier tradition to some extent. This is the form used by Butler in Hudibms, by Swift in his most famous poems, by Mandeville in The Grumbling Hive (the poetic part of The Fable of the Bees), and by Charles Churchill in The Ghost. In Butler particularly the studied carelessness which belongs to the form becomes an intentional doggerel, or what in German is called Knittelvers: But those that write in rhyme, still make The one verse for the other's sake: For, one for sense, and one for rhyme, I think's sufficient at one time. [Hudibms, pt. 2, canto 2,11. 27-30]

Pentameter satire, on the higher levels of Dryden and Pope, will have nothing to do with the earlier practice of reflecting a grotesque world by a grotesque style. It seeks, rather, as strong a contrast as possible between the shoddiness and squalor of what is being described and the disciplined precision of the manner of describing it. It is perhaps not an accident (if there are any accidents in literature) that Pope's finest images should include a spider-web and flies caught in amber: Such things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there. [Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 11.171-2]

or that the central image of The Rape of the Lock should be a pair of scissors, an antithetical machine for dividing things. Antithesis is built in to the whole conception of the satire as well as to its couplet technique. Take this from The Rape of the Lock: Now lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake, And sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake, [canto i, 11.15-16]

The second line contrasts the literary convention of sleepless lovers with their actual practice of sleeping the clock around; the first turns on the

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mechanical oscillation of sleeping and waking that keeps one going through a totally idle existence. The subtlety of saying "the rousing shake" instead of the more obvious "a rousing shake" is worth study: it suggests an action followed automatically, at a certain time, by a counter-action, the principle of mechanical existence. Seeing other people (or dogs) as mechanisms, driven by "ruling passions" and the like, is central to the perspective of satire, and again such mechanical existence is the antithesis of the conscious craftsmanship which records it. In fact Pope sees the whole universe as ruled by a God whose justice is symbolized by a balance. Folly, for Pope, is essentially the inability to see the balance: Go, wiser thou! And, in thy scale of sense, Weigh thy opinion against providence; Call imperfection what thou fancy'st such, Say, here he gives too little, there too much. [Essay on Man, Epistle i, sec. 4,11.1-4]

The Poetical Character

We have seen that English literature in every period up to Pope's time had drawn heavily on Latin, French, and Italian sources, and that every age, especially the predominantly conservative ones, was quite sure that it represented a great improvement over its predecessors. A speaker in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy remarks that he sees no reason why poetry should not improve along with the advance of science and social conditions,26 and Dryden himself says of another essay of his that "I profess to have no other ambition . . . than that poetry may not go backward, when all other arts and sciences are advancing."27 In the eighteenth century a major change in the attitude to poetry took place— part of a much larger cultural change, as we shall see—and a century after Dryden it was generally understood that, to quote the title of an essay of Hazlitt, the arts are not progressive. Poetry expresses the central imaginative needs of society: it is, both historically and psychologically, primitive: it does not improve when social conditions do. The speakers in Dryden's dialogue, though they have differing views, all assume that poetry is a product of civilization, and improves with the refinement of manners: by the time of the Romantics it was possible for Thomas Love Peacock, a contemporary of Shelley, to write a paradoxical essay (The

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Four Ages of Poetry) showing that the advance of civilization is a process which never includes the poets. An enthusiasm for primitive poetry in the eighteenth century led to calling a good deal of poetry primitive that was not really so, but what is important is the expansion of poetic interest and taste from the sharply narrowed objectives of the Augustans. Homer thus becomes a primitive poet in some influential essays by the Scottish scholar Thomas Blackwell;28 the Old Testament psalms and prophecies, following Bishop Lowth's researches into the structure of Hebrew poetry (1753, in Latin; translated into English in lyS/),29 were incorporated into the poetic tradition much more directly than before; Celtic and Norse poetry was studied and translated by Gray among others (for some reason Old English took longer to become a significant influence); and in 1765 Bishop Percy published his epoch-making Reliques of Antient English Poetry, a collection of ballads. Then again, by this time English poets realized that they were the inheritors of a first-rate literature, and from then until now English literature has been increasingly a self-fertilizing organism. There was also the use of personae, or assumed poetic roles, from earlier periods of history, like Chatterton's Rowley and Macpherson's Ossian. It is most unfortunate that the question of authenticity had to be raised with Macpherson, for the Ossianic poems are of crucial importance in understanding the change of taste in this period, and Macpherson's Ossian is no more remote from its original than, say, the hero of Yeats's The Wanderings ofOisin a century later. The effect of the new varieties of poetic experience was to burst through the limits set by the Augustans to poetry. The prophetic area above it was invaded by Blake and Smart: Smart's Song to David in particular recaptures for poetry the apocalyptic vision of Old Testament poets, as its title implies. The "superstitious" or mythological area was similarly, regarded by the Augustans as below poetry: Pope could deal playfully with sylphs in The Rape of the Lock, but without giving them the imaginative reality that Puck and Oberon and Ariel have in Shakespeare. But now the world of romance, of fairies, elves, and elemental spirits, of heathen gods, heroes, and ghosts, was explored by Macpherson, by Burns, and by Collins in his poem on the popular superstitions of the Scottish Highlands. The expansion in turn brought about a brief but intense period of radical experiment again, though one with very little direct influence on its time.

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We remember the achievement of Crashaw, which Cowley attempted to pick up and continue in his free-verse Pindarics; something similar is achieved in the Song to David, with its steady slow accumulation of speed, its hammering refrain words, and the almost unbearable power of its conclusion which makes it a kind of Ravel's Bolero of poetry. We are not surprised to find that the stanza form of this poem is the apotheosis of the ballad stanza that Chaucer had used for the tale of Sir Thopas, and which had caused the Host, a conservative critic, to remark, "Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!" [Canterbury Tales, frag. 7, 1. 930]. The Ossianic poems are written in a kind of declamatory prose rhythm which for some reason has had a much more extensive and remarkable development in Continental than in English literature. Blake's Prophecies, which owe a good deal to Ossian, use for the most part a long line of six or seven beats, but are really, as Blake points out in his preface to Jerusalem, in a free-verse rhythm which follows the curves of the subject matter. 3° Secondary Imagination

The Romantic movement began, as we all know, with the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. The second edition of 1800 was sufficiently aware of its historical significance to be a manifesto of a new conservatism. The word "ballads" in the title shows the influence of the absorption of the ballad into poetry that had begun with Percy's work, and with it the sense of the essentially primitive impact of poetry. The simplicity of Wordsworth's style, and the bald plain statements that occur in it, such as the famous I've measured it from side to side: Tis three feet long and two feet wide. [The Thorn, st. 3,11.10-11 (1798 ed.)]

for which he was so much and so ignorantly ridiculed, recall the objectivity of the ballad and of earlier narrative poetry. The ballad is a type of poetry which has been transmitted orally and preserved in popular memory. As a result of this oral transmission, whatever unusual turns of phrase it might once have had would get smoothed away, leaving a stripped poetic surface quite unlike that of poetry committed at once to writing. Many ballads may have been of courtly origin, because they reflect upper-class stereotypes as clearly as

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Chaucer or Spenser (e.g., "The Three Ravens," which strayed into a Jacobean songbook). Others, like the Robin Hood ballads, reflect a good deal of opposition to social "establishments," of whatever kind. But however they originated they belong, by virtue of their transmission, to popular literature. When Wordsworth said in his Preface that "humble and rustic life was generally chosen" as the setting for his poems,31 he indicates a desire for a form of poetic experience that would break through the limits of what we should now call elitist culture. He is not saying that people in such social surroundings are more articulate than other people: he is raising the question of how to attain a poetic language that is not also an expression of class ascendancy. Hence he repudiates such language as that of Gray's ode on the death of West, with its line And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire [On the Death of Mr. Richard West, 1. 2]

because "Phoebus" in that context is really only in-group slang for "sun." The ideal in the remote distance is a classless poetic diction, and this ideal is reinforced by his desire "to adopt the very language of men" and his assimilating of the language of poetry to that of prose. All this is very different from any previous literary conservatism, and we may wonder if the term is really applicable here. We should remember that in literature conservative movements begin as new experiments. But as the Romantic movement gathers strength and new adherents, other tendencies make their appearance. One of them, partly a product of the self-fertilizing tendency already spoken of, is a tendency to a kind of archaism. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, especially in the 1800 version with the marginalia which sound like a Renaissance scholar commenting on a Medieval romance, places the poem at a distance from us, in time as well as space, and this distancing formalizes it, just as sylphs and epic "machinery," in a very different way, formalize The Rape of the Lock. Similarly in, for instance, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: How thou art changed! I dare not look on thee; I feel but see thee not. I scarce endure The radiance of thy beauty. Some good change Is working in the elements, which suffer Thy presence thus unveiled. The Nereids tell That on the day when the clear hyaline

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On Literature and Society Was cloven at thine uprise, and thou didst stand Within a veined shell, which floated on ... [2.5.16-23]

By archaism I do not mean faking: I mean only a deliberately formal speech which shows a certain degree of retreat from the language of, say, Shelley's contemporary Jane Austen, a retreat not so much in the diction as in the rhythm. It is a quality which makes it difficult for Shelley, in the fourth act of this drama, to prophesy the future in what is in so many respects the language of the past. We may take an analogy from the Bible. The scholars who produced the "authorized" 1611 translation of the Bible, being for the most part southern English, retained the "loveth" and "giveth" forms that were still used in London and the south, though they were slowly being pushed out by the northern "loves" and "gives" forms, and naturally they also retained the second person singular of "thou hast" and the like, which was still ordinary usage. Their language, in short, was conservative but current. But it is not current with us: consequently the 1611 Bible for us is a romantic Bible, with a remote and mysterious authority that no contemporary translation can command. Shelley's language is a special language appropriate to the high style of his theme, but the effect it gives is, very curiously for Shelley of all people, rather sacerdotal. I call this a conservative tendency, because it tends toward establishing a relatively uniform imaginative pattern, whatever does not fit that pattern being excluded. The tendency has nothing to do with other forms of conservatism: Shelley was, of course, politically a radical, as was the intensely conservative William Morris at the end of the century. At the other extreme is Hopkins, authoritarian in his religious and social views, but one of the most radical poets in English literature. One danger in associating poetic style with a hieratic language removed from ordinary speech is the danger of coming too strongly under the influence of an earlier writer, for whom it was more contemporary and natural. Thus Keats found that Milton was beginning to take over his Hyperion, and in his later version, The Fall of Hyperion, he made a heroic effort to escape from this influence and write in a style closer to that of, say, his own letters. But the technical problem remained unsolved. It remained unsolved even for Wordsworth, whose theory was so diametrically opposed to archaizing. The massive Prelude, not thrown into the scales of publication until 1850, after Tennyson had established

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his reputation, is, like the less concentrated Excursion, a vision of life filtered through solitude. The observer screens out the distracting babble of the crowd, including the ghostly crowd within which we all have [sic]. "Residence in France" at the time of the Revolution disturbed and "impaired" this filtering process with urgent social concerns: This history, my friend, hath chiefly told Of intellectual power, from stage to stage Advancing, hand in hand with love and joy, And of imagination teaching truth Until that natural graciousness of mind Gave way to over-pressure from the times And their disastrous issues, [bk. 12,11. 44-50]

Again, restoration to full intellectual health includes a process of distancing, of keeping oneself in a state of ritual purity, conscious of the self though not self-conscious. We have no positive term for what the Romantics were aiming at. T.S. Eliot, who was out to attack it, called it a dissociation of sensibility, and attached it to a theory of history that will meet us later.32 In its most intense and concentrated forms, such as the five great odes of Keats and many of Tennyson's earlier poems, it becomes a poetry of spell or charm. It summons up a mood and rigorously keeps everything not belonging to that mood outside the charmed circle. In the Prelude and in many Browning monologues (e.g., that of the Pope in The Ring and the Book), it becomes, to borrow another word of Eliot's, a poetry of rumination, a meditative survey of the world which, again, screens out everything that seems emotionally irrelevant. The Romantic-Victorian conservatism (for the tradition continued without a break) runs through Housman into the twentieth century, and peters out in what Ezra Pound calls the cuckoo-clock of the Georgian poets, strophic lyrical stanzas that can attain great beauty and delicacy in, say, Walter de la Mare, but in inferior poets become simply a fixed metrical structure which the poet is incapable of varying. Meanwhile a new experimentalism had been forming against it, and this movement emerged into the foreground just after the First World War. As it incorporated all the experimental features of previous periods, we may use it as a basis for reviewing those features.

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We remember that in the fifteenth century there was an influx of Latin words into English, developing the conventions of aureate diction and macaronic verse. One result of this was somewhat unexpected. Long Latin words in English normally have one strong stress; hence such words can, if skilfully used, lighten the texture of English poetry by introducing a large number of unstressed syllables. The use of Latin words for this purpose is a central feature of Milton: Him the Almighty Power Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms. [Paradise Lost, bk. i, 11. 44-9]

Milton's control over his vocabulary is faultless: the proportion of Latin to English words is always exactly right, and the sound never slackens off into bumble. But this feature of Paradise Lost, like most features of it, is a continuous tour de force. A century later we find Blake's prophecies expanding into a much longer line than the pentameter, and the expansion clearly has a good deal to do with the fact that Blake's language is much closer to the rhythm and sound of contemporary speech than that of most of the great Romantics: As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner As of a globe rolling thro' voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro. The microscope knows not of this nor the telescope: they alter The ratio of the spectator's organs but leave objects untouched. [Milton, pi. 29,11.15-18]

Blake has realized that the speech of the average articulate and educated Englishman is becoming a polysyllabic babble, and the line has to expand to accommodate this. Again, if we look at Milton's spellings (which indicate his pronunciations) of such words as "adventrous," "vultur," "artick," or "voutsafe," we can see that the number of chewing and spitting noises in English speech has increased since his day, and the poet has to reckon with this fact. One experimental Victorian poet,

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Arthur Hugh Clough, made some remarkable efforts to incorporate speech rhythms into a longer line: Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it. [Amours de Voyage, st. i, 11. 9-10]

We may also look at the hexameters of Bridges' Testament of Beauty, one of the very few successful philosophical epics in modern poetry: Nay, see the Armenian folk in their snow-burrows, as if distrustful of their high mountainous plateau between the seas, hav riveted their patriotism by stubborn adherence to an ancient heresy, a paradoxy anent the two natures of Christ, which some theologic bishop, peering in the fog of his own exhalations, thought pleasing to God.33

Here the use of such words as "anent," which are part of Bridges' very complex theory of language, is less significant than the effort to catch the rhythm of modern educated speech. Here and elsewhere in this poem, as in Blake, we are reminded that the earlier avalanche of Latin abstractions has been succeeded by another avalanche of technical terms derived from the Greek, which has further affected the speech rhythms of English. We saw earlier that Shakespeare and Milton, becoming more radical in their technique as they went on, eventually broke through the line altogether, and swept up large groups of lines in a single paragraph rhythm. A similar development took place with Eliot and Pound, beginning around 1915, and Pound in particular became the theorist of a new form of composition in which the unit was the field or space rather than the individual line. This had always been inherent in a good many developments of poetry: we may note that the word "verse," which strictly means a single line, has come in ordinary speech to mean "stanza," or group of lines. In Pound's comments on the manuscript of Eliot's The Waste Land, we see remarks like "too penty"—i.e., too close to the pentameter line, and so becoming facile, moving away from the more difficult and subtle irregular rhythm that was really there. To capture this rhythm is also to define a larger rhythmical unit. In Gerontion, in a passage obviously indebted to the later Jacobean dramatists, the use of

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abstract words makes the style more colloquial and also emancipates the line into the paragraph. The problem is the same as that of Blake or Bridges or Clough, but the solution is not a longer line: She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. [11. 38-40]

We remember too that in the fifteenth century the aureate diction was closely associated with "macaronic" verse, or introducing tags of Latin into the texture. The same technique is used in The Waste Land, with its quotations from half a dozen languages including Sanskrit. In the much more radical developments of Pound's Cantos both aureate and macaronic tendencies flourish mightily: thin as Demeter's hair Hooo Fasa, and in a dance the renewal with two larks in contrappunto at sunset ch'intenerisce a sinistra la Torre seen thru a pair of breeches. Che sublia es laissa cader between NEKUIA where are Alcmene and Tyro and the Charybdis of action to the solitude of Mt. Taishan femina, femina, that wd/not be dragged into paradise by the hair, under the gray cliff in periplum .. .34 Prospect

The relations of English with other languages do not stop with this "macaronic" technique of embedded tags and quotations. In the early years of the twentieth century, Synge discovered in the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, an English speech which had been affected, in its syntax as well as its vocabulary, by the rhythms of Irish, whether or not the speaker actually knew Irish. The speech of Riders to the Sea is thus a development, however distant, of writing in English with another

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language forming part of the texture. Synge shows us very clearly that such a language can be capable of genuine beauty and eloquence, and is not merely a local quaintness to amuse tourists. The point is of some relevance today, because what maintains a standard language is, first, centralization of political authority, and, second, efficiency in communications. Today English has become a world language, and, though communication techniques have become formidably efficient, central political authority has receded. Hence when English becomes a literary language in places so different as, for instance, Nigeria, New Zealand, Pakistan, and Jamaica, it is obvious that there will be a centrifugal movement making for increasing local differences. Finnegans Wake, written in an associative language based on English but incorporating echoes and turns of speech from all over the world, is a prophecy, perhaps a rather ominous one, of what awaits us in future. Several other features of contemporary verse show the same experimental tendency to exploit the aspects of English that more conservative writers avoid. We may classify these as obtrusive rhyme, obtrusive rhythm, and obtrusive sound. Some of Keats's rhymes in Endymion were derided as "Cockneyisms" by the critics of his day who felt that it was safe to ridicule anything new in poetry by associating it with something not socially top drawer.35 And it is doubtless true that Keats's control of his texture was at that time uncertain: Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven ... [Endymion, bk. i, 11. 293-5]

But the obtrusive rhyme becomes a regular feature of Browning, in whom it helps to informalize the tone and make it more colloquial. Thus in "The Grammarian's Funeral" an alternating pattern of single and double rhymes punctuates the thrust-and-pause rhythm of the procession scrambling up the hillside: Let us begin and carry up this corpse, Singing together. Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes Each in its tether Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, Cared for till cockcrow:

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On Literature and Society Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! [11.1-8]

The rhymes here are strongly emphasized, though they are not burlesque rhymes, such as Browning also often uses, which bring the texture close to that of comic verse, as we have it in Gilbert and Sullivan operas or in parts of Byron's Don Juan. In Hopkins's sonnets the rhymes create a kind of parody of the conventional sonnet: some of them are so run-on as to disappear in reading, like the suffix-rhymes in Wyatt: others are again burlesque rhymes, like the "resurrection—across my foundering deck shone" or "diamond—I am and," which occur in a deeply serious poem, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" [11.16,18,23,22!. We begin to realize that all these experimental techniques are pointing to a common end, the end of Eliot's unified sensibility,36 of incorporating the greatest possible variety of moods into the same poetic structure. Thus in Eliot's description of a solemn church service: Polyphiloprogenitive The sapient sutlers of the Lord Drift across the window panes ... [Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, 11.1-3]

we are reminded of a remark of Wyndham Lewis, another twentiethcentury writer with a very distinctive prose style, that a full display of one's vocabulary is useful mainly for comic purposes.37 The possibilities inherent in obtrusive rhythm were not much exploited in English before the Song to David, but, from Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" on, we begin to get increasingly a development of high-speed poetry, no doubt affected by modern technology, and making use of all the resources latent in the heavy accentuation of English. Swinburne is the great explorer here: again he has to lengthen the line to accommodate the speed: The wings of the south-west wind are widened: the breath of his fervent lips, More keen than a sword's edge, fiercer than fire, falls full on the plunging ships. The pilot is he of their northward flight, their stay and their steersman he; A helmsman clothed with the tempest, and girdled with strength to constrain the sea. [The Armada, pt. 6, st. 3,11.1-4]

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The jazz experiments of Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Edith Sitwell's Facades are a logical development from this: in fact there are poems in Swinburne himself (and still more, to go outside the orbit of the British Isles, in Poe) that could be called jazz. Then there is obtrusive sound, usually an experimenting with heavy vowels and monosyllables which slows down the rhythm to a point normally avoided by conservative poets. One of Milton's sonnets, the one on the massacre in Piedmont, is, however deeply felt as a theme, a technical exercise based on sombre long vowels of this kind: ... in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubl'd to the hills, and they To heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow O'er all th'Italian fields ... [On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (Sonnet 18), 11. 5-11]

In Milton's pronunciation of "blood" and "redoubled" the sound would be even more concentrated. Similarly in Dylan Thomas's "A Winter's Tale": Once when the world turned old On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread, As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head, Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold ... [11.11-15]

We are still living in the aftermath of a great radical and experimental period, and in an age where the experimental tendency is not only the socially accepted one, but where a conservative one is difficult to maintain. There may be signs of a new conservatism in the development of folk singers and the revival of oral poetry, which brings with it many of the conventions belonging to a poetry that is attached to public performance and close to improvisation, such as formulaic units, refrains, and repeating phrases. But it is more likely that the cycle of conservative and radical tendencies is over, and that for the foreseeable future we shall be in a period where, technically speaking, anything goes. This means that conservative poetry, which continues to work with the standard metres

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and stanza forms of the past, is as legitimate an aim as it ever was, but that it is only one of a great many possible aims. Experimental tendencies today are mainly in the direction of exploring the boundary lines between literature and the other arts: thus concrete poetry and shape poems, which recall certain experiments in the past, such as the poems of George Herbert that were written in the visual shape of altars and wings, explore the boundary between poetic and pictorial expression. Experiments in pure sound or nonsense syllables bring us to the boundary of musical expression. But for the most part "radical" today refers to subject matter or social attitude rather than to technique. Perhaps English has lasted long enough as a literary language to bring us to a point at which we can see clearly, and for the first time, the circumference of a certain range of possibilities. Part Two: The Language and Its Prose Before Writing

The history of literature is dependent on written documents, but there is also a long oral or pre-literate phase of culture which we can reconstruct to some extent from the earliest written sources, such as the Homeric and Hesiodic poems in Greece. Where there is no general knowledge of reading and writing, the poet becomes the teacher, the speaking encyclopaedia, the custodian of memory, for his people. He it is who remembers the lists of kings and battles, the traditional legends, the elementary science and cosmology, the proverbs and axioms, the calendar with its lucky and unlucky days, the names and inter-relationships of the gods. Not being a writer, he puts his poems together with the aid of a traditional rhythmical scheme and the ready-made formulaic units already mentioned. The Iliad and Odyssey survive in writing, but the principles of their construction take us back to oral times, and we can see from them how intensely continuous the narrative drive of oral poetry can be. There is also oral or pre-literate prose, but its characteristics are very different. It is often assumed that prose is the language of ordinary speech, and M. Jourdain, the bourgeois gentilhomme of Moliere, was told that he had been talking prose all his life.38 Actually he had done nothing of the kind: he had merely talked, using the same associative babble that everybody naturally uses. The primitive and simple way of convention-

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alizing this babble is to put a verse form on it, a repeating pattern of rhyme or alliteration or stress or metre. Prose, which is organized by syntax and sentence structure, is more difficult to write than verse, which is one reason why it normally develops so much later than verse in the history of literature. Continuous prose is a by-product of writing: oral prose is discontinuous, just as oral verse is continuous. Oral prose can be seen in such forms as the proverbs which embody popular wisdom, or the aphorisms or dark sayings of the wise. The earliest Greek philosophers, for example, such as Heraclitus or Pythagoras, were not philosophers at all in the sense that Aristotle was a philosopher: they were gurus or spiritual teachers, and they taught by means of oracular utterances, like "all things flow," or "change is a rest," which have been preserved in writing often by sheer chance. We notice that discontinuous prose carries an authority and a sense of aloofness which suggests to the reader that he must come to it and be instructed, and that great reserves of wisdom are implied in the spaces between the sentences. And while this kind of prose is earlier than English literature, the Bible is full of it; hence its authority also survived in a culture which regarded the Bible as the rhetoric of God: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed [are] they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth ... [Matthew 5:3-5]

Even after writing becomes known, or even familiar, in a society, it may continue for centuries to be used for commercial, legal, or historical purposes while nearly all of what we think of as literature still remains oral. It takes a long time to arrive at a conception of authorship, of an identifiable person who can point to a body of written work and say to himself: "I wrote that." It takes even longer before we come to a social process resembling anything like publication. English literature begins after this point. Although most Old English poetry is anonymous, we have a conception of authorship when the poet Cynewulf signs his poems in runic letters, and we have a conception of publication in the translations commissioned by King Alfred, to be mentioned later. But the kind of poem that Beowulf is takes us back to the days of professional minstrels singing traditional legends to a listening audience. That we have the poem at all in a written form is a lucky accident: a great body of similar poetry has been lost. Even more signifi-

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cantly, the poem as we have it is not simply a heroic legend transcribed, in the way that a modern ballad or folktale collector would transcribe it, exactly as heard. The Beowulf that we have is a sophisticated, philosophical, Christianized version of the story, of the kind that marks its absorption into a writing culture. For Christianity was based on writing, and it brought with it a set of cultural priorities which reduced the poet's social function and the imaginative appeal of literature to a subordinate role. Elizabethan writers constantly speak of the days before Homer, when the poet was not only the most learned man in his society but was also its lawgiver, or at least the person who knew what the customs and rituals of his society were. But this is always accompanied by a sense that the poet has lost his central position in society. One result of this shift in values was the development of prose, prose being available for the non-literary activities regarded as more important than literature, such as saving souls or expounding theological doctrine. As continuous prose is made possible by writing, and as writing implies an individual writer, there is a subjective, even introverted quality inherent in the rhythm of prose which helps to explain why the most fully developed early prose in English consists so largely of devotional or mystical writing, like the fourteenthcentury Cloud of Unknowing. But, of course, prose is associated with speaking as well as writing. When Chaucer's parson is asked for a tale, he preaches a sermon instead, beginning by remarking, rather bleakly: I kan nat geeste "rum, ram, ruf," by lettre, Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre. [The Parson's Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, 11. 43-4

Ear and Eye

We may distinguish three major phases in the history of prose. The first is the oral or pre-literate prose already mentioned, which is earlier than English literature, though much of its traditions and authority survive. The second is the semi-oral or rhetorical prose which is normally written, but preserves the convention of a speaker and a listening audience. The third is what we now think of as typical prose, and which is not only written but is intended for an audience of readers. To understand the development of the last two stages in English literature, we need to

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realize how gradual and partial has been the identification, which we today take for granted, of literature and the ability to read. Chaucer's primary audience was still a listening audience, and the setting of The Canterbury Tales, where stories are supposed to be told orally by pilgrims to other pilgrims, reflects the fact. Even the printing press, brought to England by Caxton in 1476, took some time to make its full impact on contemporary literature. Printing was, first, a scholarly medium, enabling humanist scholars to establish reliable texts of the Classics and the Bible. It was also a popular medium, turning out the pamphlets that were so important in the sixteenth-century religious controversies (both Roman Catholics and Puritans maintained secret resistance presses through most of Elizabeth's reign), and the broadside ballads that were the ancestors of the tabloid newspaper. But poets of the upper class that produced Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney passed their work around in manuscripts and were in no hurry to seek out printers, and some middle-class writers imitated them, or pretended to. The manoeuvres of the poet George Gascoigne are an example: he left a carefully edited manuscript with a printer, went abroad, had his book published in his absence, returned, expressed great chagrin at what had been done, and then explained that in order to protect himself he would have to publish a second and corrected edition.39 Writers with their living to make normally printed their work with a dedication to an actual or possible patron in the nobility, for whom generosity to poets was good public relations: thus Shakespeare dedicated his two narrative poems to the Earl of Southampton. The dramatists as such, however, thought of print as something of a rival and competing medium. The second Quarto of Hamlet seems to have been printed, according to the title page, to show how much better the real play was than the pirated "bad" first Quarto. But there is no evidence that Shakespeare himself ever took an interest in publishing his plays, and some contemporary plays, including Marlowe's Faustus, survive only in vilely corrupted texts. A most significant change in the relation of print to contemporary literature is marked by Ben Jonson's publication of The Works of Ben Jonson in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death. The bulk of this Folio consists of Jonson's plays, and a joke circulated to the effect that what a dramatist produced were plays and not works. The joke expressed a social resistance to Jonson's very revolutionary act, which meant that scholarly ideals of textual accuracy and

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documentation of authorities were being extended from Classical and Biblical literature to contemporary writing in the modern languages. Drama is heavily dependent on the accidents of its performance, and what reaches the audience may often have a very indirect relation to what the author wrote. It seldom communicates all he wrote, for one thing: it is hardly possible that an uncut Hamlet, for instance, could ever have been produced under the conditions of the Elizabethan theatre. From those benighted enough not to appreciate Jonson's plays on the stage, Jonson makes an appeal to the individual reader. As the poet in Sheridan's Critic, over a century later, cried in exasperation over the cutting of his text on the stage: "I'll print it, every word."40 The assumption involved is that the reader of the text is in a better position to understand it than any audience, and consequently his judgement has a higher authority. A century or so after the publication of the Jonson Folio, we are in the age of the Taller and the Spectator, of Swift's Drapier Letters, of the Dunciad and the Grub Street writers—an age where the smell of printer's ink is everywhere, and where the author is assuming, for the most part, an audience of silent readers. Even then, outside London, most of the common people still formed a listening audience, for news and for literature alike. With the rise of mass education in the nineteenth century, this audience declined, but the coming of electronic media has revived it, and poetry is once more, as in the days of Beowulf, being sung or chanted to a musical accompaniment. It is possible that the degree of noise engendered by that accompaniment, and by other benefits of civilization, and which by the year 2000 will probably have divided society into the tonedeaf and the stone-deaf, may bring us back to the reading eye again. But for nearly all its existence, the public for English literature has been, in its numerical majority at any rate, much the same as the contemporary public for music. A fair number of people can read scores, but very few get their pleasure in music out of reading it rather than out of listening to it. The Growth of Rhetoric In the Middle Ages education was divided into seven liberal arts, of which the first three (the "trivium") were verbal and the other four (the "quadrivium" of geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy) mainly mathematical. The verbal arts were grammar (meaning Latin grammar), logic, and rhetoric. At that time, most of those trained intensively in the

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verbal arts would be expected to become either clergymen or lawyers. Hence the useful or professional part of their training would be rhetorical, learning to speak effectively in courtroom or pulpit. In rhetoric the end is the persuading of an audience, but the means are the employing of figures of speech, including the devices of rhyme, assonance, antithesis, and alliteration. The assumption behind this training—a most important assumption for the history of literature—appears to be that such devices act on the subconscious (or whatever similar conception may be involved), and gain first the attention and then the sympathy of the listener without his altogether realizing it. In the sixteenth century rhetorical training was attached to a social ideal which had come down from Cicero and Quintilian. Cicero's De Oratore had projected the figure of the ideal orator, the oral user of words in a society familiar with reading and writing, as in effect the historical successor of what the poet had been in the pre-literate age. As it is his business to be able to take up any subject and discourse about it, the orator must be a profoundly learned man. Quintilian adds that he must also be a good man, which sounds like something of a red herring, but helps to bring the conception of the social function of rhetoric into line with Aristotle, who had said that rhetoric is the counterpart (literally the "answering chorus") of the search for truth.41 Truth, in a reading and writing society, is reached by reasoning and argument; it is the function of rhetoric to persuade the will and emotions to follow the truth. After mastering language (grammar), one seeks for truth by logic, rhetoric forming a parallel appeal to what we should now call the imagination. Rhetoric in this sense includes, broadly speaking, literature as a whole, as its devices are those of poetry as well as prose. Hence rhetorical training was quite as important to poets as to clerical or legal orators; also, prose in the rhetorical period took on many of the features that we today associate only with verse. The Tudors brought to England the centralized authority typical of the Renaissance. The prince was the unchallenged centre and head of society, and next to him came the courtier, the servant of the prince. It is not an accident that two of the most influential books of the period were Machiavelli's The Prince and Castiglione's The Courtier. Renaissance education was based on the principle that the most important person to educate was the prince, the courtier being educated to be his adviser. For both, therefore, the encyclopaedic knowledge and versatility demanded of the orator by Cicero was essential, and such ideals are expressed in

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nearly all the great Renaissance books on education. An English example is Thomas Elyot's The Governour. At the centre of education was rhetoric, the imaginative use of words which could move people, the elegance of expression which set the standards of social articulateness. So Elizabethan students were trained in rhetoric, a training which included a great number of figures of speech and other verbal devices, with technical terms attached, which we today either do not know or employ without knowing what they are. What Samuel Butler, a century later, says of the education of Hudibras was almost literally true of the rhetorical handbooks of the sixteenth century: And when he happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by. [Hudibras, canto i, 11. 83-5]

It would doubtless give a writer a false sense of professionalism to know that whenever he achieved a pun or a rhyme he was employing the devices of paronomasia or homoioteleuton. But we should not overlook the value, or, more accurately, the necessity, of this kind of training for professional writers: it was what made The Faerie Queene, the Arcadia, even King Lear, possible. Much of it consisted in translation, of Latin into English and back again, and while the conscious effort was mainly focussed on Latin (Sidney says that it is part of the curse of the tower of Babel that a man should be sent to school to learn his mother tongue), the unconscious knowledge of English developed was far more important. The rhetorical handbooks look formidably pedantic at first glance, but the end at which they aimed was the reverse of pedantry. The attitude of humanism to prose was somewhat ambivalent: on the one hand, it assumed that familiar prose was something of a second-class literary form—Milton speaks of "sitting here below in the cool element of prose"42—and rhetorical prose was an attempt to give its rhythm more literary dignity. On the other hand, the humanists profoundly admired the dialogue or symposium form of Plato (which Cicero also used), because of the way in which conversation is carried on in it with courtesy, restraint, and consideration for different points of view. Cultivated conversation, where, under the stimulus of good company, one's speaking style is at its best, became both a literary and a social ideal. However pedantic a schoolmaster might be, the educated gentleman did not use

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technical or "inkhorn" terms in his conversation: he spoke like a gentleman, and he tried to write as he spoke. The ideal is very clearly expressed by Dryden: The proprieties and delicacies of the English [language] are known to few; 'tis impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them, without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted while he was laying in a stock of learning.43

When Ben Jonson remarks, "A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks,"44 he is pointing to the generic distinction between ordinary speech, which we said earlier was a kind of associative babble, and speaking prose, which requires both education and conscious control. Cultivated language of this kind registers the level of civilization, as a thermometer registers temperature; the debasing of language is the first sign that the quality of life is deteriorating. Roger Ascham, writing in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, says: Ye know not, what hurt ye do to learning, that care not for words, but for matter, and so make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart. For mark all ages: look upon the whole course of both the Greek and Latin tongue, and ye shall surely find, that, when apt and good words began to be neglected, and properties of those two tongues to be confounded, then also began ill deeds to spring: strange manners to oppress good orders, new and fond {foolish} opinions to strive true doctrine... .45

Ascham's outlook is a conservative one, but Milton says the same thing in a revolutionary context, as does Ezra Pound in our day. There could be no question of the "relevance" of literature for an age that understood how silly the notion is that one can have "ideas," without knowing what the right words for them are. All the ideals of the age, literary, political and religious, are summed up in Spenser's Faerie Queene, which is, besides being a national epic, also a Renaissance treatise on the ideal education of the prince, the prince being identified in this poem with the figure of Arthur. The Faerie Queene as we have it consists of six books, the first dealing with the virtue of

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holiness and the last with the virtue of courtesy, introducing the poet himself towards the end. Thus the poem begins with a vision of the Word and grace of God as the power that sustains human society, and ends with a vision of the good words of the poet and the gracefulness of the courtier as the human counterpart to this which keeps society together. The Elizabethan translation of Castiglione's Courtier by Sir Thomas Hoby uses the word "grace" in an almost technical sense as the ideal mode of the courtier's behavior, and puns on the divine and human contexts of the word run all through Elizabethan literature. The great enemy of courtesy, symbolized by the "Blatant Beast," is evil words, which means primarily slander, but by implication includes any perversion of speech. Forms of Rhetorical Prose

We said that rhetorical prose took on many of the features that we think of as belonging only to verse. One reason for this was that Cicero, with his rolling antithetical and balancing clauses, was accepted by most educators, including the Ascham just quoted, as the unquestioned model of style. The use of poetic devices in prose is a systematic feature of what is called euphuism, a word which derives from the vogue of Lyly's Euphues (1578), but has a long ancestry in sermons and other rhetorical forms. Thus the hero of Greene's Card of Fancy, a euphuistic romance, ruminates on finding himself in jail: Yea, I see now (quoth he) that in truth lies treason, that fair words make fools fain, and that the state of these feigned friends are like to the marigold, which as long as the sun shineth openeth her leaves, but with the least cloud, beginneth to close, like the violets in America, which in summer yield an odoriferous smell, and in winter a most pestilent savor; so these parasites in prosperity profess most, but in adversity perform least: when Fortune favoreth, they laugh, when she frowneth they lower: at every full sea, they flourish, but at every dead neap, they fade: Like to the fish Palerna, which being perfectly white in the calm, yet turneth passing black at every storm: to the trees in the deserts of Africa, that flourish but while the south wind bloweth; or to the Celedony stone, which retaineth his virtue no longer than it is rubbed with gold.46

The use of alliteration, rhyme, antithesis, and assonance is obvious enough. Of rhetorical origin too are the piling up of commonplaces about a

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commonplace theme (here the fact that one has fewer friends in adversity than in prosperity), and the use of exempla, of examples taken from history or (as here) alleged natural history. The vogue for this latter kind of illustration soon waned, but exempla from history were still extensively used in the eighteenth century in teaching students to write compositions, and the earlier pages of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria gives [give] us a glimpse of the methods involved. The same kind of training gave a good deal of prominence to the more oracular and discontinuous type of prose that had come down from the oral period. When books were relatively rare and expensive, readers made up "commonplace books" for themselves, copying out especially the maxims and aphorisms and proverbs (called sententiae or adagio) which they had found in their reading and which, under the influence of their schooling, they regarded as the most valuable part of that reading. Such quotations might be in either verse or prose, but they preserved the sense of authority and definitive statement that aphoristic prose has. Professional writers who compiled such books of quotations, as Erasmus did in his Adagia, often found themselves with best sellers as a result. The next step was to make similar aphorisms for oneself, on the basis of a prescribed rhetorical scheme. We learn from Bacon's Advancement of Learning (more clearly from the fuller Latin version De Augmentis Scientiarum) that this was how the Essays originated. These essays, designed to "come home to men's business and bosoms,"47 are typical of a kind of rhetorical prose which turns on a rhythmical, almost metrical, scheme like the triadic arrangements in the essay "Of Studies": Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business. . . . To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar.... Crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them. . . . Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.... Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.48

We should get a clearer idea of the rhythm of such prose if every sentence were a separate paragraph, suggesting that it should be lin-

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gered with and pondered over. The emphasis is not, as in modern prose, on continuity or the linking of sentences together by an argument: the continuity is carefully subordinated to a much slower rhythm. If we look at what Bacon is actually saying in this passage, we see that the end of studies, for him, is public appearance, conversation, and in general the rhetorical use of learning. If we turn to the great masters of rhetorical prose contemporary with him, or a little later, Hooker, Milton, Browne, Jeremy Taylor, we see that they nearly always have a preaching or pleading figure in mind. Sidney's Apology for Poetry is not a critical essay in the modern sense, but is cast in the form, as its title implies, of a courtroom speech for the defence. Milton's Areopagitica takes its title from an address to the Areopagus, the law-court of Athens, by the Classical orator Isocrates (with further reference to St. Paul's having preached a sermon in the same place), and this ancient law-court is being identified with the Houses of Parliament. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy adopts the position of a university lecturer, the conductor of a vast orchestra of "authorities" which he can call up one by one. He pretends to be analyzing the causes, symptoms, and cures of the disease known as melancholy, but his attitude to his audience is a rhetorical one: he is out to persuade more than to expound. That is, having written one of the most delightful books in the language, he knows that reading that book would be a much better cure for melancholy than most of the remedies he prescribes. So he links himself with the ethical tradition of rhetorical prose (note the phrase "recited, or hereafter read") with a reference to Theophrastus which we shall return to in a moment: I am so affected for my part, and hope as Theophrastus did by his Characters, "that our posterity, O friend Polycles, shall be the better for this which we have written, by correcting and rectifying what is amiss in themselves by our examples, and applying our precepts and cautions to their own use." And as that great captain Zisca would have a drum made of his skin when he was dead, because he thought the very noise of it would put his enemies to flight, I doubt not but that these following lines, when they shall be recited, or hereafter read, will drive away melancholy (though I be gone) as much as Zisca's drum could terrify his foes.49 It is difficult to give the quality of rhetorical prose in a quotation, because in its most concentrated forms it becomes as continuous and complex as music. A sermon of Donne's, for example, begins its final

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paragraph: If you look upon this world in a map, you find two hemispheres, two half worlds. If you crush heaven into a map, you may find two hemispheres too, two half heavens; half will be joy, and half will be glory.50

This becomes the starting point of a tremendous verbal fugue in which "joy" is the subject and "glory" the counter-subject, ending several pages later with: A joy, that shall pass up, and put on a more glorious garment above, and be joy super-invested in glory.51

Milton's prose, again, piles up in vast periodic sentences, accumulating phrase on phrase, example on example, allusion on allusion, throwing in echoes of sound as well as sense. Its punctuation alone is worth study, because it is purely rhetorical punctuation, following the natural rhythms of speech, far removed from the pseudo-logical fatuities of modern style manuals. Yet such a style by no means precludes the crackle of epigrammatic wit, and in fact it permits of a more varied extent of emotional appeal, ranging from prayer to personal abuses than the verse of Paradise Lost itself. Towards Fiction The greatest single achievement of prose in English literature is probably in the area of fiction, more particularly the novel, a middle-class form which begins (more or less) with Defoe in the early eighteenth century. One of the ancestors of fiction was the generalized and epigrammatic description of types of people that we find in the seventeenth-century character book, a genre derived from Aristotle's disciple Theophrastus, referred to by Burton above. We quoted Chaucer's parson as contemptuous of the graces of poetry, but the parson's sermon is not wholly innocent of rhetorical devices, as we see in these embryonic character sketches: Inobedient is he that disobeyeth for despit to the comandements of God, and to his sovereyns, and to his goostly fader. Avauntour is he that bosteth of the harm or of the bountee that he hath doon. Ypocrite is he that hideth to

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shewe hym swich as he is, and sheweth hym swich as he noght is. [The Parson's Tale, frag. 10,11. 391-3]

The same rhythm turns up, two centuries later, in an Elizabethan book on the manners and customs of the vagrant underworld of that time, Awdeley's Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561): An abram-man is he that walketh bare-armed, and bare-legged, and feigneth himself mad, and carrieth a pack of wool, or a stick with bacon on it, or suchlike toy, and nameth himself Poor Tom.52

The character book has little to add generically to this. Samuel Butler, characterizing "A Scold," attributes to her a perversion of the same kind of rhetorical devices he is using himself, ending with a reference to the humanist belief in the social importance of good words: [A Scold] is a siren, against whom there is no defence, but by fortifying of ears, as Ulysses and his mates were fain to stand upon their guard When she is heated she fans the air with her tongue, as a dog does when he is hot, to cool himself.... She is a vehement declaimer, and is stored, though not with flowers, with all manner of weeds of eloquence, that either sting, stink, or poison. She has her commonplaces as common as the kennel, from which she is furnished upon all occasions with all sorts of dirty oratory; and is never at a loss for matter or expression. She has evil words enough to corrupt all the good manners of the civilest nation.53

We can see the connection of this kind of writing with rhetoric more particularly in the drama, where it is sometimes used to build up a character's first appearance on the stage, like that of Sparkish in Wycherley's Country Wife. Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour begins, in the printed version, with characterizations of the dramatis personae written in the same form. This is of some historical importance, because it was Jonson who laid down the principle that the appropriate type of character for comedy is what he called the "humor," that is, a character identified with certain characteristics, such as a miser, a hypochondriac, or a hypocrite. The same conception appears in Pope's satires a century later as the "ruling passion" [Moral Essays, Epistle i, 1. 262]. In actual lif people may be inconsistent, or, in public, much alike: a strong emphasis on a dominant characteristic helps to sharpen and clarify differences of

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character in a work of fiction. The humor is the practical application of the characterization by type that we find in the character books and elsewhere in rhetorical prose. When the novel developed, it was defined by Fielding as a comic epic in prose,54 and the association of the novel with comedy helps to explain why its main body of characters, down to the Bloom and Stephen of Joyce's Ulysses, have been humors in Jonson's sense. In the Sir Roger de Coverley papers in The Spectator we see the character sketch heading towards modern fiction when Addison remarks: I have observed in several of my papers, that my friend Sir Roger, amidst all his good qualities, is something of an humorist, and that his virtues, as well as imperfections, are as it were tinged by a certain extravagance, which makes them particularly his, and distinguishes them from those of other men.55

Here it is an individual rather than a type who is being described, as it is also in this account of Mrs. Bennett at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, which shows the rhetorical tradition of character drawing still active: She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.56

The reader, however, may finish Pride and Prejudice with a little more tolerance for Mrs. Bennett than these lethal comments suggest: that is, in fiction we normally understand characters better through what they say than through what is said about them. This brings us to another principle of rhetoric: the principle of decorum. Decorum means the appropriateness of what is said to the person saying it. It is clear that decorum in this sense is what makes possible any form of characterization where the character speaks for himself. In the General Prologue Chaucer defends the outspokenness of his style on grounds of decorum: The Miller's Tale is the kind of story that that kind of man would tell, and it would be as great a breach of literary, if not social, decorum to give The Prioress's Tale to the miller as it would be to give The Miller's Tale to the prioress. Similarly Elizabethan fiction, like the drama contemporary with it, is highly conscious of decorum. In reading Nashe's

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Unfortunate Traveller, for instance, we should remember that the violence, brutality, and Philistinism of the story are derived from the narrator Jack Wilton. Jack Wilton appears to be something of a seedy drunk, but he is amusing and articulate, and the ruins of something like an education are still faintly visible in his speech: There was a lord in the camp, let him be a lord of misrule if you will, for he kept a plain alehouse without welt or guard of any ivybush, and sold cider and cheese by pint and by pound to all that came (at the very name of cider I can but sigh, there is so much of it in Rhenish wine nowadays). Well, Tendit ad sidera virtus, there's great virtue belongs (I can tell you) to a cup of 57 cider

Nashe is a highly sophisticated writer; his contemporary Deloney is supposed not to be, but we should not overlook his mastery of similar techniques of decorum. Thus in his story Thomas of Reading a servant girl is committed to prison, and her mistress laments: Farewell my sweet Meg, the best servant that ever came in any man's house, many may I have of thy name, but never any of thy nature, thy diligence is much, in thy hands I laid the whole government of my house, and thereby eased my self of that care, which now will cumber me.58

She is genuinely grieved and genuinely affectionate, but she is an upperclass woman speaking of a servant, and her grief does not escape from the orbit of worrying about how hard it is to get good servants these days. In Sidney's Arcadia, a pastoral romance of a type that it now requires some historical imagination to enjoy, there is a still different approach to decorum. Ben Jonson said, with his usual piercing accuracy, that "Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as well as himself."59 But Sidney's decorum is that of the polite style, in which each character is treated with equal consideration, an approach followed centuries later by Henry James. The Great Prose Age

Rhetorical prose is, obviously, very different from what we think of now as ordinary prose, of which the normal vehicle is the expository treatise. We may think of a book written in expository prose as an uninterrupted

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monologue, but in many important ways the exact opposite is true. Expository prose is, ideally, a democratic form in which the author is putting all his cards on the table, relying on no appeal except the appeal to reason which is inherent in the sequence of his sentences. It is really a continuous dialogue with a reader, for although the reader cannot directly reply, he can always turn back in the book to a previous point. Such a prose would avoid the eloquence of courtroom and pulpit and tend toward a style which is colloquial, familiar, and low-keyed. For the same reason such prose would avoid all the devices of rhetoric: in fact a careful prose writer of this kind would take pains to avoid repetition of sound or balanced antithesis of rhythm. Such things either call attention to themselves or attempt to hypnotize, and he is concerned only with his reader's waking consciousness and with his argument. His audience is an individualized audience of readers: there is no sense of the presence of a group, to be swayed by this or that emotion. In reaction to euphuism and Ciceronian prose, there had come, early in the seventeenth century, a vogue for a more informal prose of a type allegedly influenced by the philosopher Seneca. But the crucial turn in prose style is marked by the Restoration of 1660. Around that time, Dryden became the leading literary figure, and the Royal Society, founded in the same period, gave its very considerable prestige to the antirhetorical. The Society's historian Thomas Sprat tells us that it "exacted from all its members a close, naked, natural way of speaking... bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can."60 Dryden, defending his Essay of Dramatic Poesy against an attacker, says: . . . my whole discourse was sceptical, according to that way of reasoning which was used by Socrates, Plato, and all the Academics of old, which Tully and the best of the ancients followed, and which is imitated by the modest inquisitions of the Royal Society.61

By "sceptical" Dryden means what we should call critical, suspending judgement and avoiding a dogmatic or a prior exposition. We notice the appeal to the precedent not only of the Royal Society but of the Platonic and Ciceronian ("Tully" is Cicero) dialogues. Many of Dryden's essays are concerned with drama, and, like Bernard Shaw after him, he uses the essay as a kind of drama turned inside out, discussing the issues as a writer to a reader. Dryden is a master of an informal conversational style—he says that

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conversation is the "greatest advantage of our writing": i.e., Restoration writers have the advantage of listening to better talk than the writers of Shakespeare's day.62 He seldom departs from the tone of easy personal address. We enter a different world with Swift, who, being a clergyman, is closer to the oratorical tradition, at least in his rhythm, which is more hypnotic and continuous. Swift is one of the chief figures of that great age of prose and reason, the age of Newtonian science, of the founding of the Bank of England, of the establishing of philosophy on an inductive basis by Locke. His prose has all the qualities we have mentioned as typical of written prose, lucidity, logic, avoidance of tricks of style, reliance on the impersonal argument. At the same time there is a wholly different attitude in his mind which agrees with Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master, "that instead of reason, we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices."63 Consequently all these elements of prose style run along with a sense that man is a lunatic who uses his reason chiefly to rationalize his lunacy. This is perhaps most obvious in the Modest Proposal, a blandly purring argument setting out the economic advantages of selling young Irish children for food. But everywhere in Swift we feel the tone of parodyprose, of an earnest, convinced, unaffected discourse infused by the sense that all the time he is talking to, and about, fools or madmen. To take an unusually urbane example, in a letter to a young gentleman proposing to enter his own profession: I cannot forbear warning you in the most earnest manner against endeavouring at wit in your sermons, because by the strictest computation, it is very near a million to one that you have none; and because too many of your calling have consequently made themselves everlastingly ridiculous by attempting it. I remember several young men in this town, who could never leave the pulpit under half a dozen conceits; and this faculty adhered to those gentlemen a longer or shorter time exactly in proportion to their several degrees of dullness: accordingly, I am told that some of them retain it to this day.64

The third in this trio of the great age of prose is Samuel Johnson, who, thanks to Boswell, is even more famous as a talker than as a writer. This is evidence, if we needed it, that the association of good prose style with good conversation is a social fact, not merely an educational ideal. As we should expect from the author of a dictionary, Johnson has an enormous

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vocabulary, and his use of it is a further indication of the growing polysyllabic quality of English speech, already mentioned. But though a formidable social figure, and satirized in his own day as "Pomposo," he is not at all a pompous writer: he consistently directs his reader's attention to the subject, not to himself. That is, he writes as a non-rhetorical prose writer should do, and his professional bias as a writer makes him an unsafe guide where highly artificial conventions, like the convention of pastoral elegy in Milton's Lycidas, are concerned. It is significant that his most powerful adverse critique, on the metaphysical poets, should be based on the view that their rhetoric made them too self-consciously clever. And whether we accept his judgement as generally true of that school or not, what he says is a practically definitive statement of what is wrong with a good many writers of every place and every time: As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never enquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as Beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities making remarks on the actions of men, and vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before.65 Comic Epic in Prose

Meanwhile, fiction, under Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, was growing into one of the greatest literary developments of the modern world. In fiction there are two aspects of prose style involved: that of ordinary prose, which emerges in description and comment, and that of decorum, expressed in dialogue. In Richardson and Fielding particularly, with the great paragraphs sweeping up long stretches of cut-and-thrust conversation, we see that the novel is forging to the front partly because it is a high-speed medium: it gets us further in less time than having to hear such dialogue spelled out on a stage. Fiction is more efficient than drama, just as print is more efficient than television. As a rule, it is the speech rhythms of the characters that usually provide the greatest speed: authorial expositions and explanations, which are normally written in a

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comparatively formal standard English, tend to slow us down. Fielding uses such passages of comment for little critical essays at the beginning of the major divisions of Tom Jones, to put us into a more deliberate and ruminative mood. Or, to take an example from the fiction of a century later, the reverie on Egdon Heath with which Hardy's The Return of the Native opens is like the brief adagio in music that often precedes a more rapid movement. Sometimes the contrast almost divides the novel into two languages: for instance, in a novel of Scott that introduces Scottish speakers. In The Heart of Midlothian there is a marked difference between the energy of old Deans' tirade and the stodgy comment which somewhat unnecessarily follows it: "But now we haena sic spirit amang us; we think mair about the warst wally-draigle in our ain byre, than about the blessing which the angel of the covenant gave to the Patriarch, even at Peniel and Mahanaim, or the binding obligation of our national vows; and we wad rather gie a pund Scots to buy an unguent to clear our auld rannell-trees and our beds o' the English bugs, as they ca' them, than we wad gie a plack to rid the land of the swarm of Arminian caterpillars, Socinian pismires, and deistical Miss Katies {mosquitoes}, that have ascended out of the bottomless pit, to plague this perverse, insidious, and lukewarm generation." It happened to Davie Deans on this occasion as it has done to many other habitual orators, when once he became embarked on his favourite subject, the stream of his own enthusiasm carried him forward in spite of his mental distress, while his well-exercised memory supplied him amply with all the types and tropes of rhetoric peculiar to his sect and cause.66

In many novels, from Jane Austen to Henry James, characters are studied in relation to their public appearance and their conscious minds. Most of the major characters in such novels, again, are sufficiently articulate or educated to speak in prose, or a reasonable approximation to it. Here the consistency of texture and rhythm is not a technical problem. But when a novelist begins to explore, not only a speaker's conscious and public utterance, but the unconscious processes that lead up to it, or are still visible in it, or if he introduces many characters who speak not prose but what we have called associative babble, the stylistic split is likely to become obvious, unless he develops ways of intensifying his narrative rhythm and giving it something of the associative agility of his characters' speech. One way of doing this is to tell the story through a narrator,

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as Nashe does in The Unfortunate Traveller, or as Mark Twain does in Huckleberry Finn. Other methods demand more experimental approaches to prose writing. So far we have said nothing about cycles of conservative and experimental writing in prose, because prose is so much later than poetry in developing at all. But it is clear that the conservative movement of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson in poetry is one in prose also, and we might expect some experimental prose corresponding to the poetry of Blake and Smart. This we find in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the greatest masterpiece of experimental prose writing in English fiction. Here the whole book is welded into unity by a darting associative style, its essential mark of punctuation the dash, which is a sequence of lightning glances at speech, gesture, conscious action, unconscious thought, and author's comment all in turn: Are we not, continued Trim, looking still at Susannah—are we not like a flower of the field—a tear of pride stole in betwixt every two tears of humiliation—else no tongue could have described Susannah's affliction—is not all flesh grass?—Tis clay,—'tis dirt.—They all looked directly at the scullion,—the scullion had just been scouring a fish-kettle.—It was not fair.— —What is the finest face that ever man looked at!—I could hear Trim talk so for ever, cried Susannah,—what is it! (Susannah laid her hand upon Trim's shoulder)—but corruption?—Susannah took it off.67

"Nothing odd will do long," said the conservative Johnson: "Tristram Shandy did not last."68 It is true that the general body of Romantic and Victorian prose, with some striking exceptions that we shall come to in a moment, remains fairly conservative, in fiction as elsewhere. But the experimental movement in poetry which began around 1915 had its prose counterparts in Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and others, and a good deal of this movement consisted of attempts to probe below conscious speech and thought to the associative levels underlying them. This developed not only new speech patterns in dialogue but a "stream of consciousness" technique of narrative and exposition to match them. In an essay given later in this book, Virginia Woolf complains about the inadequacy of observation in Arnold Bennett's novels, on the ground that he made no effort to penetrate the visible surface of the life he described. Virginia Woolf's own fiction naturally does make such efforts,

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and it is interesting to see how far they bring her back again to Sterne: "Dear!" said Clarissa, and Lucy shared as she meant her to her disappointment (but not the pang); felt the concord between them; took the hint; thought how the gentry love; gilded her own future with calm; and, taking Mrs. Dalloway's parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand.69

Prose after Johnson Such experimental developments would hardly have been possible in fiction alone: we should expect similar tendencies in expository prose to go along with them. In the Romantic period we notice that prose is considerably less stylized than poetry, and the tendency we called "archaism" less, if at all, in evidence. It was largely Rousseau, who had brought into European consciousness the discovery that the continuity of subject life, which is dependent on memory and conscious thought, is very largely an illusion, and that a violent alternation of irrational moods keeps exalting and dethroning one consciousness after another. The result was the growth of a literature of self-revelation, which is a very different thing from self-consciousness. In self-revelation, a writer takes himself for his theme, but, with insight and control granted, can treat himself as objectively as any other subject. Here is Charles Lamb recording the changes in the universe brought about by the fact that he has caught a cold: Do you know what it is to succumb under an unsurmountable day-mare,— "a whoreson lethargy," Falstaff calls it,—an indisposition to do anything, or to be anything,—a total deadness and distaste, a suspension of vitality,—an indifference to locality,—a numb, soporifical, good-for-nothingness,—an ossification all over,—an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,—a mind-stupor,—a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience?. .. If you told me the world will be at an end tomorrow I should just say, "Will it?" I have not volition enough to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub Street attic, to let—not so much as a joint-stool or a

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crack'd Jordan left in it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are off.70

The familiar essay, and still more, as here, the familiar letter, are two genres that helped to informalize prose and make it supple and flexible enough for the demands made on it by fiction. Other developments were also revolutionizing prose rhythm in different directions. For example, British philosophy, in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, was concerned largely with theories of knowledge, in other words with how consciousness arises. This concentration on the daylight side of the mind produced, with Locke and Hume at least, some of the most lucid prose in which philosophy has ever been expounded. But after Kant in Germany had distinguished the phenomenal world, as an object of sense and knowledge, from a noumenal world of "things in themselves," which could not be directly known or seen, prose began to reflect something of the more hidden mental processes which were not only associative but worked through symbol and image rather than concept. In Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, the known world and the world of things in themselves are symbolized respectively as a clothed world and a naked world. Carlyle's philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, exploring the latter, cannot always be lucid and controlled, like Hume: his style reflects the murmuring and echoing submarine world below the threshold of perception: In respect of style our Author manifests the same genial capability, marred too often by the same rudeness, inequality, and apparent want of intercourse with the higher classes. Occasionally, as above hinted, we find consummate vigour, a true inspiration; his burning thoughts step forth in fit burning words, like so many full-formed Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendour from love's head; a rich, idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy turns; all the graces and terrors of a wild Imagination, wedded to the clearest Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, so often intervene!71

The first sentence is parody, a deliberately stupid comment of the "editor"; the rest characterizes the peculiar style of Teufelsdrockh, and of Carlyle's book, in a way that brings us to an important critical principle.

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Prose, we said, changes from the rhetorical texture of Burton, Milton, and Browne, which is full of alliteration, assonance, puns, antithetical rhythms, and every other trick of style, to a prose which consciously avoids calling attention to itself by such devices at all. Now we discover that in proportion as later prose becomes more experimental and more interested in other than conscious operations of the mind, all these rhetorical devices begin to creep back. The reason is not hard to see. We said earlier that the assumption behind rhetorical prose was that, as oratory tries to persuade, it adopts verbal devices that act on the subconscious of the listener, tickling or soothing him into an acquiescent mood. Now we see the same kind of rhetorical texture emerging from the opposite direction, from the exploring of these subconscious responses themselves. Seventeenth-century writers produced such textures out of a painfully acquired rhetorical skill; nineteenth-century writers produce them by instinct, or whatever the right term is, but there are many affinities between them nevertheless. Something similar happens in poetry, as we see if we compare a drowsy narcotic passage in Spenser's Faerie Queene with, say, Coleridge's dream-poem "Kubla Khan." Spenser's rhetoric is thus often described by critics, getting it wrong end to as usual, as an anticipation of Romanticism. We can trace this return to rhetoric in prose back a long way: in fact we may almost speak of a continuous tradition of rhetoric. In the conservative prose of the Restoration period, there is John Bunyan, who was a sensitive literary artist, but none the less as convinced as Chaucer's parson of the priority of religious to literary considerations. So he writes with great sobriety, ignoring most of the attention-getting devices of rhetoric. His disapproval of these comes out in his description of Madame Bubble: "Doth she not speak very smoothly, and give you a smile at the end of a sentence?"72 If by some chance we wanted more of this smooth style, we should expect to find it in the literary area Bunyan would most have disapproved of, Restoration comedy. In Restoration drama there is normally a fairly clear-cut distinction between verse tragedy and prose comedy. Verse tragedy had a public, and retained it for a long time, but prose exhibited a power of adaptation that verse lacked. We begin to understand why in such a passage as this from Congreve's Way of the World, where Lady Wishfort, in a blind rage, is ordering her servant out of the house to go back to the small shop she had when she first met her:

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Away! out! out!—Go, set up for yourself again!—Do, drive a trade, do, with your three-pennyworth of small ware, flaunting upon a packthread, under a brandy-seller's bulk, or against a dead wall by a ballad-monger! Go, hand out an old Fristoneer gorget, with a yard of yellow colberteen again. Do; an old gnawed mask, two rows of pins, and a child's fiddle; a glass necklace with the beads broken, and a quilted nightcap with one ear. Go, go, drive a trade!—These were your commodities, you treacherous trull! this was the merchandise you dealt in when I took you into my house, placed you next myself, and made you governante of my whole family! You have forgot this, have you, now you have feathered your nest?73

Generically, this is prose and not verse, but if we raise the more elusive word "poetry," it is much more difficult to say what it is or is not. Certainly its use of refrain, of alliteration, of catalogue (normally a feature of verse, as we can see in a great variety of poets from Homer to Whitman), and its powerful driving rhythm, are all rhetorical qualities which this prose seems to share with poetry. We notice that Congreve's prose is rhetorical mainly because it is dramatic, spoken prose to be listened to. It is not an accident that practically all the great writers of comedy in English literature since Congreve's day have been Irish: the rhetorical tradition lingered much longer in Ireland. It is significant too that drama was gradually declining as a major literary medium throughout the great age of nonrhetorical prose. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rhetorical prose continues in Burke, who was a Parliamentary orator, and an Irish one at that, in Newman, a clergyman and preacher, and, as mentioned, in Carlyle. Burke sustains the Ciceronian oratorical tradition, with its rolling antithetical clauses; Newman, as we should expect, draws on the homiletic tradition, chiefly of the early Greek Fathers. The conservative view of Carlyle is expressed by James Mill, who according to his son John Stuart Mill never saw anything in Carlyle except "insane rhapsody."74 We are not surprised to find that the Utilitarian style of James Mill and Bentham is so bound to the written page that it turns into a kind of anti-rhetoric, so dependent on a reader as to be over large areas unreadable. When experimental prose comes again into fashion, other rhetorical schemes reappear. There is euphuism, for example, in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which we notice is a dramatic form:

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{First Voice} Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the (Second Voice} titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whalejuice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.75

Of all twentieth-century writers, however, perhaps only James Joyce understood clearly that the new technical discoveries in prose were the old devices of rhetoric revived. The interested reader should consult Stuart Gilbert's commentary on Ulysses76 and the list of such devices employed in the newspaper office ("Aeolus") chapter. Experiment in Fiction

The humanists of the Renaissance had, among their literary theories, a conception of a hierarchy of genres in poetry. Tragedy and epic, which demanded ruling-class figures and the high style of speech, were at the top: they were the forms that only major poets should attempt. Pastoral and love poetry were minor genres: thus Spenser, following a precedent set by Virgil, began with pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender and went on from there to his epic masterpiece The Faerie Queene. The question would naturally arise: what are the highest genres in prose? The most usual answer given was that it was the vision of a model society. There were two forms of this, the description of an ideal state and the account of the ideal education of the prince, the classical examples of which were, respectively, the Republic of Plato and the Cyropaedia of Xenophon. English literature made one very great contribution (though it was written in Latin) to the former in More's Utopia. Sidney's Arcadia does not at first glance belong to either form of the genre, but Sidney's friend and biographer Fulke Greville says he wishes Sidney had lived "to finish, and bring to perfection this extraordinary frame of his own Common-wealth."77 The Arcadia is more obviously, however, a romance, and as such depicts an ideal or model world in modes closer to dream and fairytale. Prose is an excellent vehicle for romance, as its rhythm lends itself to the introverted quality of the romance world, with its threshold symbols like the shadowy forest, its knights and ladies—or, with a Renaissance pasto-

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ral like the Arcadia, its poetic shepherds—its ogres, giants, witches, and dragons, its elimination of all the frustrations and embarrassments of ordinary existence. In the medieval period, English literature has no body of prose romances comparable to those of French literature, with the exception—a very great exception—of Malory's Morte Darthur. It is interesting to compare, or rather contrast, the famous opening of the General Prologue of Chaucer, with its celebration of all the vigour that April injects into human bodies, with the dying fall of Malory's similar praise of May: Therefore, like as May month flowereth and flourisheth in many gardens, so in likewise let every man of worship flourish his heart in this world, first unto God, and next unto the joy of them that he promised his faith unto ... therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guenever, for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore she had a good end.78

Malory and Sidney do not present Utopian models of society, but they do each construct a completely self-contained world, in which the reader may lose himself and wander at leisure. Not many readers wander in the Arcadia, because of its different versions, its incomplete state, and the lack of a readable modern edition, but it is still that sort of book. In fiction, as it flourished from Defoe to, say, Arnold Bennett, prose expresses its conservatism not only in style but in content: that is, the more established novelists tend toward a descriptive realism. Any history of fiction during that period will be predominantly a history of the realists, who appear to have a literary and social importance, almost a moral dignity, that contemporary romancers do not have. Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, and certain selected aspects of Dickens interpret the life and trends of their time. One obvious exception, Gulliver's Travels, proves the rule by falling into the parody structure of Swift's prose already mentioned: it pretends to be a romance or fantasy, but keeps bringing us back relentlessly to eighteenth-century England. Confronted with them, the historian of fiction knows what to do: they illustrate class tensions, intellectual currents, social evolution, and a dozen other things to delight the historical mind. Confronted with BulwerLytton's occult novel Zanoni, or George MacDonald's "faerie romance" Phantasies, or Alice in Wonderland, or Rider Haggard's She, or William

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Morris's The Wood Beyond the World, he hardly knows what to do. Some of these works were very popular in their own day, and some of them, notably Alice in Wonderland, have never lost their popularity. But it seems clear that there is something radical or experimental in this tradition which has taken much longer to be fully understood. We saw that the more rhetorical quality of Carlyle's prose was due mainly to changes in philosophical tendencies: specifically, the Romantic interest in a world below the surface of ordinary perception and consciousness. In literature, of course, this world is closely related to dream and fantasy, and is therefore most likely to be evoked in the romance form. In De Quincey we find the suggestion, to be examined later, that dreams are closely connected with the mythological constructs of religion and literature. The connection of dream with Victorian romance is also clear enough in Alice in Wonderland and elsewhere. Sometimes these romances are rhetorical in style as well: William Morris, as previously remarked, works with a purified English vocabulary which gives his romances a feeling of great remoteness, as the language corresponds to nothing actually used in earlier periods. Meredith, again, is clearly returning to rhetoric in such passages as this from his early Shaving of Shagpat: The birds went up above him, and the trees shook and sparkled, and the waters of brooks and broad rivers flashed like waving mirrors waved by the slave-girls in sport when the beauties of the harem riot and dip their gleaming shoulders in the bath.79

Similar rhetoric recurs in his later novels, where the themes are closer to those of ordinary realistic fiction. A different kind of rhetoric, unlike anything else in the prose of its time, turns up in Walter Savage Lander's Imaginary Conversations, where famous people long dead, many of whom never knew one another in life, hold long dialogues about issues connected, to some degree, with their living interests. These curious spectral discussions, so disembodied from anything resembling space or time, are not romances, except in their rejection of realism, but they helped to nourish two of the most romantic imaginations in English literature, those of Swinburne and Yeats. But on the whole nineteenth-century romance is significant for its content rather than its style. The ones we have mentioned are not Utopias or model societies, but they do for the most part construct self-

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contained worlds, like the Arcadia which follow the postulates laid down by the author and not by the social conditions of his time, and they explore unconventional areas of thought, experience, and behavior. Within the last two decades the significance of this type of fiction has become more generally accepted. The vogue of Tolkien, whose influences go back through Morris and MacDonald to medieval and earlier romance, is a conspicuous example: so is the immense development of science fiction, which, despite its name, is really a form of philosophical romance. It is sometimes said that fiction has lost its reading public: this kind of remark usually indicates that certain conventions have exhausted their possibilities and that others, not yet clearly recognized, are taking over. Fiction seems to be shifting its ground to a more explicit use of mythology and symbolism: in science fiction especially it is exploring new areas of experience, and the more romantic writing of the previous century is becoming more central in its tradition. Part Three: The Imagery of Time Literature and Mythology

Literature is constructed, Coleridge tells us, by the imagination, and is addressed to the imaginations of its audience. The German word for imagination is Einbildungskraft, which Coleridge took to mean something like "the power of shaping one (eiri) thing." He wanted a similar term for English, which meant, for reasons we have glanced at, that he had to turn to Greek, and offered us "esemplastic" (inaccurate in formation: it should be "esenoplastic").80 But this term has not caught on. However it is clear that Coleridge thinks of the imagination as what Aristotle would call the efficient cause of poetry: it answers the question "how?" It is also clear that if we look for the material cause, and ask "what does a poet make his poems out of?" we cannot just say "out of his imagination," without going around in a circle. Language is one material cause of poetry, but it cannot be the only one: poems in different languages are too much alike. It is more helpful to realize that every human society develops a model or picture of the world it lives in, and that this model world takes the form of a mythology, an interconnected series of legends and tales and stories of the gods, by which man explains his situation to himself. Mythology is, of course,

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far more primitive than science, which studies the actual world, but it is not a primitive or imaginary form of science. Its primary connection is with art, not nature; with civilization, the world man is trying to build out of nature. Of course, it takes a long time to understand that mythology is a human construct, and, in its earlier stages particularly, mythology tends rather to dwell on the imperfections in man's state, and to treat the ideal world as something which has been designed by gods only for themselves. Whatever its shape, every literature enters into and inherits a mythology. A poet does not, strictly speaking, make myths: he makes his poems out of myths, just as English poets make their poems out of the English language. And just as all poets in English literature have been working with what is essentially the same language, for all its changes and developments, so all poets from the author of Beowulf to our own day have been working with what is essentially, for us, the same mythological framework of images and structures of fiction. Mythology has at all stages of social development a close connection with religion, and in its earlier stages is practically indistinguishable from it. Scholars know very little about the religion of the English before Christianity, but it must have been very similar to that of the Scandinavians, and they know a little more about that, though admittedly from late sources. Obviously the direction of one's mythological outlook at that period would depend on whether one was an earl or a churl, whether one was a member of the warrior aristocracy or of the small farmer or peasant class. The poets form a third group differing imaginatively from both. The aristocracy had much the same code as that of the Homeric warriors: there is a chief with a comitatus or group of retainers, and the essential virtue of the comitatus is loyalty to the chief, the manifestation of that virtue being death on the battlefield. The outlook on life involved is, as transmitted by the poets, a deeply tragic one. Death awaits all men, and what gives point and meaning to life is a heroic as opposed to an unheroic death. The tenth-century poem "The Battle of Maldon," composed very soon after the event it records, tells how an English force fighting under Byrhtnoth was nearly wiped out by a Danish army, largely as a result of a quixotic blunder of a type which recurs very frequently in the history of British military operations on land. At the moment of supreme disaster, Byrhtnoth pronounces the tragic formula of the ancient code:

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Mind shall grow the harder, Feeling the keener, Courage the greater, As our power weakens. [11. 312-13] We should keep in mind, first, the role of the poet in this scene, and, second, the date of the battle, in the later post-Christian Old English period. The original comitatus code might not have seemed so tragic to the warriors themselves: tragedy depends on a power of thought and feeling, which the poet has; and which according to this poet Byrhtnoth has, but which most warriors have no time or temperament for acquiring. The Scandinavian warriors believed, we are told, in valkyries, or choosers of the slain, who picked up the souls of dead heroes on the battlefield, and carried them off to Valhalla for an eternity of feasting and fighting. Heroes become tragic only when they are seen, or can see themselves, in the poet's perspective, as prodigies of skill and valor and resolution suddenly brought to nothingness by death. Byrhtnoth has this perspective because, in the things he is fighting for, his king, his country and his God, he has far outgrown the simple comitatus code. It matters to him whether he wins or loses; it matters to him that he dies, and his death is the more heroic by being the less fatalistic. As for the peasants and workers on the land, they lived, as they had lived since the beginning of neolithic times, with their lives polarized between spring and winter, seasons of life and death, of feasting and of cautious storing up of food. Among the Teutons November was Blotmonath, the time for slaughtering cattle that could not be fed over the winter; among the Celts it began with Samhain, our Halloween, the night when the spirits of the dead returned. Yule, at the winter solstice, was the time for lighting fires to encourage the sun to increase its heat; in the spring the goddess Eostre arrived with her flowers. Stories had already grown out of the yearly cycle, one of them, doubtless of Mediterranean origin, taking deep root in English literature. In this story, the figure of winter was a sterile and impotent old king; because he was impotent the land was waste; a dragon or monster from the sea, another form of the waste land, comes to demand human victims chosen by lot; the lot falls on the king's daughter; the spirit of the spring appears as a young hero from over the sea; he kills the dragon, and though he dies himself, revives, marries the daughter, and succeeds to the kingdom.

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The story symbolizes the coming of new life in the spring, but the death of the champion and the threatened life of the heroine remind us that the progression of death and life needs to be aided by frequent sacrifice and that the ultimate or supreme victim of sacrifice is a human being. Dim memories of ancient rites of such sacrifices may linger in the rhymes of children's games: Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head [Oranges and Lemons, 11. 7-8]

or in the song about London Bridge, which may glance at the practice of sacrificing someone to become the guardian of the bridge: Set a man to watch all night, Watch all night, Watch all night.

[London Bridge Is Falling Down, st. 3]

New and Old Faiths

Christianity came to England around 600, and its symbolism absorbed much of what had preceded it. Yule, the birthday of the sun, became Christmas, the birthday of the Sun of righteousness; the spring festival of Eostre became Easter, and the death and revival of the year spirit the death and resurrection of Christ, who kills the dragon of death and hell, as, centuries later, in Dunbar's poem on the Resurrection: Done is a battell on the dragon blak, Our campioun Chryst confountet hes his force.81

In the Middle Ages St. George, brought from Asia Minor to become the patron saint of England, became identified with the spring spirit, and the ritual acted at that time became the St. George play. The first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene tells the story of St. George and the dragon as an allegory of the English nation destroying and reforming its church, and thereby doing its best to imitate the death and resurrection of Christ. Similarly the feast of the dead became first the feast of all souls and then of all saints: finally, after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, it settled on the fifth of November, and the scarecrow figure it featured, the proto-

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type of Eliot's "hollow men," became identified with Guy Fawkes. The symbolism of the sacrificial victim set to guard a dangerous spot lingers in Milton's Lycidas who, drowned in the Irish sea, becomes the "genius of the shore" [1. 183]. The beast-headed dancers of the spring festival, condemned in so many church decretals, are the ancestors of the antimasque figures who turn up in Ben Jonson and Milton's Comus. Yeats still awaits the return of departed spirits in "All Soul's Night"; Eliot watches midsummer fire festivals in "East Coker." Traces of Beltane or Walpurgis Night, the corresponding gathering of spirits on the first of May, linger, despite the title, in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Burns tells us of John Barleycorn, killed and torn to pieces by his "enemies," who is transmuted into a "spirit" that we can acquire by drinking his blood. Christianity was a city religion, as the epistles of Paul remind us, and the rural populations of Europe were slow to give up their traditional rites and their ancestral gods. The word "pagan" is connected in its etymology with "peasant," and the word "heathen" with "heath." But for the intellectuals, who were then mainly priests, and for the poets, the new religion integrated, into a single framework, the diverse myths and rituals of pre-Christian peoples, and Christian missionaries, in dealing with the ancient customs, steered a cautious policy between toleration and iconoclasm. For the poets, the fulfilling of the earlier outlook by Christianity was achieved largely through the interconnected historical vision presented in the Bible. For warrior and peasant alike, life was full of the sense of fatality—"wyrd," as it is called in Old English—which works itself out without regard to human will or wishes. In Christianity this fatality becomes the machinery of God's purpose, which promises a higher destiny for man, or for some men. The great historian of the Old English period, the Venerable Bede, tells a story about a council held by a heathen king to determine whether to accept the new faith or not. One of his advisers says: When we compare the present life of man with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit. . . . Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few

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moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the darkness whence he came. Similarly, man appears on earth for a little while, but we know nothing of what went before this life, and what follows.82

Naturally, those who did not embrace Christianity, or whose lives did not meet the standard set by the church, were still, from its point of view, in the sparrow's position. The English had settled in a land still full of the great engineering works of the Roman occupation, with their aqueducts, baths, stone houses, paved roads, walls built around towns and across the island. There were also other monuments like the mysterious and terrifying Stonehenge. They looked upon these as "eald enta geweorc," the ancient work of giants [Beowulf, 1. 2717], and gazed at them with a sense of the awful power of time that levels even the greatest efforts. Thus a beautiful fragment of an Old English poem called "The Ruin": Bright were the castle-dwellings ... great the tumult of men ... till mighty fate overturned it all. The wide walls fell; the multitudes who might have built them again lay dead on the earth. [11.15-22]

This becomes the ubi sunt theme of medieval poetry: "Where beth they that biforen us weren?" asks a thirteenth-century lyric.83 It sounds like a commonplace enough theme, but the experience of a tenth-century poet contemplating the ruins of something like Bath or Chester in the midst of a desolate land would not be a commonplace experience. The sense of alienation, of man helpless in the grip of an indifferent doom, is peculiarly a part of the sensibility of the poets in this period. The poet's social position, at least in pre-Christian times, would be frequently that of a wandering minstrel, going from one bright hall with its feasting and mead-drinking to another, like the freezing sparrow of Bede's parable. One poem called "Widsith" ("far-traveller") tells of one such minstrel and of the number of patrons he had had: if we take him literally his career had extended over three centuries. "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" are poems of an almost intolerable sense of loneliness and exile, the former at least probably increased by a Christian sense of man as a prodigal son exiled from God's home. "Wyrd bith ful araed," says the Wanderer—fate is wholly determined [1. 5]. The Bible, in presenting this sense of the vast panorama of lost time within its vision of a history stretching from Creation to Last Judgement,

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made the sense of a determining fate more intelligible, if not less bleak. Something of what the connected narrative of the Bible could do for poets is in another story of Bede, the account of the monk Caedmon. According to Bede, Caedmon had often been at gatherings that expected its members to take the harp in turn and extemporize poetry, and he had been humiliated by not being able to do so. Then he dreamed that an angel appeared to him and said "Sing something." He protested that he could not sing, but the angel repeated his command. Then he asked, "What shall I sing?" "Try the Creation," suggested the angel. At once Caedmon found himself composing verses on the Creation, which are reproduced in the Old English translation of Bede's Latin history commissioned by King Alfred. The formulaic units out of which this fragment is composed are doubtless of pre-Christian origin, but this time there was something to hitch them on to. Having once started at the beginning of the Biblical narratives Caedmon kept right on going: He sang of the creation of the world, the origin of the human race, and the whole story of Genesis. He sang of Israel's departure from Egypt, their entry into the land of promise, and many other events of scriptural history. He sang of the Lord's Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the Apostles. He also made many poems on the terrors of the Last-Judgement... .84

In other words, he was beginning for English literature what the cycles of plays in the Middle Ages continued to do, and what Milton in Paradise Lost was still essentially doing a thousand years later. The influence of the Bible was reinforced by other works which King Alfred had translated into Old English. One of these was Bede's history, already mentioned. Another was Orosius' history of the world, a chronicle largely paraphrased from the Bible, designed to show that Christianity was not responsible for such disasters as the overthrow of the Roman Empire. Still another was Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius was the counsellor of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, King of Italy around 500, and one of the heroes of Teutonic epic. Boethius had incurred the displeasure of his barbarian lord, and wrote his book in prison before his execution. The book became one of the most influential works in English literature, and was translated later by Chaucer, and, it is said, by Queen Elizabeth. It transmitted to the Middle and later ages the conception of

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the wheel of fortune, which identified the ubi sunt theme of Old English poetry with the literary form of tragedy, as defined by Chaucer's monk: Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. [The Prologue of The Monk's Tale," frag. 7,11.1973-7]

One section of the book, on the golden age, was also of immense importance in reinforcing for the poetic imagination, the conception of an ideal existence in the remote past now lost, as in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden. The historical imagination of the earliest English poets, then, turned on the conception of a sombre cycle of life and death, symbolized by, and present in, the yearly cycle of seasons, where there is renewed life for the species, but never the same life again for the individual. Christianity placed this vision of fate inside its more ideological view of a divine purpose at work for its own people, but outside it fate operates without change, and in fact Christianity had expanded the cyclical vision to include the rise and fall of empires outside Christendom. All this comes into the great tale of Beowulf, which sums up every aspect of this historical vision. We first see Beowulf as a young hero in a St. George role, coming over the sea from southern Sweden to Denmark, which is being ravaged by the monster Grendel, sprung of the race of Cain and the wrath of God. Beowulf disposes of Grendel, and then goes down to a deep cave below the surface of the earth to finish off Grendel's far more dangerous mother. He kills her too, though her blood is so poisonous that it melts his sword ... like ice when the Father loosens the bond of the frost, unbinds the fetters of the floods; He has power over times and seasons. That is the true Lord. [11.1609-12]

Beowulf then returns home and recounts the quest which we have heard already. For a reader of the poem in a book this makes for impatience, but the conventions of Beowulf are closer to the publicly recited poem, and we have to think rather of the analogy of music. The singer of

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da capo aria cannot merely stop and say "Now I'm supposed to go back to the beginning and do it all over again," although that may be all that the score actually says. In listening we demand that a certain rhythmical period be filled out, and the effect of filling it out, in this case, is to weave in the cyclical movement of history with the structure of the poem. Next we are introduced to Beowulf in his old age when he has himself the role of the aged king whose land is wasted by a dragon. He goes out to fight the dragon heavy in spirit, and we feel that it is not simply a dragon but his dragon, the manifestation of his own death among other things. With the help of his comrade Wiglaf he kills the dragon, but is mortally wounded himself, and staggers to a "seat by the wall," where the rolling cycles of time make their last turn for him: He gazed on the work of giants, saw how the eternal earth-building held within stone arches, firm fixed by pillars. [11.2717-20]

Then he gives orders that his armor should pass to his son, and asks for one glimpse of the great treasure of the dragon's hoard, the treasure which had also been "the old work of giants in the mound." There is not much made of the comitatus spirit in Beowulf. When he disappears to fight with Grendel's mother most of his companions abandon the watch for him, and although he starts out on the dragon fight accompanied, like Christ, with eleven followers, all except one desert. Something else has come into the conception of the hero here, something which we can understand better when we turn to the great religious poem of the period, "The Dream of the Rood." Christianity has brought the notion of the heroic quest as one of suffering and endurance rather than action, an ordeal which the hero goes through alone, a quest in which the hero, because he is the hero, is the most lonely and alienated of all men, and the most conscious of what is really happening to him. Troy Novant This theme of the cycles of history and the "ruins of time," to quote the title of an eloquent poem by Spenser, remained to haunt the imaginations of poets until our own day. But for most of our period it was qualified by two other aspects of the prevailing outlook on history. In the first place, the world, in fact the whole universe, was finite in time: it had been created at a definite moment in the past, and would be destroyed at

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a definite moment in the future. One scheme of chronology, which asserted that the creation had taken place in the year 4004 B.C. and would last for six thousand years plus another thousand years of the millennium, corresponding to the six days and Sabbath of creation, was still being put forward in the nineteenth century. In the second place, the cycles of history and the rise and fall of empires go on chiefly in the world outside Christendom, where nothing really happens except what Spenser and Wordsworth call mutability. Within Christendom, history takes the shape of a divine plan, a drama with God as dramatist. The coming of Christ was the definitive revolutionary event on which all history turns, and the main duty of man in society is to maintain the revolutionary establishment of the Christian Church to the end of the world. This is the view of history set out most fully in St. Augustine's City of God. For St. Augustine the natural virtues, especially justice, make a distinction between two levels of ordinary life, the lower one being mainly "brigandage" (latrocinia) and the higher one the kind of order represented by the Roman Empire.85 But even the Roman Empire could not survive indefinitely without the Church, which is sacramentally connected with the City of God itself. The Roman Empire and the Christian Church were born together, and the great poets contemporary with that birth, Virgil and Ovid, reflect the sense of a vast change taking place in human affairs, the nature of which they did not, from the Christian point of view, fully understand. Virgil had written, in his Fourth Eclogue, of the birth of a child which would mark the return of the Golden Age, when mankind would enter a new era of peace and the "serpent will die" [1. 31]. This poem was taken to be a prophecy of the birth of Christ, although its general context is still cyclical, envisioning a renewal of time rather than a transformation of it. Ovid's Metamorphoses provided a kind of secular counterpart to the Biblical narrative, beginning as it did with an account of the creation of the world and a universal flood, and ending with a gloomy picture of the death of nature in the remote future, contrasted with the achievements of the two Caesars in the present. These two events of the reign of Augustus, the Birth of Christ and the unification of the Western world under Roman power, provided the imaginative basis for the medieval conception of Christendom, as a realm with a spiritual head in the Pope and a temporal one in the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which after the tenth century was centered in Germany. But this conception, so impor-

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tant to Dante, made little impact on the imaginations of English poets, which remained preoccupied with more local matters. The Christian historical outlook reflects the centring of the Christian Church in Rome. For it, the important event in the pagan world was the Trojan War, because the Romans, according to Virgil, were descended from the Trojans. During the Middle Ages, when there was very little knowledge of Greek in the Western world, readers were dependent for their knowledge of the Trojan War on Virgil and on two Latin recensions of the Homeric story, made by poets who claimed to have been present at the siege itself. Medieval sympathies were solidly with the Trojans because of Virgil, and Homer was regarded as less authoritative, not being an eye-witness, and as prejudiced in favor of the Greeks. This antiGreek and pro-Trojan bias is still obvious in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. The story of Troilus itself shows how the Homeric story expanded in more romantic directions, as Troilus is only a bare name in the Iliad. One modulation of the Roman myth became of major importance in English literature. In the middle of the twelfth century, a Welsh priest named Geoffrey of Monmouth composed the Historia Regum Britanniae, a chronicle which began by saying that the Britons (i.e., the pre-English inhabitants of England from whom the Welsh were descended) were actually Trojans, who had come to the country under the leadership of one Brutus, from whom Britain derived its name. They cleared the land of giants, of whom a particularly big one was named Goemagot. Later, under Biblical influence, this giant split in two and became Gog and Magog, statues of whom were made for the Guildhall in London by Colley Gibber's father: "Great Gibber's brazen, brainless brothers," as Pope calls them.86 Geoffrey then gives a history of pre-English Britain, and in this history the stories of Lear and his three daughters, of Gorboduc, the subject of the first English tragedy, of old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, of Cymbeline, hero of another play of Shakespeare (an actual king whose coins are in the British Museum), of the Sabrina of Milton's Comus, enter English literature for the first time. Julius Caesar speaks of a tribe of Britons called the Trinovantes, and according to Geoffrey the original name of London was Troy Novant. Geoffrey is obliged to admit that the Romans and the English invaded the country, but insists that it was only through treachery that they met with any success. The English were driven out after their first invasion, and then a great British prince

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arose named Arthur, who conquered Gaul and a great part of Northern Europe, and defied and defeated a Roman army. Arthur was aided by the wizard Merlin, who also built Stonehenge by transporting the stones by magic from Ireland. Geoffrey concludes by saying that he got all this out of a Welsh book lent him by his friend Archdeacon Walter, which he is translating into Latin. Various contemporary historians, he adds, may say that his history is a pack of lies, but then they have not seen the Archdeacon's book. Modern scholars have not seen it either, and will probably never sort out completely the melange of myth, fiction, tradition, legend, and actual history in Geoffrey's work. What is important is the fact that the historical imagination is, everywhere in human life, shaped by myth, not by history, and myth seems always to involve a distortion of actual history. Arthur was a central figure in Celtic legend and history long before Geoffrey, but whatever battles he may have won, the English occupied his country in the end. Nevertheless, literature has revolved around the figure of Arthur in a way that it could never have revolved around, for instance, Alfred, who really was a great king, and whose historical existence is not open to question. We notice how the great myths of history have often come from defeated or oppressed nations, like the Hebrews and the Celts. Legends of Arthur and his knights flourished mightily through the next centuries, to the extent that the knights of the Round Table (which appeared very soon after Geoffrey in the legend), Percival, Lancelot, Tristram, Gawain, developed cycles of their own. A more devotional and mystical development of the legend produced the Holy Grail, and the legend of the holy knight Sir Galahad. The Arthurian legend also said that Arthur was not dead, but sleeping in the island of Avalon, and would some day return to deliver his people. The Tudors came to the throne with a somewhat dubious claim to it, but they were of Welsh origin, and they found the Arthurian myth useful as a symbol of the union of the country after the Wars of the Roses. The first Tudor sovereign, Henry VII, called his eldest son and heir apparent Arthur, and Catherine of Aragon was brought to marry him. Arthur died soon after the wedding, and Catherine was married off to the next son, who eventually succeeded as Henry VIII, and who was later to argue that, as Catherine was really his brother's wife, his marriage to her was incestuous and ought to be dissolved. Despite this setback, Arthur remained a central mythical figure of the period. He is

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the hero of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and was to be the hero of an epic announced by Milton in his pastoral elegy Epitaphium Damonis (1640). Human history had begun with the Fall of man, when Eve took the forbidden apple from the serpent. (It had to be an apple, for those who had only Latin versions of the Bible, because malum in Latin means evil as well as apple.) The same symbol turns up as the cause of the Trojan War, when Paris gives a golden apple to Venus instead of to the more morally acceptable Minerva or Juno. In the third book of The Faerie Queene the characters Paridell and Hellenore, whose names echo Paris and Helen, tell the story of the fall of Troy and the establishment of a second Troy in Rome. Whereupon the heroine Britomart comments: There, there, said Britomart, a fresh appear'd The glory of the later world to spring, And Troy again out of her dust was rear'd, To sit in second seat of sovereign king, Of all the world under her governing. But a third kingdom yet is to arise, Out of the Trojan's scattered offspring, That in all glory and great enterprise, Both first and second Troy shall dare to equalise, [bk. 3, canto 9, st. 44]

Something of the sense of Rome and Britain as a second and third Troy may be traced in the sequence of Shakespeare's plays too, from Troilus and Cressida to Cymbeline. Something of it also lingers in Milton, who abandoned his Arthurian epic scheme and omits Arthur from his History of Britain, but retains the rest of the Geoffrey version. By that time, however, belief in the authenticity of Geoffrey was on the way out. Meanwhile, various other historical myths were also taking shape and combining with each other. One of these was the myth that accompanied the humanist movement. Humanism, as previously remarked, regarded the age of Augustus as the Golden Age of Classical literature, the time when Latin literature had reached its pinnacle of stylistic perfection. The "silver" writers begin around the age of Nero, and from then on Latin becomes steadily more corrupt and barbarous. The bishop in Robert Browning's poem, "The Bishop Orders his Tomb ..." wants the inscription on his tomb to be "choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word," and he sneers at his rival Gandolf's tomb, which uses the word "elucescebat" [11.77,99], marking a later and inferior Latin (Cicero would

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have used "elucebat"). Humanism thus saw cultural history since the Augustan time as forming a U-shaped movement, declining from the Augustan height to monkish superstition, and then recovering something of its original power, as is implied in the word "Renaissance" itself. This U-shaped humanist view is still going strong in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the eighteenth century: Gibbon's golden age begins a little later, in the period of the Antonines, but the mythical outline of his "decline and fall" closely follows the original humanist one. This myth, in Protestant England, closely fitted the historical myth of the Reformation. According to that view, the original purity of the Christian Church, established in the New Testament, had become corrupted as the centre of power shifted to Rome, and was now to be recovered by a reform which would return to New Testament principles. The demonic figures in the Book of Revelation, the Beast and the Great Whore, which in their original context represented the persecuting Roman emperors, notably Nero, were identified by many Protestants with the Roman Church, which was regarded as a historical extension of the pagan Roman Empire. In Milton the sense of a cultural, a religious, and a political rebirth taking place in his own time is very strong in the earlier prose period, especially in Areopagitica (1644). The early reforming movement in the English church under Wyclif is, according to Milton, evidence that God reveals his will "first to his Englishmen,"87 and the rebellion of Parliament against the King is a sign that England has been chosen, like Israel, as a people of an exodus from tyranny. Milton is touched, however lightly, by the same kind of vision that some of his extremist contemporaries had, when they applied the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Book of Daniel to their own day. According to that dream, history would take the form of a succession of four great empires, usually identified with Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome, and this would be followed by a "fifth monarchy" or Messianic kingdom, which would put an end to history. This fifth monarchy speculation enters Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist, in a very sardonic context [4-549]. Gardener or Farmer?

The first Tudor king, Henry VII, a Lancastrian, had married the Yorkist heiress and had thereby united the red and the white rose. He had also got the new middle class, which had been growing in wealth and power

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all through the fifteenth century, solidly behind him and smashed what was left of the older feudal nobility. Under Henry VIII allegiance—and substantial payments of money—to Rome were renounced, and many of the newer moneyed class became a landed aristocracy through the confiscation of land owned by the monasteries. Despite many rebellions, much misery, and some eloquent poets among the Catholic resistance, notably Southwell, nationalism and Protestantism were, on the whole, popular movements, and Elizabethan poetic imagination was intensely centripetal, focussed on the figure of Elizabeth and on what she symbolized: the principle that only in unity and order is there strength, peace, or security. Thus Fulke Greville: Under a throne I saw a virgin sit, The red and white rose quartered in her face; Star of the north! and for true guards to it, Princes, church, states, all pointing out her grace; The homage done her was not born of wit; Wisdom admired, zeal took ambition's place, State in her eyes taught order how to fit And fix confusion's unobserving race. Fortune can here claim nothing truly great, But that this princely creature is her seat. [Caelica, st. 81]

Shakespeare, Drayton, Daniel, all wrote extensively about the fifteenthcentury civil wars, implying a self-congratulatory moral about the contrast with their own time. Whenever a character on the Elizabethan stage, like Hotspur or King Lear, calls for a map and proceeds to divide up the country, the audience knows that disasters will follow. Obviously such optimistic myths as that of the third Troy could not survive the seventeenth century, when civil war had returned in an even bloodier shape. The Restoration period, like the Elizabethan one, congratulated itself on the peace and order that had followed an exhausting and bitter struggle. As Cowley says: "a warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in."88 But there is a very important difference in feeling. The exaltation of the monarch was central in the Elizabethan period: we can gauge the strength of this feeling by comparing the figures of Arthur in Malory and in Spenser. In Malory, Arthur is a medieval king, primus inter pares, given a certain theoretical respect because of his rank, but inferior in all respects, including literary

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interest, to such knights of his court as Lancelot or Tristram. Malory reflects the time of the War of the Roses, when the Earl of Warwick could be a much more powerful figure than the king. In Spenser, Arthur is infinitely stronger than all his knights: his allegorical connections are with divine grace; wherever he appears, the action turns in his direction. In the Restoration period there is no comparable exalting of the royal figure: the civil war preceding it had been a conflict of religious and political ideologies, and the predominant mood of the age of Dryden was anti-ideological. We begin to get the first stirrings of a conception of progress with Dryden: science is advancing, literature is becoming more correct, and above all there has been a great refinement in manners, including conversation. This last is the beginning of the specifically modern feeling, which has never wholly disappeared since Restoration times, that the true indication of the level a civilization has reached is the quality of its worldliness. One would hardly expect such Tories and churchmen as Swift and Samuel Johnson to subscribe to such a view, but they reflect an important aspect of it. For Swift, the establishments of church and state are necessary to restrain the desperately wicked soul of man: religion must be a matter of faith beyond reason and commandment beyond argument, because man uses reason, as noted, mainly to rationalize his vices. There must be a commandment even to love, because, as Swift says, "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."89 Samuel Johnson's very similar views of spiritual and temporal authority are written all over his essay on Milton. Yet it was Milton who had presented in Paradise Lost the traditional Christian view of history to which Johnson adhered. That is, the implication of the story of Adam and Eve is that man has been created civilized. Civilization is his natural state, not savagery. After his fall, Adam in Milton becomes a noble savage: "Such of late Columbus found th' American" [bk. 9,11. 1115-16], and on the point of discovering the use of fire. For many readers of Paradise Lost the contrast between the domestic, highly cultivated atmosphere of Eden and the nudity of the inhabitants seems grotesque, like Manet's picture Dejeuner sur I'herbe. But Milton's approach to his subject is thoroughly consistent with his view of the human state, and it is by no means humorless: in fact a careful reader of Paradise Lost can easily see that one of the most important things Adam loses in his fall is his sense of humor. Humor, innocence, and nakedness go together, as do solemnity, aggressiveness, and fig leaves.

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We saw that in the eighteenth century came the realization of the primitiveness of poetry. This was part of a growing tendency to feel that man's life on earth must have been far more extensive than the Book of Genesis suggests. Perhaps the Biblical myth of man as a child of God would simply have to co-exist with a quite different view of him as a product of nature who has gradually advanced from the primitive, which implies the possibility that many aspects of civilization, ranging from social inequality to the wearing of jewels, could be regarded as unnatural, and a source of social corruption. This is the conception of "natural society," which, largely through the influence of Rousseau, became central to the development of revolutionary thought in France. Central to it is the identity of the natural and the reasonable: whatever in society seems logically absurd will sooner or later be found to be unnatural as well. In England a similar issue was raised by Lord Bolingbroke, a friend of Pope and an influence on his Essay on Man. The conservative views of Swift and Johnson, to be understood in depth, have to be seen as vigorous repudiations of the conception of natural society and defences of the opposed and more traditional view, that civilization, including law, class ascendancy, and the restraints of authority, is what is really natural to man. The last book of Gulliver's Travels presents us with rational horses called Houyhnhmns and anthropoid creatures called Yahoos. The Yahoo is man as pure animal, and, judged by animal standards, man is the dirtiest and most vicious of all animals. We constantly use names of animals as terms of abuse, but in doing so we project on them dualities in human nature which are far worse than anything that any swine or skunk or rat can emulate. Gulliver discovers, to his horror, that he belongs, generically and genetically, to the Yahoos: he is cleaner and more intelligent, but the account he has just given of the state of Europe does not reassure us about what man does with his intelligence. The conclusion we come to is that a natural society might be possible for gifted animals, like the Houyhnhmns, but man is not a gifted animal: he is a higher being under a curse, and is consequently stuck with the illogical disciplines of civilization, such as they are. The best he can do is to remember his curse, in other words to abandon pride. Pride is the greatest of vices partly because it is the most futile of vices: man has nothing to be proud of. The tone of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas is considerably gentler, but the attitude is not greatly different. In a kind of reversal of the Biblical story

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of a descent from a paradisal garden to a life of hard work, aging, and death, Rasselas escapes from a "happy valley," which is also called a prison of pleasure, in Abyssinia to the more workaday world of Egypt. The instinct which prompted his escape, and which he finds confirmed at every turn, is that there is no way of identifying nature and reason, no simple adjustment to existence, no key to a contented or happy life. Johnson introduces a favorite figure of eighteenth-century romanticism, the hermit, but all that the hermit can say is: "the life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout."90 We are also given "a glimpse of pastoral life," the title of one of the chapters [chap. 19], but pastoral life is no more reassuring. To use the terms of a century later, if man were simply a product of nature he could adapt to his environment as other organisms do; but he never can. Such is the attitude of two eighteenth-century Tories; an eighteenthcentury Whig, Edmund Burke, who became the founder of modern Conservatism, takes the same view. One of Burke's earliest writings was a satire on the conception of natural society,91 and later, faced with the menace of the French Revolution, he seized on the same conception as the key to what for him was the essential fallacy of that revolution and of its philosophy. For man, Burke says, the state of art and the state of nature are the same thing: society is an organism, and preserving its health, which means the well being of every component of the organism, is its first duty. The natural is the reasonable, it is true, but this applies only to human nature and human, or what we should now call existential, reason: it does not apply to physical nature or to mathematical reasoning. Speaking of aristocracy, he says: The state of civil society which necessarily generates this aristocracy is a state of Nature,— and much more truly so than a savage and incoherent mode of life. For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated, and most predominates. Art is man's nature. We are as much, at least, in a state of Nature in formed manhood as in immature and helpless infancy.92 The Poet as Primitive

However, while Britain avoided a political revolution, the agrarian and industrial revolutions proceeded apace. Technological development, and

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the tremendous overseas expansion of the British Empire, most naturally suggested the idea of progress, which became very prominent in nineteenth-century philosophy. When the Darwinian theory of evolution was articulated in the Origin of Species (1859), many people seized on evolution as the scientific evidence for the conception of progress, ignoring the vast difference in context between biology and human history. The Darwinian conception of the struggle for survival and the eventual survival of the "fittest" was also used to some extent to rationalize imperialism. The idea of progress enters literature here and there, for instance in some of the writings of H.G. Wells. But for the most part literature took a very different line. The association of poetry with primitive society, so emphasized in the eighteenth century, suggested that poetry was something likely to be left behind by the march of progress, whatever progress might be marching to. Peacock, for instance, the friend, and friendly satirist, of Shelley, wrote a paradoxical essay, The Four Ages of Poetry, in which he remarked that the poet was a barbarian in a civilized community, only able to repeat the formulas, such as panegyrics on conquerors, which he had inherited from an earlier and cruder time. Peacock's essay was answered by Shelley in his Defence of Poetry: Shelley's answer was to the effect that poetry could find its social function in its opposition to a social order in which "the rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism."93 For Shelley, then, poetry represents something rather similar to the eighteenth-century natural society; a more organic and coherent society buried underneath, and so ignored by, the actual society of the present. This conception had already taken a variety of different forms, and it is easy to project it in various historical directions. Many poets seem to feel that, of the three ideals of the French Revolution, liberty, equality, and fraternity, liberty and equality can to some degree be realized in an age of rapidly growing cities, population, and industry, but that fraternity, the sense of immediate and personal relationship, gets lost. Several of Scott's novels, including the very popular Waverley, describe the destruction of the aristocratic and primitive society of the Scottish Highlands by the middle-class Hanoverians from the south. The imaginative sympathy falls on the side of the former. Scott's compatriot Carlyle, in Past and Present, symbolizes the lost sense of fraternity by a medieval monastery, which he makes into a kind of model for contemporary society. As

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Carlyle presents it, the chief problem of the monastery, and by implication of society generally, is to find the right man for its leader. The search for a leader or hero whose charisma will draw society into an organic unity again continues into the twentieth century, where it inspires some very quixotic partisanships. Eliot's "royalism," Yeats's nostalgic cult of aristocracy, Lawrence's exaltation of a racial Mexican hero in The Plumed Serpent, and many tendencies in Bernard Shaw (see, for instance, the discussion between Charles II and his queen in the second act of In Good King Charles' Golden Days) are some examples. Another modulation of the same tendency is the feeling that, just as "progress" relates primarily to technology and the growth of cities, so society, to the extent that it progresses, realizes a continuous cultural decline. It follows that the genuinely creative societies are simpler, full of imaginative elements that progress thinks it has outgrown. The Augustans tended to regard the use of Classical gods, and still more of fairies, as a false and affected form of naivete. But later eighteenth-century writers and critics rediscovered the virtues of "the fairy way of writing," as it was called, and so Spenser and the early Milton began to take on something of their proper proportions in the literary tradition. Some striking changes in sensibility in the eighteenth century bring back something of the Old English sense of the "ancient work of giants" [Beowulf, 1. 2717]. Ossian is full of ruined buildings and desolate landscapes; other poets, including Blake, turned to contemporary speculations about the ancient Druids, who were supposed to have built the gigantic monument of Stonehenge. More important is the new interest in the "Gothic." In the chapel of New College, Oxford, a remarkably unpleasant stained glass window, after a design by Reynolds, was inserted in place of a medieval original, and the younger Thomas Warton wrote a protesting poem (1782) describing the direction of his own cultural sympathies: For long, enamour'd of a barbarous age, A faithless truant to the classic page, Long have I lov'd to catch the simple chime Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rime; To view the festive rites, the knightly play, That deck'd heroic Albion's elder day; To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold, And the rough castle, cast in giant mould;

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With Gothic manners Gothic arts explore, And muse on the magnificence of yore. [Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds's Painted Window at New College, Oxford, 11. 7-16]

What is present in such a passage as this is, implicitly, a completely reshaped historical myth. One element in it is the pathos of a vanished heroism, again a feeling strong in Ossian, one of whose most memorable phrases is "They went forth to battle, but they always fell."94 Another is a growing sense of the identity of social progress and cultural decline: that is, the great lost causes of national history have a glamour about them, indicating that something irreplaceable has been lost with the cause. This is imaginatively a revival of the old feeling about the Trojan war, as we have it, for example, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: the feeling that something genuinely noble, if quixotic, was destroyed with the defeated city, and that something smaller, colder, and meaner succeeded with the Greek victory. In the Warton passage we notice, along with the "mouldering" castles "cast in giant mould," a reference to "minstrel harps," evoking a sense of a lost poetic tradition, associated with poets of a legendary oral period, which we have, for instance, in the poem of Scott, significantly called The Lay of the Last Minstrel Even as early as Gray's "The Bard," our sympathies are enlisted on the side of the massacred Welsh bards as against the imperialism of Edward I, and these bards had, according to contemporary views, descended from the caste of bards among the Druids. The reference to "festive rites," again, marks a revival of sympathy for festival seasons, which increases through the next century into the Christmas cult fostered by Dickens and others. All these are elements in a conservative vision of history, an aesthetic preference for an older cause that casts a glow over such figures as Mary Queen of Scots and over Cavalier, and later Jacobite, loyalties. These imaginative sympathies were popularized to a degree by Scott's novels and were, if often unconsciously, exploited by conservative religious and political developments, notably the Oxford Movement. The continuity of this historical myth is extraordinary. Byron inhabited a "Gothic" castle called Newstead Abbey, and if we look at his early poem, "On Leaving Newstead Abbey," we see the structure of the entire sensibility laid out. First comes a motto from Ossian, full of gloom and ruins, then a vision of decay and weeds growing in the garden; then the

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disappearance of the "mail-Cover'd Barons" and of the minstrels, "old Robert, with harp-stringing numbers," then the Cavaliers, "with Rupert, 'gainst traitors contending" [11. 5,9,17]. Byron is a Romantic, or at least is in this poem, but some of the historical stereotypes are still there in Eliot's "Little Gidding," in Yeats's poems about his tower in Ireland with its ghosts of "rough men-at-arms . . . shod in iron" [The Tower, pt. 2,11. 66-7], in Pound's "Altaforte" sestina. They are also in the critical writing of the same poets: Pound's Spirit of Romance and ABC of Reading, Eliot's essays on seventeenth-century poetry, Yeats's early essay on Spenser, run parallel, as does their common dislike of Milton, as the major poet among the victorious Roundheads. In the nineteenth century the focus of this myth becomes less vaguely "Gothic" and more specifically medieval. We spoke of the U-shaped view of history in Gibbon and the humanists: if we look at Ruskin, more particularly at the "Nature of Gothic" section of his Stones of Venice, we find a view of history which is precisely the reverse of this shape, an inverted U. Taking architecture as his model for all the arts, Ruskin divides its history into three main periods. First is pre-medieval or "servile" architecture, where there is an undue subordination of ornament and detail to structure, as in the pyramids; then comes the Gothic period, where the proportion is exactly right, and finally the "revolutionary" (always a bad word in Ruskin) period, beginning with the Renaissance, where design gets increasingly smothered in detail. The implication is that the history of culture leads up to and falls away from the crucial revelation of "Gothic" in the Middle Ages. The following century produced a good deal of writing which saw the medieval period, or perhaps rather an idea which the medieval period represented, as a kind of cultural age of innocence, preceding a historical toboggan slide down into increasing sterility. The myth was congenial to Roman Catholic apologists, including G.K. Chesterton, who found in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas a definitive synthesis of faith and reason, and in the ascendancy of the Church during the period an ideal of a unified society. The left-wing William Morris, however, also tended to regard most later art as a progressive degeneration from medieval standards. Some of his admiration for fourteenth-century culture was connected with the fact that in the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 something like a genuine proletariat had, for almost the only time in British history, appeared on the social scene. The villain of the story, that is, the focus of the tendency to post-

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medieval decline, is variously identified. It may be the Renaissance itself, a period explicitly called a "Fall" in Stones of Venice, or the Reformation, or, as suggested in Newman, the beginnings of an empirical and utilitarian philosophy in Francis Bacon, or, as in Eliot and Yeats, "Whiggery," the ethos of a nation of shopkeepers. As a rule it is associated with bourgeois capitalism and the individualized form of society that spread from economics into culture. In the American historian Brooks Adams, reflecting certain Populist views of the turn of the century, this view of history expands into a cyclical conception called "the law of civilization and decay," according to which a period of aggression and conquest is followed by a commercial period of exploitation and profiteering.95 Adams's theory is close to Ezra Pound's conception of "usury," according to which the profiteering tendency in society gathered strength after the medieval period and progressively debased every form of culture (Canto 45). A very influential German book, The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler (1918), crystallized the main elements of this myth for the early twentieth century. According to Spengler, Western culture since medieval times has not been getting better or worse so much as simply growing older. The Middle Ages were the spring of Western culture and its youth; the Renaissance was its summer, the eighteenth century its autumn in which its cultural possibilities were exhausted; Napoleon represents a transition to a winter of technological progress, dictatorships, annihilation wars, huge cities and great uprooted proletarian masses fed by the state on what Juvenal calls bread and circuses, and empires fighting it out for world supremacy. Before this, a "Classical" culture had gone through the same stages, achieving a spring like the medieval period in Homeric times, a summer and autumn during the great Greek period, and a winter beginning with Alexander, a world-conqueror figure corresponding to Napoleon. We are now, says Spengler, in the period of culture corresponding to the Punic Wars in earlier times, with Germany and Britain having the roles respectively of a new Rome and a new Carthage.96 This historical myth pulls together most of the features of the imagery of time that had been there since the beginning. It includes the Ruskinian notion of a "decline" of age from a more vigorous youth, the humanist notion (in a very different context) of a return to or imitation of Rome, and the medieval notion of a cyclical fatality in secular human affairs. Spengler's theory is not, strictly, a cyclical theory: he merely sees "cul-

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tures" as organic growths that spring up unpredictably and go through certain stages of development already contained within them. But the following of the Classical by the Western culture suggests a cycle, and in fact Vico, the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher, had, long before Spengler, outlined a theory of history in which society proceeds through a mythical age of gods and an age of heroes to an age of the people, and then goes into a "ricorso" or return to the beginning again. The example given of the ricorso is the medieval culture following the fall of the Roman Empire. Spengler is an unattractive writer, limited in his outlook to the verge of being stupid, but his powerful grasp of the historical vision of his time makes him very valuable as a commentary on twentieth-century poets, even poets who did not read him or would have thought very little of him if they had. Eliot had certainly not read Spengler for The Waste Land, yet The Waste Land is a very Spenglerian poem, even to the allusion to the Punic Wars [1. 70]. Auden's For the Time Being and such shorter poems a "The Fall of Rome" are Spenglerian also, with similar reservations. Yeats, on the contrary, did make some use of Spengler for A Vision, though, with his astrological interests, he was more inclined to a straight cyclical theory, in which democratic and comic cultures alternate with aristocratic and tragic ones, a conception owing something to Nietzsche as well. Joyce, too, preferred a cyclical theory, and went back to Vico for Finnegans Wake, presenting in his final chapter a "ricorso" which has overtones both of the Dark Ages and of Joyce's own time. Pound, though influenced by Ruskin and Brooks Adams, turned in later years to Frobenius, the German anthropologist whom he regarded as Spengler's main source, and whose theories also embrace the conceptions of a plurality of cultures and of the organic behavior of a culture. It seems clear that the imagery of time in English literature has not changed essentially since Beowulf, but has revolved continuously aroun the same mythical constructs. In medieval times the vision of history was based on a contrast between two forces. One is original sin, a bias in the wrong direction which ensures that man cannot by his own efforts escape from the wheel of fortune and the fatality of the stars. The other is the divine power that continues in the church, which aligns human life sacramentally, within that community, with the City of God. In our day the sense of some creative power lost in history, and the consequent ironic feeling that man cannot seem to escape from a cyclical movement in time, continues the pessimistic side of the medieval feeling.

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The difficulty is in finding a modern equivalent for the old sacramental conception, of defining a human social ideal in imaginatively accessible terms. Countering the conception of cultural decline with a theory of progress is not very satisfying, because in most versions of it progress means, or is bound up with, technological progress. And technological progress has turned out to be a donkey's carrot, even in the Marxist visions in which it is to be placed in the hands of humanity as a whole instead of profiteers. The poets emphasize, for the most part, a strong protest against the dehumanizing of life brought about by technology. D.H. Lawrence, in whom this protest is at its strongest, follows a nineteenth-century dream in proposing to found the model for a new world as a colony, to be called "Rananim."97 Eliot leads us to what is essentially the older sacramental vision again in "Little Gidding," a world where "the fire and the rose are one" [pt. 4,1. 60] as in Dante's Paradise. Pound has glimpses of the great city whose maker and builder is man, which he associates with the Dioce described by Herodotus, and which various great seers, from Confucius to John Adams, have been trying to help build. But the end of the Cantos, as we now have them, records his failure to make a "paradiso terrestre."98 Yeats had glimpses of the same city, which he called Byzantium, and of a state of emancipation from history called mysteriously "the thirteenth cone,"99 but not much of this comes through the endless shuttlings of his "gyres." Finnegans Wake takes us around in a circle also, though Joyce's Viconian motto, "the same anew," suggests that the cycle is the only form in which we can understand whatever is beyond the cycle—by no means a new idea in poetry, as we shall see.100 But so far the great writers of the twentieth century have been preoccupied with ironic and fatalistic patterns, and have lacked the wisdom or energy to look consistently beyond them. Perhaps this is something we may hope for from the writers of the immediate future. Part Four: The Imagery of Space Every society, however primitive, has a verbal culture, the bulk of which usually consists of a collection of stories. Some of these stories are regarded by the society which produces them as having a particular importance in explaining the religious, political, and social structures and values of that society. These are the stories that are most readily describable as myths, and as time goes on they tend to differ in social function,

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though not in structure, from other types of stories that we call folk tales. Myths tend to stick together to form a mythology, and they also define a genius loci, a specific cultural area of shared allusion and tradition, whereas folk-tales are nomadic, travelling over the world interchanging their themes and motifs. In English literature the Biblical stories have traditionally had this central mythical importance. Some writers, including Milton, tend to recreate the central myths; others, including Shakespeare, avoid them and turn to folktale instead. There is no comedy of Shakespeare without a specific folklore theme in it, like the bed trick in All's Well and Measure for Measure. But of course, the specifically Christian poets recreate the Christian myths on the same imaginative basis that other poets are using, and similarly folklore themes, like the story of King Lear, acquire, when treated with enough intensity, the essential seriousness of myth. Hence the two types of writing, on the highest levels at any rate, coincide. At the same time, the development of writing and continuous prose fosters the view that discursive prose, more particularly theology, reaches truth more directly than the imagination, and thus the poet, who in primitive times is the central cultural figure of his society, has to compete for authority, on a rather subordinate basis, with other types of verbal culture. His poetry tends to be regarded as serious in proportion to its allegorical content, that is, the amount of external reference to religious truth that it reflects. When religious anxieties give place to more secular ones, the same attitude persists. In the nineteenth century, as we saw, the realists are assumed to have a serious social responsibility that the romancers, who tend rather to tell stories for fun, do not have or even claim, and twentieth-century theories of "social realism" carry on the same anxieties. Hence mythology, though used for many social purposes besides literature, tends to become a framework of metaphors and allusions for the poets. As such, mythology belongs to the world of art, not nature: that is, it is a cultural construct expressing the model world that man wants to live in or the demonic world that he wants to avoid living in, or else it explains to him why his life is ordered in the way that it is, with reference to the history and traditions underlying that life. Mythology is not a description of the outer world, a crude form of philosophy or science, or a disguised form of conceptual thought: it normally develops first in cultures where conceptual thought has no real social function. On the other hand, as a mythology develops, it can hardly avoid

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incorporating certain assumptions about the outer world, and so expanding to include a cosmology or picture of the universe. A cosmology, unlike a mythology, is a primitive form of science, and as science develops, there comes a conflict in culture between those who gradually realize that a valid account of the external world must be descriptive and rely on experiment and measurement, and those who continue to cling to their constructs and struggle to reconcile the emerging science with their cosmology. We notice that cosmology is an integral part of much of the greatest poetry, including the major works of Lucretius, Dante, and Milton. From the scientific point of view, this means that such poetry is full of dated and obsolete notions, and we tend to assume that we have to learn some obsolete pseudo-science for the sake of certain values inhering in the poetry in spite of, and apart from, all this antiquated lumber. But then we notice that after science develops, poetry seems to have a very limited capacity for absorbing its language and attitude. Eventually we discover that the obsolete science is not something apart from the poetic merits of such works, but an essential part of them. A cosmology, however unscientific or fallacious, is, in literature, a framework of metaphors, and poetry must have such a framework no matter what science says about the structure of the external world. What we have to examine in this section is, first, the cosmological fiction within which English poets worked down to the close of the seventeenth century; second, the way in which they expanded this fiction imaginatively while it survived, and, third, how they adapted to its collapse. For most of our period a pre-scientific cosmology prevailed in Western Europe, originating in pre-Christian times, and taking its shape mainly around the researches of Ptolemy of Alexandria in the second century A.D. According to this, the earth was a sphere, stationary, and at the centre of the universe. The universe itself was onion-shaped, consisting of nine or ten concentric spheres surrounding the earth. The first seven were the spheres of the seven planets, which included the sun and the moon. The eighth sphere was that of the "fixed" stars, thought of as motionless and as being all in one plane. Then, in some cosmologies, came a "crystalline" sphere, thought of as liquid, and finally the great shell of the primum mobile, which contained the whole universe—for this world picture was finite in space as well as time. The primum mobile revolves with incredible speed from east to west every twentyfour hours, reversing the movement of the rest of the universe. In

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Chaucer's Man of Laws Tale we read: O firste movyng! cruel firmament, With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay And hurlest al from est til Occident That naturelly wolde holde another way. [The Canterbury Tales, frag. 2,11. 295-8]

One often gets the notion at school that everyone believed the world to be flat until Columbus proved it to be round by discovering America, but that is no more true than many other notions acquired at school. In Dante's Commedia, in the thirteenth century, the earth is a sphere about six thousand miles in diameter, a logical enough estimate when the existence of America was unknown, and hell is at the centre of it. The other side of the world, except for the mountain of Purgatory, consists entirely of water. There were religious reasons for believing this: Jesus had told his disciples to go into all parts of the world to preach the Gospel, which implied that all inhabited parts of the world were reachable on foot. So St. Augustine, writing in the fifth century A.D., decides that the antipodes are uninhabited. That left three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, radiating out from Jerusalem, the centre of the inhabited world. The zones were also recognized from early times, though because of the Sahara desert, south of the northern fringe of Africa, it was generally assumed that the torrid zone was too hot to live in. As it was assumed that the earth was stationary, and as the planets were assumed to move in circular paths, the mathematical observations got very complicated. Copernicus, in the early part of the sixteenth century, showed that these calculations would be considerably simpler on the assumption that the earth went around the sun. He was followed by Galileo and Kepler, but for Milton, in the mid-seventeenth century, the question was still open, and many passages in Paradise Lost present the Copernican and Ptolemaic hypotheses side by side as alternatives. Milton had met Galileo, and understood his importance for the modern world, but he deliberately chooses a Ptolemaic world-picture for the scene of his drama. His reasons for doing so, whether or not they were clear to him, should be clear to us: the geocentric model was more suitable to an epic where all the forces of heaven and hell are concentrated on man.

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The liquid crystalline sphere was one of the postulates made to account for irregularities in the observed movements which, we know now, are actually caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis. Marlowe's Faustus learns from Mephistopheles, as part of the reward of his bargain, that this sphere is only a fable, but Milton retains it because it enables him to explain the "firmament in the midst of the waters" of Genesis as the sky extending from the upper water of this sphere to the lower water of the ocean. Milton describes the upward journey of those headed for his paradise of fools thus: They pass the planets seven, and pass the fix'd, And that crystalline sphere whose balance weighs The trepidation talk'd, and that first mov'd. [Paradise Lost, bk. 3,11. 481-3]

The "trepidation talk'd" (i.e., talked of or discussed) is the irregular movement just mentioned. Other explanations of a similar kind were the theory of "epicycles," or wobbles of the various planets on their own axes, and of eccentricity, or assuming that some of the heavenly bodies were not centered on the earth but revolved around some other centre, usually the sun, this last being the kernel of what became the Copernican hypothesis. Some of these theories are referred to by Milton with what at first seems rather cheap ridicule: From man or angel the great Architect... Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide Hereafter, when they come to model heaven And calculate the stars, how they will wield The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive To save appearances, how gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbl'd o'er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. [Paradise Lost, bk. 7,11. 709,714-21]

But in the seventeenth century, when the new science was not yet unquestioned and the old was becoming intolerably complicated, Milton was not alone in thinking that the resulting confusion had a funny side. Thus Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy, discussing the hypothesis of an astronomer named Roeslin:

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In his own hypothesis he makes the earth as before the universal centre, the sun to the five upper planets, to the eighth sphere he ascribes diurnal motion, eccentrics and epicycles to the seven planets, which hath been formerly exploded; and so ... as a tinker stops one hole and makes two, he corrects them and doth worse himself, reforms some and mars all. In the meantime, the world is tossed in a blanket amongst them, they hoist the earth up and down like a ball, make it stand and go at their pleasures; one saith the sun stands, another he moves; a third comes in, taking them all at rebound.101

Central to this world-vision were the seven planets, surrounding the earth in the order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. This order corresponds fairly well to the present one if we interchange the earth and sun, and the transits of Venus and Mercury as well as the moon had also been observed and charted. Each planet rose into the ascendant in the sky for an hour, to be followed by the next planet. If Saturn were in the ascendant in the first hour of a day, that would be Saturn's day, or Saturday. Every seventh hour of Saturday from the first, the eighth, fifteenth and twenty-second, would also have Saturn in the ascendant. The twenty-third would have Jupiter, the twenty-fourth Mars, the twenty-fifth would be the start of a new day, the Sun's day. The next cycle brings us to the Moon's day, or Monday, and so on through the week. The French words mardi, mercredi, jeudi, and vendredi preserve the associations with Mercury, Jupiter (or Jove), and Venus. Our words for the corresponding days are derived from a series of identifications of Roman with Norse gods made in Old English times, all of them wrong. Chaucer's nun's priest says he cannot understand why so devoted a servant of Venus as his cock should have met with disaster on her day, that is, Friday: O Venus, that art goddesse of plesaunce, Syn that thy servant was this Chauntecleer ... Why woldestow suffre hym on thy day to dye? [The Nun's Priest's Tale, frag. 7,11. 3342-6]

The planets in the ascendant at a human being's birth would determine certain elements in his character: the words saturnine, jovial, martial, venereal (in its original sense), mercurial and lunatic derive from these associations. The planets also caused metals to grow in the soil:

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Saturn fostered lead, Jupiter tin, Mars iron, the sun gold, Venus copper, Mercury the quicksilver which we still call mercury, the moon silver. The further away and smaller the planet, the less precious the metal: lead and tin are still called "base metals," reflecting an ancient hierarchic mode of thinking. Thus Pope in the Dunciad, punning on the fact that in Classical mythology the reign of Saturn, which preceded Jupiter's, was the time of the Golden Age, says that his dunces represent "a new Saturnian age of lead."102 It is difficult to realize how much astrology conditioned the thinking of earlier times, until we remember that such common words as "influence," "consider," "contemplate," "disaster," were originally astrological terms. The heresy of fatalism was avoided by drawing a distinction between causing and conditioning, derived from Boethius. People outside the Christian dispensation had no overruling divine power to protect them from the influence of the stars: thus the tragedy of Chaucer's Troilus follows inevitably on a conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and the crescent moon in Cancer, which points the moral: Lo here, of payens corsed olde rites, Lo here, what alle hire goddes may availle. [Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 5,11.1849-50]

On the other hand, those who could see the order of nature in relation to the will of God saw it as a harmony. This was not simply a musical metaphor but a conception in musical theory itself. The harmony of music expressed something deeply present in the cosmic order, and helped to create a corresponding moral order within the man who heard it; hence David was able to cure Saul's melancholia by music. The famous speech in The Merchant of Venice was not simply fanciful to those who first heard it: The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet notes, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ... [5.1.83-5]

And, of course, chastity, or the highest degree of moral order in the soul, is the closest state attainable to the only part of the natural world which is still unfallen, still as God intended the whole of nature to be. The symbol of the perfection of this divinely ordained world is the music of

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the spheres. According to Milton, Adam could hear the music of the spheres before his fall, and the chaste Lady in Comus is very close to doing so. The moon marked the boundary between the heavenly and the earthly kingdoms. Below the moon is the "sublunary" world of the four elements, which, since the fall of Adam, have been subject to change and decay. The heavenly bodies are made of a fifth element (quintessence), which is immortal, and so is the human soul, as distinct from the human body. Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" explains that absence does not affect the love of two souls, but that Dull sublunary lovers' love, (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. [11.13-16]

The sphere of fire lies directly below the moon; the sphere of air below that; then water, then the earth. The principle that each element seeks its own sphere accounted for many phenomena that were later explained by gravitation. Before Newton's time, the fact that a book held in the air and let go will drop was explained by saying that the book, being an earthy substance, is seeking the sphere of earth. Similarly, a fire lit on the ground will go up because it seeks the sphere of fire; bubbles of air rise in water and springs of water from earth; earthquakes are caused by the escape of air from underground. Weight is a consequence of being in the wrong sphere: things in their natural place, or what the eagle in Chaucer's House of Fame calls their "kindly stead" [1. 731], weigh nothing. The sphere of fire was needed for symmetrical reasons, and is in Dante's universe, being the fire that Dante has to pass through at the top of Purgatory, just before he enters the earthly paradise. This fire returns in Eliot's The Waste Land as the symbol of an ascetic purity in contrast to the main setting of the poem. But Milton ignores the sphere of fire, and in his day there was little belief in it: as Donne says: And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out. [An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary, 11. 205-6]

The moon's variableness, and the spots on her face, indicate how close

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she is to the world of death, time, and corruption. In Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos, Mutability, the goddess of change and decay, thrusts herself into the sphere of the moon to claim sovereignty of the world above, which is ruled by Jupiter. Nobody questions her world, but she claims the higher one as well on the ground that the heavenly bodies move in cycles, and consequently change. Appeal is made from Jupiter to the goddess Nature, who decides in favor of Jupiter. Nature points out that while cyclical motion is a feature of both worlds, the lower one is ruled by change, whereas the higher one rules over change. She also says to Mutability: "For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire" [Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 7, st. 59,1. 3], which implies that within nature as we know it there is a destructive force trying to break away from creation, and held to it by the order which, as Milton says, helps to "Keep unsteady nature to her law" [Arcades, 1. 70]. Thus cyclical movement represents two opposed concep tions. In the lower world it represents fatality, change, and the annihilation of everything in time. In the upper world it represents an eternal existence which contains its energy within itself. One could carry this principle a step further. The principle of the higher or unfallen world is harmony or concord; the principle of the lower world is metamorphosis, the passing out of one state of being into another. But perhaps a sufficiently penetrating wisdom could see in metamorphosis itself a kind of harmony, a principle of change moving in correspondence with the worlds above. In Elizabethan poetry, Sir John Davies's poem Orchestra presents the movements of the heavenly bodies as a single coordinated dance. The poem is said to be sung to Penelope by the leader among her unwanted suitors, Antinous: we wonder why so artificial a setting is provided, until we remember that Penelope's web was for Elizabethan readers a symbol of natural metamorphosis: So subtile and curious was the measure, With such unlookt-for change in every strain, As that Penelope, rapt with sweet pleasure, Ween'd she beheld the true proportion plain Of her own web, weaved and unweaved again ... [st. 134,11.1-5]

The same vision of a corresponding between the circling of the stars and the metamorphoses of lower existence is still doing duty as the opening of the second section of Eliot's "Burnt Norton." Outside creation is chaos, where we find, not the four elements, but

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the four "principles" out of which the elements are made. These principles are, according to Milton's description of chaos: Hot, Cold, Moist, Dry, four champions fierce.

[Paradise Lost, bk. 2,1. 898]

In chaos, according to Milton, these principles keep combining and recombining by chance, an interesting suggestion that this universe, like the modern one after Planck, rested on a basis of variability. Satan, travelling through chaos, is never quite sure whether his next move should be a step, a swim, or a flight. There are four possible combinations of these principles, hot and dry, hot and moist, cold and moist, cold and dry, and in the inorganic world these combinations produce the four elements, respectively, fire, air, water, and earth. Creation was thus a matter of imposing these four permanent combinations on chaos, in a hierarchy of four levels. In the organic world the same four combinations produced the four "humors" or liquids of the body, the proportion or mixing of which (the origin of our words "complexion" and "temperament") make up a large part of our mental and physical inheritance. The hot and dry humor is choler or bile; the hot and moist one, blood; the cold and moist, phlegm; the cold and dry, black bile. The predominance of one of these humors makes one respectively choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholy or atrabilious. Chaucer's pilgrims include a physician, of whom it is said: He knew the cause of everich maladye, Were it of hoot, or coold, or moyste, or drye, And where they engendred, and of what humour. [General Prologue, Canterbury Tales, 11. 419-21

If a patient were short and stocky, with red hair and freckles, such a doctor would assume that he had a choleric temperament, probably born under Mercury, and would be inclined to red diseases, such as scrofula. If he were tall, dark, sallow in complexion, and emotionally introverted, he would be melancholy, perhaps born under Saturn or the moon, inclined to yellow diseases like jaundice. We note that physical and mental diseases were regarded as having a common origin, more especially melancholy. When Hamlet appears in a black cloak, refusing to take part in any festivity, inclined to soliloquy and to expressing a nauseated vision of nature, an Elizabethan audience would see at a glance that he

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was suffering from melancholy, which, again, was not a metaphor, but a specific disease that one took pills and laxatives for. Of Chaucer's pilgrims, the franklin is said to be sanguine and the reeve choleric, and the various ailments for which they are seeking cures at Becket's shrine are those appropriate to their planetary and humorous makeups. Humors were, of course, found in animals and plants. Cypresses and yews were melancholy, as were bats, owls, and hares. This meant that a doctor's pharmacopia extended over the entire range of nature, and many herbals and lapidaries were available to explain the virtues of plants and precious stones. The cure for a disease was either contrary or similar to the disease itself, depending on whether the doctor was of the allopathic or the homeopathic school. The proportion of cures in the two schools seems to have been approximately equal. Galen, the great medical authority of antiquity, had accepted a cosmology in which every substance and organism in nature had its contrary; but the principle of "like cures like" also had a strong following. There was a brisk trade in saffron because, being yellow, it was good for jaundice, and the word amethyst (Greek: "not drunk") recalls its use as a protection against intoxication (because wine-coloured). Besides the humors, there were also the "spirits," or essences derived from the digesting of food. There were three grades of spirits: the vegetative, which man shares with plants; the cordial, which he shares with animals; and animal spirits, peculiar to man's anima or soul. We still use the phrase "animal spirits," though in the sense of cordial spirits. The spirits represented the link between the mental and the physical, and a premature uprush of lower spirits into the head produced "vapors" which caused dreams and other fantasies. The belief in humors naturally dropped out after Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood (1628), but belief in vapors persisted, and in the eighteenth century, when "melancholy" had modulated to "spleen" and was ascribed to a morbid condition of that organ, Swift used the conception of vapors in his satire on contemporary fanaticism, in his pamphlet on the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit" and elsewhere. Swift says, in language remarkably similar to the psychology of today, that many mental obsessions, including some of the most refined forms of idealism, represent a displaced sexual impulse. "The very same principle," he says, "that influences a bully to break the windows of a whore who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies, and dream of nothing but sieges, battles and victories."103

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This world-picture took the form, for most of our period, of what has been called the great chain of being, or what Sir Thomas Browne calls "a Stair, or manifest Scale of creatures, rising not disorderly, or in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion."104 That is, the whole of nature exhibits the hierarchical principle on which monarchical government is founded, and indicates how "natural" the latter is. At the top of the chain of being is God, next come spiritual beings, or angels, then mankind, then animals, plants, minerals, and finally chaos. The chain is polarized by the principles of form and matter: God is pure form, chaos as near to pure matter without form as we can get. Man, being exactly in the middle, half spiritual and half material, is a microcosm or little replica or epitome of everything that is in the great world (macrocosm). Everything on the chain is material in relation to what is above it, formal in relation to what is below it. Each department of the chain has its "primate" or supreme manifestation of its form, corresponding to the king in human society. Thus the lion is the primate of animals, the eagle of birds, the dolphin of fish, the rose of flowers, gold of metals. Evil is not, of course, a part of the chain of being, and is not in any respect a creation of God's. The appearance of evil in the world creates an unnatural moral tension within the chain of being. The fallen angels in Milton dwell in a hell at the bottom of chaos; Satan journeys through chaos, makes a pact with its ruler, and in a sense annexes it to his own empire. Then he proceeds to the cosmos, seduces man from his allegiance, and extends his dominion to the very middle of the chain of being. In the debate in hell, Belial advises doing nothing, on the ground that the souls of the devils, being spiritual, naturally belong in heaven, and will eventually rise up there just as bubbles of air rise in water, and for similar reasons. It is clear that his argument is fallacious, and that the paradox of spiritual beings living below the chain of being will endure to the end of time. We may simplify this world-picture by saying that it envisages a universe on four main levels. The highest level is heaven, the place of the presence of God. In Dante, this heaven occupies the upper level of the cosmos, beginning at the moon and ending at the primum mobile. Of course even in Dante this is a spatial metaphor, but it is a significant metaphor, and for most of our period the association of God and heaven with somewhere "up there" is something more than metaphorical. Thus in the Mutabilitie Cantos, although the upper spheres are within the realm of nature, they still symbolize whatever is "above" nature. In any case

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order, concord, harmony, music, and immortal existence without change are among the attributes of heaven represented or symbolized by the stars, the only part of the order of nature still existing in the form in which God had originally designed it. The second level is that of the earthly Paradise or Garden of Eden, which is usually regarded, symbolically or literally, as the highest point on the surface of the earth. Dante puts it at the top of the Mountain of Purgatory: for Milton, it has disappeared as a place, having been destroyed in the flood, and survives only as an inner state of mind. The third level is that of ordinary experience, theologically a "fallen" world, where everything alive dies sooner or later. Man is born into this world, but though in it he is not of it, and is faced from birth with a moral dialectic which compels him either to move upward towards his original home, or downward to the fourth level. This fourth level is the demonic world or hell, the world of eternal death, and, for man, sin, a level of degradation which animals, who are better adjusted to the third level of experience, cannot reach. Such a universe has a moral principle built into it: the upper regions are better than the lower ones. Hell is downward, again a metaphor which is something more than a metaphor. In Dante hell is a subterranean world; Milton puts his hell, like his heaven, outside the cosmos altogether, in a kind of absolute up and down. The macrocosm also bears a curious analogy to a projected human body. What corresponds to the brain and the intelligence is on top; the more disapproved areas of sex and excretion are much further down, in a world of devils equipped with horns and tails and with a strong smell of sulphur. Three things strike us particularly about this "discarded model" of the universe as C.S. Lewis calls it.105 First, it is put together schematically, by correspondences of numbers and the like, the seven planets and the seven metals, the four elements and the four humors, being linked by correspondence. Poets, who work with simile and metaphor, are predisposed to schematic thinking; hence such a construct is congenial to them. After belief in the construct waned, these schematic correspondences went underground into the area generally called occultism, and it is significant that occult thinking, from Swedenborg in the eighteenth century to Blavatsky in the twentieth, has continuously exerted a strong influence on poets. The revival of occultism today, in the cult of astrology and the like, indicates perhaps a new tolerance for schematic ways of thinking, including the poetic.

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Secondly, the construct is dominated, to the point of obsession, by the notion of a personal creating deity, and the human sense of function and relevance in creation is projected on that deity. The stars, in particular, have no business to be just there: they ought to be doing something, like growing metals or influencing character. It seemed almost wrong to believe that any plant could be without some medicinal or other human use: surely no plant would be made just for its own sake. Raphael remarks to Adam in Paradise Lost that the number of stars, and the small amount of light each one gives, may make us wonder whether their whole function is merely to light up human life, though we should be careful not to wonder too much. The whole construct is really an effort to see nature in terms of a human function, which is why we have called it a cultural construct and not a primitive form of science. It begins with the axiom in the catechism that man's chief end is to glorify God, but it ends in the implicit assumption, at least, that God's chief end is to glorify man. The argument: "the universe exists, therefore somebody must have made it," seemed unanswerable to most people even in the nineteenth century. The reason for this brings us to the third characteristic of this discarded model. This is, that for Christianity nothing numinous, nothing suggestive of divinity, must ever be discovered in nature. Nature is a fellow-creature of man: all the gods that other religions have discovered in nature are devils; the only aspect of divinity in nature is the sense of design in its construction. As just noted, the older nature-spirits, the fauns and satyrs of Classical religions, with their horns and tails and cloven hoofs, were degraded into devils. This teaching had conditioned thinkers to look for evidences of divine presence, as distinct from creation, only in human life and institutions. This was one reason why the doctrine of evolution, with its implication of a creative force working within nature, came as so profound a shock. Poetry is, we have seen, a primitive element in culture, and there will always be a sense in which the poet's world is geocentric, with the sun rising and setting over it. Chemistry has a complicated periodical table of elements, but the Eliot Quartets and the poems of Dylan Thomas still have the traditional four. This is not in itself surprising: others besides poets can work for a long time within a structure of metaphor. When we read medical treatises of Shakespeare's day, we may be astonished by the authority with which they discuss the normal and morbid workings of the humors in the body, and coordinate large groups of symptoms as

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arising from "cholera dust" and the like. But then we may think of the similar assurance with which psychologists today work with a body of hydraulic metaphors about blocks and outlets and concentrations of force. However, while the schematism and functionalism of the "discarded model" was congenial to poets, its rational, almost mechanistic quality was more confining. For there is also in poetry a strong sense of imaginative kinship with nature, the sense of a common process which is also a sense of mystery and separation. An animal lives, as much as we do; but we have little idea how it lives. We also share with animals the process which is, in Eliot's phrase, birth, copulation, and death [Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon, 11. 32-3, 39-40]. The Christian tradition taught that man was higher than the animals because of his reason, that although he would die his soul was immortal, and that while love was the greatest of virtues, this love was qualitatively distinct from the sexual love founded on what Sir Thomas Browne calls "this trivial and foolish way of union."106 Human experience, however, obstinately kept turning up with a much more immediate set of emotional priorities. Christianity revolved around man's consciousness of sin, his struggle for forgiveness and absolution, his need to repent and live a new life. The poets set up a corresponding process in the sexual world, where the lover suddenly feels a total commitment to a mistress, besieges her with entreaties, is treated with disdain and exclusion, and expounds on his inner sickness and misery. Christianity has its Christ, its interceding Virgin Mary, and its Mother Church; the poets have their God of love, Eros or Cupid, their divine mother Venus, and their embodiment of that mother in the mistress. Christianity has its legends of saints and martyrs; Chaucer has his Legend of Good Women, who include Dido and Cleopatra, who were saints and martyrs from Cupid's point of view. The Church stressed confession and the sacrament of penance: Gower's great contribution to English literature is a Confessio Amantis, a lover's confession to a priest of Venus. The sinner is warned of what threatens him after death; the unloving lady is threatened with having to lead "apes in Avernus," in a song of Campion's [A Book of Ay res, Song 19,1. 35], or, as Shakespeare's shrewish Katherine says of her sister's marriage: I must dance barefoot on her wedding day, And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell. [The Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.33]

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The good man, on the other hand, dies and rises again with Christ: in Shakespeare's "Phoenix and the Turtle" two birds are burned up on a funeral pyre which is clearly the symbol of their sexual union, and are united in a world that "Reason" cannot see. There is a similar image in Donne: The phoenix riddle hath more wit By us: we two being one, are it... We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. [The Canonization, 11. 23-4,26-7

And Donne's "The Ecstasy" also speaks of two souls becoming a single soul in love. Sometimes the transitions from one symbolic system to the other are so rapid as to be difficult to follow. One of Spenser's Amoretti sonnets begins with the Christian Lent, but instantly moves into an erotic religion where the church is the temple of Venus: This holy season, fit to fast and pray, Men to devotion ought to be inclin'd: Therefore, I likewise on so holy day For my sweet saint some service fit will find. Her temple fair is built within my mind, In which her glorious image placed is, On which my thoughts do day and night attend, Like sacred priests that never think amiss. There I to her, as the author of my bliss, Will build an altar to appease her ire; And on the same my heart will sacrifice, Burning in flames of pure and chaste desire: The which vouchsafe, O goddess, to accept, Amongst thy dearest relics to be kept. [Sonnet 22]

We are told that this convention of love poetry began in Provence, around the eleventh century, and that originally the poet represented himself as the lover of a lady who was so far superior to him in social rank as to be entirely beyond reach, not merely of marriage, but of sexual connection of any kind. The convention spread northward through France, where it became the informing spirit of the romances of chivalry. Here, the knight's brave deeds were done in the service of his lady, of whom he

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was the unquestioning servant: if he were ordered, as Lancelot once was, to ride in a cart for condemned criminals, it was not for him to reason why. It also spread southward into Italy, where it was developed by Dante and Petrarch. Dante represents his Commedia journey as the response made by Beatrice to his love for her: we also discover, in his Vita Nuova (New Life) that this love was based on having seen her once in his life, at the age of nine. Such a love did not affect his marriage, nor is there any evidence that the thirteenth-century Beatrice was even aware of it. Petrarch was, however, the popularizer par excellence of the convention: his Rime are addressed to his mistress Laura and fall into three parts, the poems written during her life, those written after her death, and a final section called "The Triumph of Love." The ambivalent emotions roused by love, and which may range from devotion to hatred, also enter the convention on the less idealistic level represented by Donne and by Shakespeare's "dark lady" sonnets. Here the main influence is Ovid, who was studied by love poets with an intensity that has led modern critics, not capable of any such intensity, to speak of it as "Ovid Misunderstood." The predominance of this convention in poetry is remarkable, but even more remarkable is its persistence and its uniformity over a period of centuries. In the fourteenth century, we may not be surprised to find it in Chaucer and Gower: Petrarch was then a modern poet. But in the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey in the sixteenth century Petrarch revived in even greater force, and from then until the Restoration poets of the later seventeenth century there was hardly a break in the outpouring of poems about sighing lovers and disdainful mistresses. Themes and moods are extraordinarily consistent. In a poem called "Alysoun," dating from the early fourteenth century, we find: Icham for wowyng al forwake, wery so water in wore. [11. 31-2]

("I am worn out with lying awake for my love, weary as water in a troubled pool.") In poems by the noblemen of the court of Charles II the tone is unchanged over three hundred years later: I attempt from love's sickness to fly in vain, For I am myself my own fever and pain.107

The convention seems to dominate poetry almost exactly as long as the

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corresponding construct dominated religion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it modulated, in a good deal of fiction at least, into a theme of premarital courtship ending, as a rule, in happy marriage. But the parallel with religion continues: in Victorian times we have Meredith's Modern Love and Rossetti's House of Life, sequences of unhappy love poems contemporary with the agonized religious sonnets of Hopkins, and still later we have the poems of Yeats that grew out [of] his association with Maud Gonne along with Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday." If we ask why this theme should be so central to poetry, the simplest answer is true so far as it goes. During a time when sexual sublimation was about the most highly approved of all social acts, it would not be surprising, on the face of it, that poets, deprived of what Emily Dickinson calls "our confiscated gods,"108 should have decided that, while they could get along without Jupiter, certainly without Mars, the loss of Venus was intolerable. We remember that the discarded model had two levels of nature, a lower level of physical nature and a higher level appropriate to human nature. This higher level was the one originally designed for man by God, the level represented by the earthly paradise or garden of Eden. Man has lost it, but the disciplines of religion, law and morality are there to help him regain it. All these disciplines demand either the sublimation of sex or the confining of it to marriage. When the Lady in Milton's Comus is urged by Comus that sexual promiscuity is natural, because one sees it in animals, the Lady's reply is to the effect that her chastity is what is really natural, on her own human level of nature [11. 706-99]. The implication is that paradisal life is without sex: Milton himself denies this, but when Dante climbs to the garden of Eden at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, the last of the seven deadly sins he gets rid of is lechery, and in the garden itself he meets first a maiden named Matilda, who is separated from him by a river, and then Beatrice, who assumes toward him what is psychologically a maternal role. Dante's poem, of course, remains within the terms of Christianity, but not all poets are so willing to assume that the highest goals of human effort all transcend sex. In another great medieval poem, The Romaunt of the Rose, which was translated into English by Chaucer (or so he says: his authorship of the existing partial translation is disputed), the ultimate goal of the poet's quest is the possession of his lady's body, and the conclusion of the poem is so openly sexual that a cautious Victorian translator substituted a different conclusion of his own. The ambiguity between sexual and

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sublimated climaxes of human aspiration is preserved in the Biblical Song of Songs, which was interpreted in sublimated terms by theologians as representing Christ's birth from a virgin and his love for his Bride the Church, but which remains a poem full of heavily charged erotic imagery. Hence while there are many poems that follow the religious imagery of the Song of Songs, there are many others in which the woman's body is also a "garden enclosed, a fountain sealed" [4:12] in a paradise belonging to the god of sexual love. Thus in a sonnet by a minor Elizabethan writer (Bartholomew Griffin): Fair is my love that feeds among the lilies, The lilies growing in that pleasant garden Where Cupid's mount, that well beloved hill is, And where that little god himself is warden. See where my love sits in the beds of spices, Beset all round with camphor, myrrh, and roses, And interlaced with curious devices, Which her from all the world apart encloses. There doth she tune her lute for her delight, And with sweet music makes the ground to move, Whilst I, poor I, do sit in heavy plight, Wailing alone my unrespected love; Not daring rush into so rare a place, That gives to her, and she to it, a grace.109

Similar identifications of the mistress' body with a paradisal garden are in Campion and Herrick. A good deal of love poetry, therefore, deliberately makes the point that the poetic imagination needs to get out from under a system of values which stresses the sublimation of the sexual instinct. It makes the point by constructing a counter-system, in which everything related to love in Christianity has its counterpart in another "religion" with a God of a different kind of love. There are, of course, many admissions that while the two systems may equally appeal to the imagination, the sublimated one is the higher of the two. Thus Spenser writes hymns to love and beauty, and follows them with hymns to heavenly love and beauty, said in the Preface to be later and wiser palinodes or retractions of what is so eloquently said about their earthly parallels. There is also, in most of the sixteenth-century sonnet writers, the convention of the "renuncia-

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tion" sonnet, where the poet leaves an earthly for a philosophical or religious love. Even this has an Ovidian ancestry, as Ovid also wrote about "remedies against love." But still the poets keep the escape hatch open, as long as there is any danger of its being closed. All this however does not explain why the most emphasized theme of the convention is not love at all, but the frustration of love. For this love poetry has its own form of sublimation, and a much more agonizing one than its orthodox counterpart. The poet's mistress is for the most part not an embodiment of the goddess of love and beauty so much as a narcissistic, self-absorbed, unresponsive, tantalizing female figure, whose ultimate triumph is not in union with her lover but in his death. The emotional weight tends to fall on that aspect of love in which the lover is sick with frustration, rejected, fascinated with the cruelty and coldness of his mistress: "If on your death-bed you be lying, What's that to Barbara Allen? I cannot keep you from your death; So farewell," said Barbara Allen.110

This is from a ballad, but we also have, for example, Campion's "When thou must home" song, Donne's poems about the lover's death ("The Apparition," "The Funeral," "The Relic"), and Shakespeare's thirty-first sonnet: Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone [11. 9-10]

where the mistress is a murderer or devourer of not only the lover in the poem, but a whole series of predecessors and successors. Shakespeare's "master-mistress" is even more frightening because male, and so nearer to the original Narcissus figure who loves no one but himself. The explanation is perhaps the one suggested in Robert Graves's book The White Goddess. A long series of developments, ending in Christianity, had shifted the centre of mythology from an earth-goddess who brought the world into being, like a mother, to a sky-father who designed and made it, like a carpenter. But the figure who presides over all birth presides over all death as well: she is the tomb as well as the womb of all living things, and so Eros (love) and Thanatos (death) are ultimately the

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same thing. Each lover goes through "the never altered circuit of his fate," as Graves calls it, accepted partner at one phase of life, sacrificed victim, at another.111 The poets, in invoking the older goddess of sexual love, evoked the whole of her, the death-dealing Hecate as well as the laughter-loving Aphrodite. In Elizabethan language, "die" could mean the climax of a sexual experience as well as ceasing to exist, and the poets are full of the residual sense of frustration in sex, as expressed in prose by Sir Thomas Browne: "United souls are not satisfied with embraces, but desire to be truly each other; which being impossible, their desires are infinite, and must proceed without a possibility of satisfaction."112 Thus in Donne's "The Ecstasy," two souls are united in love, but the "one flesh" of the marriage service is still not there, and the single soul must return to the double body: So must pure lovers' souls descend T' affections, and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies. [11. 65-8]

There is only one way of achieving total unity with what is around us, and that is through death. The Romantic poets emphasize this theme a good deal, especially the neglected poet Beddoes, as in this haunting fragment called "Lament of Thanatos," where Thanatos or death is, significantly, a female figure: I was to wait, to wait, my only time of youth away— As many a maiden isle far in the sea From Adam to Columbus did for him Who was its destined finder ... [11.1-4]

The same identity of love and death recurs in the Keats odes, especially in the nightingale one, and in the twentieth century, Dylan Thomas's "A Winter's Tale" describes a death which also becomes a marriage and a near birth. There are other developments also that show how the poetic imagination tends to break out of all mechanical models of the universe, however sophisticated. We spoke of the poetic tendency to think of man as linked to nature in a common process of life, rather than being separated from it

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by reason. We hardly need to look far in English poetry for this: the great opening of Chaucer's General Prologue tells us that the real power that sends such diverse people to Canterbury is not the attraction of sanctity or even the promise of healing, but the stirring within human beings of the same natural force that brings the flowers in spring: So priketh hem nature in hir corages. [General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, 1.11] If we look at a spring poem from a little earlier in the same period, we find this: deores with huere derne rounes, domes forte deme. [Anonymous, Spring-tide, 11. 29-30] ("Beasts with their mysterious murmurings whereby they converse.") A very unpretentious, almost parenthetical passage, but it opens up a whole dimension of poetic experience: the dimension suggested four centuries later in Blake's How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?113 and continued, still later, in D.H. Lawrence's struggles to reach the inner awareness of snakes and goats and tortoises. Such imaginative sympathy with the natural world leads a somewhat furtive existence through most of our period. The discarded model thought of animals and plants in terms of their moral and symbolic relation to man, and for such purposes fabulous animals like unicorns and phoenixes, or fabulous characteristics of actual animals, like the pelican feeding its young with its blood, were much more useful than anything in the realm of fact. There were collections of such legends about animals known as bestiaries, where the alleged characteristic of the animal was followed by its moral or religious significatio. We saw that sixteenth-century euphuism made a special feature of imagery of this kind: the passage we quoted speaks of "the violets in America, which in summer yield an odoriferous smell, and in winter a most pestilent savor."114 This does not mean that the early explorers of America could not distinguish a violet from a skunk cabbage, but that the first duty of a flower of any kind is to fit into a rhetorical antithesis, not simply be what it is. Such a world of

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nature, however full of curiosities and marvels, is, in a larger sense, a world totally without genuine mystery. Similarly, the dialectic of religion allowed for angels, or spiritual beings superior to man, and fallen angels or devils, who included all the banished gods and nature-spirits of wood and stream. For superstition such beings were still sinister and hostile presences, phosphorescent lights over marshes and the like, dangerous to be even referred to, unless in an occasional euphemism like "the good people." But what religion assimilates to a doctrinal system and superstition runs away from is for the poetic imagination an area of consciousness and experience to explore. Hence if English literature is full of fairies and other quasi-human beings of the natural world, that does not mean that the poet is endorsing superstition or contradicting religion, but merely that he is doing his own job, seeking out the kind of reality that eludes other modes of consciousness. Chaucer's Wife of Bath begins her tale by explaining demurely that nowadays women are in no danger from seduction by fairies or elves, because now all such beings have been banished and replaced by "lymytours" or begging friars: But now kan no man se none elves mo ... For ther as wont to walken was an elf, Ther walketh now the lymytour hymself... Women may go now saufly up and doun In everv bussh or under every tree; Ther is noon oother incubus but he. [The Wife of Bath's Tale, frag. 3,11. 865,873-4,878-80]

We are not surprised, after such a prologue, to encounter in the tale the immemorial scene of a knight riding through a forest and coming upon a group of dancing fairies: Toward the whiche daunce he drow ful yerne, In Hope that som wysdom sholde he lerne. But certainly, er he cam fully there, Vanysshed was this daunce, he nyste where. [The Wife of Bath's Tale, frag. 3,11. 993-6]

The line "In hope that som wysdom sholde he lerne" is particularly significant, but the encounter itself is of a type that runs all through

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literature and embraces every poetic mood, from the pastoral comedy of the closing cantos of The Faerie Queen to the tragedy of Macbeth and the broad ribaldry of "Tarn o' Shanter." The following passage, picked almost at random from the "Digression of Spirits" in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, takes in an imaginative sweep that, for us at least, extends from Classical stories older than any English literature through Chaucer and Shakespeare to Arnold's "Forsaken Merman" and the early poems of Yeats: Water-devils are those naiades or water-nymphs which have been heretofore conversant about waters and rivers.... some call them fairies, and say that Habundia is their queen; these cause inundations, many times shipwrecks, and deceive men divers ways, as succubae, or otherwise. . . . Paracelsus hath several stories of them that have lived and been married to mortal men, and so continued for certain years with them, and after, upon some dislike have forsaken them. Such a one was Egeria, with whom Numa was so familiar, Diana, Ceres, etc Hector Boethius {tells} of Macbeth and Banquo, two Scottish lords, that, as they were wandering in the woods, had their fortunes told them by three strange women.115

Burton is not, of course, speaking as a poet, but he is reflecting a Renaissance tendency (which he condemns) to think in terms of presences within the order of nature which are neither angels nor devils. Adam explains to Eve in Paradise Lost that Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep, [bk. 4,11. 677-8]

All of these, except one that Adam does not yet know about, are angelic beings, but Milton's // Penseroso is going to devote most of his pensive evening to considering the possible existence of neutral spirits, or at least of neutral habitations: What worlds or what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook. [11. 90-2]

Such spirits would include those "spirits of a middle sort" mentioned by

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Dryden in The Hind and the Panther [1. 242] and associated there with the Anglicans. Of all such neutral spirits, the most important are the elemental spirits. The Platonic conception of intelligences moving the heavenly spheres was naturally familiar to Renaissance poets, and meets us frequently in Spenser and Donne: such a conception was easy to assimilate to the Christian angels. But, if the general principles of the chain of being were to hold, there ought similarly to be spirits inhabiting the lower elements, or, to go back to Milton's persona: And of those demons that are found In fire, air, flood, or underground, Whose power hath a true consent With planet or with element. [// Penseroso, 11. 93-6]

Such beings might, perhaps, be controlled by magic: they would not necessarily be evil, but they might be sulky and unwilling, ready to destroy the magician at any hint of weakness. They included fire-spirits, or salamanders; air-spirits or sylphs, like those in The Rape of the Lock, a company to which Shakespeare's Ariel also belongs; water-spirits, like the nymphs or undines mentioned by Burton in the passage quoted above, and earth-spirits, some of whom inhabited the surface of the earth, like elves, fairies and the Puck of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This last is more accurately Robin Goodfellow the puck, and he turns up also in "I/Allegro." Below the surface were gnomes or kobolds like the minespirits of the Snow White story. As this list already makes clear, such beings have had a flourishing career in English literature: in Milton's Comus, for example, all the characters except the Lady and her brothers are elemental spirits, Sabrina being a water-spirit, the Attendant Spirit an air-spirit, and Comus and his rout fallen fire-spirits. The poetic importance of fairies and other such beings is that they preserve, for the imagination, the sense that man is linked with nature by a common process of life. This is why, however often they may have gone out of fashion or been derided as puerile, they have stayed in English literature from the ogres of Beowulf to the Sidhe of Yeats and the hobbits of Tolkien. Down to the Romantic period, they represented an imaginative expansion of the discarded model, keeping alive an older and more primitive sense of mystery and enchantment. After the Ro-

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mantic period they merged with a number of other phenomena to be considered next. By Newton's time it was becoming obvious that the older notions about the starry heavens were fictions. It was now certain that the earth and not the sun was a planet; that the stars were not made of quintessence but of the same substances as the lower world; that they did not move in the perfect circles that symbolized eternity; that their distance from the earth and from each other was unimaginably remote; and that it was not reasonable to think of their origin as connected with human life on earth. The collapse of all these assumptions into poetic fictions would not in itself, of course, affect their usefulness as poetic fictions. But it did make the stars less emotionally convincing as images of a divinely sanctioned order, and more convincing as images of alienation and loneliness. Naturally this did not happen at once, poets being very reluctant to throw away anything traditional, besides dimly realizing that the new facts were not the whole of the imaginative truth involved. Addison, for instance, early in the eighteenth century, is still writing variations on the tremendous phrase of the nineteenth Psalm, "night unto night showeth knowledge": The spacious firmament on high, And all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim.116

But slowly and surely another kind of feeling made its way into the skies. In Milton's Nativity Ode the angels descend to earth at the moment of incarnation, and their song is in counterpoint to the music of the spheres, heard for that instant only in the lower world since the Fall. By the time of Hardy's Dynasts, at the turn of the twentieth century, there is little music left: the stars are rather Monsters of magnitude without a shape Hanging amid deep wells of nothingness.117

Or, even more explicitly, in the Victorian James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night: If we could near them with the flight unflown, We should but find them worlds as sad as this,

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Or suns all self-consuming like our own Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss: They wax and wane through fusion and confusion; The spheres eternal are a grand illusion, The empyrean is a void abyss, [sec. 17,11.22-8]

Once the upper world, or "outer space" as we call it now, comes to be thought of as mostly dead and empty, the most important distinction remaining is the distinction between death and life, the mechanical and the organic. Coleridge took over from Spinoza the distinction between natura naturata, nature as structure or system, and natura naturans, nature as organic process, and all his philosophy turns on the superiority and priority of the latter. The importance of this for literature is mainly in the new status given to the poet, or the artist or creative person generally, as a result. As long as it is assumed that, in Sir Thomas Browne's phrase, "Nature is the Art of God,"118 the poet cannot be more than an imitator of nature at one remove, of God at two removes. Man's creative power is at best a faint shadow of the power that made the realities of the world. But for Coleridge, and increasingly for Romantic writers, man's creative power does not imitate a structure of things out there, but participates in the organic process of nature. The poet creates, first because he is alive and participates in the being of God (primary imagination), and, second, because creation is the highest effort of conscious life. Coleridge is trying to resist the new revolutionary doctrines coming from France, and is hagridden with conservative anxieties, religious, moral and political. But these very anxieties show how the old model of the world has crumbled away. The older model was an authoritarian structure in politics and religion as well as a hierarchy of being: the moral principle of the feudal system, protection from above and obedience from below, was incorporated into it, as something not merely essential to human society but part of the actual nature of things. Man is born into a fallen world, and what can lift him to his original state again are the discipline of law and the sacraments of religion. The ultimate structures of human civilization, the city and the garden, had been created by God, not by man: man was entrusted with them and was responsible for them, but had not conceived them in the first place. His religion and his law were also divinely revealed, and it was his duty to practise them as given. But though many leaders of nineteenth-century thought continued to say and believe these things, there came a steady and increasing permeation of the feeling that man had created his own

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laws, and was responsible for altering them as well as observing them; that he had created his own civilization, and was similarly responsible for reshaping that. Such a view naturally gives the poet a new and central social function, for in his imagination models of human civilization are continually built anew. The effect of this on poetic imagery is, in the long run, to turn the older model of the universe almost upside down. In the eighteenth century we begin to get an increasing number of poems in which the poet is or sees a solitary wanderer communing with a quality in nature represented particularly by mountains and oceans: the quality known as the "sublime." The sublime is something in nature which is not human nature but nevertheless is needed to complement human nature. It reminds man that he participates in a natural process greater than himself, but it is not directly connected with the social disciplines of law and religion. That is why it is contemplated in solitude: society and all its educating structures have to be disintegrated, so to speak, before man can feel his place in the order of things, and feel also the serenity and balance that goes with that. The sublime modulates into the sense of an unspoiled nature in Wordsworth, as represented by the lake country which fostered his imagination, and which is man's "teacher" in a sense very different from books. The natural order that the Romantic poet feels a part of is not a hierarchical order like the chain of being, where man is the centre and everything else is outside him. It is rather a sense of unity or identity with nature, and as such it is a restatement of what we saw to be the essential point about the literature of fairyland. Wordsworth says of an early experience of this kind: after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Work'd with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts There was a darkness, call it solitude, Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men mov'd slowly through the mind By day and were the trouble of my dreams. [The Prelude, bk. i, 11. 390-400

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Such an experience is a matter of inwardness calling to inwardness, or deep calling to deep, something hidden within nature and something hidden within the poet forming an identity. The most natural images for such identity are those that express something downward and inside. The experience Wordsworth has previously described is one involving a cavern, a lake, and a boat, and images of caves, and of waters with their "depths," run all through Romantic poetry. Thus in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound we have Prometheus, representing the martyrdom of man, facing Jupiter, the figure of human tyranny created by cowardice and superstition, whose symbol is the orderly movement of the heavenly bodies. Jupiter is one of several evil sky-gods in Romantic and later poetry, including Blake's Urizen and Nobodaddy, Hardy's "President of the Immortals" who appears at the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the "brute and blackguard" of Housman's poem "The chestnut casts his flambeaux" [Poem 9, in Last Poems, 1. 12]. Prometheus is helped and encouraged by Mother Earth, and eventually his bride Asia descends to a deep cave to bring up Demogorgon, the power that overthrows Jupiter and frees mankind. As soon as Prometheus is liberated, the ideal kingdom of Atlantis reappears from the depths of the sea. This tendency to put the union of man and nature, and God if God enters the picture, at the bedrock of experience rather than at the top, is already present in Cowper's hymn, "God moves in a mysterious way" (1773): Deep in unfathomable mines Of never failing skill, He treasures up his bright designs, And works his sovereign will. [11. 4-7]

But what is far more important than the spatial imagery as such is the new complex of ideas which accompanies it. It has often been noted that such environments as the lake country do not represent nature unspoiled: they represent a nature which is to a very considerable degree a human creation, and a creation possible only within one of the temperate zones. Nature in the "raw" seems to bear a very strong resemblance to human life in the raw, being a world of hideous cruelty and ruthless struggle, with no regard for the individual or for any of the ethical values of humanity. Tennyson makes the poet Lucretius say, after his philosophy of nature has led him to look at what is really in nature:

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It is not nature but something in the human mind that has suggested all these metaphors of descent and depth, and the metaphors, like the caves and underground rivers of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," seem insistently to point to something in the creative process that produced them. Poets, in short, are becoming increasingly aware of what came to be called a subconscious or unconscious mind, lying, in what seems to be an inevitable spatial metaphor, "below" the conscious mind. This subconscious mind appears to register itself by images and symbols rather than concepts; and it obviously has a good deal more to do with the dream world than with the waking world. We noticed that the older worldmodel had some analogy to a projected human body, with the brain or intelligence in heaven and the sexual and excretory functions in a demonized lower world. The erotic content of so many dreams makes it clear that the old instinct of poets in making a special poetic "religion" out of sexual impulses and frustrations was correct. Scientific and political developments had destroyed the old model of the universe as a description of what is actually there in nature and ought to be there in society. But such models are, we said, constructs or creations of the human mind; consequently they should be primarily referred, not to history or geography or any aspect of the waking mind, but to the dream world. The closest analogues to myths of the fall and redemption of man are anxiety and wish-fulfilment dreams. The resemblance between dream imagery and the mythopoeic structures of literature and religion is a commonplace to us now after Freud: in English literature the first important writer to note it is De Quincey. Speaking of an anxiety nightmare of meeting a lion and lying down in front of it, De Quincey says: Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once again a snare is presented for tempting him into captivity to a luxury of ruin; once again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls by his own choice. . . . in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the original transgression.119

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This passage was apparently known to Joyce, and must have been one of the influences leading Joyce to compose Finnegans Wake, where dreams of a single night expand into a myth encompassing the entire imaginative circumference of human life. Most structures of mythology begin with a creation myth, and assume that that creation is repeated in every turn of the cycle of time. The imposing of creation on chaos, and the bringing of life out of death, happens again every spring, in fact every morning when we wake up. Within the last two centuries there has been an increasing tendency to assume the reverse of this process: that the creation myth is a projection of what we become familiar with in the cycles of ordinary experience. This is what is different about the use of myth in Joyce's Ulysses, for example, as compared with its use in Milton or Spenser. Joyce begins at the centre, with an ordinary man putting in his day in Dublin in 1904, and expands this concentrically so that it becomes a repetition of the great literary myth enshrined in the Odyssey, the myth of the voyage and the return home. Joyce is following on a precedent set by nineteenthcentury novelists, Dickens, for example, who starts with ordinary people in Victorian London, but gives their experiences something of the sense of expanding enchantment that we find in romance. A remarkable passage from Dickens's Christmas story, The Chimes, shows how well aware he is of the direction of his procedure: Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different things are joined and mixed by chance; and when, and how, and by what wonderful degrees, each separates from each, and every sense and object of the mind resumes its usual form and lives again, no man—though every man is every day the casket of this type of the Great Mystery—can tell.120

Only the individual dreams or writes poetry, just as only the solitary in nature can experience the sublime. But perhaps there is an aspect to this buried creative mind which is social as well, and where a community can find some political or religious identity. It is obvious that in Prometheus Unbound, for example, it is human society as a whole that gets liberated. And in Shelley's Defence of Poetry we get a glimpse of the role of poetry in this emancipation. For Shelley there are two levels of Ian-

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guage, corresponding to two levels of society. Uppermost is the language of argument and polemic, an aggressive use of half-truths to attack other people's half-truths, which corresponds to "normal" society with its wars and intrigues. Below this is the genuine language of poetry, which cannot contradict, being based on image rather than thesis, and which evokes a society free of the anxieties and intolerance that belong to the other language. Keats also speaks of a similar society founded on a deeper verbal agreement than conscious language can reach: Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour and thus by every germ of spirit sucking the sap from mould ethereal every human might become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furze and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees!121

The eighteenth-century writers who sought the experience of the sublime were, we said, looking for something in nature that was not human nature but was needed to complete and round out human nature. What they projected on nature later writers tended rather to locate in some lower level of individual creativity or social cohesion. Everywhere we turn in nineteenth-century thought we find some variant of this construct of an upper and a lower level, whether in society, in the human mind, or in nature, where the lower level is vastly the stronger and threatens the ascendancy of the upper one, like a rough sea under a tossing boat. In social thought, we have Marx's ruling class threatened by an excluded proletariat below it; in psychology, Freud's ego threatened by the subconscious forces of libido and id; in nature, the conception of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, where the moral values of mankind, tending to the protection of the weak and the like, are threatened with collapse into the fierce competition of the state of nature. Writers tend to polarize themselves as conservatives or liberal (or radical) in relation to this lower level. The conservatives distrust it and look for some power that can control it; the radicals see its upsurgence as a promise of emancipation. The hell with it. I'm getting bored. Part Four ends as follows: Conservative view: closely connected with the conservative or butterslide view of history discussed in the imagery of time section. Ruskin again: his conception of the arts as indexes or signatures to the quality of a civilization.

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Conservatives tend to think of a threat to the established order coming in the imminent future, controllable only by a sense of continuity with the past. Political and religious developments of this (Burke and Newman) are for Part Five, but in literature we have, e.g., the absorption of echoes from the past in Eliot, where the past confronts the present and, as in Ruskin, condemns it for its aesthetic and other sins. Connects with Eliot's sense of the creativity of tradition. Tradition is only one of several conservative variations of a "given" principle in history representing something permanent and unchanging in the human flux. Hopkins and the "inscape" that comes from thinking of everything in nature as a manifestation of God. Pound and his unwobbling pivot: the glimpses of human order through the mists of "usury." Yeats and his gyre-shuttle: whatever happens repeats. Radical views may be Marxist, Freudian, or Kierkegaardian, depending on whether the centre of interest is social, psychological, or religious. Auden's For the Time Being and the three constructs set out side by side. The centre of the radical view is the sense that the myth itself, the shaping power of the imagination, may transform society. In Shelley's Prometheus Unbound this happens negatively with withdrawal of the curse on a Jupiter whom Prometheus has really created himself. In Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell "hell" is the buried sexual world exploding and setting on fire the "heaven" of Urizen's sexless brain. Similar symbolism in America and Europe, and cf. the potentially revolutionary quality of the resurrection dream in "The Chimney-Sweeper." In Yeats's The King's Threshold the poet goes on a hunger strike to force the king to recognize him equally with the great lords, but the dialogue discloses a more far-reaching claim: that kings exist only because poets have built up myths about crowned heads. Conclusion: in proportion as actual space becomes alienating, an outer world receding indefinitely from us on all sides, real space becomes created space. The principle of creation being mythical, it follows that the mental landscape of poetry is the model for the humanized world beyond and transcending what is there. Part Five: Retrospect (Summary only) For all the simplistic reduction involved, certain characteristics do seem to emerge from a cultural pattern. We think of Greek, Roman, Hebrew

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culture as having dominant characteristics of, respectively, reason, order, and holiness or moral energy. Does English literature, or British culture generally, have anything comparable? One answer derives from the Whig interpretation of history, which, of course, is none the worse for being Whig. The strength of local government was remarkable in Old English times. The Norman Conquest centralized authority, but the "feudal" system began a jockeying for power between the king and the barons which could lead to straight terrorism (as in Stephen's reign) or to certain legal achievements (Magna Carta in John's). An emergent middle class began to profit from this situation, after the establishing of the House of Commons in the thirteenth century. This process considerably accelerated after the weakening of the nobility in the War of the Roses. The fight for the freedom of the cities, represented in many Elizabethan plays (Eastward Ho). Deloney and the Dick Whittington industrious-apprentice ideology, gathering strength throughout the i8th and 19th centuries. The continued metamorphosis of the upper-middle class: a new landed aristocracy taking over in the i6th c., becoming the Tories of the i/th, then a steady series of shifts of class power down to our own time. Henry VIII the only British sovereign able to act with continuous arbitrary and absolute power. Fostering of a strong commercial class through primogeniture and the like. The Langland vision of a united working country, part of a tradition continuous to Burke and Carlyle. Spenser's St. George and the Plowman's Tale. More and his uncanny economic insight in Utopia, especially with the Utopians being so clear that gold is not wealth. Centrifugal expansion in Hakluyt and Purchas: India and America; the growth of empire from Robinson Crusoe to Kipling. Wool trade; protective measures like the Navigation Act; Corn Laws in 19th c. Continental policy changed to colonial after the loss of Calais in 1553. (Don't know how much of this one needs.) Philosophical tradition: nominalism, centred at Oxford with Duns Scotus and Occam, an attempt to define experience, just as continental realism was an attempt to define knowledge. Significance of Scotist conception of experience in Hopkins later. Bacon and the program of step-by-step induction, with its emphasis on a mechanical procedure. Bacon's resistance to the large principles of Gilbert and Copernicus— wrong for some of the right reasons. Better to keep to a more pedestrian

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rhythm in knowledge—cf. Ascham's preference for the "hard wit," and Lyly's Euphues. The religious settlement as a via media defining the Catholic and Puritan positions as extremes. Hooker; Herbert on the British Church. Survives in the contemporary conception of democracy as a via media between right and left totalitarians. Personal independence: Deloney's Jack of Newbery and his refusal of a knighthood. Johnson and the repudiating of patronage in the Chesterfield letter. Tolerance of eccentricity in Dickens: point in Mill's Essay on Liberty too. Locke, Newton and the modern mind. Locke's liberal contract and his pragmatic approach to knowledge. Burke and the conception of a national telos, a unity or state of total social health beyond the unconditioned will of the people (this last being the Geneva development from Calvin's God of unconditioned will to Rousseau's general will of society). The conception of social crisis as a legal agreement safeguarding both sides. This begins in resistance to revolutionary theories coming from France, but continues in Fabian socialism and a similar resistance to dialectical Hegelian and Marxist theories later. Spiritual authority as the symbol of a social totality beyond will also in Arnold's culture. Success of British in maintaining royalty as a visible symbol of this. The legal agreement seen historically as Tennyson's freedom broadening through precedents. Victorian fascination with law— the complicated legal situations behind the most unexpected novels— Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights. Even Alice in Wonderland ends in a trial scene and discussions about the rules of evidence. Emphasis on experience as opposed to systematic or deductive reasoning, e.g., in Dickens (Bumble's speech in Oliver Twist), Meredith (the "system" in Richard Feverel), and Henry James (philosophical basis for this in his brother William, in whom experience practically becomes substance). Some of this built into the archetype of comedy, but a special British fondness for it. British too nonconformist for most political programs (see Spender's essay in The God that Failed); George Orwell as a typical conscience-figure of the 2Oth c. Remark in Bernard Shaw about British "steadfast refusal to be governed at all." Not inconsistent with the legal preoccupations mentioned above as long as the law also remains pragmatic, advancing empirically like the British Constitution.

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Peroration to the effect that the idea of liberty is distinctive in British culture, and the emphasis on experience, pragmatism, practicality, trialand-error, nonconformity, tolerance of individual variations, the respect for law and history engendered by the absence of any revolution outside the historical process (vs. France and America), are all aspects of that. How this makes Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, at least, central in the cultural tradition.

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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

This is the last of three papers on Chaucer that Frye wrote in 1936 for his Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden. References in square brackets are to the line numbers in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). The holograph manuscript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 12.

We have seen in our previous investigations1 that Chaucer's poems possess an amazing constructive skill, and that it is only the startling originality of their forms which prevents so many critics from reading them as wholes. We have shown that while the ordinary analytic approach to, say, The House of Fame shows it up as a brilliant extravaganza, even when the unity is considered to be confined to the separate books, it takes on a far more profoundly significant unity when read as one poem rather than two or three.2 We have also shown that while Troilus and Criseyde would no doubt be great without its intensely religious conclusion, it is infinitely greater and more consistently integrated with it.3 By looking at Chaucer's pieces we see an exceedingly clever versifier: by looking at his completed structures we see the greatness of his mind in something like its true perspective. The supreme masters of comedy have rather a hard time of it with critics: because they amuse, one is tempted to patronize them. Besides, the appeal of comedy might perhaps without overstatement be described as more intellectualized than that of tragedy, and comedy usually includes a considered refusal to explore the emotional possibilities which tragedy affords. The indication of tragedy is one of the most powerful effects that comedy, particularly satiric comedy, can produce. But only the indication is possible: to go

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further would upset the balance of tone. Abysses of horror open up on all sides in Volpone, but the dramatist points them out without descending them. Deserts of futile snobbery and stupidity stretch around The Way of the World, but again the dramatist only brings us to the edge. Now whether the artist is able to explore these tragic possibilities in some other work or not, the comedy stops him. He has to take it for granted that if he indicates, we will understand, and will laugh even when we shiver uncomfortably. But for the most part we refuse to understand, the emotional approach being more facile than the intellectual. The deserts and abysses being there, we feel that a conscientious guide should explore them: we accuse him of lacking in "high seriousness," because we want what we already know insisted on and preached about.4 The master of comedy gets little reward for not being sententious. Because what was a profound truth to Beethoven was only a platitude to Mozart, Beethoven is listened to with awestruck reverence and Mozart indulgently smiled at as charmingly superficial. Intellectual subtlety is a hard quality to get in art, and with Chaucer, who thinks in terms of and alludes to concepts so remote from ours, especially so. We have seen something of the quality of Chaucer's mind in Troilus and Criseyde. Now when we turn from the very great masterpiece to the huge canvas of The Canterbury Tales, one would expect to find a Human Comedy thought out on such a scale as to make it worthy of complementing the Divine Comedy. That is not too much to expect from Chaucer. But instead of that we find precisely the reverse of what we have found before. The Canterbury Tales is greatest in its separate parts. When we come to building up larger units, we find inconsistencies; the more general a view we try to take, the more puzzling these become; and looked at as a whole, the work is almost meaningless. The mechanical inconsistencies are unusually numerous. The Man of Law promises a tale in prose and tells one in verse; the Parson promises a "merry tale" presumably in verse, and delivers an amazingly tedious homily in prose. The Second Nun's Tale obviously belongs to a man, and The Shipman's Tale to a woman, no doubt the Wife of Bath. The Cook begins a tale after the Reeve, but stops short without explanation, while much later the Host, addressing him for the first time and without referring to his earlier attempt, tries unsuccessfully to wake him up and get another out of him. On the other hand, the Shipman cuts short the Parson and announces that he will tell a tale himself, but it is not until much later that he does so, while the Parson draws to his very remote

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conclusion without a protest. The original scheme broached in the Prologue of four tales from each traveller is obviously dropped before very long. Even if we could be sure that the expedition started with twentynine members, the number is added to by the Canon's Yeoman. But perhaps the most mysterious thing of all is the haunting Squire's Tale, which seems to be like Melchizedek, without father, mother, or descent. No source has ever been discovered for it, and it vanishes as suddenly as it has come, again without explanation. All these, together with the fragmentary and uncompleted nature of the material in the manuscripts, points to a very real fatigue on the part of the author, not any slackening of facility in either invention or execution, but a growing weariness with the scheme as a whole. It would be rather strange to find Chaucer protesting about scribal errors in The Canterbury Tales as he protests about them in Boethius or Troilus and Criseyde. It seems to me impossible to devise a theory about the manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales which can successfully avoid the conclusion that Chaucer got very tired of it. And when we turn from minor inconsistencies of detail to more important ones of tone and attitude, our suspicions become practical certainties. Many stories do bring out the salient qualities of their tellers as outlined in the Prologue. The tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are masterly expositions of the egotism and knavery respectively of their tellers, The Knight's Tale is what one would expect of "a verray, parfit, gentil Knight" [General Prologue, 1.72], and The Prioress's Tale is exactly as naively refined as the Prioress. We feel a similar dramatic fitness in the portrayal of the company. They are not going to be bored: they cut short the drone of the Monk and the jingle of the account of Sir Thopas, and a suggestion that the Parson contribute something is hooted down by the Shipman, who, like a seventeenth-century Cavalier, considers dullness an infallible symptom of heresy. But with The Tale ofMelibee we strike an awkward snag. This is one of the longest tales yet; it is certainly the dullest; yet the company apparently passes it without protest, the Host, who had stopped the jog-trot of Sir Thopas, having his own reasons for approving it. It may be said that the exemplum, or homiletic elaboration of the fable, was popular in the Middle Ages, which accounts for its favorable reception, besides being an important tale form, and consequently essential to the scheme. Again, it is an obvious but not an isolated use of the hamper. A reviewer recently remarked that he supposed the idea of writing a new Decameron had occurred to every writer

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with half a dozen unsaleable short stories in his drawer. Chaucer obviously had a stuffed drawer long before he started The Canterbury Tales: The Knight's Tale apparently belongs to the Italian period, and The Clerk's Tale might very well have been part of The Legend of Good Women scheme. But The Knight's Tale stands on its own merits, and although The Clerk's Tale is dull, the envoy puts everything straight and fits it perfectly into the poem: only a student who was as innocent of life as a baby would have the unconscious priggishness necessary to tell the story of Griselda. If The Tale ofMelibee is merely something more from the drawer, its use is far less defensible. The point of all this is, of course, that when we have got as far as The Tale ofMelibee in our reading of Chaucer we feel sure that we are dealing with a poet who knows that The Tale ofMelibee is dull. Chesterton is the only critic I know who has seriously tried to rescue The Tale ofMelibee. He says, and from what we have seen in The House of Fame, says quite rightly, that Chaucer's humour is of Gargantuan scope: to pick sly witticisms out of half-lines does not give us that humor in its proper perspective. Now The Tale of Sir Thopas is funny, not only as a parody, but because the poet represents himself as unable to produce anything better than this fearful doggerel. Therefore he is merely completing the joke by telling a dull story, in prose, as the only other in his repertoire. This is at any rate an explanation, and a subtler one than the more conventional suggestion that Melibee is Chaucer's "revenge" for the interruption of Sir Thopas, as he seems to have gained no revenge in particular. But if it is a joke, it is carried rather far: as a music critic once observed in another connection, a joke in sonata form is not a good joke. Or the joke may be in the fact that the people who silence one form of dullness will submit to another; or the joke may be on us. But in any case one thing is clear: on the whole we are dealing with a scheme in which the tales are adapted to the tellers. Chaucer tells The Tale ofMelibee, so we must assume either that he told it with his tongue in his cheek or that the scheme breaks down at this point. The rest of The Canterbury Tales hang together fairly well until we come to The Parson's Tale, longer, duller, and stupider than The Tale ofMelibee, and as far as we can see—and we can see a long way—equally acceptable to the company. This monstrous harangue makes the joke theory almost untenable: what joke there is is on Chaucer. We have gathered that the "snibbing" parson, who checks a very harmless oath of Harry Bailly's, is somewhat on the righteous overmuch side, and so are not surprised to find that so mercilessly exposed in his sermon. But when the discourse

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rolls on and on without a single glint of irony, and we suddenly, after looking at the end to see how much more there is of it, discover that it is the summing-up and peroration of the entire work, the whole epic structure seems to fall with a crash. A Catholic friend of mine once told me that that sermon would be preached in any Catholic church in the world next Sunday, banning the remark that the hose worn by the preacher's parishioners make their buttocks look like the hinder part of a she ape in the full of the moon [The Parson's Tale, 1. 424]. Which, I am afraid, is depressingly true. Then we find a Retraction at the end, where Chaucer, with a dismally pious snuffle, pleads forgiveness for having written his poetry. Now this is no joke. There is no room in the same poem for both this Retraction and the rest of the work: the most eclectic reader could not extend Chaucer's moral standards that far. To us The Miller's Tale is great art and thoroughly good in the Platonic sense of the word: it is the Retraction that appears to us as a grotesquely leering obscenity. It is, of course, customary to invoke the Middle Ages at this point, and say that Chaucer lived at a time when it was generally considered meritorious to make such an exhibition of oneself. But that is far too easy-going. When Chaucer started out he made no concessions to medievalism: he defended his own coarseness by saying that Jesus Himself did not hesitate at coarseness when occasion demanded, and that those who wished to be holier than Jesus could simply read something else. Morally, this defence and its retraction are mutually exclusive. The man who made the Miller, Reeve, Friar, Summoner, and Pardoner was a creator, a worthy servant of the CreatorGod who presumably looked, in the Garden of Eden, upon the hinder parts of a she-ape and saw that it was very good. The writer of the Retraction is accepting the moral standards of the Summoner and Pardoner at their face value, with all the hypocrisy and vulgarity they imply. This is something absolutely different from the conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde: there, the great artist rejected the world; here, a canting Worldly Wiseman is rejecting great art. It may be objected that this is taking the Retraction more seriously than it deserves: that what probably happened was that something like the fear of imminent death put Chaucer into a blue funk, which is undoubtedly true as far as it goes. But the Retraction is more insidiously evil than that: it contains a qualifying clause restricting the condemnation to "thilke that sownen into synne" [Retraction, 1.1086]. It is difficult to see what this can mean except that Chaucer is endorsing The Parson's

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Tale and giving a sinister significance to the fact that he has assigned The Tale of Melibee to himself. When we go back to the Prologue we find, of course, that the Parson is a model of virtue, and are driven to the conclusion that Chaucer really has a double focus: one of masterly irony, brought out in The Tale of Sir Thopas, and the other of the plodding sententiousness evinced in The Tale of Melibee, and that The Canterbury Tales splits into two irreconcilable attitudes. When we add that Retraction to the confused state of the existing fragments, it becomes clear that Chaucer tired of the scheme because it had broken down. Now, what made it break down? In comparing The House of Fame with Troilus and Criseyde we find that they are analogous in form, being both developments of the love vision, and both satires on it. But in The House of Fame the satire remains negative: the poem is mocking and aloof to the end, while in Troilus and Criseyde the convention attacked is thoroughly and seriously analyzed, so that the final explosion is a dynamite charge, not a squib. Troilus and Criseyde is obviously, however, a development and further extension of The House of Fame. Chaucer could write The House of Fame only because he was the potential author of Troilus and Criseyde, but to have written it after Troilus and Criseyde would have been an anticlimax. Chaucer's artistic conscience naturally develops toward a more positive and fully interpreted form. The conscience which had moulded Troilus and Criseyde then got to work on The Canterbury Tales. Now when we look at this scheme we find that the tales in themselves are frequently, as with The Knight's Tale, as closely welded together, as carefully thought out and rounded off, as Troilus and Criseyde itself, although on a smaller scale. But the framework in which this is contained, the journey of the Pilgrims as described in the Prologues, is again the quizzical irony of The House of Fame. We wake up with a start from the tragedy of Arcite to realize that it is only a story after all, told to amuse a company, many of whom are incapable of appreciating it. The negative attitude overrides the positive one. Now with The Knight's Tale this works fairly well, as it is obviously earlier than the Prologue, and is pure narrative. But Troilus and Criseyde was more than narrative: it was a great philosophical poem; and when Chaucer, with that behind him, turned from it to a still larger canvas he needed an equally concentrated design. The unit in The Canterbury Tales is a multiple one, and the connecting link of the pilgrimage not concentrated

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enough. A narrative and an argument, twisted together, unite Troilus and Criseyde: in The Canterbury Tales there is a connecting narrative but no argument. So Chaucer very soon sets to work constructing one. He joins together the Miller's and the Reeve's stories by an account of a mutual rivalry. But this does not go far enough, and when, with the Friar and the Summoner, he repeats this design, it is as part of a much larger unit, to which critics have given the name of the Marriage Group.5 Here Chaucer is most obviously trying to relate the tales to a connecting theme as well as a connecting story, and each tale lights up a different attitude toward meaning. Several other stories outside this group might be welded into the scheme, but it would not fit the Prologue even so, for there is no essential reason why Canterbury Pilgrims should have unanimously decided to discuss marriage. This lack of complete unity may not matter to us, but that is no reason for assuming that it did not matter to Chaucer. To us the scheme is all right the way it is, and the more tales Chaucer tells, the better pleased we will be. But Chaucer did not get his sense of form out of the air: it was produced by the relentless discipline of an artistic conscience which would be satisfied with nothing less than perfection, and Chaucer's idea of perfection may be considerably higher than ours. Had Chaucer given every pilgrim a story appropriate to his character, even we could see that the resulting poem would be less unified, as a whole, than Troilus and Criseyde, and Chaucer would be more acutely aware of that fact than we. Besides, we are apt to forget that The Canterbury Tales is much more of a unity to us than it would be to Chaucer. Since the Reformation, it has been impossible that a social group as varied as the Canterbury Pilgrims could all travel to the same place with the same object, and the single fact of the shrine, as far as we are concerned, gives a certain unity to the pilgrimage to it. But Chaucer would take the shrine for granted: he would be more conscious of the variety of motives for going on the pilgrimage than of the unity of the religious force sending all the pilgrims there. To the Wife of Bath the pilgrimage was a cook's tour; to the Pardoner, a possible market for pig's bones: and the extent to which both were "Catholic" is more obvious to a later reader. Again, for us the very variety of pilgrims gives the Prologue a unity; here, we feel, Chaucer has brought together every possible type of humanity in a given society and a cross-section of that society's culture is the result. This is, of course, the

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point made by Blake in his great essay on Chaucer.6 But here again it is the centuries of historical perspective that make this unity more evident to us. In The Canterbury Tales, then, the attempt to fuse together a connecting argument and a narrative does not come off: there is a disjunction between the didactic and the technical requirements of the epic form. Chaucer has two stories to tell: one, a lively ironic narrative, constructed with incredible skill, which does not seem to be getting anywhere, and the other an intellectual development which remains abortive. It is some such disjunction as this, I feel sure, which is expressed by the two stories Chaucer represents himself as telling. In this connection it is curiously interesting to consider the only attempt to get at some underlying unity of argument in The Canterbury Tales which has been made since Blake's essay. An American scholar named Professor Tupper tried to show that each tale was an offering to Venus, the planet dominating the pilgrimage.7 Then he repudiated this and tried to show that they constitute a systematic treatment of the Seven Deadly Sins.8 These two essays, taken together, exactly reflect Chaucer's own difficulties in connecting his stories to a main theme. It may be worth noticing that, in spite of the Wife of Bath's discourse on gentilesse, Chaucer on the whole shies away from welding an argument even into the single tales. Palamon and Dorigen both avoid discussing the problem of evil, and the Nun's Priest dismisses the question of predestination which is so searchingly examined in Troilus and Criseyde, though this last is perhaps not a fair example. It is very misleading to call The Canterbury Tales a torso, as Saintsbury does, for a torso is a unity, and a unity of exactly the kind we have noted as frequently characteristic of the great masters of comedy: a full treatment of part of a complete form, with an indication of the rest. But The Canterbury Tales is not a unity; and it seems to me that as Chaucer kept on expending his magnificent powers on what to him was an unsatisfactory scheme, his uncompromising aesthetic conscience suddenly, in a moment of depression, turned moral, or rather immoral, passed from sharp criticism to blasphemy, and produced the Retraction. Chaucer was a narrative poet with a strongly dramatic attitude, living in an age of undeveloped secular drama. Troilus and Criseyde reaches what is perhaps the limit of dramatic narrative: to develop further from this poem Chaucer needed the objective concentration of actual drama, just as Shakespeare needed it after writing his great narratives. Shakespeare's time supplied the form; Chaucer's did not. In trying to expand

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the dramatic narrative into the epic without sacrificing unity, Chaucer found he would have to expand an argument into a super-argument, and this he did not find, as his real interest was dramatic rather than didactic. Chaucer's tales anticipate Elizabethan drama: the naive virtue of Griselda anticipates Heywood; the corrosive satire of The Merchant's Tale, something like Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida; The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, of course, Jonson's The Alchemist. Without any question of a higher unity, Chaucer's variety is astounding: even Shakespeare never tackled a comedy of manners. To put all this variety into an incidental framework such as the pilgrimage affords was comparatively easy, but to make the unifying schemes, not a mere framework, but a whole of which those disparate tales would be essential parts, would have been by far the greatest technical tour de force in English poetry. Chaucer almost did it, but not quite: just as he is himself almost, but not quite, as great a poet as Shakespeare or Dante.

3

George Orwell

The exact date of this CBC Radio talk is uncertain, but, as Frye notes in his Foreword to 1984 (Don Mills, Ont.: Bellhaven House, 1967; orig. pub. 1949), he reviewed the book for CBC when it "first came out" (viii), which means that the review dates from 1949 or 1950. The typescript is in the NFF, 1988, box 48, file 3. Frye gave another talk on Orwell for CBC on 25 January 1965, and that talk became the foreword to the edition just mentioned. The page reference below is to this edition. George Orwell is the pen name of one of the most brilliant of living English writers. His real name is Eric Blair. He began his career in the Imperial Army in Burma, then resigned his commission and went to fight for the Spanish Loyalists. One result of that was a contempt for Russian Communism which he put into a recent satire called Animal Farm. Now he has written a full-scale novel, 1984, published by S.J. Reginald Saunders, where he gives us one idea of the sort of world that the children of today may grow up in. His central character, Winston Smith, was born in 1945. When he was a little boy, some time in the fifties, the world was smashed up by a series of atomic-bomb wars, and that led to revolutions and tremendous massacres, or "purges." By 1984, the whole world was divided into three great powers: Eurasia, taking in the present Russia and continent of Europe; Eastasia, which is mainly China, India, and Indonesia; and Oceania, an expansion of the United States over South America and the British Isles. The story is laid in London, now of course a part of Oceania. All three world-states are totalitarian, and Orwell's description of Oceania is based for the most part on present-day Communist Russia, though there are some Nazi features and some even nearer home.

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There are three classes of society. The upper class, known as the Inner Party, have absolute power and all the privileges there are going. There is a dictator, who is called simply Big Brother, but he's just a voice and a face on televisions, and there's no real proof that he exists at all. The middle class, or Party members, have white-collar and civil service jobs, and the lower class, called the "proles" or proletariat, make up the other eighty-five per cent of the population. The Party members are kept in order by a televised development of two-way radio. In every home, every place of business, in the cafeterias, and the washrooms, there is a "telescreen" where the secret police can see what you are doing at every moment of the day, and hear every word you speak. Patrols of police roam the streets to make sure that you go from your office to your home in a straight line. The "proles" are not watched with telescreens, although the secret police keep snooping on them to pick off anybody who might be dangerous, but the government keeps them quiet with synthetic entertainment known as "prolefeed." That consists of trashy movies, propaganda bulletins disguised as newspapers, popular songs composed on a machine known as a "versificator," and pornography. Children get no education whatever, but they have to join an organization called the "Spies," and spend most of their time eavesdropping on their elders, mainly their parents, so as to denounce them whenever possible to the police. This kind of thing is made possible by a constant churning up of war hysteria, for the three world-states are always at war. Each power spends most of its national income and energy in a great pretense of making campaigns of total conquest, but none of them has any intention either of stopping the war or of trying to win it. So they don't use atomic bombs any more: that's too much like playing for keeps. The Inner Party doesn't want to win: it just wants to tie up as much of everything the country produces as it can. A free development of industry and science would tend to raise the standard of living, and so to equalize the classes. To maintain their power the Inner Party has to destroy as much industrial production as it can; hence the permanent war. Canadian readers may be reminded at this point of Professor Lome Morgan's satire, Homo the Sap,1 that appeared some years ago. So, in this England of the future nothing is efficient except the secret police, the thought police as they are called. Buildings are crumbling and unpainted, the lifts don't work, there's an appalling housing shortage, and all the ordinary comforts of life like razor blades are in short supply. Only members of the Inner Party have comfortable flats or unlimited supplies of coffee and fresh fruit. Mean-

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while the government issues fake statistics showing how much production has increased over the previous year. Winston Smith's job is falsifying records. If Big Brother makes a speech predicting a turn in the war that doesn't happen, or if he praises a Party member who is afterwards liquidated, the old copies of the government newspaper reporting his speeches are altered and reprinted, so no one can ever have documentary evidence to catch the government in a lie. The point of this is not just to fake evidence, but to destroy the whole sense of past time. If Oceania gets tired of fighting Eurasia, and decides to fight Eastasia instead, all the records that imply that Eurasia is an enemy are changed, so that what the Inner Party dictates as the policy now is what the policy always has been since the beginning of time. Smith finds that he can't stand this kind of society, so he falls into the hands of the secret police. He goes through an incredible series of tortures, and the police even resort to psychoanalysis to find out what torments his subconscious is most afraid of. Naturally he confesses to every kind of crime, but the police are not satisfied with mere confession. They are determined to make him accept their society with an internal conviction as well as with an outward acceptance, so what he goes through is a kind of horrible parody of a religious conversion. The police don't take this trouble for Smith's own sake, but only to make their triumph over him complete. The people who operate this foul machine know all the answers. They break down every support that Smith has: his hope that the "proles" will rebel, his belief in the dignity of man, his belief in truth (truth exists only in records, and Smith has helped to fake the records). Finally, with one last effort of torture, they break his last hold on his own life, his love for a girl. They even destroy his illusion that they are doing all this for some rational motive. They haven't any motive. The desire to get power and to torment other people is an end in itself. Smith's torturer says to him, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever" [274; pt. 3, chap. 3]. It should be clear from this that 1984 is not exactly the sort of book you would want to cuddle up with in a hammock at a summer cottage. It shows, with a hideous logic, that it is perfectly possible for the children of today to grow up into a world without religion, without art, without science, without freedom, without leisure, without privacy, without law— without any of the things that we today take as much for granted as air and water. A world like this is, quite literally, hell on earth. Mr. Orwell has written a modern Inferno. And to write about hell you can't just

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frighten people: you have to show them what their lives must become if they keep on doing the things they ought not to do. If we were to ask Mr. Orwell why he wants us to read this brutal nightmare, he would probably say that there is not one horror in his book which is not being systematically practised somewhere right now. The trouble with preaching hell to a frightened world is that everyone will identify hell with what he is most afraid of already. Liberals will see Mr. Orwell's book as an attack on Communism; Tories, as an attack on all state planning; the Communists themselves would see it as a good analysis of the tendencies of American capitalism. But the real value in showing us how easily the world could turn into hell in our own lifetime is to give us a concentrated picture of what we don't want either for ourselves or our children. Mr. Orwell doesn't tell us what to fight for, but he gives us a terrifyingly clear impression of what we should fight against. And what we should fight against, according to him, is not Russia or China, not Eurasia or Eastasia, but the evil tendencies in our own minds, our own weak and gullible compromises in a contempt of law and a contempt for truth. I hope Mr. Orwell's hell-fire sermon will have the influence it deserves.

4 Shakespeare's Comedy of Humors

Frye presented this paper at Radcliffe College on 30 November 1950. The typescript, which is in the NFF, 1993, box 4, file 3, contains a number of holograph corrections, additions, and deletions. Frye put either square brackets or parentheses around some twenty passages in the text. These appear to be portions of the text that he omitted, in the interest of conserving time, when he read the paper. I have retained all of these passages, as well as all of his holograph additions and corrections. In another pen (and doubtless at a later date) Frye cancelled other passages by drawing a line through them. As a number of these passages contain holograph additions, it seems likely that he wanted to have them deleted in this version of the paper—which is what I have done in the present text. Several of the deleted passages, however, appear in those parts of the essay that Frye incorporated into Anatomy of Criticism, so I have included the cancelled passages in the notes. Those parts of the paper that Frye used in the Anatomy are recorded in the notes as well. The phrase "comedy of humors" belongs to Ben Jonson,1 so that a paper with such a title has to begin with the relation of Jonson's comedy to Shakespeare's. The facts of this are simple enough. Jonson's great comedies are comedies of manners: they are not exactly realistic plays, but they do maintain a kind of realistic illusion. No character or incident is introduced which permanently upsets that illusion, and unities of time and place are observed, not out of pedantry, but because they are essential to the unity of action. Shakespeare, on the other hand, never wrote a pure comedy of manners, and never failed to include something in his comedy which tends to dispel the realistic atmosphere. If there are no fairies or magical forests and islands, there are plot-themes derived from

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myth, folklore, and romance. The strong element of folklore in the baiting of Falstaff seems to me to rule out even The Merry Wives, which would otherwise be Shakespeare's closest approach to the Jonsonian formula. The unities of time and place largely disappear along with the unity of probability. They are observed in The Tempest, but The Winter's Tale, which belongs to the same period, seems to make something of a point of defying them. Jonson, of course, had a theory of comedy that was closely related to the critical canons of his time. He was doing everything that a Renaissance critic would mean by following nature. In his preface to The Alchemist he congratulates himself on his superiority to certain other writers of comedy who, unlike him, "run away from nature."2 In his introduction to Bartholomew Fair, he is a little more explicit about who some of these other writers are: "He is loth," says Jonson, meaning himself, "to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests and such-like drolleries" [Prologue, sc. 2, 11. 134-6!. Shakespeare knew a about Jonson's theory,3 and one wonders whether there is something deliberate in Shakespeare's avoidance of Jonson's formulas, almost as though he had a counter-theory of his own. At any rate, Jonson and Shakespeare have often been thought of as forming a kind of antithesis, and some of the fallacies from this oversimplified view of them are still with us.4 There is evidence that Jonson was a laborious writer and Shakespeare a fluent one, and it is clear that Jonson was more interested in the theory of criticism. On this basis many of us tend to think of Jonson and Shakespeare as respectively the sophisticated student of art and the inspired child of nature, the lawgiver and the possessor of grace. True, as we have seen, Jonson was certain that he followed nature better than Shakespeare did. But since the rise of primitivism, the conception of "nature" has become less Aristotelian and more outdoorsy, and so Shakespeare's comedies, which lend themselves admirably to open-air performance, seem more natural than ever. With the triumph of the novel over the drama as a form of fiction, the criticism of drama became full of assumptions derived from the novel. Hence the frequent assertion that Jonson's characters are "flat" and Shakespeare's "round"—especially, of course, Falstaff. It is supposed to take more genius to create round characters, and the implication is that Jonson's theory of humor or partial character merely rationalizes his comparative lack of creative power. This is, of course, nonsense, and I mention it only to get rid of it. The

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distinction of flat and round characters is quite useless and misleading in dramatic criticism, where it is a waste of time to discuss.5 There is also the possibility that the difference between the two techniques is simply a difference between two kinds of artists: in other words that there is no real problem. The reason why I think there is a problem is that Jonson seems to have been so utterly right, as far as the history of the stage is concerned. His theory of comedy is an integral development of the tradition that came down from Plautus and Terence and has survived through Moliere to our own day. All the important writers of English comedy since Jonson have cultivated the comedy of manners with its realistic illusion and not Shakespeare's romantic kind. Nearly all of them have been Irishmen, and one might expect them to have a fey and Celtic sympathy for fairyland; but from Congreve to O'Casey, English comedy exhibits a remarkable dearth of leprechauns. Bernard Shaw remarked that the best way for a dramatist to get a reputation for daring originality is to stick as closely as possible to the method of Moliere,6 whose comedy of humors is more conventionalized even than Jonson's. As for the unities of time and place, many of us are graduated from college with a vague notion that they are useless and obsolete pedantries, and that Samuel Johnson or somebody proved it. Nevertheless I should guess that the overwhelming majority of contemporary plays still rigorously observe them.7 The tradition of Shakespearean comedy is very different. Since the closing of the theatres in 1642, it has survived chiefly in opera. As long as we have Mozart or Verdi or Sullivan to listen to, we can tolerate identical twins and lost heirs and love potions and folk tales: we can even stand a fairy queen if she is under two hundred pounds. But the main tradition of Shakespearean fantasy seems to have drifted from the stage into lyric poetry, an oddly bookish fate for the warbler of native woodnotes. The dramatic validity even of Shakespeare's own comedies has not been left unattacked either. Some time ago an effort was made to incorporate All's Well and Measure for Measure into the Jonsonian tradition by calling them "problem comedies," thus suggesting that for once in his life Shakespeare managed to produce something almost on a level with the weakest period of Ibsen. But even so Shaw could make out a fair case for saying that many of Shakespeare's comedies would hardly hold the stage if Shakespeare were not a cultural vested interest.8 He also made the insidious suggestion that the titles of As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing represented the author's opinion of these plays.9 Shake-

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speare's comedies, wrote Walt Whitman, "are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy."10 I mention such things because I think that the question of the merits of Shakespeare's comedies might never have come up if, besides being great plays, they had also belonged to a great and well-integrated dramatic tradition, as Jonson's obviously do. No serious student of Shakespeare as a practising dramatist is likely to deny that he knew all there was to know about stagecraft and effective theatre.11 It is perhaps worthwhile, therefore, to examine the structure of comedy in general in order to see where Shakespeare belongs. I feel that it is a waste of time to discuss Shakespeare's characterization without relating characters to their dramatic functions, which in turn cannot be done without some knowledge of the genres of drama, and of the structures peculiar to those genres. The most recent dramatic critic to be primarily interested in structure and genre appears to be Aristotle, who did not say much about comedy.12 All we have is a Greek treatise on comedy called the Tractatus Coislinianus, which may go back to Aristotle's teachings.13 Jonson's comedy is one of the Renaissance developments of the Classical New Comedy that comes down from Plautus and Terence. This form, though it is perhaps less of a form than a formula, has been the ground plan of nearly all popular comedy down to our own time. Its most frequent theme is the approximation of a young man to a desirable young woman. The obstacles to this constitute the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution. The obstacles are usually parental, and comedy often turns on a clash between a son's and a father's will. Thus the comic dramatist as a rule writes for the younger men in his audience, and the older members of almost any society are apt to feel that comedy has something subversive about it. This is certainly one element in the frequent social persecution of drama: in all the diatribes against the Elizabethan stage, no charge is more frequent than the corrupting of youth. Antagonism to comic drama is not peculiar to Puritans or even Christians: Terence in pagan Rome met much the same kind of social opposition that Jonson did. There is one scene in Plautus where a son and father are making love to the same courtesan, and the son asks his father pointedly if he really does love mother.14 One has to see this scene against the background of Roman family life to understand its importance as psychological release. Even in Shakespeare there are startling outbreaks of parallel ferocity. When Mr. Alfred Harbage speaks in his As They Liked It of the normal courtesy of Shakespeare's

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characters, the exceptions he finds to his rule are all concerned with the mockery of older men.15 In the movies, which provide the popular comedies of our own day, the triumph of youth is so relentless that the moviemakers are finding some difficulty in getting anyone over the age of seventeen into their audiences.16 The opponent to the hero's wishes, when not the father, is generally someone who partakes of the father's closer relation to established society: that is, he is a rival with less youth and more money. In Plautus and Terence he is usually either the pimp who owns the girl, or a wandering soldier with a supply of ready cash. The fury with which these characters are baited and exploded from the stage shows that they are fathersurrogates, and even if they were not, they would still be usurpers, and their claims to possess the girl must be shown up as somehow fraudulent. They are, in short, impostors, and the extent to which they have real power implies a criticism of the society that allows them their power. In Plautus and Terence this criticism seldom goes further than the fact that brothels are immoral; but in some Renaissance dramatists, including Jonson, there is some sharp observation of the rising power of money and the sort of ruling class it is building up.17 The action of comedy, therefore, consists normally in a clash of wills having for its aim the control of the comic society represented in the cast of characters. At first the characters who are thwarting the hero's triumph are in possession of social authority, and the audience realizes that this society is a Saturnalia or temporary inversion of the rightful society of the hero's triumph and their desires. When the obstacles are surmounted and the blocking characters reconciled or forced to submit, a new society is born on the stage,18 its appearance usually symbolized by some kind of party: a wedding, a banquet, as in The Taming of the Shrew, or a dance. Yet this new birth is also a rebirth, the return of the old normal society that the audience is accustomed to, and which has been for a moment usurped. According to the Tractatus Coislinianus, there are three essential types of comic character: the alazon or imposter, who pretends to be more than he is; the eiron or self-deprecator, who pretends to be less than he is; and the bomolochos, or buffoon, usually identical with one of the other two when the atmosphere is one of farce rather than comedy proper.19 In the alazon or impostor we may discover the archetype of the thwarting characters of comedy, the heavy father and his allies, who have to be exposed, converted, or routed. In the eiron, the man whose merits are not

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fully revealed but who usually wins out, we may see the archetype of the victorious hero and his allies. The buffoon in New Comedy, when a separate type, is usually a parasite, and in later times he often retains an incidental relation to the plot.20 There are also certain stock types of alazon, two of particular importance. One is the miles gloriosus or bragging soldier, who has had a dramatic run stretching from the earliest extant European comedy, The Acharnians of Aristophanes, to Arms and the Man and Chaplin's Great Dictator. There is also the pedant or learned doctor, who appears in Aristophanes' Clouds as Socrates and is still going strong.21 Whatever he is, the alazon is an impostor, and so a hypocrite. The word hypocrite is interesting: it means etymologically an actor wearing a mask. But a good actor forgets his mask, and the hypocrite also has to throw himself into the part, so that he can no longer clearly distinguish what he believes from what he says he believes. Otherwise he would be someone like lago, too haunting and terrible a figure to be contained within a comedy. It makes for better comedy, therefore, when the alazon is not a simple hypocrite, but a man who has conditioned himself to act a single part, and so falls into the bondage of his own law. This brings us abreast of Jonson's theory of humors, expounded in the prologue to Every Man Out of His Humor. A humor, Jonson explains, is a character so possessed by a certain type of behavior that he can act in no other way. A sick man is not a humor, but a hypochondriac is, because, qua hypochondriac, he can never admit to good health, and can never do anything inconsistent with being an invalid.22 All humors are possessed by what Pope calls a "ruling passion,"23 and they are the opposites of the normal or temperate people who have their humors under control, like the hero and the audience. Jonson's theory applies to the buffoon as well as the alazon, which enables his comedy to include so great a variety of characters and give buffoons a more integral role in the plot. Moliere's comedy is also a comedy of humors, but of a much simpler type: he usually concentrates his action on a single alazon, a miser, a religious hypocrite, or a misanthrope, whose humor, or obsession, throws the whole society he controls into a perverted form. Jonson came nearest to this type of construction in The Silent Woman, where the whole action recedes from the humor of Morose, whose determination to eliminate noise and disturbance from his life produces so uproarious and garrulous a comic action. The humor is uniform rather than consistent, and the appeal of humors

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is based on one of the essential principles of comic writing: that unincremental repetition is funny. In a tragedy everything turns on a final catastrophe, and all repetition in tragedy—Oedipus Rex is the famous example—must lead emotionally and logically to that catastrophe. Laughter, however, is partly a reflex, and, like other reflexes, can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern. In Synge's Riders to the Sea a mother's last and seventh son is drowned, and the result is a very beautiful and moving play. But if it had been a five-act tragedy plodding glumly through the whole seven drownings one after another, the audience would have been helpless with unsympathetic laughter long before it was over. The same principle may be observed in comic strips and radio programs, which, as they deal with static characters and an interminable form, can do nothing but repeat. A humor is established as a miser or a glutton or a shrew, and after the point has been made every day for several months it begins to be amusing. The girth of Falstaff and the obsession of Don Quixote may be at the other end of art, but they are based on the same comic laws. Mr. E.M. Forster speaks with disdain of Mrs. Micawber, who, he tells us, never says anything except that she will never desert her husband.24 Here we may see the contrast between the minor comic writer who is afraid of popular formulas, and the major one who is not.25 We turn now to the eiron characters, of which the most important are the technical hero and heroine, the nice young man and the nice young girl he finally gets. We find, from Plautus to the movies, that these central characters of comedy are seldom very interesting people. The young men in Plautus are all alike, and the young women have practically nothing to say for themselves unless they are prostitutes. Shakespeare does much better by his heroines, partly because, as we shall explain in a moment, he gives them a different role. But his heroes reflect a real technical difficulty, surmounted sometimes in a way that looks like a dodge. Thus the nice young men of Much Ado and All's Well, Claudio and Bertram, are improved dramatically by the fact that they are not very nice young men. In The Merry Wives the technical hero, a man named Fenton, has only a bit part, and this play has picked up a hint or two from Plautus' Casina, where the hero and heroine are not even brought on the stage at all. Ben Jonson, of course, follows the same pattern. There is a nice young man in Volpone named Bonario, but he is a nuisance, and in The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair we are not troubled with nice people, young or otherwise. It is the same in Moliere: everyone

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knows who Tartuffe and Harpagon are, but it is very hard to distinguish all the Valentins and Angeliques who wriggle out of their clutches. The eiron is quiet and modest: even if he does not deprecate himself, the dramatist plays him down, and his character has the neutrality which enables him to represent a wish-fulfillment. That is, we have to believe him to be a more interesting and important person than he is represented. Two other eiron figures call for comment. One is the character whose intrigues enable the hero to triumph, the midwife, so to speak, of the comic resolution, who represents a kind of projection of the author's will into the play. We may call him what he is sometimes called in Roman comedy, the architectus: in Plautus and Terence he is nearly always a clever slave. In Shakespeare this role is frequently played by the heroine: other Renaissance dramatists often use some adaptation of the medieval "vice." Whoever acts the part, it is one which usually calls for a great deal of disguising. A good example is the Brainworm of Jonson's Every Man in His Humor, who assumes so many disguises that he speaks of the action of the play as the day of his metamorphoses [act 5, sc. i]. Such a character, who needs no motivation because he acts merely for the fun of seeing what will happen, is to comedy what the Machiavellian villain is to tragedy, a self-starting principle of the action. In King Lear the Machiavellian Edmund is balanced against Edgar, who, with his manifold disguises and his tendency to come pat like the catastrophe of the old comedy and to appear on the third sound of the trumpet, seems to have something of the comic architectus about him, transposed of course from a "vice" into a kind of "virtue," if I may coin this word by analogy.26 Another important eiron character seems to have been even less noticed. This is a character, generally an older man, who deliberately withdraws from the action at the beginning of the play and returns at the end. A simple example is Lovewit in The Alchemist, the owner of the house whose flight enables the comic action to break out, and whose return resolves it. Such a character usually represents normal society: the clearest Shakespearean example is the Duke in Measure for Measure. The retracting eiron is often a benevolent father, who wants to see what his son will do but is willing to give him his head. The action of Every Man in his Humor is set going in this way by Knowell Senior. One catches glimpses of this type elsewhere: Polonius, who shows so many of the disadvantages of a literary education, attempts the role three times, once too often. Consistently with the comic prejudice against paternal figures, even well-meaning ones, the retracting eiron is often something of a bore

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and a stuffed shirt. The dramatic action of Paradise Lost, which is a divine comedy as well as a human tragedy, has a retracting eiron in God the Father, where the same characteristics apply. Sometimes this older eiron is the architectus as well, and then he does not withdraw: we can watch him at work all through the play, bringing about a normal society and driving off or converting the humors. The greatest example of such a character is of course Prospero, but he is all over the history of comedy from the hero of The Acharnians to the psychiatrist of The Cocktail Party. Jonson introduced a female example of the type, not without a touch of parody, into his Magnetic Lady.27 Whatever tragedy is, it has something to do with a vision of law, of what is and must be. It is parallel to the scientific vision, and it cannot be an accident that the two great developments of tragedy, in fifth-century Athens and seventeenth-century Europe, coincided with the two great revolutions in science. But when in a tragedy of Euripides the gods28 descend into the action and set everything right, something fundamentally irrational has been brought into the vision of law, something which may lead even to the happy ending of comedy, as in Alcestis. Tragic endings impress us as true, and the suspense of tragedy is simply the waiting for an inevitable moment. The fall of Oedipus has the suspense of an accurately predicted eclipse. But there is no such thing as inevitable comedy. Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desirable, and they are brought about by deliberate manipulation. The watcher of death has nothing to do but sit and watch: the watcher of birth is involved with obstetrical forceps, basins, and a society of attendants. The comic ending is generally manipulated by a twist in the plot. In Roman comedy the heroine, who is usually a slave or courtesan, turns out to be the daughter of somebody respectable, so that the hero can marry her without loss of face. This type of ending is called a cognitio or recognition, in Greek anagnorisis, and is present whenever the final scene of a comedy turns on a lost heir found, the return of a rich forgotten relative, or a nurse with a retentive memory for birthmarks. There is a brilliant parody of a cognitio at the end of Major Barbara, where Undershaft is enabled to break the rule that he cannot appoint his son-in-law as successor by the fact that the son-in-law's own father married his deceased wife's sister in Australia, so that the son-in-law is his own first cousin as well as himself. It sounds complicated, but29 the plots of comedy usually are complicated, as there is something inherently absurd about complications. This is one reason for the convention of dis-

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guise, which in the fourth act of the Winter's Tale assumes patterns of bewildering intricacy. It should be noticed too that, as the main character interest in comedy is focussed on the alazons or defeated characters, comedy regularly illustrates a victory of plot over characterization. Hence many of the most exhaustively studied comic characters, such as Falstaff and Don Quixote, are not, or not exclusively, characters in comedy.30 The manipulation of plot is often accompanied by metamorphosis of character. Irrational conversions, miraculous transformations, and providential assistance are inseparable from comedy. The conversion of Oliver in As You Like It, or of the agents of Don John in Much Ado, to say nothing of Katarina the shrew, strain our credulity even more than our heartstrings. Further, whatever emerges is supposed to be there for good. If the boy gets the girl, they are going to live happily ever after; if the curmudgeon becomes lovable, we are given to understand that he will not relapse. It is perhaps not surprising that the greatest comic dramatist of our age, so lately and so incredibly dead,31 should be interested in such subjects as creative evolution, social revolution, the advent of the Superman, and whatever metabiology is. Civilizations which stress the desirable rather than the real, and the religious as opposed to the scientific perspective, think of drama almost entirely in terms of comedy. In the classical drama of India, we are told, the tragic ending was regarded as bad taste, much as the manipulated endings of comedy are regarded as bad taste by novelists interested in scientific realism. One reason why there is such an emphasis on conversion is that the natural tendency of comedy is to include as many characters as possible in its new society. Comedy delivers us from humors, not from villains, and if we treat a humor too much like a villain, he becomes pathetic, the audience's sympathy switches over to him, and the balance of comic tone is upset. The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual from the community to which he is trying to belong.32 Even Shylock, whose humor of carving up his debtors with a knife goes a little beyond the merely ridiculous, is a pathetic figure, and nearly upsets the balance of tone. If his dramatic importance is ever so slightly exaggerated, he does upset it: I daresay that when Sir Henry Irving took the role the play became simply the tragedy of the Jew of Venice.33 The same thing is far more true of the alazon whose chief function has been to amuse the audience, especially the braggart. The original miles gloriosus in Plautus is a son of Jove and Venus who has killed an elephant with his fist and seven thousand men in one day's fighting. In other words, he is trying to

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put on a good show: the exuberance of his boasting helps to put the play over. The convention says that the braggart must be exposed, ridiculed, swindled, and beaten. But why should a professional dramatist, of all people, want so to harry a character who is putting on a good show—his show at that? Comedy, unlike tragedy, seems to move logically up toward the final curtain call in which all the characters are equally applauded. The word "plaudite" at the end of a Roman comedy would seem out of place in a tragedy, even if the applause itself is not.34 Hence, when we find Falstaff invited to the final feast in The Merry Wives, or Parolles allowed to forget his disgrace in All's Well, we are seeing a fundamental principle of comedy at work. Caliban is not a real exception: he is, like Milton's Satan, deficient in humanity, and the comic rule does not apply to him.35 We have next to determine how much area is covered by comedy, and what its limits are. If we look at tragedy, we can see that it has, so to speak, a positive and a negative pole. At one end is a feeling of acceptance: the tragedy is inevitable, and somehow right, in accord with our sense of reality. At the other end is a feeling of the incongruous: the tragedy seems avoidable and somehow wrong. Combined, they make up the paradox of pity and terror which is tragedy. Desdemona arouses pity and lago terror, but the tragedy belongs to Othello, and our feelings about him are ambiguous. The negative pole of tragedy, the sense of wrongness, we call irony. All tragedies contain irony, but as long as they deal with heroes, or predestined sacrificial victims, they will still be tragedies. Social or "all too human" tragedy, however, as we get it in Ibsen or Chekhov, is primarily ironic, and some nineteenth-century writers, including Thomas Hardy, find it difficult to distinguish the tragic from the ironic vision. So did Gloucester in Lear, and so does anyone who finds the real meaning of the tragedy of Lear in the speeches of Gloucester. Irony by itself is a vision of what in theology is called the fallen world: this is why in Shakespeare's only purely ironic play, Troilus and Cressida, we get the long harangues of Ulysses on the two primary facts of the fallen world: time and the chain of being [3.3.145-90; 1.3.75136]. Here we are coming close to the negative pole of comedy, the vision of the incongruous society which we recognize as wrong and yet a form of our own society. The conflict of eiron and alazon exists in tragedy as well as comedy, for the tragic hero who commits hybris is an alazon: even some of the stock types reappear. The touch of miles gloriosus in Othello, to say nothing of

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Tamburlaine, is unmistakable, and so is the touch of learned doctor in Hamlet and Faustus. The eiron is the one who laughs last, and in tragedy the eiron is, so to speak, on the other side of the play from the audience: the eiron is whatever produces the catastrophe, and we know nothing about it. In comedy the eiron is on the side of the audience.36 In a purely ironic comedy there are no virtuous or harmless characters to personify the audience's attitude. The only eiron is the audience itself. A singularly pure example of such a comedy is The Alchemist, where the return of the master of the house, instead of restoring the rightful social order, merely comes to terms with the one established by the rascals. Here the comic resolution is not expressed in the play: the audience laughs at the play, and the laughter detaches them from the society it represents. The audience's laughter is itself a moral judgement, as so many writers of comedy from Jonson onward have tried to explain. Nevertheless, it often offends the moralist, who cannot always trust the audience to detach itself. The peril of Narcissus, of falling in love with one's rippling reflection, besets both the audience with its vague and easy-going morality, and the dramatist who has lavished all his wit on his puppets. This, perhaps, was what did happen in Restoration comedy, and even Jonson, in his comedies after Bartholomew Fair, gives the impression of being no longer able to create humors so lifelike and yet so absurd that the audience can recognize them, and then, so to speak, bounce away from them. Comedy, said Renaissance critics, is imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, et imago veritatis.37 Ironic comedy, down near the negative pole, is clearly speculum consuetudinis, the way of the world, cosi fan tutte.38 This is the kind of comedy that Jonson at his best produced, but it is an easily exhaustible kind. In what sense, then, can comedy be imago veritatis as well, and does it have a positive pole corresponding to the heroic myth of tragedy? In ironic comedy the rightful society which marks the contrast to the humors is implicit only. The judgement is simply that whatever life should be like, it should be something different from this, but the social ideal is left undefined. The experience of comedy indicates that on the whole it had better be left undefined. When the comedy turns on the explicit assertion of moral or social values, we have melodrama or the morality play, where the alazons are not primarily humorous but primarily vicious or villainous. There is nothing wrong with these forms if the moral values are controversial. A surprising number of the best American plays of the last quarter-century have been moralities dealing

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with race prejudice or conspiracies against democracy. If they are not controversial, the insistence on them is apt to become priggish, which is why pure melodrama seems humorless in both the Jonsonian and the modern sense, and why it is so easy to ridicule. It is safer for a comic writer to give us a neutral hero who merely seems likeable enough, or, at most, someone who stands for a common-sense attitude to life, emancipated from the obsessions and ritual compulsions of the humors. This stock type we may call the plain dealer: he appears in Jonson's Squire Downright and in the Cleante of Moliere's Tartuffe. He is conventional, but his strength resides less in the conventions he observes than in his pragmatic attitude toward them. On a far more searching and profound level we have Measure for Measure, which illustrates among other things how far the explicit insistence on morality is from the spirit of comedy. A more ironical context makes the plain dealer turn into the malcontent or railer, the greatest Shakespearean example being of course Thersites. It is the same with more intellectual or philosophical conceptions of the form of the good. We have said that the philosopher is himself one of the favorite alazon types, and this seems his normal role.39 Philosophical Utopias fare no better, from Plato's republic in Aristophanes to the academic retreat in Love's Labor's Lost.40 It is of course true that Plato took a form of comic drama and developed it into the dramatic genre of the symposium, and it is also true that the symposium is a perfectly legitimate form of comedy. The Socrates of Plato is an eiron who ranks among the greatest characters of drama. In the symposium the hero who wins out represents the victory of an emerging dialectic. When Shaw says, in the Quintessence oflbsenism,, that a play ought to be an intelligent discus sion of a serious problem,41 he is really saying that there is no valid form of drama except the symposium.42 However, Shaw discovered in his own practice that what emerges from comedy is not a dialectic, but emancipation from all formulated principles of conduct. The shape of such a comedy is very clear in Shaw's own sketch Good King Charles, where even the most highly developed human types, the saintly Fox and the philosophical Newton, are shown to be humors by the mere simultaneous presence of other types of people. This is the comedy of Terence's motto "nothing human is alien to me,"43 the vision of the free society which by tolerating as wide a variety of life as possible purges the humors from all who belong to it. It may be noted that the king serves as the umpire of the discussion, and if a socialist writer is impelled to make this use of a royal figure, we can

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understand better the importance of the courtliness in Shakespeare which so outraged Walt Whitman, of how the aristocrat's code of liberal manners can be a valid symbol of free society in a comedy like Twelfth Night, whatever it may be in real life. The development of the pure symposium is shown in Plato's Republic, where Socrates begins in the first book as an ordinary dramatic eiron, achieving his expected victory over the alazon Thrasymachus. After that, the action moves inside Socrates' mind, so to speak, and it is within his mind and within the dialectic he has created that his audience sees the pattern of the just state. Here the symposium shows itself to be a dramatic but not a theatrical form, a form too which contains both tragedy and comedy, as Socrates indicates at the end of the dialogue which is explicitly called the Symposium. In Shakespeare, the contest of alazon and eiron is usually presented as a collision of two societies. We have first a world presented as similar to our own, but subject to an obviously absurd law, the law of killing strangers in the Comedy of Errors, of compulsory marriage in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the law that confirms Shylock's bond, or the attempts of Angelo in Measure for Measure to legislate people into righteousness. Sometimes the absurd law takes the simpler form of a tyrant's will, like the humorous Duke Frederick or the mad Leontes. This once established, the action normally moves into a strange and yet oddly familiar wonderland, the wood of Puck and Oberon, the forest of Arden, Portia's house in Belmont, the pastoral retreat of Florizel and Perdita, and from there the comic resolution is brought to birth. The bondage of the law is defeated by another kind of community, a world which is not admitted to be real, but which is sufficiently strong to enter the so-called real world and impose its form on it. This is a far more primitive comedy of humors than Jonson's, and one that succeeds in locating the positive pole of comedy, the imago veritatis. This positive pole is nothing that can be explicitly defined or formulated as an ideal society, but it lies deep in the common consciousness of the audience. It is—well, it is what you will, the world as you live it. Outside the theatre, it is the simply unreal world of the dream in which desire is irresistible. It is only in comedy like Shakespeare's that we understand how it determines the form of our waking actions. The world of the absurd law is headed for tragedy, and in comedy we are usually aware of having been delivered from tragedy. Even in laughter itself the element of release from something unpleasant seems to be very important. The tricky slave who carries out the comic resolution in

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Plautus is regularly threatened with the most appalling tortures if he should fail: we might refer this simply to the brutality of Roman life until we remember that boiling oil and burying alive turn up in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. The Cocktail Party and The Lady's Not for Burning are civilized and high-spirited comedies, but the cross appears in the background of the one and the stake in the background of the other. Shylock's knife and Angelo's gallows appear in Shakespeare, but as Shakespeare goes on he tends to put the tragic symbol nearer to the beginning of the comedy. The Winter's Tale and The Tempest are comedies that contain tragedies: they do not simply avoid them. The dramatic form here is one which approaches the form of the Book of Job. In Job there is first a tragic catastrophe, then a symposium based on it, then the disappearance of the symposium into the mind of the eiron, who in this case is God, and a comic resolution. The Tempest is a comedy of intrigue turned inside out, as it were, in which, instead of having Prospero exiled and brought back, we go with him into his exile. There all the materials both of comedy and tragedy are brought together and allowed to find their own levels, and the result is a coordinated social vision which again seems to be within the mind of Prospero. We think of Prospero as an artist, but he is a magician, the raiser of the tempest, the comic counterpart not of Hamlet or Caesar, but of the witches in Macbeth. When he renounces his magic, and pleads for release in the epilogue, he is resigning his mind to the audience's mind. The resolution of Shakespeare's greatest comedy, then, is not properly either tragic or comic: it has no relation to catharsis or judgement, but is simply the uniting of the whole theatre in a common vision. Since Shakespeare, this kind of resolution can only be attained by the help of music, which also seems to have something to do with transcending tragedy and comedy. We have said that Shakespeare's tradition survives chiefly in opera, and when we think of something comparable to Twelfth Night or The Tempest, we think, not of The Alchemist or Tartuffe, but of Figaro and The Magic Flute. The intimate and peculiar relation of Shakespeare's comedy to music needs no labouring, but we do not yet know what happens in music, or what kind of dramatic form it creates. But when the action of Figaro is halted and an aria like "Dove sono" begins, we no longer worry about the brittle and factitious relation of the comedy before us to life, for the bottom has dropped out of the world behind the stage. All that is left is the theatre, and the theatre for the moment is the real presence of a real world, timeless and spaceless, intelligent and

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organized, and full of an inexhaustible joy. And when Prospero also tries to tell us that nature is as much an illusion as the comedy that mirrors it, we are not being passively entertained by a beautiful speech, but participating in an experience that draws up all our resources of faith and of vision.

5

The Writer as Prophet: Milton, Blake, Swift, Shaw

During the summer of 1950 Frye presented four talks—on Milton, Swift, Blake, and Shaw—in CBC Radio's "Writer as Prophet" series. The talks were given on four consecutive Fridays—16 June, 23 June, 30 June, and 7 July. The programs were arranged by Robert Weaver, who two years earlier had been appointed program organizer in the talks and public affairs department at CBC. The cancelled passages, recorded in the notes, appear to have been made in the interest of fitting the talks into the time allotted. The typescripts—seven doublespaced pages each—are in the NFF, 1988, box 48, file 3. Milton There seem to be two kinds of great artists. One is the kind that just minds his own business, and hasn't any energy to spare in building up a personality. Shakespeare is an artist of that kind: he never did anything but write and produce plays. Nobody has any idea what his opinions were or even what sort of man he was. But there's another kind, and that's the kind Milton belonged to. Milton wasn't only a great poet, but a great man who wrote poetry. If he'd written no poetry at all, he'd still have made a big impression on English history and thought, and anyone reading his poetry is bound to have his opinion of it affected by what he knows or thinks of Milton as a man. Milton was born in 1608—we'll need a few dates, because his life was so closely attached to the history of his time. Queen Elizabeth had been dead for five years, and King James of Scotland was on the throne. James' motto was "Blessed are the peacemakers," which is a very good motto, but not an easy one for him to live up to. In the first place, he

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believed that he was responsible only to God for what he did, but he had to depend for money on his Parliaments, and his Parliaments had other ideas about responsibilities. In the second place, he was convinced that the Established Church of England ought to have bishops. "No bishop, no king," he said.1 But half that church consisted of Puritans, who wouldn't have bishops at any price. One Puritan pamphleteer said that the bishops were not the pillars but the caterpillars of the church. The class represented in Parliament was a powerful and wealthy middle class, planted mainly in the south and east of England, and especially in London. London was always the centre of resistance to the king. James was followed by Charles, who stepped up his father's policy, and in 1642 the Great Civil War between king and Parliament, which was more or less a war between Anglican and Puritan too, began. Like most great English poets, Milton was a Cockney, born in London within the sound of Bow Bells. Like most great English poets, he was brought up in a cultivated middle-class family, where he got a much better than average education. So Milton was almost sure to take the Parliamentary and Puritan side. He went to Cambridge with the idea of going into the Church, but his point of view even then was too Puritan, and he said he was "church-outed by the prelates,"2 meaning the bishops. Before the Civil War actually began there was a cold war of pamphlets and propaganda, and Milton threw himself into that. He wrote five pamphlets trying to prove that there shouldn't be any bishops in the Church of England. But when the war actually began, Milton left the Parliamentary cause to the army for the time being, and started working out his own ideas. Milton, like Shelley and Byron after him, was a revolutionary thinker who tried all the time to fight for human liberty. That was why he had joined the Parliament and the Puritans in the first place. But he was also a deeply religious man, and unlike Shelley and Byron, the problem of human liberty doesn't start with man for him: it starts with God. If you want man to be free, the next question is, free from what? Milton's answer was that man enslaves himself, but God wants him to be free. The Gospel of Christ is the message of man's deliverance from idols and tyrants. Man becomes free by doing the will of God, which means two things: one, that nobody really wants freedom except good men, and two, that man can't do anything directly to free himself. But man can show that he wants to be set free by God, and he can do this by knocking down his idols and kicking out his tyrants. That, according to Milton,

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was what England was doing in the Civil War, when it was getting rid of bishops and kings and censors and other useless baggage. So Milton hoped that England would do for the modern world what the Israelites had done for the ancient world: become a nation chosen by God to teach other nations the way to freedom.3 But in working out his ideas about liberty himself, Milton developed some ideas that turned out to be far too advanced for practically anybody at that time, so from about 1643on Milton was a political party and a religious sect all by himself. For example: Milton had just married a girl much too young for him who belonged to a strongly Royalist family. After a few weeks of Milton, she decided to go home to mother. Now, thought Milton, if one believes in the freedom of man, surely a man whose life is in danger of being crippled by marriage to an unsuitable wife ought to be allowed to get rid of her. But all Christian churches at that time condemned divorce because Jesus had declared marriage to be indissoluble. Did Jesus, asked Milton, really say that every marriage ceremony tied the partners together for life? Not a bit of it. What Jesus meant was that a true marriage, which is a life-long companionship, is indissoluble. But a marriage ceremony doesn't automatically produce a life-long companionship, and if it doesn't, man can always put asunder what God has never joined together in the first place. Such speculations as this didn't make Milton any more popular with Puritans, nor did his attack on the censorship of books, Areopagitica, which he wrote just after the Parliament had brought a new censorship law in. However, the parties in England soon regrouped themselves. The year after Areopagitica, the Parliament captured the King and won the first civil war. In another year or two the second civil war began. This one was between Oliver Cromwell's Ironsides and a new Royalist coalition, and Milton joined the Cromwellians. In the second civil war Charles I got his head cut off, and Milton stepped forward as one of the few men of culture and learning in England willing to defend the execution.4 So he was given an official job under the Cromwellian government.5 Oliver Cromwell was a bit more tolerant than the Puritans: for instance, it was under Cromwell that the Jews were allowed to live in England for the first time in four hundred years. And it was under Cromwell that Milton wrote pamphlets which, in spite of all the limitations in his thinking, make him one of the great pioneers of religious toleration. But the years of Oliver Cromwell's rule were a hard period in Milton's life. To begin with, he went totally blind in the middle of writing propa-

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ganda for it. That enabled his enemies to make jokes about England's "blind guides." Then, the government of Cromwell was a military dictatorship, and Milton didn't like dictatorships. He accepted Cromwell as a temporary measure, and told him in one of his pamphlets that he would have to do until the English people found better. It's perhaps to Cromwell's credit that he would let his paid officials talk to him like that. But Cromwell died in 1658, and that left the army as the only source of authority in the country. In another year, it was pretty clear that they were going to bring back the monarchy. To the very last gasp Milton fought for the Republic. He proposed what he called a "Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth"—in other words a permanent Senate. He realized that his cause was lost and says at the end of his pamphlet: "Thus much I should perhaps have said . . . though what I have spoke should happen . . . to be the last words of our expiring liberty."6 As a matter of fact they were not even the last words of the expiring Milton. After Charles II entered London in triumph, Milton was arrested and deprived of office, and for a time his life was in some danger. In an enlightened age like our own, he would, of course, have gone straight to a concentration camp, but the seventeenth century let him finish his work and die in his bed. During the twenty years that Milton spent in politics he wrote very little poetry, except a few sonnets. His great poetry was written before and after this time. He was scribbling verses from his early teens on, but it wasn't until he was twenty-one and a student at Cambridge that he wrote his great Christmas poem, the Nativity Ode, which was the first thing he wrote that showed him a major poet. From that time on he felt that he had been called by God to write poetry, and that if he didn't write it he'd be in the position of the man in the Gospel who buried his talent. A major poet needs a major poem, and for at least the next thirty years Milton was preoccupied with the idea of writing a great religious epic. He was asked to write a sort of valedictory when he graduated from Cambridge, which was supposed to be in Latin. After a while he suddenly broke into English and informed his audience that some day he was going to write a great poem about heaven and hell that would really astonish them. (He left Cambridge and instead of taking up a profession, he retired to read and study for some years. In that period of retirement he wrote two of his greatest poems, Comus and Lycidas.) But still his epic haunted him, and he must have been continually under a nervous strain that we can hardly imagine. On the one hand, there was the impulse to

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get at his epic and get it done, and on the other, there were not only all the interruptions, but an equally strong impulse to postpone writing it until he was ready for it. In the middle of this he went blind. His mental recovery from the shock of his blindness was the most heroic effort of his life, and it finally taught him how to wait. Paradise Lost comes out of the defeat of the English republic, the loss of all Milton's hopes for it, and the failure of his twenty-year fight for liberty. It's natural, then, that Paradise Lost should deal mainly with two questions: why did man lose his liberty, and why does he fight so hard against all God's efforts to give it back to him? To answer these questions Milton goes back to the story of Adam and Eve. Once upon a time, that story said, man lived in a city and a garden. The city was the city of God, a free and happy community of angels, and in the garden all man's food grew by itself and all the animals were man's pets. Now he lives in the wilderness, most animals avoid him, and his cities are full of crime and misery. And yet, in everything constructive that man does, he shows that he's trying to find his way back to the city and the garden he lost. In telling once again the story of how man was driven out of the garden by listening to the voice of the serpent, Milton was convinced that an event had actually occurred that was more or less like that. We may not want to take the story so literally, as he does, but still there's another question: what keeps man from going back to his lost paradise? The answer is the story of Satan, the sombre figure that meets us everywhere we turn in Paradise Lost. Satan, we're told, became jealous of God, and that made him separate himself from God and his community of angels. At first that made him feel that he had got away from God's apron strings and become free for the first time. But he soon found that being alone made him a prisoner to his own price. In heaven there's a continual dance and song, and you can't dance or sing without cooperation. In Milton's hell the sense of a community has somehow been broken down, and what that produces we know from our experience of human life. When people stop cooperating with each other, when they get jealous or suspicious or frightened, they lose two things: their freedom and their power to create. Hell becomes almost automatically a tyranny with Satan as its dictator. Both Milton's God and Milton's Satan have plenty of energy, but God puts his energy into creation, and Satan can't use his for anything but destruction. Now after Adam and Eve are pushed out of Paradise, they find themselves in a world which is, so to speak, shared by God and Satan. From

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now on man is subject to the pull of two influences. On one side, there's Satan, with all his cleverness and courage and ruthlessness and his amazing will to destroy. Man tends to admire that: Satan is usually man's model when man tries to be heroic, and it's this admiration for Satan that produces all our wars and all our destructive heroes. On the other side, there's the God who works for the freedom of man. But the people on God's side aren't popular in society; they keep saying that wars are a waste of time, and that the society man ought to belong to is free and equal. In the last book of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michae tells Adam what's going to happen in history, and shows him two figures. One is Nimrod, the "mighty hunter" who built the tower of Babel and was the first to claim authority over other men. The other is the despised, ridiculed and tortured Jesus of Nazareth. At the one pole of human life is the God who becomes Man; at the other is the man who becomes God, or tries to, the infallible dictator, the king who reigns by divine right, the ruler who pushes us around and tells us what we have to do—generally fight. When we follow one, we find ourselves doing what he does, loving, creating, and setting free; when we follow the other we find ourselves hating, destroying, and enslaving. But the tyrant wouldn't be there if he weren't in us first; if he weren't the shadow of our own pride, the destroying demon who makes us first alone and then afraid. Swift There must be very few books that can be read at all stages of life from childhood to old age. I don't know just how many there are, but Huckleberry Finn, Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels would certainly be three of them. But Gulliver's Travels is different from the other two, because when you go back to it as an adult, you find it's a different book. You find that what you thought was just a fairy tale is really full of political satire and all sorts of allusions to eighteenth-century England. You also find certain passages that weren't in your child's edition, and some of those passages may make you wonder if Gulliver's Travels, for the adult, isn't just a child's fairy tale gone sour. You may even feel that you'd have done better not to have gone back to it at all. I had a student tell me once that in her opinion the author of Gulliver's Travels was a dirty-minded grouch. I think she was wrong, but a lot of people have agreed with her.

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Swift was fifty-four when he began to write Gulliver's Travels, and by that time he certainly had had enough setbacks to make him a grouch. He was a priest of the Church of England who never made any secret of the fact that he thought he ought to be a bishop, but he never was one. He was a friend of most of the poets and wits of London, and loved being with them, but he had to live in Dublin, and he thought that was exile. He was an ambitious politician, but his party was down and out. He was arrogant, and he could be cruel, and it's very lucky for him and for English literature that he didn't get everything he wanted. But he was a fighter who never stopped fighting: he was turning Ireland upside down all the time he was writing Gulliver's Travels, and if he'd really been so fed up with the human race, he wouldn't have had either the courage or the will to be a fighter. He was born in Ireland in the year that Milton published Paradise Lost—1667—and while he was growing up the two-party system of government was getting itself established in English politics. There were the Tories, who stood for the Crown, the landed aristocracy, and the High Church, and there were the Whigs, who stood for the Parliament, the new mercantile middle class, and for more of a Low Church policy. The Whigs were imperialists, so they were violently anti-French, and whenever the Whigs were in power there was likely to be a war with France. Swift got into public life in Queen Anne's reign, when the Whigs were keeping a French war going long after they had won it. The English and their allies were led by the Duke of Marlborough, one of the greatest generals in history, and they'd won a string of brilliant victories, but the English public was beginning to feel it had had enough. Swift had started out as a Whig, but now he turned Tory and began to work for peace. He accused the Duke of Marlborough of deliberately prolonging the war for his own profit. The Duke, said Swift, was as covetous as hell, and as ambitious as the prince of it. Finally the Whigs were thrown out of office, the Tories went in, and the war stopped. For a few months Swift was an important man, because the two Tory leaders, Bolingbroke and Oxford, were very jealous of each other, and Swift was about the only man who could hold them together. But the next year Queen Anne died, and the Whigs staged a comeback. The new king, George I, was pretty well in the Whigs' pocket, and the Tories didn't get another look-in for the next fifty years. So Swift had to go back to Ireland, where he'd been made Dean of St. Patrick's cathedral in Dublin. For some years he was in retirement,

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licking his wounds and looking around for another fight. He hadn't long to wait. For the last thirty years at least Ireland had been one of the worst governed countries in Europe. When Swift was twenty-one, the Whigs had taken the lead in putting through the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, when William III was brought over from Holland to make sure of the Protestant succession. But the glorious Revolution hadn't been glorious for Ireland: it had been a bloody civil war, and at the end of it the governing Protestant minority clamped down the most ferocious penal laws on the Catholics. They expropriated most of their property and shut them out of practically all civil rights, from holding public office to getting an ordinary education. But on top of this the whole people of Ireland, Protestants included, were being continually fleeced by England: the English politicians seemed to think of Ireland as nothing but a sponge to squeeze. Swift wrote an anonymous pamphlet telling the Irish to develop their own manufactures and boycott English imports. The government couldn't find him, but they arrested the printer. The jury acquitted the printer, and the judge sent the jury back nine times until they had to bring in another verdict. Then the news came that an English hardware merchant named Wood had acquired the right to issue a new copper coinage in Ireland. (As a matter of fact he'd bought the patent from the king's mistress.) Swift thought that Wood was just a profiteer trying to make money out of debasing the Irish coinage, so he issued a series of leaflets called the Drapier Letters attacking Wood, and he managed to raise such a row that the whole project had to be called off. The government offered a reward of £500 for the author of the Drapier Letters: everyone in Dublin knew who had written them, but not a soul could be found to say so. From that time on Swift was the idol of the Irish people. As an English High Church Tory, Swift was a little taken aback to find himself defending a largely Catholic Irish populace: he kept grumbling that he hated the sight of the Irish, and if he was leaving Dublin all his money to build a mental hospital, it was only because he couldn't think of any town that needed one more. But the Irish people weren't fooled by any of this, and they still haven't forgotten Swift. A few years later the misery of Ireland goaded Swift into writing one of the most terrible satires in literature, the Modest Proposal. The trouble with Ireland, says the Modest Proposal, is that it has no food and a lot of mouths to be fed. The author has been told by an American (he means an American Indian) "that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed,

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roasted, baked, or boiled."7 So he proposes that a number of children should be set aside to be fattened up for the meat market. He admits that they might be an expensive dish, and therefore, he says, "very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children."8 You can almost feel your brains beginning to soften when you read the Modest Proposal: the argument is so logical, and there's a horrible plaintive kindliness in the tone, as though he really had nothing in mind except, as he says, to relieve the poor, and afford some pleasure to the rich. But even Swift couldn't keep this sort of thing up indefinitely. He wrote another pamphlet that begins in a similar way, but before long he says, "my heart is too heavy to continue this irony longer."9 Swift was a good hater, but he also had a great capacity for friendship. The poet Alexander Pope, who wasn't the easiest person in the world to get along with himself, said that Swift was "the best-natured and most indulgent man I know."10 He loved company, and his house in Ireland always was full of guests. He got gloomy and irritable only in his last years: when about seventy, he began to suffer terribly from earaches and roarings in his head, and he finally had a stroke that paralyzed both his body and his mind for the rest of his life. He took the same view of friendship in his relations with women. He never married, and rather distrusted marriage because he thought it would interfere with real companionship. That, apparently, was why he didn't marry the woman he loved, whom he called Stella. But people couldn't believe this, and before Swift was dead a curious scandal had got started that's still being raked up. Maybe Swift and Stella had a secret marriage. Maybe Stella was an illegitimate daughter of Swift's first employer, Sir William Temple. Swift met her in Temple's house, and people said she looked like Temple. Come to think of it, Swift looked a little like Temple: maybe he was an illegitimate son of Temple, which would make him Stella's half brother. Maybe they had a secret marriage and then discovered they were brother and sister. This is clearly a parlor game that any number may play. Personally, I think it's more fun to read the wonderful enormous endless letter called the Journal to Stella that Swift kept writing to her for three years, and ranges from political gossip to baby talk. This is supposed to be a series on the writer as prophet, and last week I was speaking about Milton, who certainly took the prophetic line, but was so different from Swift that you may wonder how I could squeeze

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them both into the same series. Milton sided with Parliament against the king, for the Puritans against the Anglicans, and with Cromwell against the Irish. Swift was a High Church Tory and a defender of the Irish people. Milton and Swift couldn't have been further apart in the things they applied their beliefs to. Milton fought for liberty all his life, and the epitaph on Swift's tomb says that Swift did too.11 Swift must have thought this was true because he wrote the epitaph himself. One thing that Swift certainly did believe in was simplicity. He wrote simply: anybody who can read at all can read Swift: he's never hard to read except when he's taking off bad writers. He lived simply, and in a rather dirty age he knew that living simply means keeping clean. It's because of his love of simple cleanliness that he feels, and makes his reader feel, so much disgust and nausea at dirt and filth of all kinds. He's never tired of making fun of people who spend all their money and time on food and clothes and jewelry, and he says very unkind things about women who paint but don't wash. He thought simply: he believed that common sense ought to be the final judge in everything, and he got suspicious whenever the expert began to get out of its range. It was this belief in simplicity and common sense that corresponds in Swift to what we'd call now a belief in democracy. He thought that the source of all political power lay with the people as a whole, and that all honest people of average intelligence ought to know what was going on. He attacked lawyers because he thought that real laws ought to be very few and very simple. He attacked science and mathematics, partly because he saw that if science got too technical and too far away from the public it could become a danger as well as a benefit. He attacked secret diplomacy, because he knew it usually meant war. He attacked corruptions in religion because he saw that the simplicity of the Gospel was getting lost in all the conflicts of sects and in the pressure of worldly interests on the Church. Wherever he turned, it was affectation and vanity that seemed to be the enemy. It was vanity that made people want to go beyond common sense in everything from clothes to scholarship. And vanity develops the desire to push one's own way ahead of others. Swift was a Tory because he distrusted the middle-class basis of the Whig party and its middleclass philosophy of every man getting all he can for himself. But he thought that vanity was too deeply rooted in man ever to develop a really simple and free society: Swift never expected anything from political action except a kind of holding operation. That threw him back for his

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real social beliefs on the Church. Nobody knew better than Swift how corrupt the Church could get, and nobody said so in plainer words. But for all that the Church, for him, was a community that had got its standards of simplicity and freedom from God: it would always be responsible to God for maintaining those standards, and so it would always stand for something that was not quite the same thing as the world. Swift took a low view of human nature in general, but so does Christianity. What sounds in Gulliver's Travels like bitterness and disgust at the whole human race is really, when you look at it more carefully, the detachment of a highly civilized man. If we can get this clear, then we don't need to miss the terrific sweep and exuberance of Gulliver's Travels, and all its high spirits and good humor. There's no mystery about that book's appeal for children: it really is the fairy tale that children think it is. And there's something in Swift's own reaction to the book that shows that he could still believe in fairy tales himself. He wrote to his friend Pope to tell him that he'd finished writing his Travels, and says: "they are admirable things, and will wonderfully mend the world."12 Blake Many great writers have made a big impression on the times they lived in: they've been active in religious and political conflicts and have used their talents as writers to help make contemporary history. Of the four writers that I'm talking about in this series, that's true of three, Milton, Swift, and Bernard Shaw. Blake is the exception. He made very little impression on his time either as a poet or as a painter. He was practically unknown during his life and for nearly fifty years after his death. He didn't exactly starve in a garret, but he made a pretty thin living, and without the help of two or three very generous people, he couldn't have done much of the work he did. Now, of course, he's recognized as one of the very greatest geniuses England has ever produced, both as poet and as painter, and his paintings and engravings today sell for enormous prices. The history of his reputation is like a Cinderella story, except that the fairy godmother arrived much too late to be any use to him. Blake made his living as an engraver. He was born in 1757, which was long before photography was invented. In those days all illustrations to books or newspapers had to be engraved by someone who was a good enough artist to copy the original design on a metal plate so it could be

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reproduced. It was possible to make a fair living as an engraver, and when Blake showed a talent for drawing as a small boy his father promptly took him off to a master engraver to be his apprentice and learn the trade. His father was a shopkeeper who couldn't afford expensive educations for his five children, and Blake never went to university—in fact he had very little schooling at all. The first man his father took him to was a man named Ryland, and on the way home the boy said he didn't like Ryland's face: he looked as though he were born to be hanged. No biographer of Blake has ever been able to resist adding that Ryland was hanged for forgery, fourteen years later. So Blake went to another engraver, a man named Basire, and stayed with him for seven years, then studied at the Royal Academy. Basire taught him to love medieval art and the great Renaissance painters, Raphael and Michelangelo. At the Royal Academy Blake found Sir Joshua Reynolds in charge, and a fashionable technique of portrait painting in vogue that Blake called "blotting and blurring."13 Blake, partly because he was an engraver, always laid great emphasis on sharp clear outlines. Blake tells us that one of his Academy teachers tried to wean him away from his preference for the older style of drawing, and to get him interested in modern and what he called "more finished" drawings of Dutch and English painters.14 Blake, then about twenty-three, remarked that these drawings weren't even begun, and so couldn't very well be finished. Blake decided that he had no use for oil painting, which he thought was like painting with colored mud, and for the rest of his life he worked almost entirely in watercolor. It was because of this that his pictures were rejected from the Royal Academy exhibitions, which accepted only oils, so Blake found himself pretty isolated from the painting market. He'd started to write poetry very early—a lovely little lyric beginning "How sweet I roamed from field to field" was written when he was about fourteen. Before he was twenty he had a book of poems ready, and some friends helped him publish them. It was the only book he ever did publish. When he was about thirty he invented a scheme of engraving his own poems, a scheme that combined all his talents as poet, painter, and engraver. The general idea of it was probably something like this: he took a metal plate, zinc or copper, and drew a design on it in some kind of liquid—I don't know what it was made of—that would resist acid. In the middle of the design he wrote, or rather printed, the words of the poem, back handed, using the same liquid. Then he put the metal plate in an acid bath. The acid ate all around the design, so the design stood

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out in relief. Then he inked the plate and stamped it on paper, where the words of the poem would be right side up. Then he, or his wife, colored the design by hand. This scheme had the advantage of making him independent of publishers: it had the disadvantage of making his poetry almost unknown during his life, as hardly anyone ever got to know about it except a few connoisseurs of painting. Only once in his life did Blake make any great effort to become a public figure. He had noticed that painting had long ceased to be a public art: painters never produced anything but individual oil paintings, portraits, and the like, for the more well-to-do people to buy. In the days of Raphael and Michelangelo, however, most great painting was done on the walls of public buildings, churches, and the like, where everybody could see it. Blake argued that if this art of wall painting were revived in England, a very dirty and dingy country would suddenly find itself in possession of works of art, painters would find employment, and public taste could be developed. Blake had invented a new method of fresco painting, to be put on canvas instead of directly on the plaster of the wall, so that the picture could be taken off and changed instead of being left on the wall as long as the building stayed there. So Blake held an exhibition, the only one of his life, and printed catalogues explaining what his new process was and how the pictures in his exhibit illustrated it. However, only one man reviewed the exhibition, and he said merely that Blake had up till now been a harmless lunatic, but if he kept on with this sort of thing he really would have to be shut up.15 After that, Blake went on with his own business, and never tried to improve public taste again. Towards the end of his life he began to get a few glimmers of recognition. A group of younger painters gathered around him and he began to meet some of the literary figures of the time, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb. He lived quietly with his wife, Catherine, always very poor, but apparently not unhappy. His wife was a grocer's daughter who had signed the marriage register with an x when he married her, but he taught her to read and write and help him color his pictures, and she seems to have been devoted to him. One of the few stories about Blake that I believe describes how a visitor came to their house towards the end of Blake's life and remarked on the absence of soap. Catherine drew herself up and said, "Mr. Blake's skin don't dirt." Blake watched the contemporary scene as an observer rather than as a partisan like Milton or Swift. He felt very sympathetic with both the

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American and the French revolutions, and wrote enthusiastic poems about both; but he couldn't help seeing that the Americans kept on owning Negro slaves, and that the French government just went from the royal tyranny of King Louis XVI to the imperial tyranny of Napoleon. He loved England's "green and pleasant land,"16 but he also saw all the horrors of unemployment, of slums and the dreadful poor houses and orphanages that Dickens was later to attack, the filth and degradation of the poor and the callousness of the rich. He writes: Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand? [Holy Thursday, 11.1-4]

England and France were almost continually at war during Blake's life, so he never was able to get out of England and see the great works of art on the Continent. Blake, like Milton, Chaucer, and Keats, was a London Cockney, and I think he would have agreed with Samuel Johnson, who said that the full tide of human existence is to be found at Charing Cross.17 Blake spent his whole life in London, except for three miserable years when he was on the Sussex coast, a good fifty miles from the full tide of human existence. He loved London, and walked around its streets seeing all the wonder and all the horror of one of the world's greatest cities. It was a squalid, dirty, and iniquitous city, and he saw all of that: I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe ... But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse [London, 11.1-4,13-16]

That's from a poem that he called London. But London also meant something bigger to him. It was one of the whole succession of cities in the world that man keeps building up and knocking down again, but it was still more than that. London became for Blake what Jerusalem was for

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the Old Testament prophets: it was a symbol of the eternal city in the human mind, the home of the soul and the city of God. The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood: Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalems pillars stood. [Jerusalem, pi. 27]

Everywhere the poet turns, he sees misery and cruelty: that's the world of experience. If that were all there were to life, it wouldn't be worthwhile to go on living. But men also have pictures and dreams on their minds of a better kind of life, dreams of Utopias and heavens and gardens of Eden and New Jerusalems where there is perfect peace and happiness. Whenever we dream such dreams, we go back to our childhood, to the time when we thought the world made sense because our lives were taken care of. That is what Blake calls the world of innocence. So Blake wrote a series of poems called Songs of Innocence, which describe this happy children's world, and another series called Songs of Experience, which show the world as it really is. Each poem in the Songs of Experience corresponds to one in the Songs of Innocence, and reads like a parody of it. Here is part of a Song of Innocence called The Divine Image: For Mercy Pity Peace and Love Is God our father dear: And Mercy Pity Peace and Love, Is Man his child and care ... Then every man of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine Love Mercy Pity Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, rurk or jew. Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too. [11. 4-8,13-20]

This is all very fine, but we know that in this world peace only means the end of war, and that pity only means that someone has been cruel. So in

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the Songs of Experience Blake says, in the poem corresponding to the one I just read: Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody poor: And Mercy no more could be, If all were as happy as we. And mutual fear brings peace: Till the selfish loves increase. That Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care. [The Human Abstract, 11.1-8]

There's another poem in the Songs of Innocence called The Lamb, where the innocent lamb becomes a symbol of the God who made it, which is why we speak of the Lamb of God. But God in this world got killed by bad men, and lambs get eaten by tigers. Did God make a ferocious wildcat like the tiger, and if so, why? So the older we get the more we realize that the child's feeling that the world was made for his benefit is just something we have to outgrow. But Blake says no. It's very important to keep the vision of that simple and child-like world always in our minds no matter what the real world is like. Because having that world in our minds doesn't make us want to run away from the world we have to live in. It gives us a model to work by. We have to take the world as we find it, and we're not being realistic if we don't see that the world as we find it is quite a mess. But we're not being realistic either if we don't see that human life ought to be simpler, more sensible and freer than it is—in other words, more like the child's world. And if human life ought to be more sensible than it is, it ought to be made more sensible than it is. That's how we can tell the real worker in human society from the slacker or the drudge. Slacking and drudging are not real work. Real work builds cities and plants gardens and farms, it domesticates animals and makes men co-operate with each other. Slavery and tyranny hinder real work: they make us waste our time fighting wars. Real work leads us to freedom and equality. So Blake, as he looks at London, sees the New Jerusalem in it with the child's innocent eye. But there are a lot of people in London: it isn't just his childhood he thinks of, but the sort of universal childhood that the Bible speaks of when it says that once men lived with the gods in innocence

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and freedom—the same story that Milton tells us in Paradise Lost: And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God In England's pleasant pastures seen! ["Jerusalem," the hymn, 11.1-4] What the poet sees now are the "dark Satanic mills/' the hideous sweatshops that starve women and murder children, but it is the poet's business to point out that a clean and free world is hidden behind them: I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant land. ["Jerusalem," the hymn, 11.13-16] Shaw In Shakespeare's day the great arts in England were the public arts, music and drama. In the next three hundred years music and drama gradually declined and more individualized arts like the novel and the essay came up. The social reason for this was the rise of a wealthy middle class, which went in for private enterprise in literature, as well as in business. But Ireland, which was more conservative in manners and too poor to develop a wealthy middle class, could still produce dramatists. The playwrights who have held the stage since Shakespeare's time are Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Synge, and Sean O'Casey: every one an Irishman. Every one has been a writer of comedy too: the Irish seemed to turn to wit and realism as English middle-class taste got more sentimental and romantic. Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, ninety-four years ago. His mother was a singer, and his early training was mostly in music. His first published work was a letter to a Dublin newspaper written when he was nineteen. The famous American team of evangelists, Moody and Sankey, had just come to Dublin, and Shaw's letter was to the effect that if this sort of thing was religion he preferred atheism. His relatives didn't like this letter, and the next year he went off to London to join his mother, who had started to teach singing there. In the next nine years he earned six pounds by his pen. In other words, his mother supported him while

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he learned to write. As he says: "I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it."18 He wrote five novels, none of which any publisher would take. The first one, which he wrote at twenty-two, was called Immaturity. It was, as he says, well named. He said too that he put the manuscript away in the attic where the mice chewed it, although even they couldn't finish it. However, when he became famous he dug out another copy of Immaturity that the mice hadn't chewed and published it in his collected works. Shaw is no longer immature, but he has always been thrifty. It was partly thrift too, in these early days when he was poor and unknown, that led him to become the vegetarian and teetotaler that he still is. But he acquired two things by his long nine-year ordeal of poverty and dependence. One was the finest prose style of modern times. The second was the discovery that he didn't want to write novels at all, but plays. At first, of course, Shaw was handicapped by his lack of knowledge of life: when he started in, he really didn't know anything except the fact that he wanted to write. He educated himself, partly by reading in the British Museum, partly by going out in the evenings to all sorts of debating societies and discussion groups. In the course of this he decided that the only way to get any concrete knowledge of the world he lived in was to study economics. He read Karl Marx and became a socialist, though never a Marxist. In May 1884, he dropped in on a tiny discussion group, five months old, called the Fabian Society, which proposed to bring socialism to England by constitutional means. The minutes for that evening record that the meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Mr. Bernard Shaw. The note is in Shaw's handwriting. Shaw liked the Fabian Society, because its members didn't take themselves quite as seriously as some of the others, and he persuaded a young friend of his named Sidney Webb to join it. Sidney Webb brought in others, including the brilliant woman who became Beatrice Webb, and the Fabian Society started one of the greatest political movements of modern times, a movement which has already completely changed the history of the world and is by no means finished yet. It was through working with the Fabian Society that Shaw learned enough about modern life to become a great dramatist. For years he slugged away writing pamphlets and making speeches, serving on vestry boards and municipal councils; and when he began to write plays about the conditions of life in Victorian society, he knew what he was talking about.

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Shaw took a step nearer his real job when he became, first a music critic, and then a dramatic critic. As a music critic he fought for Wagner, and as a dramatic critic he fought for Ibsen. In both cases he maintained that a good play ought to be a serious discussion of a serious problem, as Ibsen's were.19 He didn't realize himself at the time that by his criticisms he was laying down a propaganda barrage for his own kind of play. The London theatre in 1890 wasn't much of a place. There was hardly any classical drama except a certain amount of very distorted Shakespeare. Shaw continually asserted that there was too much Shakespeare in the theatre, and that by Ibsen's standards the plays of Shakespeare were the work of a commonplace mind with no ideas. Contemporary plays were mostly corny melodrama and slapstick farce. It was a noisy and often a rowdy theatre. Shaw ends one of his criticisms by asking if the gentleman who threw a sausage at him the night before would please throw cabbage next time, because he was a vegetarian, and sausages were a waste on him. But he carried on night after night, demolishing all the melodramas and farces in their turn, and applauding every tendency to make a play a serious discussion of a serious problem. When people complained of the violence of his assault on mediocre plays, Shaw merely told them that they ought to see what he did not say. Gradually Shaw forced his way into the theatres as a playwright. He became a friend of William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, who had sat beside him in the reading room of the British Museum, and wondered who that strange young man with the red beard was who was alternately reading Marx's Das Kapital and studying the score of Wagner's Tristan. So Archer and Shaw decided to collaborate on a play of their own. Shaw was supposed to be good at dialogue and Archer at plot, so Archer drafted the plot and Shaw began writing the play. However, Shaw didn't care much for the plot, and changed it around so much that Archer withdrew from the collaboration. Shaw promptly borrowed another plot from Dickens and made it into his first play, Widowers' Houses. The play is about slum profiteering, but its real power comes from the fact that it shows how much of the comfort and respectability of the middle class is made possible only through the misery of others. It was the first of a series of what Shaw later called "unpleasant" plays. Another unpleasant play, Mrs. Warren's Profession, dealt with the trading in prostitution— what would now be called the white slave trade. This play was of course promptly banned in England, as half a dozen of Shaw's plays have been. English drama has always been crippled by a functionary called the Lord

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Chamberlain, who acts as a censor of plays, and who was originally appointed by an eighteenth-century prime minister with a very corrupt government who wanted to stop the dramatists from attacking the corruption. But the banning in England was nothing compared to the hullabaloo that was made over Mrs. Warren's Profession in New York. The reason for that was that some of the New York newspapers made a good deal of revenue out of the white slave traffic, and the one that made the most noise about Shaw's play was shortly afterwards convicted of this and heavily fined. Shaw's reputation as a dramatist was secure, but not his popularity, so he switched over to a series of "pleasant" plays, which include two of his best loved comedies, Arms and the Man and Candida. After a triumphant performance of Arms and the Man Shaw was called before the curtain. In front of him was a wildly applauding audience and one solitary hiss from the gallery. Shaw looked up and said: "I agree with you entirely, sir, but what are we among so many?" When the twentieth century arrived Shaw was in a position to make the public listen to his serious discussions of serious problems. John Bull's Other Island discusses the Irish situation; Androcles and the Lion the psychology of the martyr; Major Barbara the problem of power; Heartbreak House the degeneracy of the cultured class of Europe; Misalliance the Victorian family, and Getting Married is, not unnaturally, about marriage, which Shaw defines as the institution combining the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Being serious, of course, has nothing to do with being solemn: many solemn people are quite superficial. Once Shaw went to an oculist who told him that his vision was perfectly normal. Shaw assumed that he meant just like everyone else's, but the oculist said no: very few people have normal vision. This explained to Shaw the nature of his own genius; he could see what other people saw, but he could see it without distortion. Somerset Maugham tells a story about a very simple and honest woman who always told the exact truth. In no time she was the wit of London, and her epigrams and bon mots were quoted everywhere. That's the formula for most of Shaw's wit. He takes the role of the child in Andersen's fairy tale about the emperor's new clothes. He's not a cynic or an iconoclast or a troublemaker or a self-advertising buffoon, but just somebody who can't see that the emperor has anything on. This is the attitude that he takes to the democratic society of his own time. The great weakness Shaw finds in democracy is that it requires people to govern themselves, which he says most people are far too lazy

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and ignorant of public affairs to do. So the best that man can hope for in the present state of things is to get leaders who have some sense of responsibility and will act in the interests of the people as a whole. Such leaders will be simple, unpretentious, hard-working, capable administrators who take the same attitude to human society that an efficient housewife takes to a dirty and untidy house. It is in this light that Shaw sees Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc: in fact most of the characters whom he really admires in his plays act rather like busy and bothered housewives. But the real heroes and heroines in life are never loved by the people they are trying to help. The story of Jesus in the Gospels shows that perfect love for man inspired a good deal of perfect hatred in return, and that is also the theme of Shaw's greatest play, St. Joan. It was not only hypocrites and scoundrels but the best and most sincere people of Joan's time who put her to her death, just because they couldn't stand her simplicity and her efficiency. Then the world changes its mind and makes her a saint, but when she proposes to come back to the world, she finds that the world hates saints as much as it ever did, and can only tolerate them when they've been dead a long time. It's rather curious that the greatest play of a writer of comedy should be a tragedy, and it sounds as though Shaw, for all his wit and charm, takes a fairly gloomy view of the human race. What he says is, in fact, that man will never solve his problems until he evolves into a higher type of man, or what he called a superman. Shaw never tired of attacking Charles Darwin's explanation that things evolve by adapting themselves to a changing environment. Forms of life don't evolve by luck, Shaw says: they evolve by the creative will inside them. In a conscious being like man that will is partly a conscious will. In Shaw's longest play, Back to Methuselah, which is really five plays stuck together, some scientists decide that man will go the way of the dinosaurs unless he wills to live longer, say for three hundred years. So a race of human beings develops that can live for that length of time. Don't ask me how: I don't profess to understand how Shaw expects his creative evolution to work. It's very cold comfort to be told that there's no help for us except in a future superman, especially when we're told it in plays as long as Back to Methuselah and Man and Superman, which are certainly better adapted to people with a lot more time to live than we have. The point is, according to Shaw, that once you realize that the superman is the only answer, you'll never be taken in by panaceas and short-term quack remedies like

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reform bills and elections and revolutions and wars to end war and other carrots in front of the old human donkey. Shaw will be ninety-four in three weeks. He never reached the height of St. Joan again, and in his comments on public affairs he has been, in the last twenty years at least, as confused as all the rest of us. But in comedy his touch is as light as ever, as you'll discover if you listen to the CBC Wednesday night on July 12 and hear one of his latest plays, A Village Wooing. I have several reasons for wanting to end my series on the writer as prophet with Shaw. For one thing, he's still alive, and shows us that the species of prophet is not dead even in this bewildering age. For another, he seems to me the only living writer whose work compares in size and scope with the work of the other three I spoke of, Milton, Swift, and Blake. He even has one quality that the other three tended to lack— urbanity. And finally, he's a writer whom many younger people today may think of as out of date and old hat. That's mainly because so many of the things he went to bat for are things that we now take for granted. This is typical of the way the prophet works, and that's why it's important for us to stop occasionally, and think of them, or, as the Bible says: "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us" [Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Sirach 44:1].

6

The Literary Meaning of "Archetype"

This is a paper that Frye presented on 27 December 1952 at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association.1 It contains a few corrections and additions by Frye in ink, and there are three holograph annotations in another hand, which have been recorded in the notes. Frye has added one phrase that is not a correction—the phrase "anagogic section" at the end of paragraph 6, anagogy being the phase of symbolism that follows the archetypal phase in the "Theory of Symbols" of Anatomy of Criticism. The parallel passages in the Anatomy, following the sequence of paragraphs here, can be found on the following pages of that book: 72; 71; #5; 95-6', 99; 99-100; 95; 95; 104-5; I04~5/' 103-4; 104; 107; 108-9; 111-12; 99; and 106. The typescript is in the NFF, 1993, box 3, file 9.

It was a central principle of criticism in the Middle Ages that meaning in poetry was complex and variable, or, to use Dante's term, polysemous.2 This principle, after being ignored for centuries, has now been re-established. The thing that has re-established it is the simultaneous development of several different schools of criticism. The modern student of critical theory is faced with a body of rhetoricians who speak of texture and frontal assaults, with students of history who deal with traditions and sources, with critics preoccupied by psychology and anthropology, with Aristotelians, Coleridgians, Thomists, and Marxists. The student must either admit the principle of polysemous meaning, or choose one school and then try to prove that all the others are less legitimate. The former is the way of scholarship, and leads to the advancement of learning; the latter is the way of pedantry, and gives up a wide choice of goals,

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the most conspicuous being fantastical learning, or myth criticism, contentious learning, or historical criticism, and delicate learning, or new criticism. In this confusion of tongues we need a starting-point that will make a theory of variable meaning possible. My own solution to this is to begin with the word "symbol," and define it as any unit of any literary structure that can be isolated for critical attention.3 Not only the image used with some kind of special reference (which is what a symbol is usually taken to mean), but a word, a phrase, or any other verbal motif may be called a symbol when it is a distinguishable element in critical analysis. Even the letters a writer spells his words with form part of his symbolism in this sense, if the criticism is concerned with alliteration or dialect forms. There will be, then, within the same literary work, as many types of symbolism as there are schools of critics to examine it, and critics may be classified by the different contexts for symbols which they establish and by the choice of symbols they make. For instance, a critic may look at the symbols or units of a poem as a complex of sounds and significances. This is one of the usual techniques of what is called "new" criticism, I suppose because it cannot be traced much further back than Plato, who is full of it.4 I should prefer to call it rhetorical criticism. Or, a critic may read a poem from the point of view of a theory of external imitation, and will see the poem in terms of its relationship to external events, ideas, and objects. He will, in short, treat the poem as a document, and will be interested primarily in that aspect of symbolism which indicates external meaning. Or, a critic may read a poem in the light of an Aristotelian theory of imitation, and see the poem as a form of which nature is the content. The symbols most interesting to him will be images, or units of the containing form, and the most interesting images will be those that unify the form of the poem by recurrence or by special emphasis. The principle that a poem is an imitation of nature, however, though a perfectly sound one, is still a principle that isolates the individual poem. And it is clear that any poem may be examined, not only as an imitation of nature, but as an imitation of other poems. Thus Virgil discovered, according to Pope, that following nature was ultimately the same thing as following Homer.5 Once we think of a poem in relation to other poems, as a unit of poetry, questions of genre and of convention begin to arise. The type of criticism that deals with such matters will have to be

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based on that aspect of symbolism which relates poems to one another, and it will choose, as its main field of operations, the symbols that link poems together. This aspect of symbolism is what I mean by archetypal symbolism. I should tentatively define an archetype, then, as a symbol, that is, a unit of a work of literary art, which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience. The archetype is thus primarily the communicable symbol, and archetypal criticism is particularly concerned with literature as a social fact and as a technique of communication. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole. It is the only method of criticism known to me in which it is really necessary to assume that there is such a subject as comparative literature. Or even, we may say, that there is such a subject as literature at all. The repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be called even "coincidence," which is the name we give to a piece of design when we cannot find a use for it. But it does indicate a certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates. And when pastoral images are deliberately employed in Lycidas, for instance, merely because they are conventional, we can see that the convention makes us assimilate these images to other parts of literature. We think first of its descent from the ritual of the Adonis lament down through Theocritus, Virgil, and the whole pastoral tradition to The Shepheardes Calendar, then of the intricate pastoral symbolism of the Bible and the Christian Church, then of the extensions of pastoral symbolism into Sidney's Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's forest comedies, and so on, then of the post-Miltonic development of pastoral elegy in Shelley, Arnold and Whitman.6 We can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature. Expanding images into conventional archetypes is a process that takes place unconsciously in all our reading. A symbol like the sea or the paradisal garden cannot remain within Conrad or Green Mansions; it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole. The ancient mariner's albatross links us to Baudelaire and his ship to Rimbaud's bateau ivre; Yeats's tower and winding stair blend into Dante's Purgatory, like their more explicitly allusive counterparts in Eliot; and Moby Dick merges into the leviathan of Job.7 There is only one hypothesis that will prevent this linking of archetypes in our

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reading from being simply free association. That is the hypothesis that literature is a total form, and not simply the name given to the aggregate of existing literary works. In other words, we have to think, not only of a single poem imitating nature, but of an order of nature as a whole being imitated by a corresponding order of words. From such a point of view as this, the conception of literary genre becomes intelligible. The study of genres is based on analogies in form. Oedipus Tyrannos is not like any other tragedy, but still it does belong to the category of things called tragedies. This category is much broader than a historical development in Greek literature, as we also speak of tragedies by Shakespeare and Racine, and we even think of works as tragedies which are not dramatic in form. It is characteristic of documentary and historical criticism that it cannot deal with pure analogies of form. It can trace influence with great plausibility, whether it exists or not, but confronted with a tragedy of Shakespeare and a tragedy of Sophocles, to be compared solely because they are both tragedies, the historical critic is compelled to abandon criticism in favor of general reflections about the seriousness of life. On the other hand, a real attempt to grapple with the conception "tragedy" leads us to try to understand what an aspect of literature as a whole is. If there is no such thing as literature as a total form; if the word "literature" means simply the miscellaneous pile of all the literary works that have got written, then there is no such thing as tragedy, or any other generic conception. Many critics in fact believe that there are no genres, that there is no such thing as literature, and no meaning to the word "poetry" except the total number of existing poems (or good poems), but the value of studying any subject which is assumed not to exist must always remain an open question. The trouble with all theories of meaning, whether polysemous or not, is that the word "meaning" is usually equated only with the static aspect of literature, with what a poem, say, presents to our minds when we see it all at once. But works of literature have narrative as well as meaning. No matter what type of symbolism we are interested in, we shall be compelled to study each literary work in two aspects: as a movement and as a stasis, a rhythm and a pattern, or, to use Aristotelian terms, a mythos or plot and a dianoia or significance. To the rhetorical critic, movement will be a flow of sounds, and meaning an ambiguous and complex verbal pattern. To the documentary critic, movement or narrative will be an imitation of real events, and meaning an imitation of

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actual objects or propositions. To an Aristotelian critic, poetry would not exist between actual events and ideas, but rather, as Sidney says, between the example and the precept. The events of a poem do not teach us history, but are exemplary: they show us general facts of human action. Similarly, a poem's ideas are not reflections of philosophical ideas, but are ideal in the poetic sense: they show us concrete truths of human experience. For the Aristotelian critic, therefore, who sees the individual poem as an imitation of nature, events will be exemplary and general, and hence there will be a strong element of recurrence in them. For the same critic, ideas will be precepts, or statements of what might be or ought to be, and hence there will be a strong element of desire in them. These elements of recurrence and of desire come into the foreground in archetypal criticism, which studies poems as units of poetry as a whole, and symbols as units of communication. From such a point of view, the narrative aspect of literature is a recurrent act of symbolic communication: in other words a ritual. The narrative content of a work of literature is studied by the archetypal critic as ritual or imitation of action, and not simply as a mimesis praxeos or imitation of an action. Similarly, in archetypal criticism the significant content is the conflict of desire and reality which has for its basis the work of the dream. Hence it is likely that the archetypal critic would find much of interest in the work done by contemporary anthropology in ritual, and by contemporary psychology in dreams. An archetype is, in the first place, a variable convention. At one extreme we have the pure variable, as in Dadaism, where the poet repudiates all convention in meaning because he is not really interested in communication. However, extremes meet, as Coleridge said,8 and anti-conventional poetry soon becomes a convention in its turn, to be explored only by hardy scholars accustomed to the dreariness of literary bad lands. At the other extreme we have the pure convention, which a poet uses merely because it has often been used before. This is most frequent in naive poetry, in the fixed epithets and phrase-tags of medieval romance and ballad, in the invariable plots and character types of naive drama. It survives in the kind of writing that most students of literature keep in the middle distance: the run-of-the-mill Elizabethan sonnets, eighteenth-century pastorals, and the like. The hasty inference that convention shows lack of feeling, and that the poet attains "sincerity" (which usually means articulate feeling) by avoiding it, is not consistent with the facts of literary history.

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Archetypes are most easily studied in highly conventionalized literature: that is, in naive, primitive, or popular literature. By primitive and popular I mean here the ability to communicate in time and space respectively. Otherwise they mean much the same thing. Popular art is normally decried as vulgar for a century or two, then it merges into the softer lighting of "quaint," and after another couple of centuries it takes on the archaic dignity of the primitive.9 What I am suggesting, therefore, is the possibility of extending the kind of comparative study now made of folk tales and ballads into the rest of literature. This should be more easily conceivable now that it is no longer possible to mark off popular and primitive literature from ordinary literature as sharply as we used to do. The first step in such a study is to understand the importance of primitive and popular formulas in great art: the formulas that Shakespeare uses in his last period, or that the Bible uses when it ends in a fairy tale about a damsel in distress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city glittering with jewels. We may distinguish two kinds of archetypes: structural or narrative archetypes with a ritual content, and modal or emblematic archetypes with a dream content. The former are most easily studied in drama: not, as a rule, in the drama of the educated audience and the settled theatre, but in naive or spectacular drama: the folk play, the puppet show, the pantomime, the farce, the pageant, and their descendants in masque, comic opera, and commercial movie. Modal archetypes are best studied first in naive romance, which includes the folk tales and fairy tales that are so closely related to dreams of wonderful wishes coming true, and to nightmares of ogres and witches. The fact that the archetype is primarily a communicable symbol largely accounts for the ease with which ballads and folk tales and mimes travel through the world, like so many of their heroes, over all barriers of language and culture. What I call ritual is the narrative content of which plot generally, and dramatic plot especially, is the form. Ritual should not be studied as a source of drama, except by the historian, and actual rituals are not necessarily sources or influences on any drama, but are simply analogous to it. Frazer's Golden Bough is, from the point of view of literary criticism, an essay on the ritual content of naive drama: that is, it reconstructs an archetypal ritual from which the structural and generic principles of drama may be logically derived. It does not matter two pins to the literary critic whether such a ritual ever had any historical existence or not. It is very probable that Frazer's hypothetical ritual would have

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many and striking analogies to actual rituals. But the relation of ritual to drama is a relation of content to form, not of source to derivation. The dying god and the rest of Frazer's apparatus are dramatic themes which every dramatist finds by experience that he must use if he is to keep his audience's attention from wandering, especially if it is an unsophisticated audience. The instant that drama becomes primitive and popular, as it does, say in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, back come the king's son and the mock sacrifice and the analogy with the festival of the Sacaea.10 When archetypal criticism first began with a vogue for sun myths in the nineteenth century, an attempt was made to ridicule it by proving that Napoleon was a sun myth. The ridicule is effective only against the historical distortion of the method. From the archetypal critic's point of view, we turn Napoleon into a sun myth whenever we speak of the rise of his career, the zenith of his fame, or the eclipse of his fortunes. Similarly, the dream content of naive romance is the communicable dream content. It has no relation to the process of trying to psychoanalyze a dead poet, though, again, it is likely that there would be striking analogies to the sort of fantasies dredged up during psychoanalysis. Jung's work, especially his book on libido symbols,11 is of great value to the literary critic for the light it throws on the content of romance, but it does not follow that the critic has any interest in reading all literature as an allegory of Jungian or Freudian techniques in psychotherapy. And when we have realized that we are under no compulsion to trace the ritual pattern of every play or movie we see back to primeval fertility rites, we may realize too that we do not need Jung's conception of a collective or racial unconsciousness to bridge all the chronological gaps that we shall assuredly find. Further, the literary critic is the sole arbiter of the value of all such work to literary criticism. It would be an advantage to critics if Frazer were completely rejected by anthropologists, and Jung by psychologists, as then it could be seen more clearly that their work belongs to literary criticism, but such questions are no concern of ours. To return to our assumption about the unity of literature. If there is such a thing as an order of words, then archetypes progress towards a centre of literary experience, and we shall find that communicable symbols radiate from a small group of universal symbols. I do not mean by this phrase that there is any archetypal codebook which has been memorized by all human societies without exception. I mean symbols which express things common to all men, and which therefore have a commu-

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nicable force which is potentially unlimited. Archetypal criticism studies literature as a phase of civilization; civilization is the process of constructing, by social work, a human form of nature, and the universal symbols of literature are those which express the goals of work. Such are the symbols of food and drink and social communion, of the quest and the journey, of the city, the sheepfold and the garden; and of their opposites, the waste land, the tower and the dragon or monster of darkness. Our theory of archetypal criticism, then, corresponds to the moral or tropological level of Dante's scheme: the aspect of symbolism which answers the question quid agas: what does man do?12

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Frye presented this paper at the annual meeting of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association on 31 May 1974 in Toronto. The editor has a photocop of the nine-page typescript. The location of the original typescript is unknown. This is the third Comparative Literature Conference I have been asked to speak to/ and I think all three have had some hope that I would outline a theory of comparative literature as a distinct entity within the humanities. I don't think I can do this, because for the life of me I don't see how there can be any difference between a theory of comparative literature and a theory of literature in general. This is particularly true in relation to my own interests, because my main contributions to critical theory have been in the structural area. And problems of comparative literature, as such, really belong in the social context of literature. Our society is struggling with inner conflicts and tensions, and all kinds of minority groups are struggling to articulate themselves. If such a group possesses a distinctive language, and consequently the actual or potential power of literary expression, it reaches a decisive stage in self-definition. In Canada, for example, we have not only the English and French language groups, but many others as well, and a very considerable part of, say, Ukrainian or Icelandic literature is actually written in this country. This type of ethnocentric culture is likely to be transitional, because, as the writer contributing to it gets more professional in outlook, the pressures right in one of the large-market languages become very strong.2 Naturally certain advantages have to be given up in this process. In English or French literature, the emphasis is overwhelmingly traditional because the majority of its writers are dead. But in Yoruba or Swahili most of the

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significant writers are still alive, and a writer in these regions who shifts to English or French becomes haunted by the oppressive presence of an alien tradition. On the other hand, the assuming of that presence may be inescapable for a writer, or at least a tradition of writing, sooner or later. Thus English and French themselves voluntarily assume the burden of the Classical tradition. There is no distinctive theory for comparative literature, therefore, because the barriers of language within literature are, so far as structure is concerned, accidental, even meaningless. In English literature, the major influences have been Latin, French, and Italian: the influence of Old English on later developments has been minimal, as has that of medieval English apart from Chaucer. The most familiar schemata of English poetry, rhyme and meter, were taken over from French. And underlying a great deal of its fiction is a solid basis of popular literature, in folktale and ballad, which has travelled around the world without regard to linguistic barriers. At the same time the immense difficulty of learning languages, to the point of understanding the nuances of expression which are so important in literature, is so difficult that our teaching departments are still confined to individual languages and comparative literature has to be reserved for graduate programs. As such, it occupies an uneasy position as an activity concerned mainly with an exceedingly rarified aspect of translation. If a student studies Spenser, he is "in" English; if he studies Ariosto, he is "in" Italian; if he wants to study the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, he is in, or may be in if some other program has not annexed him, comparative literature. This is what I think of as the Swiss hotel keeper conception of the subject: anyone who commands two or more languages equally well becomes a comparatiste. To pursue the metaphor a little further: the Swiss hotel keeper watches his guests come down to breakfast. The first couple is clearly German; the second couple obviously American; the third couple seem ill-assorted. He looks English, but her perfume smells French, and he doesn't think they are married anyway. So, again, they are comparatistes. And yet at the same time there are other areas, more particularly in linguistics, where the differences among languages seem to be of immense importance. Robert Frost has even defined poetry as whatever it is that escapes translation.3 What escapes translation, obviously, are the accidents of language, the associations in sound, the big clusters of ambiguity within a single word, which belong to one language and not to another. I suggest going at the problem in a different way, and this will necessi-

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tate repeating some things that I have said elsewhere, for which I apologize in advance. Let us assume that we are examining a verbal structure, in the form of a book or a part of a book. We do not know whether it belongs to literature or not, only that it is a verbal structure. In the first place, it possesses a sequential narrative. One begins in the top left-hand corner of the first page, and pursues this narrative down to the bottom righthand corner of the last page. Every verbal structure has a narrative of this kind, except books like dictionaries or bibliographies, which cannot be read at all but can only be consulted. This narrative is the structure or total form of what we are reading. There are, however, two stages in reading it. In the first stage, we are engaged in the actual process of following the lines of type from beginning to end. We are engaged with a narrative in the proper sense, but as we have not yet reached the end, the process is pre-critical. After we have finished reading, the structure freezes into simultaneous unity, which we call the theme or meaning. The Greek word for narrative is mythos, and this informing structure, which Aristotle called the "soul" [Poetics, chap. 6], is what I mean by its myth. At the same time, this narrative, or mythos, is made up of verbal units. The most conspicuous among these are the names of things (nouns) or names of actions (verbs), and those we usually speak of as "images." In all reading, our minds are simultaneously going in two directions. One direction is centrifugal: it goes outside the work being read to our memories of the conventional meanings of the words employed. If we don't know the language, and have to look up every third word, the fact that this direction of attention is moving outside what we are reading into the external world becomes very obvious. The other direction is centripetal, and is concerned with trying to fit the verbal units we are reading into the myth or informing structure. At a certain point, we may become aware that the verbal units are relating themselves to some kind of model or pattern outside what we are reading. We have a verbal structure A, and a body of facts, phenomena, propositions, for something independent of the words, which forms a second body, B. If we find that the units of what we are reading are forming this double pattern, we may say that what we are reading is non-literary. That is, it is discursive, descriptive, didactic, or in some other way related to something else. If this following of a B structure doesn't take shape, the verbal units keep coming back into the structure of what we are reading. Suppose we are reading Carl Sandburg's poem on the fog:

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the fog comes on little cat feet [Fog, 11.1-2]

If we don't know English, and have to look up cat and feet and fog in the dictionary, we will still have three useful words. But clearly, as we are not going to learn anything about the feet of cats, the sense of something furry and silent comes back into the verbal structure A and relates to the fog. When the verbal image, like "cat" or "feet" or "fog," is primarily used to describe, it becomes a verbal replica of that thing. But if the descriptive interest is not the primary one, the relationship of the images to one another is what is important. When two images are related primarily to one another, rather than separately to the outside world, we speak of their relationship as a metaphor. If verbal structure A has no counterpart B in the outside world, we say that the structure is literary, that it is a structure of words made for its own sake, and in a literary structure, all the images are in a metaphorical relationship with one another. The relationship may be actual or, if they are very far apart, only potential. But whichever it is, it is there, and consequently a literary verbal structure, one made for its own sake, is a structure of myth and metaphor. The word myth refers to its unity; the word metaphor to its units. I suppose that back in the days of the oral tradition there was really no consistent sense of words as descriptive, as pointing to a B order of things. The development of writing immensely increased the descriptive aspect of words, and writing also made continuous prose possible. At this point we become aware that there are two places where the B world is: it may be outside, or it may be above. If it is outside, as it normally is, the conception of truth as correspondence arises. That is, a verbal structure, A, is aligned with a body of phenomena, B, and is called "truth" if it is a satisfactory verbal replica of B. This is the normal Aristotelian view: for Aristotle, there were two main bodies of verbal structures used descriptively, the historical and the philosophical. Historical writing was the primary verbal imitation of human action; moral, philosophical, scientific writing the primary verbal imitation of human thought. For Plato the B world was above the A world, and hence words for him formed embodiments or incarnations of the world of forms. This means, among other things, that there are two levels on which the word mythos or narrative can be applied. On the lower level, myths are most clearly represented by the stories of the poets, such as we have in Homer: these are mostly lies, and a well-ordered state will get rid of them. On the

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higher level, there are the myths which represent the purified verbal structures that emerge from dialectic: these include the myths that Plato himself used. In any case, the distinction between Plato and Aristotle is clear: for Aristotle a verbal structure is judged by the standards of truth or falsehood if it is non-literary. If literary, it represents a secondary imitation of thought or action, deals with universal rather than particular statements, does not deny or affirm, and is not to be judged by the standards of truth or falsehood at all. For Plato, the standards of truth and falsehood apply to all verbal structures, but verbal structures are arranged vertically on two tiers. For Christianity, the verbal structures that had to do with religion, at least, were also arranged vertically on two levels. On the lower level were the mythoi, the fables of the heathen and the fancies of the poets, which were to be either tolerated or rejected according to the liberality of the theologian. On the upper level were the logoi of the Bible and the teachings of the Church, which are truth by correspondence: they are the faithful verbal replicas of established facts. Why the essential structure of the Bible should be mythical rather than logical was something for which Christianity had no real answer. In our day certain principles seem to be emerging which are of immense significance for literary criticism generally. In the first place, it seems clear that what words do most accurately, most powerfully, and most satisfactorily, is hold together. That is, the mythical and metaphorical structure of words in themselves, without reference to any corresponding world, is still the primary verbal area. When it comes to describing or representing external facts, words seem to have only a limited role. In the first place, they are conditioned by their own grammatical relationships, and such relationships as those of subject, predicate, and object are verbal only, in the sense that they derive at second hand from the facts of experience. Grammar keeps twisting the descriptive function of words into its own shapes. In short, words have a very limited informing power for the outer world, as compared with mathematics. The nouns and verbs which are used to describe things and processes deal mainly with the gross phenomena of experience, and when names are given to such phenomena as electrons and photons, they tend to transform them into gross phenomena. In literary structures, then, more particularly poetic ones, we find the primitive and primary activity of words. In such structures, there is no

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such thing as truth of correspondence: whatever truth there is arises from the implications of verbal interrelationships. We are also beginning to understand that other types of verbal structures are also retreating from the external world and the standards of truth of correspondence. One of these is philosophy. Heidegger, in his little book of lectures, Was Heisst Denken?, raises the question of what thinking is. It turns out that thinking is really the construction of words, where the criteria of solidity and consistency are purely internal ones. Science, Heidegger says, does not think. People who think, it appears, think only about Being, and when he examines such thinkers, such as Nietzsche or Parmenides, Heidegger resorts to the methods of a preacher selecting a text from the Bible. He takes a single sentence from those philosophers and shows how their entire thought is mirrored in that sentence. The assumption being precisely that of homiletics, that every sentence of the Bible contains the whole of the Bible.

8 Blake's Jerusalem

"Blake's Jerusalem" is a set of notes for "The Revolutionary Imagination: The Work of William Blake," a slide-illustrated lecture on Blake's poem that Frye gave at the first program in the International Lecture Series, 26 November 1981, at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. The notes are part of a sixteen-page typescript in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file 7. The typescript is actually three different sets of notes on Blake's poem. The first is incomplete. The second is the longest of the three by virtue of the illustrative quotations from Jerusalem Frye has inserted into his text. The third, however, appears to be the final version, as it is syntactically the most continuous. Still, the exposition is concentrated: Frye had to move through his remarks at a brisk pace in order to comment, in the time allotted, on all of the slides for the one hundred plates of Jerusalem. The third set of notes is what is reproduced here, though the last three paragraphs, Frye's conclusion, come from the second set of notes. In the text that follows the numbers in parentheses are the plate numbers of Jerusalem, the location of the number in the text being the point at which Frye projected the image onto a screen. The letter "t" following a plate number means that the slide is of a plate that is primarily text, that is, with only minimal illustration or decoration.

You may know that Blake's poems were not published but engraved on copper plates with accompanying designs, so that there's a double impact on the ear and eye at once. We have to pause over the designs and not the text, but I'll try to indicate something of what the text is saying. Traditionally, in the Western Christian view, God created a model world that man fell out of into a lower world, where he's subject to sin and misery. Blake was (so far as I know) the first man in the modern world to try to construct another model of human experience. In his

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early poetry he says that the child is the symbol of innocence because he assumes a world that makes human sense, with parents looking after him. He becomes an adult and finds this isn't true, so what happens to his childhood vision? The answer is simple enough now, but Blake was the first one to hit on it. It's driven underground into what we call the subconscious, where it becomes a seething mass of frustrated desire, largely sexual. Society tries to keep going by saying that accommodating oneself to experience is "good" and indulging in desire is "bad" but it can't do that indefinitely.1 Later, Blake came to think more and more of man as an exile from the home which is rightfully his, which the Bible calls the garden of Eden and the ideal city of Jerusalem. He could possess the palace, but he lives in the cellar in the dark with the rats. The only way he can get back into the rest of the palace is through his creative energy. So we start Jerusalem with two characters, Los, or creative human imagination, and Albion, the giant man who is all mankind (i). Los is exploring the subterranean world of a fallen and sleeping Albion, carrying what looks like a model of the old planetary system. Jerusalem (2) is the "emanation" of Albion, that is, she's what Albion could create and live in. We read about fairies in the moonlight in Shakespeare and elsewhere: they're glimpses of a shadowy half-real imaginative world when the master of the house is away. So Blake (3) first addresses the "Public," dividing them into the sheep and the goats. Sheep (4) want to realize their creative powers, build civilization, love without shame, and live in peace; goats want to divide the world into good and bad, the good who obey orders mechanically and the bad who can be killed or accused of something. "Jesus alone" [pi. 40,1. 18] is the Jesus who forgave the harlot in the gospels: Jesus represents the total unity of the divine and the human, so he's a third figure, what Los is working toward and what Albion has to wake up to. The sibyl is the moral order: in Blake any woman with all those clothes on is up to no good. Los (5) wants to keep man's five senses creating and not just staring at an objective world, but (6) he has to struggle with two things, abstract time and abstract space, the two things that convince us we're in this cellar-world. Los is a blacksmith, forging the city of God; his hammer and bellows are our own hearts and lungs. Abstract time, the ticking clock, is not just that: it's the artist's ego, his sense of existential despair, and. all the things that distract him. Jerusalem is one of the noisiest poems in the language: a pandemonium of howling and shrieking and

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thundering is going on all the time. Los is trying to hear his forges in Napoleon's world of heavy artillery, which was when the poem was written; and then there's the noise of the body in the pounding heart, heaving lungs and churning bowels, and the noise of mind in the screaming of the ego that makes Hindu yogis speak of the conscious mind as a drunken monkey.2 Or, as Blake says, "knowing and seeing life, yet living not" [pi. 10,1. 58]. Under Los's efforts things begin to move up and down a bit (7); but here (8) we have a fairy or human imaginative power turned into a moon-goddess, harnessed to an eclipsed moon and separated from the imagination. So we realize (9) that we've fallen from paradise through a knowledge of serpentine morality to a world where our real powers are imprisoned giants. The text (10, t) tells us about this, and here's (11) a curious creature, part swan, part serpent, descending from a world above water and becoming a kind of female noble savage under it. Our cellar-world is symbolically underground, but it's submarine as well: Noah's flood has never receded; like Narcissus, we've fallen in love with our own reflection under water. The woman trying on a hat (12) is another Narcissus image, and measuring the world with compasses means that modern society has derived from the stars the notion of a mechanical universal order that it wants to make human life imitate. Newtonian science was a sinister image to Blake, but he wasn't attacking science so much as a death wish in human life he saw as trying to get control of science. The world of Narcissus is a world where man is, Blake says, "idolatrous to his own shadow" [pi. 43, 1. 46], an object even to himself: "an outside spread without and an outside spread within" [pi. 18,1. 2], as he also says. In such a world (13) the imagination can create only dreams (14), beautiful but unreal. People who try (15) to escape from such a world to a better one, like Abraham, find themselves opposed by the stagnancy and rooted conservatism of society, which Blake calls "vegetable" (16, t; 17, t).3 Gradually another female figure appears: she's called Vala, the opposite of Jerusalem, and she represents the nature that's separated from us (18), the elusive objective alienated world we can only stare at, and she and Jerusalem separate, even when something in them tries to unite. Blake was, I think, the first to think of the stars in the sky as a symbol of alienation and dead mechanism beyond human reach, instead of as the perfection of divine civilization as formerly, so we see (19) Albion asleep at the bottom of the Atlantic, and his twelve sons rising into the sky to become the Zodiac. They are spirits of

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tyranny, morality, and conformity (and their names are derived from people who made Blake's own life miserable). Stars and comets (20) get plowed under as man sinks down on the sado-masochist roller-coaster (21), where woman is enslaved to man and man enslaved to woman. Ezekiel in the Bible speaks of a chariot of God guided by cherubim and having "wheels within wheels" [Ezekiel i], in contrast to the geared and toothed machinery we (22) see below it. What Blake calls the "vegetable" world is the decayed trunk (23) of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, with evil spirits inhabiting its roots. Because our fallen cellar-world is under water, the moon, the nearest heavenly body to us, and Noah's ark floating on top of the world, are the same, so Los, who builds the ark (24), is Noah as well (the Bible doesn't distinguish smiths from carpenters). We close with a visit of Albion, assimilated to the blinded and betrayed giants Samson and Orion (25), with his bowels torn out, as in the ritual punishment of traitors, and close the [first] book (26) with a figure of the kind the New Testament calls Antichrist, summoning Jerusalem into the hell-world. Blake says the three states of life in this world are creation, redemption, and judgment [pi. 32, 1. 42]. Part Two, addressed to "Jews" (27), which means practically everybody, deals with creation, which is primarily the creation of the present body, which Blake regards as quite a mess. The nature outside us is the projected shadow of this body. That is, we see the sky as a concave vault because we're looking at it out of a concave vault of bone. Idolatry is condemned in the Bible because it's an attempt to find something divine in this shadow-world, and the refrain that runs all through Part Two is "they became what they beheld."4 Studying our own shadow is what Blake means by reason, which for him is the opposite of the intellect, and this starts (28) with Jerusalem, created nature, and Vala, objective nature, trying to assimilate into the same person. Figures still (29) float aimlessly up and down; Los is still struggling with his two forms of abstract time and space (30), but the naked female of imagination and the wrapped-up female of morality (31) are beginning to separate, until we get an embarrassment dream (32) where a naked Jerusalem and her children are in London between St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey, summoned by a properly draped Vala to church. The children look confused. Man continues to "plow the earth in his own conceit" [pi. 29,1. 9] (33) harnessed to a short life that is not a merry one. The creation of the body (34, t) by its own imagination is a kind of parody (35) of the Bible's account of the creation of Eve out of

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Adam's rib. Here Jesus makes his first appearance in the poem, but not as the creator.5 Man gets eyes as Los hammers the sun into his body (36), and we have again a double focus, of Jesus supporting the exhausted Albion (37) and the spectre of reason hovering over Jerusalem. The body (38, t) Los finally creates is the body of our five senses that filter out reality instead of admitting it, and (39) plunge us into a lethal world of a sun spiked like a helmet and Apollyon, one of the names of the devil in the Bible, shooting the arrows of "demonstrative science" [pi. 12, 1. 14]: Blake wants us to develop a counter-science that will pierce Apollyon with his own bow. Apollyon here is identified with Apollo, the Greek archer-god of pestilence in the Iliad. Los is still (40) struggling to keep art alive in the world, but the "Spectre," the rational ghost in the human machine (41), still can't see anything. We pass through a world (42) where pyramids of men and women try to reach some unimaginable grapes and of shadows (43) thrown by ourselves, with, far above us, an angel-guided ark (44) of the imagination floating on the sea of time and space, Blake's term for the Atlantic Ocean lying on top of man's real home, which is Atlantis. But the world (45) is still a world of pieces cut off a rooted and fibred body and a world where big fish swallow little ones. Finally (46) we reach a climax of confused imagery, like the grotesque gods of the early world, half imaginative, and half nightmares, an elderly Adam and Eve trying to work with an amorphous mass of mutating life, like Alice in Wonderland trying to play croquet with flamingoes for mallets. The contorted figures of (47) are still Vala, Jerusalem, and Albion, and we proceed through (48) an increasingly barren world (49) to another monster (50), the dragon or Antichrist of the Book of Revelation, the established tyrannies of society, representing what Blake calls a "murderous providence" [pi. 50,1. 5]. This providence appears in a threefold form (51) as we close Part Two.6 Part Three is addressed to the "Deists" (52), the nature-worshippers of Blake's day, who no longer have any fairies or gods, but only a mathematical and rational order which will develop a death-wish ending in annihilation wars. There have been two great periods of this technological anti-culture: one was in the time of the Druids in early Britain, who worshipped the oak, or vegetative life, the serpent, or conveyer of moral knowledge, built serpent-shaped temples, and practiced human sacrifice, which survived in Mexico. This was an eighteenth-century mythology, and Blake got out of it everything that has since got into Frazer's

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Golden Bough and Graves' White Goddess. The second period is the one beginning in Blake's day with Napoleon, and continuing to our own time. We start (53) with a vision of the "white goddess," symbolizing the elusiveness of objective nature, worldly power (the tiara), a pseudoknowledge of the stars, all resting on a sunflower, the flower tied to the revolution of the sun in the sky. In (54) we go back to the falling rocky world and the giants at the bottom (55, t; 56, t), and in (57) we see London and York, the main church cities of England, along with Jerusalem. Here we begin to meet the twelve "Daughters of Albion," ferocious bacchantes whose rites focus on human sacrifice. They are the powers that impel us to stay in the world of constant murder, and try to lock us into that world.7 Los explores (58) this hell-world, dominated by an image that looks like female genital organs and the corresponding image of a skeleton. The three Fates (59) appear in a different context: they seem more concerned about human life than their Greek prototypes. The hideous text (60, t; 61, t) describing sacrificial rites like the Aztec ones in Mexico, focuses on the dying god of Blake's mythology, Luvah (62), continuously martyred humanity and what Blake calls the "spiritual deaths of mighty men / Who give themselves in Golgotha, Victims to Justice" [pi. 34,11. 53-4]. {The plate forms a wall he is grasping, his head wound round with serpents and peacocks, emblems of solar accusation.} Associated horrors (63) include the demand for "chastity" represented by the serpent wrapped around the woman, the transmission of a dead tradition (64) in one's sleep, and marginal indications of chains (65), barrenness (66), and torture (67). The text continues (68, t) to describe sacrificial rituals (69), and we get a glimpse of these bloody bacchantes, with their scalps and cups full of blood, just before the tremendous Druidic trilithon (70). This is an emblem of the mathematical arrogance which has dominated human history from the pyramids to our own time, of the conquest of nature by a hostile intelligence, the prototype of the Arch of Titus and the Marble Arch in London (after Blake's death, as though that mattered). Blake says the trilithon stands for the two thrusts of human imagination, the sublime and the beautiful or "pathetic," under the horizontal domination of reason. After a curious parody of what looks like the Leda and swan motif (71), two regenerative images of guardian angels brooding over the human cosmos (72) and Los swinging his hammer (73) break the gloom, and take us to a hermaphroditic body (74) trying to break out of the

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rooted fibre-world. In (75) we have another double design, the sons of God in Job parodied by the rolling serpents of nature-worship below. At last, the great symbol of redemption by human sacrifice (76) comes into view, Jesus bound to what Blake calls the stems of vegetation, the victimfigure on the Druid oak, and the emblem of what man does to God whenever he catches him, but still a redeeming God. Part Four, addressed to the Christians (77), who are urged to become fully human instead of trying to deny all their own best qualities, and are told to keep winding Blake's golden string,8 starts with another metamorphosis symbol {the metamorphosis in Ovid is a story about something originally articulate falling silent, and hence for later Christian readers of Ovid a parallel to the Biblical story of the Fall}. The cockheaded man (78) reminds us that the cock is connected with both the denial of Christ and the coming of the dawn. The symbolism in the text (79, t) is very intricate (80), but man is now beginning to struggle out of his winding serpents, though he still has the strong temptation (81) to remain in his cellar-world. These are the daughters of Albion, and the one in front holds what Blake calls a "falsehood" behind her back. The falsehood is essentially that man can never escape from his dreary cycles of war and exploitation and misery, and the mock-modest Venus figure seems to agree. In (82) the serpent winding up the right side is still sinister, though less so: (83) we are beginning to move into a clearer world (84) with the old man being led by a child from a Druid to a Gothic building (Blake had more sympathy with Gothic architecture). In this part Los is making his final efforts to regenerate the world: he has subdued abstract time, existential despair or the Spectre of Urthona, but he still has Enitharmon, the space-world, which is still alienated and receding from us (85), yet even she seems to be starting to work for the imagination (86, t). A number of mysterious energies new to the poem now begin to emerge from below, like Enion (87), the mother of all life, still blind and age-bent, as Blake says, but searching like Demeter for her daughter. The text gives us (88, t; 89, t; 90) a long and intricate description of the consolidating of error in the human mind, but truth comes out of error rather than confusion, law begins to pass into gospel (91) {with the emblem of magic and mystery contrasted with the ear of wheat}, and Jerusalem finally appears (92), though still as the mourning mother of human life, with corpses around her. The three watching accusers (93) recall the accusers of Job, Socrates, and Blake himself as well as Christ, but are unable to prevent the female figure at the bottom from rising out

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of her grave. In (94) the accusers fall from the sky and are shown along with a corpse mourned by a female under a Druid arch; then Albion (95), for the first time youthful, begins to rise into the real world. In (96) he is again an old man, but welcoming his daughter Jerusalem, a Lear whose love for Cordelia does not come too late. At this point (97) Albion moves into what Blake calls the fury of my course among the stars [pi. 58,11. 489; pi. 84,11.19-21], carrying the sun like Los in the first plate, as a world (98) in which "everything has its own vermin" [pi. i, 1.11], as Blake said at the beginning, begins to come to life, vermin and all. In this world (99) age and youth are not bound to a sequence, so the regenerate Albion can be young like Jesus or old like the Father, in a world where, as the text says, all human forms are identified [pi. 99, 11. 1-2], that is, made on with the single consciousness of man. As we close the book and look at its back cover (100), the three chief actors, Los, Enitharmon, and the Spectre of Urthona, appear with the "Druid" serpent temple of Avebury in the background; the hammer and tongs are images of the human heart and brain, now enthroned in their proper place.9 Jerusalem is a very Biblical poem, but the last thing Blake wanted in his text was the oracular cadences of the King James Bible. He realized that the speech of the average educated Englishman in his day was becoming a breathless polysyllabic splutter, and he tried to represent this direct and colloquial kind of speech in his long line. The only poets I can think of who followed him were the Victorian poet Clough and Robert Bridges in The Testament of Beauty, and so far as I know neither was influenced by Blake. In avoiding the ruling-class language of epic and tragedy and the hieratic language of some of the great Romantics, Blake is really raising the same question that Wordsworth raises in his "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads. What kind of diction is most appropriate for a classless society, that is, a society where there is no connection between speech and class, which has neither a social nor an intellectual hierarchy? Blake's answer is very different from Wordsworth's, but in a free society there ought to be differences. All genuinely creative art operates in space and time at once, with Los in control of the other two forces. Writing is the visualizing of the word: it was traditionally given to man at Mt. Sinai, a tradition Blake refers to at the beginning of the poem. Writing makes us less dependent on sequence. In Part Two, one copy of Jerusalem has a quite different series of plates, and it doesn't seem to matter too much. We notice that on the whole Blake does not use text and design to prescribe, to formulate in

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advance, the patterns of our response. Often the design illustrates something in the text; but where a plate is all text, something is usually being described which the reader has to visualize for himself; where the plate is all design, the reader has to supply the missing verbal commentary. Again, there is no four-act plot in the poem; everything goes on simultaneously in Blake's view of history, and what we have is a series of spirals going more and more deeply into the dialectic out of which the Resurrection and the Apocalypse separate from the slavery and misery of their opposites. Similarly, there's a constant spatial collage, with England being superimposed on Israel geographically as well as historically, sometimes in almost unbearable detail, as when the fifty-two counties of England are divided among the twelve tribes of Israel. Blake compares Los to Prospero,10 and there is something of magic in Blake's anxiety to recite long lists of names, and ensure that every name is pronounced. In general, we may say that the ear takes in the cycles of nature and history as they repeat age after age; the eye takes in the separation of the world of ultimate realities into a heaven and a hell, and so leads us directly to the vision of the fulfilment of desire, which is the same thing as the goal of the march of the intellect.11

II

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9 The Present Condition of the World

f rye's holograph note toward the top of the first page of the typescript indicates that this paper was "written for an Emmanuel [College] publication project that never came off." Above these words Frye wrote "Spring 0/1943." His statement in the last paragraph—"Peroration of some kind"—indicates that he had not completed his essay: he apparently intended to develop the conclusion from the single-spaced material in the last two paragraphs (the rest of the typescript is double-spaced). The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 7.

\ wish to examine this question from the point of view of a North American, a citizen of a continent, even a hemisphere, in which the influence of the United States of America is all-powerful. Canadians are so closely identified with Americans in their political fortunes that to make the identification complete actually improves the perspective. For the same reason I shall speak of other countries in terms of their relation to North America, and of the impression they make upon the inhabitants of this continent.1 In dealing with such a subject the chief problem is to steer a middle course between platitude and paradox, and maintain some balance of tone between Olympian detachment and Bacchic outcries. The present condition of the world is a condition of universal warfare, and this war is seen by both sides as a struggle of right and justice against wrong and injustice, an Armageddon of millennial hosts against the power of Gog. If we feel that it is impossible that our enemies can really see it in this way, they certainly feel that it is necessary for them to fight as though they did. But once we have admitted that, we can also understand that this "as though" basis is also ours. Our moral superiority to our enemies

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is the moral superiority of a war of defence over a war of conquest. And the aims of the former are to some extent negative. We have no coherent idea of what we are fighting for, but a clairvoyant one of what we are fighting against: we are not trying to attain a greater good, but to avoid a greater evil. This negation, even when given the quasi-positive form of "preserving our way of life," is not enough for most people, for whom the question "to what purpose is this waste?" comes with a cruelly ironic insistence. Hence the outburst of "post-war planning," the promises made to labour, the technological Utopias and social security schemes. But these, if they are to be of any use, must be regarded as rewards of peace, not of war. A corrupt tree can only bring forth corrupt fruit, and the notion that some good may be salvaged from this evil and monstrous horror is, however pathetic and wistful, a pernicious illusion. In temporal terms, peace is an economic system functioning: war is an economic system breaking down. When we recover peace we shall recover the benefits of peace; but to regard them as benefits of war is at best a case of post hoc propter hoc. And that such benefits will be "worth" the blood and misery and destruction of the war is nonsense, unless posterity are insanely cynical bookkeepers. This is not a quibble: its importance is indicated by the popularity of the catchword that we must win the peace as well as the war. Everything at the moment points to our eventually winning the war, and winning it more or less on our own terms. We have been tested by war, and we seem to be passing the test. We shall now be tested by peace, and the psychological impact of peace on us is still the great unknown factor in our situation. All through the last war, men grimly resolved that out of this hideous thing some good would come, that in the suffering it brought we should learn, once for all, the folly of organized murder and would settle down in sober charity to build a better world. The men who resolved this were no more foolish or hypocritical than we are now: they fought as bravely and as coolly: they passed the test of war and arrived at a victorious peace. And, then, soldiers gasped with relief and flung off their uniforms; the most preposterous incompetents were enthusiastically voted into the highest public offices; the promises to labour were not only ignored but vicious Red-baiting campaigns were opened which, as usual, were aimed at labour leaders generally rather than merely at Communists; and the entire nation plunged into a fools' paradise in which all the problems and responsibilities raised by the war were petulantly rejected with a grotesque childishness. And however sobered

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by a depression, by the advance of Fascism, by humiliating defeats, and by the power and resourcefulness displayed by foreigners, there is little evidence that for the great mass of American people the conception of "normalcy" has been radically altered. Russia, China, Britain and all the occupied countries have suffered too terribly for an elastic recovery at peace: but America, once more, will face a victory with only the most superficial damage done to that armour of complacency which we call our way of life. Even if we are hardly likely to repeat the frivolous inanity of the first decade of the Twenty-year Truce,2 there is another danger in seeing the present struggle, in the light of victory, as a mere incident in the expansion of American imperialism. It would not be pleasant to think of Americans forcing this, under the name of democracy, on late allies who have bled themselves white in defence of a way of life radically different from ours. In any event, we have still ahead of us a danger to face from within ourselves, and a more terrible one than anything the enemy seems likely, at the time of writing, to marshal against us. II

There is a tendency, not confined to the academic, to discuss questions of this kind in relation to leading thinkers: to see the principle of Nazism in the anti-rational teachings of Nietzsche and Sorel, of Communism in the dialectical materialism of Marx and Lenin, and our own systems in terms of our own culture traditions. This line of approach is of course essential in its place, but it is possible to carry it too far. Social movements invariably modify their cultural traditions to any extent ranging from distortion to perversion. Whatever Nietzsche may be talking about in his theory of a master race he is certainly not talking about Nazism; and to Wagner a man like Hitler would only be Alberich, not Siegfried. The phrase "leaders of thought" itself begs a large question: leaders imply followers, and few coherent thinkers have had, in society, any follower except those who have followed in the wrong direction. In this sense Marx and Lenin are almost the only "leaders of thought" in modern history, and the international reference to their thinking has been so modified as to bear little resemblance to its original pattern. To speak of the present condition of the world in terms of its beliefs and assumptions, we must be careful of those who have tried to keep their arguments clear and consistent, have tried to safeguard themselves against

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misunderstanding and have qualified the extreme statements disciples and detractors alike seize on. Our subject is rather on the plane of vulgarized ideas, of catchwords, slogans, stereotypes, platitudes, popular proverbs and epigrams, wise saws and modern instances. The use made on this level of ideas from the higher one is an important source of confusion. Thus the word "Christian" in the name of a political party usually means "Roman Catholic Fascist"; and those who are afraid of Christianity in any form are only too pleased to draw what seems to them an obvious inference. It is easy to interpret the Middle Ages in terms of Dante, St. Thomas, and the Chartres Cathedral, because in them the chaos of material in medieval life has become ordered form. But it would be wrong to forget that for the average Christian of that time the essential thing in his religion was the magical virtue of relics, pilgrimages, and sacraments. Similarly, it is easy, and quite sound, to interpret America today in terms of Marx's analysis of capitalist economy. But it would be wrong to forget that the average American does not think of the rich and poor as separate classes, but as lucky and unlucky branches of an undifferentiated society he does not even think of as middle-class. It is on this plane of popular metaphysical axioms that we shall find the underlying unity of American religious, political, and social life. It is quite wrong to say that there is no established church in America today: there is one, and one which we may call, as a name will be useful, the Church of Deism or Natural Religion. The essential principle of this religion is that there is no real world except the physical world and the order of nature, and that our senses alone afford direct contact with it. As this is the only real world, religion can provide no revelation of another, and to believe that it can represents a flight from reality. Nature being red in tooth and claw,3 we must not look for God there, but in man, and in nature to the extent that it is subdued and tamed by man. The essence of religion, therefore, is morality, dogma and ritual alike being parasites that settle on it in decay. The chief end of man is to improve his own lot in the natural world, and the noblest thing he can do (this is for wartime) is to lay down his life for posterity. The essential meaning of human life is the progressive removal of the obstacles presented by nature, including the survival within man himself of atavistic impulses harking back to an earlier state of greater bondage to it. This is done chiefly through the advance of science. By the advance of science is meant the increase in the comfort of the body, the mind being regarded as a bodily function. Mental education is a revelation of the natural world, including of course its fossilized form of the history and literature of the past.

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This is the basis on which nearly the whole of American culture, alike in its kindliness and in its brutal violence, in its sentimental honest idealism and in its Titanic star-scraping vulgarity, is founded. No other church in history has ever had such unquestioning support, largely because it does not persecute and is, agreeably to its own principles, taught by implication rather than by assertion. Nine-tenths of our clergymen (it is difficult to say anything stronger than "a great many" without relapsing into rhetorical statistics) know no other creed. It is taught in all our schools, from which its more dogmatic rivals have long been excluded. It is implicit in the American Constitution, a completely deist scripture; it is expounded in university classrooms and in drug stores; it is defended by Communists and by millionaires. Lately there has been a little sniping at it from theological circles, where it is generally spoken of as "liberalism"; though the use of this term, if we continue merely to repeat the word instead of defining the thing, can lead to some rather warped results. So far, this has been about as effective as an attack on the Sphinx with a pea-shooter: Mother Church remains unperturbed. What becomes of those branches of this church which explicitly call themselves churches? They are reduced to elaborating their own version of what the Funeral Service calls "the comfort of a reasonable religion." Their central problem is, how much of the traditional or historical faith of Christianity can a modern man, assumed to be a believer in natural religion and the advance of science, be reasonably expected or induced to accept? Well, there is as much historical evidence for the existence of Jesus as for that of any great figure of the past, and we find in the teachings of Jesus a moral integrity which would make them, if the world would only observe them, a panacea for all our ills. Thus far we are on reasonable ground, and everything not amenable to reason in religion (reason of course meaning easy inferences from sense experience) has already been eroded by the advance of science. Some of our more ambitious clerical deists go on to attempt a synthesis of scientific and religious modes of thought, producing from the horse of science and the jackass of natural theology that curious sterile mule of modern rationalism, an apology for Christianity concerned with laws of entropy and thermodynamics. But with the majority the Church has become a residual or vestigial antiquarian survival, an archaic palladium preserved through a superstitious magpie reluctance to throw it away, its traditional words, "sin," "holiness," "sanctity," "piety," "wisdom," a specialized hieratic argot. Even those who feel most strongly what a naive and childish faith such deism is seldom get far beyond a somewhat

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maudlin assertion that there are more things in heaven, if not in earth, than are dreamt of in this particular philosophy,4 and that even some scientists are willing to admit it. One feature of this catholic if not apostolic faith is that its reliance on sense experience emphasizes the receptive and passive aspects of the mind and minimizes its active and creative power. Hence America is a happy-hunting-ground of all forms of advertisement, propaganda, and suggestions. Advertising and "publicity" are based on the fact that sense experience is involuntary and on the assumption that the mind does not possess enough selective power to resist a large number of repeated impressions. The synthetic entertainment provided by the radio and the movies is based on the normality and predictability of the public responses to certain stimuli. Education is loaded with an apparatus of magical systems and methods which are supposed to inscribe significant patterns on the student's tabula rasa. It is important, too, to notice what a superstitious belief the average American has in the power of Nazi propaganda over the German mind: that is, he thinks of it as a mysterious poison which has seeped into the brain and is now impossible to remove, rather than as an unnatural hysteria kept up artificially by a continuous external pressure. It is important too, especially in Canada, to notice how closely this passivity of mind is associated with political apathy, a tendency to think of the government, not as the paid officials of the people, or even as merely a few more average and indifferently honest Canadians, but as an anonymous "they," a group of Norns who sit in Thule waging war and rationing coffee.5 There is much less of this in the United States, but the impact of peace may revive it; and if it does, the danger that the propaganda in favour of democracy will be reversed to propaganda in favour of inspired leadership is by no means a mere intellectual's nightmare. For natural religion, in itself, provides no defence against well-organized propaganda coming from any direction. There are of course reactions to deism from those whose spiritual needs are unsatisfied by it; but as deism is the established church, these reactions are likely to be sectarian ones, controlled by the pseudoevangelical charlatans, in the church and out of it, who fortunately seem now to be losing some of their influence. And of course the sectarian tendency can lead only to that grotesque self-mutilation which begins by rejecting all culture and beauty for a theological formula, goes on to exchange the formula for a narrow and negative morality, then drops the morality for a handful of taboos and fetishes, and finally rots away in the

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dungeon of egoism. Again, a certain dissatisfaction with the national cultus is indicated in the popularity of various systems of yoga, of getting in tune with the infinite and thinking beautiful thoughts, which has grown to the proportions of a major industry and is still growing. But these nostrums have to be advertised and sold like everything else. There is practically no opposition to deism from the intellectuals; and in the universities the consolations of philosophy have not yet proved any superiority to the consolations of pedantry. And though American literature is full of satire on aberrations in American life, there has been none directed against the underlying causes of these aberrations, no Candide or Gulliver's Travels or Erewhon. Sinclair Lewis and Mencken, sometimes superficially regarded as satirists of the American middle class, are among the tenderest panegyrists of it we possess; and even the most radical writers do not seem to be aware how much they have in common with the bourgeois mentality they condemn. Deism is, in itself, broad enough to accommodate any shade of opinion from agnosticism and the more facile brands of atheistic humanism to liberal Christianity. But it is the former who appear as the more advanced and progressive groups, because they have followed out the implications of the creed more consistently. Thus the eighteenth-century deist argument, that it is necessary to postulate a conscious God to account for the existence of an ordered physical world, is no doubt still accepted by millions of Americans. But the gradual permeation of evolutionary modes of thought, and evidence that the physical world develops and transforms itself, makes this unnecessary for the more enlightened. And the fact that nature evolves reinforces, by a form of analogy which is frequent on this level of thinking, the stress laid by natural religion on the progressive improvement of society. It is perhaps worth noting that American deism is very similar to the established church of More's Utopia, the ideal state founded on natural religion. Deism therefore implies, and in its most acute devotees envisages, a progress of humanity to the point at which the postulate of a personal God will be as irrelevant to human life as it is now to science. To our really advanced and most anticipatory thinkers, therefore, God is a spiritual water-wings invented by man to comfort and support him in the earlier and more miserable stages of his social development. And if we look at history in terms of the baroque foreshortening of Mr. Wells' Outline,6 we can see that the rapidity of our development in the final millennia of a timetable stretching back to Paleozoic slime has been

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amazing. We are now at a crisis in which those who continue to talk of God are clogging the wheels of an advance to fuller humanity, and the latter should now be our whole concern. A few more bites out of the apple of the tree of knowledge, and we shall be as gods. It is thus left to the more timid and credulous to feel that it is necessary to keep God as a palladium, to appeal to in case anything goes wrong, and perhaps to remind us that there is still much that is wrong. Russian Communism, starting from premises which, as far as religion is concerned, are identical with those of American deism, decided to throw away the palladium, and the horrified revulsion that this act produced in America had at least as much superstition as genuine faith in it. For just as the millionaire hoped that what used to be called "the Russian experiment" would fail because if it succeeded it would prove the superfluity of millionaires, so most of our deists who thought about the matter at all felt vaguely that a successful Russia would prove the superfluity of God on their own principles. Thus the preservation of the palladium in America has tended to become a symbol of opposition to the revolutionary spirit. With many exceptions, and exceptions which are increasing in importance and influence every day, it is still broadly true that the Church in America not only has most of its eggs in the middle-class basket, but is mainly supported by those who politically are either reactionary or inert. The feeling that the world is rapidly progressing toward a permanently stable society and a solution of its most urgent problems of want, disease, and warfare, provides to some extent a moral justification and impetus for the hysterical pressure that an overproductive capitalism imposes on life. This communal hysteria is of course an obvious phenomenon of American society and has been much remarked upon. It is the direct cause of the dread of insecurity which radicals attempt to exploit in their favour, in spite of the fact that no one can be a radical without losing it. It is also, of course, a main cause of the barrenness of American culture, for it destroys all it can of the leisured evolution into understanding which is the condition of creative power. It is perhaps in the universities, where "scholarship" means an overproduction of unreadable books, that this hysteria has struck most deeply into cultural life. I am not saying that American achievements in culture have been negligible, though literature and painting have been, as we should expect, hampered by a narrow naturalism, called, in a term which is a little masterpiece of question-begging, "realism." I say only that the amount of Philistinism in so well educated a country is abnormally high. And as

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the contemplative virtues decline, and the word "wisdom" slowly becomes obsolete, the arts and humanities are forced back on the defensive and compelled to take second place to things more practical and useful. Useful for what? practical to what end? It has taken a long time to find the answer to such a question, not that one is ever needed, but now we have it. The activities spoken of as practical and useful are the activities essential to waging war. War, in short, is the goal to which this whole deistic civilization has been tending: war is the precipitate or isolation of the Philistinism which is its driving force. As soon as it comes, we can see that it gathers into itself many of the most striking features of American life: the cult of selfconscious toughness in its novels and crimes, the restless craving for novelty and excitement, the readiness of appeals to physical violence, the enthusiasm for causes and crusades. Even the habit just referred to of thinking in terms of an imminent generalized good is reflected in the military system of inverted values in which "damage to personnel negligible" means the death of a hundred men. War sweeps away what Falstaff calls "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace" [Henry TV, Pt. i, 4.2.32]; and it is still the Big Parade to most Americans, whatever their better judgements say. Yet at the same time America is a peaceful nation, who did not seek the war, and in fact avoided it more than was altogether consistent with her own safety. The resolution of this paradox is our next problem. Ill

One of the more sinister by-products of wartime propaganda is the attempt to show that this war is the result of a form of original sin peculiar to Germany. The Nazis could not have come to power, we are told, in any country except Germany, and Nazism is only the latest example of a recurrent mass neurosis which has made Germany the plague spot of modern civilization and the source of all its wars. One enterprising writer has traced this mass neurosis back to the time of Augustus and the destruction of his legions by Arminius. Others have demonstrated its existence in practically every great German from Luther to Nietzsche; a line of thought not obviously superior to the Nazi denigration of great Jews. I am not saying that this theory of mass neurosis is not an accurate analysis of the present condition of Germany: I am saying that the habit of thinking in terms of inbred racial impurities and

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of inventing historical myths to justify current expediencies of procedure are Nazi habits. Most of the features of Nazism existed in Russia before the revolution and were largely removed by that revolution, which suggests that Nazism is a social and not a racial disease. This point is all the more striking when we compare the Nazi psychosis with our own. Nazi lynchings of Jews are matched by the Ku Klux Klan and the lynching of Negroes; and anti-Semitism itself has greatly increased over here since Hitler came to power, a clear indication that the Nazi persecutions of the Jews have aroused far more sneaking sympathy than contempt on this continent. German trumpetings of the superiority of Germans to all other people are obviously attempts to exorcise an inner demon of disbelief in it; to raise an earthquake and fire to roar down a still small voice of self-ridicule. The average Anglo-Saxon has an inner conviction of the superiority of his race and his institutions which is the despairing envy of the purple-faced bawling Nazi, and which the latter would give anything to possess. The American tendency to stampede under mass emotional pressure is as marked as that of the Germans. The labour record of the great German industrialists who backed Hitler can hardly be worse than that of Ford or the steel and coal capitalists here; nor is the willingness of the latter to support a would-be Fascist dictator less in evidence. The ferocity of capital and labour warfare and the prevalence of gangsterism and thuggery in politics, however bad in Germany, have significant parallels in America. In both countries there has been a very powerful but easily frightened and bamboozled middle class. The Germans have had less experience of democracy, but much of our democracy is a rationalization of oligarchy or the opportunity of the lobbyist and ward heeler. Given the right conditions, we could develop on this continent a Nazism of a fury compared to which that of the Germans would be, in American language, bush-league stuff. And if it has not occurred, and even if the danger of its occurring has perhaps passed its meridian, our escape is due to the anodyne of prosperity and to certain economic and geographical factors in our favour, not to any special virtue in us, any innate love of liberty in our people, or any invincible power in our democratic institutions. With regard to the last, the general level of political education and insight is even lower here than in Germany before Hitler. American Fascists, or Defenders of American Democracy as they would doubtless call themselves, if in the first place they could achieve power, would find even less difficulty in rounding up and shooting the leaders of what organized resistance there

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would be than the Nazis had in Germany, where nearly half the population, in 1932, belonged to well-disciplined revolutionary parties. I have left Japan out of this discussion because the Japanese are easier to regard as totally alien: to the average American there is something eerily Robot-like and Martian about these enemies, something to remind him of thrillers read in childhood about inscrutable Orientals. But with Germany it is possible to see that we are fighting in the Nazis an objectification of our own worst impulses. We stand before them like Ebenezer Scrooge at his own grave: they are the goal to which our own deism is tending: what is confused and sporadic in us is logical and systematic in them. If the military defeat of Germany involves for us a total rejection of what Nazism stands for, we shall have cast out one of our most dangerous devils: if it involves the acceptance of it, and it is still possible that it may, our last state will be monstrously worse than our first. Crude and corrupt as the church of deism is, it has at least some of the advantages of catholicity: that is, it contains in solution a number of different and conflicting tendencies, any one of which would prove destructive to it if unchecked. Most conspicuous of these tendencies is the utilitarian cult of the practical and useful. When this gets out of hand, as it has done in Germany, we can see the result: a state organized wholly for war without any real purpose beyond waging it. In the words of the excellent title of an indifferent book, it is a "revolution of nihilism":7 revolution in the double sense of overthrow and of circulation, an endless subversion and an endless cyclic pursuit of the instrumental by the unconditioned evil will. Again, we have spoken of the sectarian quality of most reactions to American bourgeois deism, and the Nazis are an example, fortunately very rare in history, of the absolutizing of the sectarian mind. The most bigoted Puritan at the battle of Dunbar still felt that he was a member of a holy catholic church into which the entire human race should come to be saved: but the Nazis, who have repeated so many of the errors of Pharisaic Judaism, have carried the theory of an exclusive race much further than any Pharisee. The inference is that the Philistine and the sectarian tendencies are at bottom the same. They both begin with an attack on the large cultural tolerance which is the prerequisite of all catholicity and all spiritual freedom; they both end in the hideous accidia in which the will to die which is latent in all sin becomes fully manifest. The more thoughtful Americans are, of course, well aware that Na-

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zism is an internal as well as an external threat to the country, and that if America's cause is just, it is not in spite of the affinity between herself and Germany, but precisely because of it. And many of them make heroic efforts to separate from "the American way of life" the elements which tend away from Nazism, and hold them up as a purified ideal which is worthy of defence. An allegedly cynical Broadway has seen for several years now a long succession of earnest morality plays, each trying to work out a real reason for fighting Nazis and hating Nazism. These dramatists know that the defence of the country against all enemies regardless of who they are is not the whole matter. They know that personal hatred and revenge are signs of a latent sympathy with the enemy. They know that ferocity has nothing to do with courage. They know that an impassable gulf separates the cause of the Spanish Loyalists from the cause of Franco. They know that a Jew beaten to death in a concentration camp dies for something, whereas a fearless and resolute Nazi soldier on the Russian front merely dies. On the other hand, as good deists they must keep their argument on the plane of moral decency, excluding all matters relating to a personal God or the immortality of the soul. How, on this basis, can we explain the intuitions just listed? The plays usually end in an inconclusive murmur about the future and about the sanctity of individual freedom: we are to fight and die, it seems, to safeguard for our grandchildren the right to eccentricity. Meanwhile, the soldiers get on with the job. Many of those whose deism retains some Christian colouring are little better off. Disgust at the futility of the last war led many of them into pacifism, and for many years we were told that if the Church supported another war it was doomed. The almost total collapse of this large body of pacifist sentiment was less dramatic than at first appears. Its foundations had been sapped by the rise of Fascism, and all through the Spanish war, which in some respects presented a more clear-cut moral issue than at least the first year or two of the present one, the resemblance of pacifism to non-intervention caused the former to lose prestige. In the present war pacifists found themselves allied with a rabble of pro-Fascist elements for the same reason. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the failure of pacifism was the failure of a liberalism based on natural religion which could not stand against Hitler's demonic insight into the real nature and conditions of a fallen world. Meanwhile, Tory support of Fascism was weakened by an underlying fear that Bolshevism was inevitable, and liberal support of Communism was weakened by a depressed

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conviction that Fascism was gathering irresistible power. Both sides watched the oncoming of war with the paralyzed fascination of a bird hypnotized by a snake. One result of this paradoxical situation was that Fascism developed from a paranoiac nationalism to an organized international force, and Communism modulated from international revolution to a patriotic nationalism, in all countries where it has had much influence. The outbreak of war in the form of a renewal of hostilities between Germany and the Anglo-French alliance was immediately congenial only to those who had not responded to the progress of events since 1918. Thus the war seemed to justify, by its occurrence, the people with the most inflexible minds, the very ones who could not possibly possess enough vision to get us out of it. By the time of the attack on Russia, there were very few reasonable and decent men of good will who had not been hopelessly checkmated by the course of events. It was inevitable that those who saw most clearly that there was much in American life heading straight for Nazism, and who were still looking for something which should be definitely anti-Nazi and still consistent with deism, should have found what they were looking for in the Communists. All through the thirties, Communism in America had in academic, artistic, and even clerical circles an influence out of all proportion to its popular support. In English-speaking countries there has never been the sharp antagonism between Christian Churches and radical politics that there has often been in Continental Europe. Within the churches, we are frequently told that the Russians are now engaged in practising all the Christian virtues without its yet having dawned on them that they are Christian, Gentiles doing by nature the things contained in the law. And before the war, many liberals felt that Communists were really their own vanguard, and that the difference between them was merely one of degree of courage and resolution. For Communists had rejected all forms of revealed religion, had renounced the glorifying of God in favour of the progress of humanity, had identified the eternal with the future: in short, its religious aims and beliefs were identical with those of American deism except for the absence of costive timidity. Its leaders, or leaders deeply affected by it, include an astonishingly large proportion of the really great men of our time, and, with all its glaring faults, an outburst of renewed creative energy has followed it wherever it has gone: in Russia, in China, in Barcelona, in Prague, and in Mexico. Its view of capitalist society is, as far as it ever claimed to go, irrefutable; and its view of history at least more stimulating than the

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soporific theories of painless evolution taught in the democracies. According to this last, the English and American bourgeoisie constitute the telos of history; to produce them the Greeks contributed reason, the Romans law, the Jews energetic morality, and the Renaissance individual liberty: this segment of history is the only one that shows any purpose or direction, the rest being mere cycles of Cathay. This is perhaps not the best mental equipment with which to sit down at a peace conference on equal terms with Russians and Chinese; in any case, Communism kept all that was progressive in this theory and galvanized it into a revolutionary and catastrophic drama. This catastrophic view of history and the belief in the inevitability of certain historical processes may be waning. Both Communist and Nazi prestige owe much to the effective way in which they have dramatized catastrophe and the logic of violence. If revolutionary movements spread, the Church will have to get along as well as it can with the collapse of its middle class: if not, as is perhaps more likely (vide the "managerial" theories in modern economics), we shall have to revise our naturalreligion culture in the direction neither of Nazism nor Communism nor any other logical theory of politics, but, rejecting all externally compelled syntheses of culture, such as totalitarian states invariably bring, based on the large cultural tolerance of our democracy, a new kind of catholicity. Peroration of some kind: the role of the prophet is not to prophesy doom and hope it will come about because he has prophesied it, like Jonah, nor to recommend as beneficial an amount of suffering for others he would not be willing to undergo himself. His role is to preach the Word of revealed, not natural, religion. Note the repetition, which occurs every century or so, of the situation described in Bunyan: So Christian turned out of his way to go to Mr. Legality's house for help; but, behold, when he was got now hard by the hill, it seemed so high, and also that side of it that was next the way-side did hang so much over, that Christian was afraid to venture further, lest the hill should fall on his head; wherefore there he stood still, and wotted not what to do. Also his burden now seemed heavier to him than while he was in his way. There came also flashes of fire out of the hill, that made Christian afraid that he should be burned. Here, therefore, he sweat and did quake for fear. And now he began to be sorry that he had taken Mr. Worldly Wiseman's counsel. And with that he saw Evangelist coming to meet him; at the sight also of whom he began to blush for shame.8

10 Leisure and Boredom

The provenance of this paper is unknown, though it reads like, and is about the same length as, Frye's radio talks. IfFrye's reference in the third paragraph to the ending of slavery in the United States is not approximate, then the paper dates from 1963. The typescript is in the NFF, 1988, box 48, file 3.

The oldest stories in the world are stories about how man once had just nothing to do, and was as happy as he could be. This was the state of things called paradise or the golden age. Man lived in a garden that supplied him with his food, or in a warm climate where he didn't need clothes. He was happy, though, not because his needs were supplied, but because he didn't want anything that was particularly hard to get. All he wanted to do was eat his acorns and berries and roots; he didn't farm or build boats; there were no social distinctions or even any trade. Consequently no money: all versions of this story agree that there was no gold in the golden age. In some versions, including the one in the Bible, there was no death either, and man was all set to live forever this way. Well, the story goes on, man wasn't good enough for such a life. Things got worse, or he did something wrong: anyway, he lost his paradise and had to go out and work to live. There are two morals to the story. One is that it takes a pretty superior character to be able to live without work. The other, and the main one intended, is that work is a curse, and it would be a lot pleasanter if we didn't have to work. So pleasant, in fact, that we have to put the very idea of it away out of our reach, back before any human life at all started as we know human life. This idea of the curse of work has certainly been true for the great majority of people. For thousands of years civilization was built on

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slavery, work that meant that those who did it spent their lives in humiliation, misery, and terror. Negro slavery in the United States ended just a hundred years ago. By that time the industrial revolution was under way, and it was clear that slavery was not just immoral—it could be that and still survive—but inefficient as well. In the north and in Europe there were millions of wage slaves, who kept from starving by doing the most menial and monotonous jobs imaginable: sometimes just one motion in a factory, repeated day in and day out for years. Even the majority of people have work to do that they would never think of doing if they didn't have to do it. When most people are doing what they don't especially want to do, the "best people" are supposed to be the people who don't have to work at all—the aristocracy or the gentry who get waited on by servants and spend their lives riding, hunting, dining, flirting, and generally reminding us of how nice it would be not to have to work. A hundred years ago slavery tried to compete with industry, and lost because it was less efficient. Today a human industrial system is trying to compete with an automated industry, and is losing out for the same reason. A manufacturer of something like sewing machines let us say, for which there's a steady demand, can retool his plant, throw hundreds or even thousands of people out of work, cut his overhead to the tiniest fraction of what it was, and produce far more sewing machines than before. True, he won't be able to sell them to the people he's just fired, or not for a while, and if the number of unemployed runs into the tens of millions that might become a problem. But the point is that producing things, whether food or essential services, requires fewer people all the time. If you go down town in any big city and do some snooping, you'll find thousands of people already working at made-up jobs, subsidized employment; clerks handing memoranda around to each other, and so on. So we're really, potentially, at the stage that Thomas More prophesied in his Utopia: everybody worked in More's Utopia, and so, More said, because there were no idlers to feed, nobody had to work more than a few hours a day. But we're getting ahead even of that situation. Perhaps we could develop social services to the point where all the people thrown out of work by automation could be made into a new aristocracy, with nothing to do except go on luxury cruises. How would that do? It wouldn't do at all, as anybody can see. The reason is not that the people who'd be working would be jealous of the people not working, but the other way round. In other words, there's something wrong about

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this "work is a curse" notion. Humiliating and degrading work like slavery may be a curse, but that's not what we really mean by work. Everybody is part of a community, and everybody wants to feel that he has some function in that community, contributing something to society that gives him a place in it. There are two kinds of work, apparently. One is doing menial or mechanical labour. This kind of work is being cut down now with automation: machines can do most of it better and more cheaply. But there's another kind of work which is a man's contribution to society of what he can do best. That's a central part of his life, and taking it away from him leads to boredom. Boredom is not just a trivial way of wasting time: it can be a slow and bitter death. It happens to elderly people all the time: people who have been vigorous and active, raising families and doing things for their community, suddenly find themselves retired and on a shelf, with no real function any more. If they're sick or passive, they can adjust to this, and some of them can form communities of their own and develop a different set of interests: but a good many of them just crawl away to die, like mutilated animals. When younger people are bored, they start smashing things, and if we develop a large group of bored people, a lot of the things we've been preserving with great care—not just buildings but more delicate constructions like our inherited rights and freedoms—are likely to get smashed. If a man's job is what he really wants to do, and is his real contribution to society, the difference between his working hours and his spare time isn't so important. He'd be quite willing to fill up some of his spare time with extra work if that were necessary: if not, he'll cultivate other interests: playing golf, travelling, collecting pictures, making furniture, serving on school or church boards: whatever else he can do that he has the money to do but doesn't have to do for money. Such a man's life will be a bundle of active interests: one will be his work; the rest will belong to what we call his leisure. But there won't be much psychological difference between them. He works equally hard at anything that interests him, whether he gets paid for it or not, but the ability to fill his spare time with other activities makes his whole life leisurely. The more menial or mechanical a job is, the less it's likely to be what the worker can really do best. He doesn't feel that a job like this is his real contribution to society: it's just a job. He takes it only to keep himself and his family going, and he'd trade it in for another job at any moment. He isn't as badly off as the man who is bored with nothing to, but there's a

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kind of charge of boredom working up inside him that he wants to let off on weekends or whatever time he's "free." With him there's a big psychological difference between work time and play time: he'll fight for shorter working hours, and not work overtime unless he's paid extra. It's quite possible to have a dullish job and still have other active interests: if we have, we think of our interests as our real life, and subtract our working time from that real life. But if a man resents the job he's in, it's more likely that the charge of boredom inside him will explode in doing things just to kill time. The difference between leisure and distraction or boredom is not so much in what one does as in the mental attitudes toward it. It's easiest to see this if we take extreme examples. Our television sets and highways are crowded on weekends with people who are not looking for leisure but are running away from it. Leisure goes to a hockey game to see a game: distraction or boredom goes to see one team trample the other into the ice. Leisure drives a car to see the country: boredom drives it to get in front of the car ahead. Leisure is not afraid of solitude, quiet, or unplanned stretches of time; boredom has to have noise, crowds, and constant panic. Leisure goes to a movie to see a play; boredom goes to get enough of a sexy or violent or sentimental shock to forget about real life for a while. Leisure doesn't feel put upon when asked to take some civic responsibilities; boredom never contributes anything to society: it can't think or create or help others; all it can do is try to forget that job that comes back on Monday morning. Leisure takes people as they come; boredom keeps talking about how the Jews are running everything these days and how all these uppity niggers are getting so they want to marry our daughters and how all these wops and krauts are coming over here and taking our jobs away from us. When you ask what's the matter with a man who talks this way, the answer is very often that he has to feel superior to somebody because he knows he's not contributing anything to society himself that somebody else couldn't contribute just as well, or for less money. The Communists started revolutions in Russia and China on the Marxist theory that workers were getting less out of society in money and social position than their contribution to society entitled them to. That feeling can cause strikes in a democracy, but it's not a strong enough idea to start a revolution in one any longer. Besides, the Communist countries have the same problems with growing automation that we have: at least the Soviet Union has, and China soon will have. No: the real danger to us

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is not in a revolution, but in a boredom and frustration that wants to move towards starting a war, just to have something really distracting to do. This is the feeling that's behind most of the right-wing hysteria in the democracies today. Well, what can be done about leisure and boredom? As usual, it's easier to see what can't be done, at least at first. There'll be a lot of attempts at featherbedding and made-up jobs and compulsory stand-ins and the like, and some of this will be necessary socially, if not industrially. Perhaps, too, there'll be a mass distribution of happy pills of various kinds, and a great shower of propaganda about the dignity of labour and the importance of whatever one is doing. Maybe donkey's carrots will work with donkeys: I don't know: they won't work indefinitely with human beings. Wherever we turn in this problem, we keep falling over the word "education": but if education means trying to get people to stop going to hockey games and go to discussion groups on great books instead, education isn't going to help much either. Still, the problem of leisure and boredom is an educational problem. Education may not solve it, but nothing else will. Schools, churches, clubs, and whatever else has any right at all to be called educational, need to think of educating for leisure as one of our central and major social needs. And education is a much broader business than studying certain subjects, though it includes that. Television, newspapers, films, are all educational agencies, though what they do mostly is more like dope peddling than like serious education. Education reflects the kind of society we have. If society is competitive and aggressive and ego-centered, education will be too; and if education is that way, it'll produce a cynical and selfish society, round and round in a vicious circle. Intelligent and dedicated people can break this circle in a lot of places if they try hard. What makes boredom boring? It's not just a matter of not being busy enough. Take a girl who's dropped out of college because the slick magazines told her she wasn't being feminine unless she threw her brains away. What with running a house and three children and outside activities, she hasn't a minute of free time, but she's bored all the same. Being bored is really the feeling that there's something missing inside oneself. When someone gets that feeling, his instinct is to feel that something outside him can supply what's missing. This is what inspires the chase for what are called status symbols. A man struggles to get an expensive car or a mink coat for his wife in the hope that people will judge him by these things instead of by himself. One trouble with these

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things is that they wear out so fast. In fact, our economy partly depends on their wearing out fast. As soon as anything is recognized to be a status symbol, it begins to look silly, and we have to start chasing something else. Suppose a man wants to collect pictures, not because he likes pictures, but because it's an approved thing to do. He's soon told that certain kinds of pictures are fashionable and others aren't. But as soon as he's got his house filled with canvases a hundred feet square covered with red paint, the fashion changes to pop art, and there he is with last year's model of status symbols. It's the same with all the distracting activities. A man is bored because he bores himself. Boredom always tends toward aggressiveness, something that may build up a man's opinion of himself. In the past the class structure of society meant that most people couldn't do much about being bored. But every so often there could be a war, to kill off some of the people who weren't having much of a life anyway. Shakespeare's Falstaff speaks of the pitiful wretches that he recruits to go to fight the French as "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace" [Henry IV, Pt. i, 4.2.32-3]. But, now we have another problem on our hands besides automation. We can't throw ourselves into war with the same old enthusiasm: it's too dangerous. And we can't take out our aggressions on people in Asia and Africa, or even on the poorer and more helpless people in our own society. People can't be pushed around so easily as they used to be. We get bored because we feel that something is missing inside ourselves. We look outside ourselves for the missing place, either aggressively, by trying to bully somebody, or by trying to forget about ourselves by throwing ourselves into some kind of illusion. For this state of mind, illusion is a lot better than reality. Far better to go into squealing hysterics over a rock-and-roll singer than over a dictator: far better to fight the Russians in a hockey game than on a battlefield. But illusion can't fool everybody all the time. Some people, sooner or later, have to wake up and look for the missing piece inside themselves. Everybody has, inside himself, certain powers of development and growth: interests and abilities that make him what he is and not someone else. Developing these things is education in the real sense of the word. Nobody ever develops all his powers fully: most people develop only a very small proportion of them. But the need to grow and expand as a human being is the most important need we have. We're always being told that we shouldn't grow but adjust, do what other people are doing, even if it means stunting and twisting our own growth. That's a lie. It's

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the most fully grown people who are best adjusted; the warped and stunted people never are. In a society like ours there's no excuse for depriving anybody of a social function, and the growing amount of free time means that more people will have more time to develop their own interests and abilities. That is, they'll have more leisure. We may develop the mechanical means to get back to a world of pure leisure. But the old stories of paradise and a golden age and of how we lost it so easily were right after all. We can't stay in a world of leisure mechanically because leisure is not something you get: it's something you are.

1 1

Criticism and Society

The date and provenance of this address are unknown. It was presented sometime after 1966, the date of the most recently published work Frye refers to (Irving Howe's Steady Work). While there is no record of Frye's having given this talk or, as his opening sentence suggests, another with the same title, he did speak on "The Social Context of Literature" at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, in October 1969, and again at Wells College, Aurora, New York, in November of the same year; and in February 1970 he spoke at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, on "The Social Context of Literary Criticism." The issues Frye addresses are treated at greater length in The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (1971), a book he wrote and rewrote over the course of three years, beginning in 1968. It seems likely, then, that this paper dates from the late 19605 or early 19705. It also seems likely that he addressed it to a group of educators: at one point, where he is discussing the questions of education, he refers to his audience as "a group like this." Several things suggest that the typescript, which is in the NFF, 1991, box 38, file 2, was transcribed from a tape of Frye's talk: for example, the words "Thank you" that appear at the conclusion (a phrase Frye never typed, or had typed, at the end of his papers), an incorrect title for Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New, the misspellings of the names Feidelson and Ellmann, the use of "butterfly" for "butterslide," the use of "unmistakenly" for "unmistakably," and a typed format (unindented paragraphs separated by spaces) that deviates from both Frye's own practice and that of his secretary, Jane Widdicombe. I have corrected these mistakes, removed the "Thank you," and made a few other changes to regularize the prose with Frye's standard practices. In recent months I have been offering the title "Criticism and Society" to

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almost everybody who asked me to speak, partly because I like to be as wide open as possible and partly because this is a general line of interest in which I have become increasingly engaged. I am concerned, in general, with the question of the context of literary criticism and in particular of defining the entire subject of which literary criticism forms a part. Now when one asks, What is the whole subject of which criticism forms part? the first and readiest answer is literature. That is the way the librarians catalogue criticism, as one of the subdivisions of literature, but I have never been very satisfied with that set-up. It seems to me that literature is divided into a theory and a practice, and that the practice of literature is an art and that the theory of literature, which includes the whole teaching and learning process connected with literature, is criticism. The main reason why literature is difficult to teach is that it is impossible to teach. The subject that is taught and learned directly is criticism, which one relapses into as soon as one begins to talk about literature. Consequently, there is no larger subject in literature itself into which criticism expands. The critic may be a poet or a novelist, but he is unlikely to be that merely as an extension of his critical interests. If he is, he is not likely to be a very good poet or novelist. And so we come to the second and so perhaps the whole subject of which literature or literary criticism forms part—the criticism of the other arts. These undoubtedly are connected with literary criticism. We would know more about that if the criticism of the other arts was more highly developed than it is. There is, of course, a general question of taste. Taste is a kind of general cultural problem which a historian or sociologist may deal with, and literary criticism is one of the aspects of any age's taste. But when I look at the books on the shelves in my study, it does not seem as though the criticism of the other arts was the field into which literary critics naturally expanded when they began to deal with larger and broader issues. I can see in front of me on the walls of my study such books as Lionel Trilling's Beyond Culture, Leslie Fiedler's An End to Innocence, Irving Howe's Steady Work, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. These are all books written by literary critics. They all deal with matters considerably removed from literary criticism and yet they say about them the things that a person trained in literary criticism would look for and would naturally say. Again, if one studies the large volume called The Modern Tradition—a collection of documents about twentieth-century literature and culture edited by Professors Ellmann and Feidelson of Northwestern and Yale—one finds that these docu-

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ments are in political theory, history, psychology, philosophy, religion, and that that seems to be the general area into which criticism naturally expands. This is true also if we turn to the great critics of the past. Such works as Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy or Carlyle's Sartor Resartus are works rooted in the study of literature. Although they set forth ideas and make propositions, they are clearly something other than actual philosophy; and yet they seem to be the kind of interest that a literary critic develops when he begins to think of his literary interests in their wider social context. The same thing is true if you go back to Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, or even as far back as Dante. So that the context of literary criticism is something more like what we call, rather generally, the humanities. Now in order to look at this question a bit more specifically I would begin with the principle that a great deal of our education is what might be called initiatory education. That is, it is the matter of learning what society requires or expects us to know. A great deal of the educational process consists in doing what some educators, whose intentions are perhaps somewhat better than their semantics, call adjusting one to society, and consequently one finds that all teachers are deeply concerned with the kind of information and attitudes and cultural slant which enables one to move freely and in an area of communication with one's fellows in one's own society. I would call this structure of initiatory education a mythology. The word "myth," of course, like other terms which belong in literary criticism such as "fable" and "fiction," often means something untrue—but that is a vulgarization and not what I mean by it. I mean by a mythology a body of informing ideas or conceptions or images which hold a society together and unify its social vision. There are cultures in the past and in the present which have had a very definite structure of mythology of this kind. It has been taught as a major part of the educational curriculum and is not only expected but demanded of all citizens of a society. In the Middle Ages, for example, there was a Christian myth, the vast synthesis which Christianity had made of its Biblical and Aristotelian sources and which formed the basis of education in all areas of education. In our own time the Marxist societies also have a closely organized body of mythology of Marxist principles, and these also are directly taught and learned: they form the body of what those who live in Marxist societies are required to know and to understand, and they are administered educationally by a certain class of theoreticians who understand both the principles of Marxism and the way in which the existing power structure wishes those principles to be

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rationalized. Wherever we have a definite mythology taught and learned in this way, we have a rather limited amount of social tolerance. That is, tolerance is fundamentally a matter of deciding how much deviation is consistent with the safety of the myth. And a mythology of this kind is a structure of belief both theoretical and practical. There are two senses in which we use the words "belief" and "faith." There is a practical sense in which what a man believes is what his actions and behavior and attitudes show that he believes. This is his practical belief. And the principles of it are formulated in such writers as Pascal with his wager.1 And then there is also a theoretical structure of belief of what a man says he believes, or thinks he believes or believes he believes. This is fundamentally a statement of adherence to a certain kind of social body. In the societies that I spoke of, the medieval and the Marxist, society is based on what I shall call a "closed" mythology, where the myth forms a structure of theoretical and practical belief, and consequently becomes a central element in the educational process. Our own society I should characterize rather as having an open mythology which is not directly taught as a subject but is rather acquired by the student as a result of being taught specific disciplines. It is more of an attitude to society than a definite statement of belief. It is rather a kind of reservoir of possibilities of belief and an area of imaginative discussion. This open mythology comes to us on two levels. The lower level is the level of stock response and cliche. That is, these are the prefabricated ideas which we learn from our conversation, from our family, and from other casual social contact, and which are reinforced by the mass media. These ideas also form a very large body of elementary education, and many schools in this country—at least before the Sputnik crisis of 1957—taught nothing else but a stock response mythology called the "American way of life." This stock-response mythology preserves the faint outlines of the Christian myth from which it is partly descended: "Things were much simpler in the olden days," "The world has unaccountably lost its innocence since we were children," "I just live to get out of this rat race for a while and go somewhere where I can get away from it all." "Yet there is a bracing atmosphere in progress and competition, and although the world is threatened with grave dangers from foreigners—perhaps with total destruction—yet if we dedicate ourselves anew to the tasks before us we may preserve our way of life for generations yet unborn." One recognizes in these sentiments the dim outlines of pastoral myths, fall from paradise myths,

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exodus from Egypt myths, and apocalyptic myths. The first modern novelist, in the technical sense of the term modern, is usually taken to be Raubert, and Raubert's last work, La Tentation de saint Antoine,included, as part of his research, a dictionary of accepted ideas, which is one of the first attempts, I think, to map out systematically this mythology of stock response. In other nineteenth-century writers one finds similar tendencies. Some characters in Dickens, for example, like the Barnacles in Little Dorrit or the Wilfers and the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend, are characters who expand into cultural allegories, and the particular cultural allegory that they represent is this form of stock response. In our own day there has been a remarkable development of books which have been written from within one of the social sciences but which are really read as a form of literary satire. One can think of dozens of titles without trying very hard—The Affluent Society, The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers, The Insolent Chariots, The Organization Man— all these have a certain uniformity of rhythm to their title which suggests that they are all dealing with much the same subject.2 They are, in fact, a form of literary fiction which is dealing primarily with the symbolism, ritual, and mythology of cliche and stock response. The systematic development of this form of fiction is, of course, bound to have very considerable consequences for the fiction of novel and drama, and in fact already has had. This then is the lower level of the open mythology which we are compelled to learn something about. There is a higher level, which is the normal content of the type of education which, at the university level, is usually called general education or liberal education: the liberal arts program. If one asks the favorite question of so much academic oratory—what a liberal education is, as distinct from professional training— one can perhaps answer it best by placing it on the basis of what it is that the student retains from such an educational program. It is hardly specific information or facts, or even ideas, because although he can learn these very quickly, he will certainly forget them very quickly too. And what the student retains from it, other than habits of study, is surely something more like what I have been calling a mythology or a vision of society. It is a much more actively learned form of mythology than the stock-response one, and we find in our society a good deal of antiintellectual fear that a less naive and less conditioned attitude to the mythology of our society will destroy one's loyalties. But in a group like this, of course, we know better. And we understand that it is necessary to

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examine the assumptions of our society actively and critically and not simply to absorb them. In a society with an open mythology, which, as I described it earlier, is rather a reservoir of possible belief than an actual structure of belief, we have something which John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, identified with the area of free discussion that he regarded as the central safeguard of democracy, and it is also something very close to what Matthew Arnold meant by culture. We notice that a society with a closed mythology, whether medieval or Marxist, produces a general elite, that is, a group of people who are specifically charged with the task of interpreting this mythology and teaching it. In a society with an open mythology we do not have this general elite, because in a democracy everybody belongs to some kind of elite—that is, everyone derives from his social function some kind of importance and has a specific contribution to his society that nobody else has. If I look back now to some of the books that I mentioned earlier, books by Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Marshall McLuhan, and others which seem to expand the interest of the literary critic into other fields, we find them unmistakably expanding into this field of what I have called social mythology. And there are many other books which are written from within other disciplines, not just philosophy and Whitehead's Science and the Modern World or the works of the existentialist philosophers who have taught us the meanings of some of our central myths, like alienation and anxiety and nausea and absurdity. Some of them are written from within psychology, like Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents or the more optimistic works of Norman Brown and Herbert Marcuse. Some of them are written from within the discipline of history, like the works of Toynbee and Spengler and the large group of what I call butterslide books which tell us how many values we have lost since the Middle Ages. And some of them, like Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New, are based in the criticism of other arts. I am speaking now, of course, of conceptual myths, of myths which are really informing ideas that help to unify our vision of our world. But these conceptual myths are, in their turn, derived from images which are shaped from literature itself by the poets and novelists and dramatists. To look at the source of these informing ideas of our time, one has to turn to contemporary drama and poetry. I have spoken of this structure of open mythology as having been based in the area that we refer to vaguely as the humanities. The reason

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for that is that there seem to be two worlds in front of us. There is the world that we see and live in, and there is the world that we make and recreate. The mythology that I am talking about is based on what the existentialists call "concern."3 That is, it relates primarily to the world that man makes, not to the world that he sees. The world that he sees, the nature which is simply there to be studied, is the domain particularly of the physical sciences, and the physical sciences do not form an integral part of this open mythology which I have been discussing. The reason is that the scientific vision cannot be man-centred, as far as its subject matter is concerned, whereas the mythology of a society's hopes and despairs and visions and dreams, its anxieties and its ideals, is a product of human concern with oneself and with the civilization that one makes and remakes. There is a psychological difference between the two. Our mythologists are, of course, continually attempting to annex principles from the sciences in order to show that science supports their opinions as well. But some very awkward snags develop. Such a conception as evolution, for example, has stimulated a great many mythical conceptions in the philosophies of Bergson and Bernard Shaw or in the history of the arts, where art is supposed to have evolved from the cave drawings to Picasso, who draws on much the same level as the cave drawings. But the word "evolution," or "development," is still employed. When the conception of evolution is used in history or philosophy or literary criticism, what is being used is not a principle identical with the biological hypothesis, but a mythical analogy to that hypothesis, and how important the analogy is has still to be determined, as a separate problem. Criticism, therefore, expands into an activity of examining the general cultural assumptions either of our own age, in the case of contemporary criticism, or of earlier times, with historical criticism. It has, however, I think, one further step to take. Criticism in its ultimate form is the study of the structural principles of literature itself, of the way in which it has preserved the continuity of its tradition and maintained and modulated those traditions from one age to another. It is the function of the poet, the novelist, the dramatist to express, in imaginative form, and in the form of images and symbols, the informing hopes and anxieties and ideals of mankind. It is the function of criticism to examine this myth-making power as it has thrown up one culture, or one civilization, after another. There is a work that I often turn to in this connection, William Morris's collection of tales in verse called The Earthly Paradise. The story begins

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with a group of lonely wanderers who are, in fact, personified myths. That is, they are identified with the stories that they tell. And they have met together on an abandoned island in the North Atlantic (some of them are Greek in origin and others Norse in origin), and they interchange their stories, one after the other, around the year. They have had a long history set out in the prologue of the poem where they have been, and have outgrown the role of kings and gods. They are now left to themselves and they now interchange their myths among themselves, and the general tone of the work as a whole is a rather lonely and ineffectual one. Morris thought of himself as, in his own words, "the idle singer of an empty day,"4 and he thought of man's myth-making power as something submerged—something which had not really yet emerged to transform society in the way that Morris hoped it would be transformed. It seems to me that since Morris's time we have become much more conscious of the actual extent to which the imagination creates and re-creates human civilization, and what is still a bit isolated from this activity is the kind of criticism which examines the theoretical basis of it. The great age of that kind of criticism is, in my opinion, still to come. I am aware that there are people who have been industriously trying to popularize the idea that the age of criticism is over. These are the bad critics who hope that if they can throw enough discredit on the good ones somebody may pay some attention to them for a change. But it seems to me that the age of criticism as a unified cultural activity linked to its context in the study of human society, and of the attitudes which underlie the shaping of human society, is just beginning to enter upon its great age.

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The date and provenance of this essay are unknown. The earliest it could have been written is 1957, the year that Frye received word about one of the teaching experiments of James Reaney, the colleague mentioned in the penultimate paragraph.1 As Frye refers to a talk earlier in the day by the Minister of Education, the paper appears to have been presented to a conference of teachers or educators. The seven-page typescript is in the NFF, 1999, box 37, file 7. Everyone who has attempted the teaching of English knows that it is very difficult to do. Some of the difficulty is built into the subject, and is not removable; but there are other difficulties which, if they cannot be wholly removed, can at least be considerably diminished. These latter include the difficulties that come from confusion in the theory of literature, for all effective teaching depends on theoretical clarity. Literature has a theory and a practice, and the teaching or learning of literature is not really either of them. The practice of literature is writing, and writing is a skill, like playing the piano or painting, attainable by constant practice. The theory of literature is criticism, and nearly all of what we call the teaching and learning of literature is really the teaching and learning of literary criticism. Anyone who could memorize a poem without stopping to think about what it meant would be coming fairly close to the pure learning of literature: but such a person would normally be either someone with total recall or an extremely sophisticated lover of poetry. As soon as anyone stops to think about what a poem means or sounds like, he has moved into the area of criticism. The easiest subjects to teach, I should think, are the subjects with a highly organized structure, like mathematics, as opposed to such sub-

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jects as history and political geography, where a great number of facts have to be memorized before much of a pattern can emerge. This principle ought to make literature one of the more readily teachable subjects, as structure is so much more important than content in literature. Again, it makes for easier teaching if a subject can be approached deductively, relating illustrations and examples to general principles. In the physical sciences, those at the top of the scientific hierarchy, the original and creative thinkers in science, are usually proceeding inductively, establishing new conceptual areas by experiment. But elementary science, as taught in school, deals with principles so well established that all experimental work simply illustrates those principles. Where a deductive approach is possible, it is also usually possible to present the established principles at different levels of complexity. Laws of thermodynamics and the conception of entropy cannot be presented as such to a six-yearold child, but his attention can be called to the fact that he gets warmer when he runs, and so the notion that heat is produced by the expenditure of energy can enter his mind even at that age, on an appropriately simple and concrete level of experience. It would certainly make for easier teaching if literature, like science, possessed a deductive pattern of this sort. In the practice of literature, or learning to write, there is such a pattern, though its benefits are not always exploited. The writer learns, not through a descriptive or empirical approach to language such as we have in linguistics, but through the normative approach of grammar, with its canon of accepted standards, and through the parallel approach of dictionaries—at least if the beginning writer is lucky enough to have a proper dictionary, one that is willing to say, loudly and frequently, "most people get this wrong." The timidity with which so many educators handle even the resources of grammars and dictionaries in teaching composition, as though accepted usage and standards of clarity had something of the hickory-stick conception of education about them, is based on a misunderstanding. Certainly if a student is thought of as advancing from word to phrase, from phrase to sentence, from sentence to paragraph, learning more complex rules at each enlargement, he will tend to write English as though he were deciphering something from Linear B, and any permission given him to relapse into his normal sub-standard idiom is good if it loosens him up. But any young person I have ever tried to communicate with invariably expressed himself in a flow of words that could only be stopped by forcible interruption, and if the standards of usage are thought

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of as breaking into this flow, as a process of transforming monologue into communication, they should become more natural to the learning process. For good writing there must be a working relationship between the spoken and the written style; otherwise what one writes is a dead language, an academic exercise with no real relationship to the writer's actual mental processes. The most natural way to learn to write is to imitate one's own speaking style, provided one has learned to talk. Now the desire to speak is as powerful a drive as any that the human being possesses, but if grammar is thrown up as an obstacle to block this drive, the drive is dammed up and rolls back into sub-standard idioms. These idioms are not necessarily part of natural speech at all, but are often expressions of subconscious resentment directed against the barrier. If one frequently hears "throwed" instead of "threw" at baseball games, it does not mean that the speaker is unfamiliar with "threw": it means that he is quite familiar with it, and that his sense of what critics call decorum is prompting him not to use the language of the schoolroom in a healthy outdoors atmosphere. Still less does it mean that the colloquial language is trying to do anything logical, like changing strong verbs into weak ones: the same speaker would be as ready to say "dove" if he associated "dived" with good grammar. We are familiar with the disasters wrought by half-educated pedantry, such as the contortions involved in not splitting infinitives or not saying "ain't I?," and we are aware by now, or should be, of the futility of trying to teach one language while speaking another (I still cherish a sentence I remember from a public-school teacher: "Now tomorrow we will go on to the lesson on shall and will, because I would like to finish it by Friday"). At the same time teaching language by "following usage" is like trying to plow by following a horse, and when English is in a fair way to become a world language, the acceptance of conventional forms is a matter of major importance. It seems to me that the way toward a solution is to think of a student's power of self-expression as continuous, and as gradually conditioned by the demands of a reader or listener, not as a chaos of troglodytic noises which the spirit of correct usage is expected to brood on and impregnate. Approached in this way, a student's reading could become more directly a working model for his speech. If the sense of drive or continuity is carried over into reading and literary education generally, the young student may perhaps see more

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easily why poetry is at the centre of literature. Jeremy Bentham's remark that we have poetry when the lines don't run to the end of the page is an excellent formulation of a book-bogged approach to poetry.2 The connection of poetry with dance and song, with a physically pulsating rhythm, which gives surge and sweep to epic, a sinewy running strength to drama, a precise marching wit to satire, and a caressing and swaying movement to lyric, is never to be lost sight of, from infantile contact with nursery rhymes to the relentless carburetor-explosions of Beckett's The Unnamable. Such a sense of poetry > expanding into the prose which is one's normal medium of literary expression, may illustrate how rhythm is the first principle of good prose, and that such rhythm is, like one's handwriting, a distinctive expression of one's personality. My main concern at present, however, is with an extension of such principles into another area. Is it possible to develop, out of the theory of literary criticism, a deductive pattern which can help to put the teaching of literature at any level into an intelligible context, logically related to what has gone before and to what may come later? I am convinced that criticism can produce such a structure, and the reasons why it has not done so are partly historical. The modern languages, including English, became teaching subjects at the university level, in a general context of philology, history of language, social and political history, and against a background of Classical scholarship. The critical techniques that have developed since then, such as "new" or rhetorical criticism (for critics no longer possess this Classical background, and so find a technique new that was quite familiar to Plato) have also been university-centered, at least in their origin. The methods of rhetorical criticism have filtered down a good deal into secondary school teaching, and will doubtless continue to do so. But between the teaching of reading in elementary schools and the critical study of literature in universities, there is still a great theoretical gap, filled in by various ad hoc classroom devices. This gap exists because criticism has not developed a coherent unified theory of literature, or any sense of its total shape, which would tell us what is central and what peripheral, what elementary and what advanced. The result is that the early years of university study are often filled up with survey courses, general education courses, world literature courses, and the like, which may be rationalized as an attempt to give the student a coordinated view of his cultural heritage or what not, but which would be much more accurately described as remedial literary education. The framework containing such a deductive pattern would have to

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consist of certain assumptions about the origin and the direction of literature. The origin of literature, I think, is in the impulse to do with words what the rest of culture and civilization does with other media. That is, literature is part of the process of transforming a nonhuman and subhuman physical environment into something with a human shape, purpose, and meaning that produces cities, gardens, farms, technology and political entities as well as literature. Literature tries by means of words to associate, or perhaps more accurately to assimilate, the nonhuman with the human world. The main principles of this verbal association are likeness and identity, which are reflected in the two commonest figures of speech, the simile and the metaphor: "A is like B" and "A is B." These processes are, judged by the standards of discursive thought, which fortunately are not relevant, crude, primitive, and archaic modes of thought. It follows that they ought to be relatively easy to introduce to young students. The assimilating of external nature to human life is most clearly marked in myths, folk tales, fairy tales and legends. This is a class of literature which we instinctively feel to be "good for the imagination" because it restores to the mind the sense of the primitive function of literature. The greatest producers of these genres, such as Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen, seem to drop into the very centre of our literary experience even when they come late in the history of literature. What is ancient is equally central, but is in a much more strategic position. Here we encounter the second great fact about literature: its pervasive allusiveness. If critical theory does not seem to know that literature has a definite shape with an identifiable centre, poets do. The poets know, in particular, that the myths of Biblical and Classical literature are fundamental to all literary experience, and most of them will not admit a reader to their inner circle who cannot place an allusion to Achilles or to Samson, to Philomela or to Ruth. It seems to me that a knowledge of Biblical and Classical mythology, being absolutely fundamental to all literary experience, should come as early as possible in the student's education. The ability to recognize allusions is a valid enough incidental reason for studying them, but of course not the essential one. Myths are stories, and it is as stories that they should be taught and learned, with no historical background, at least at first, beyond what is indicated in the phrase "once upon a time." The art of listening to stories is indispensable to the training of the imagination, for two reasons in particular. First, it is the most effective

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way of developing a sense of literary structure, and second, it trains one to accept whatever postulates a writer lays down, and to suspend judgement until everything has been presented. All the arts today have to suffer from a public who have never been properly taught the difference between imaginative and discursive language and who approach even painting and music as though they were allegories conveying some kind of message, or as though the meaning of a work of art were "in" the work, something to be seized and carried off. The first law of critical procedure, "go for the structure, not content," is incomprehensible to far too many people, including not only teachers but some who may have to sit on boards of education deciding on curricula or on juries examining the indecency of a novel. There is a limited number of ways in which stories can be effectively told, and there is a limited number of types that can serve as a basis for literary characterization. As the student goes on to more complicated literature, many problems may disappear if he can recognize in this literature an adaptation of the structural principles he has already met. The increasing complications are largely due to an increasing demand for plausibility and the writer's need to provide logical motivation and credible incident. I have elsewhere called this kind of development in literature "displacement."3 A colleague of mine in another Canadian university, a former student, reports considerable success in using this conception in teaching "creative writing" courses: students are, for example, given a fairy tale in Grimm and told to translate every detail of it into something credible, while preserving the consistency of the story.4 It is certainly easier to read most Dickens, for example, as displaced fairy tale than as a transcription of Victorian life and manners; and the easier way is also the better critical method. Many adults today read the more serious works of literature for instruction, or the improving of the mind, as they do nonfiction, while for relaxation they turn to a purely conventional literary structure, such as a detective story, a "Western" pastoral, or a science fiction romance. There is nothing wrong with this, but so marked a cleavage between delight and instruction indicates that there may be something wrong with the literary education behind it. It is not only in fiction that the student should be trained to watch for new applications of principles he should already have learned. The theories in Wordsworth's preface do not embody any "philosophy of nature" which is worth investigating as a philosophy, but indicate that Wordsworth is making a fresh return to poetry's primitive function of

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assimilating nature to human life and emotion. He does not say Phoebus when he means the sun, or Philomela when he means the nightingale, because he feels that those epithets have become a kind of literary trade slang; but he sees in such natural objects the same kind of essential involvement with human life that originally prompted the myth. Similarly, he takes his human archetypes from humble life rather than heroic or aristocratic life, but only to re-awaken the sense of archetypal significance.5

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Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism

Frye presented this paper as an address at the eleventh triennial congress of the Federation Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes, Islamabad, Pakistan, 20 September 1969. He wrote the paper during the time he was at work on The Critical Path, and many of the themes treated here were expanded in that book, especially in chapters i, 4, and 5. Copies of the typescript are in the NFF, 1988, box 3, file cc, and 1991, box 36, file 4.

When I first became interested in the theory of criticism about a generation ago, I was startled to discover how pervasive was the assumption that literary criticism had no postulates of its own, but that those postulates had to be derived from some other subject, such as history or philosophy, or, later, psychology and anthropology. The function of criticism was then conceived, and still is in many quarters, as the relating of literature to whatever is not literature. Such an approach produces a body of what I should call documentary criticism, where works of literature are studied as documents illustrating biographical, historical, philosophical, or psychological phenomena. I could also call it allegorical criticism, because for it works of literature are essentially allegories of psychological processes or of historical or social developments. Now of course nobody denies the relevance of these external studies to the study of literature. At the same time, it is possible to get out of proportion if we forget the fact that the primary concern of criticism is with literature itself, and that the primary assumptions and postulates of criticism have to be derived from literature, not from some other subject from which they have been wrenched out of their proper context. Thus it is obvious that some knowledge of a poet's life is relevant to our knowl-

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edge of the poetry that he writes. Yet we must distinguish such poets as Byron, who does make much of his poetry an allegory of his life, from such poets as Keats, who prefer to think that a poet's life ought to be an allegory of his poetry. Also, interpretations of passages in a poet's work as allusions to his life, when we have no evidence whatever from his life to support them, have to be recognized as uncritical. When we have no real knowledge of a poet's life at all, as is true of Shakespeare, and start inventing a biography out of fancied allusions in the poetry, what results is not criticism but something between pedantic gossip and working out cryptograms. Identifying the Mr. W.H. connected with Shakespeare's sonnets with Southampton or Pembroke or Willie Hughes (Oscar Wilde's contribution)1 or what not is an activity very little, if at all, more culturally productive than identifying Shakespeare himself with Bacon or Oxford. Similarly it is possible to make works of literature allegories of psychology, which means in the Western world very largely Freudian, or Luther-on-the-privy, psychology. Allegory in every field is a technique calling for tact, and in most such interpretations there is once again an undertow of gossip or pseudo-detection pulling us away from literature. Again, however intimate and important the relation of a poet to the history of his time may be, we can still make a great many irrelevant references to "background." I have often been informed by students that Tennyson's In Memoriam reflects the mood of uneasy pessimism engendered by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species twenty years later. I suppose it does, in a way: poets often anticipate the moods of their age: it would be less anachronistic to suggest that Tennyson influenced the rhetoric of the conclusion of the Descent of Man, but it would not carry much conviction, because it is only poets who are supposed to have this litmus-paper response to the color of their surroundings. All such methods of criticism, even when they are properly handled, still do not account for the literary form of what they are dealing with. If we are studying Milton's Lycidas, the fact that it is a pastoral elegy with certain clearly marked Classical and Italian lines of ancestry is central. The identity of Edward King and Milton's relationship to the Church of England are peripheral, as is symbolized by the fact that they are not really in the poem so much as in a prose note attached to the poem: they end as extensions of the footnote in which they began. There is no reason for not having footnotes, but there is a much bigger confusion behind the procedure which is expressed by the curious looseness with which we

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use, in English, the word "literal." When we say that the poem means "literally" this, and then give a paraphrase of it, we are implying that the real meaning of a poem is not what it says as a poem, but what is derived from a prose statement of that meaning. The importance of what a generation ago was called the new criticism, the development of techniques of explication and stylistic analysis, is that it did accept the poetic and metaphorical form of a poem as the basis for its meaning. But in doing so it deprived itself of the great strength of documentary criticism, which was a sense of context. As a result we find many students of literature still obsessed by an over-simplified antithesis between literature and life. According to this, literature must either be instantly dissolved into categories which are not those of literature, or it must be withdrawn from its social context entirely. I have always thought this situation preposterous, in the original sense of the word, and I have been looking all my professional life for the elements inside literature on which one could base the assumptions of criticism. T.S. Eliot a generation ago had spoken of "tradition" as a quality in literature which has something directly to do with the poet's craftsmanship, and affects the form of what he produces.2 But, as the Minister of Education said most accurately earlier this morning, "tradition" in itself is a vague and elusive term, and it can mean only a consecration of prejudice. I had, however, noticed the extraordinary power of convention and genre in literature, and have tried to show elsewhere how certain conventional character types, like the boaster and the parasite in comedy, recur from the earliest written literature to our own day without essential change.3 This suggests that the history inside literature is, for the critic, a force immensely more powerful and important than the history outside literature, and that we have to know the history of literature, which is a real history with its own shape and not merely a string of dates, before we can make any sense out of the relation of literature to nonliterary history. The traditional situation in the theory of criticism, then, is that literary phenomena can only be explained in terms of the nonliterary. The assumption underlying this is that the norms of literary meaning are established outside literature. If we really want to understand what a poet is saying, we have to look at something that is not poetry. This being an absurd situation, we naturally ask ourselves how it could ever arise. If we turn to the great defences of poetry, like those of Sidney and Shelley in English literature, we notice how strong is the sense of the

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dispossession of the poet, the feeling that at one time he had a much greater social function which he has since lost. We realize today that this feeling refers to the social conditions of the oral or preliterate civilization in which literature normally begins. Oral culture is necessarily very dependent on memory, and verse is the easiest and most memorable way of conventionalizing speech. Hence in an oral culture the poet is the teacher, even in a sense the lawgiver, because he is the man who remembers. The mental habits brought in by a writing culture are very different. In an oral culture prose tends to be detached into isolated proverbs, epigrams or oracles; a writing culture brings in the conception of prose as a continuous form of verbal expression. Philosophy with continuous prose becomes an argument organized by dialectic and the technique of continuous narrative similarly begins to separate history from legend or saga. Socrates expels the poets from his philosophical republic on the ground that poets are no longer to be regarded as the primary educators of society, and that in the search for truth the philosophers are to be our guides. In the Christianity of the Middle Ages, no poet could be given the kind of authority that was accorded to the theologian. In a writing culture, the conceptual and discursive writers, historians, philosophers, and the like, are the people who really mean what they say. Sidney accepts this situation, by implication at least, and for him the poet establishes his social function by withdrawing from the particular statement. A poet, says Sidney, does not affirm or deny, and is not to be judged by such standards. He gives us rather an illustration of what is, as we say now, "literally" presented by the historian or philosopher. Hence the importance of the tag ut pictura poesis to the Elizabethan critics: poetry is a speaking picture or illustration of truth. This is a rhetorical conception of literature. The first remark that Aristotle makes about rhetoric is that it is the antistrophos or answering chorus of dialectic [Rhetoric, 13543]. It is the function of the poet to provide a rhetorical analogue to the truth presented more precisely by other workers in words: such a rhetorical analogue addresses itself mainly to the emotions and feelings, and enlists them in the service of the truth. The same view of poetry is still, so far as I can make out, the view of Marxism, which holds that Marxism provides this conceptual guide to truth which the poet and novelist should imaginatively support. An essential part of this attitude is an opposition to "formalism," which implies that a poet's distinctive way of saying things should be taken as the basis of criticism. The democracies provide more amiable if more

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naive analogues to Marxist antiformalism. The context of Sidney's defence is Renaissance humanism. In between the Greek and the medieval philosophers there had come the Roman cult of the orator, the chief oral figure of a writing society, and Renaissance humanism, which owed so much to Cicero and Quintilian, was greatly preoccupied with the sense of the social relevance of cultivated speech. A rhetorical training which was equally useful to the poet and the orator, which rejected technical languages, especially in philosophy, as pedantic and barbaric (though of course rhetoric developed a formidable jargon of its own), and which made the style of the gentleman amateur the social model of all writers, was the basis of a culture that has lasted to our own day. A decayed humanism still protests against all technical features of criticism as an unreal separation of literature and life, in the familiar pattern of an elitism rationalizing itself by pseudo-democratic arguments. The educators who lay down the teaching policies of American and Canadian schools are not humanists, but some of the prejudices of their ignorance and confusion run parallel. Their program is to back into the teaching of literature the wrong way round, starting with the nonliterary prose of "communication," ending with a cautious approach to poetry which surveys it as Moses did the Promised Land, from a distance, and dividing it up into allegorical "themes." The younger victims of such educators are less helpless than they were, because one of the extraordinary features of our time is a quite sudden revival of the oral tradition in literature. This is not surprising to those of us who live in Islamic, or even in Slavic countries, where the oral traditions of literature have been so much better preserved. But for those of us who live in the Americas or Western Europe, it is a new experience to find so much of the literature around us taking a popular form, recited to a listening audience generally with a musical background, employing once again such ancient features of oral poetry as formulaic units, ballad refrains, and topical subjects. It is clear that we have to have a new critical theory for this kind of situation, and I should like in the rest of the time at my disposal to list a few of the elements of what seems to me to be a more adequate theory of criticism. One is the point made by Peacock's brilliant satirical essay, The Four Ages of Poetry, the essay that stimulated his friend Shelley to write his Defence of Poetry. It is generally thought that Shelley ignores Peacock, but I think on the contrary that Shelley gives a very searching and accurate answer to Peacock's paradoxes. According to Peacock, the poet had his

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great day in primitive and barbaric times, and as civilization became progressively more refined, the poet progressively lost his social function. "A poet in our time," says Peacock, "is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community."41 think that, first of all, one has to accept this fact about the primitiveness of poetry. Poetry deals with the archaic intellectual categories of analogy and identity, and poetic thinking is schematic, like the scientific thinking of Dante's day, which rested on symmetrical correspondences of seven metals with the seven planets and the like. As science moves beyond the schematic stage, the poet does not move with it, but is driven into the intellectual underground of occultists and theosophists, like Swedenborg or Madame Blavatsky, in the search for structures that are still naively symmetrical. Poetry has a limited tolerance for conceptual or technical language in any field: it is compelled to design, not to describe. Astrology develops into astronomy and alchemy into chemistry, but the poet remains on a flat earth where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, an earth made up of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. This situation in poetry is unlikely to change until that remote time in the distant future when chemistry, or whatever the relevant science will then be, will have discovered that as a matter of fact there are really four elements, and that their names are earth, air, fire and water. Poetry does not improve or progress with the times; it produces classics and continues to rewrite its classics with the same mental attitudes. The first principle of "tradition and change in the theory of criticism," then, is that in criticism all change takes the form of a recovery of some neglected aspect of tradition. Then again, in the preliterate culture which the poet transmits, we notice that some elements have a different social function from others. Every culture possesses, for example, a group of stories, but some of these stories have a central importance. They are believed in, or they are held to explain something of crucial significance for that society's knowledge of itself, its history, its ritual, its social structure. These central stories are the ones we call myths. Myths are not different in literary form from folk tales or legends: it is their cultural context that is different. Myths stick together and form a mythology and the mythology becomes encyclopaedic, covering every aspect of a society's belief, its concerns, and its traditional knowledge. Myths are culturally rooted in a specific society, whereas folk tales have a more nomadic existence, travelling over the world interchanging themes and motifs. This distinction is essential for the critic because the whole historical dimension of litera-

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ture is bound up with it. Wherever we have a culturally rooted mythology we have a magic circle drawn around a specific society, and literature grows up within that magic circle. If we were to attend only to the similarity in literary form between the myth and the folk tale, we should get involved in a facile structuralism which ignores historical development and the differences among cultures. Then again, we notice that a poet's greatness does not seem to depend on his wisdom, his serenity, or even on any consistent sense of social reality. It was possible for W.H. Auden to say of Yeats, "You were silly like us: your gift survived it all" [In Memory of W.B. Yeats, 1. 32]. Such a comment, whether true of Yeats or not, could certainly be made of many important and significant writers. The reason is that a poet's real thoughts and his real meanings are presented by the images and metaphors that make up the structure of his poem. On top of this the poet says things, utters opinions and prejudices and beliefs and anxieties which he has acquired from the limitations of his age and time and from the promptings of his ego. He is entitled to these limiting things: he is after all a human being. But in studying him we snip all this off, as if with a pair of scissors, and examine only what the vision in the poem shows us. At a certain point, of course, we realize that the personal opinions and so forth are still there, and that we have not snipped them off at all; but by this time they have appeared in a new context as a part of the vision, and not as an obstacle to it. I often think of T.S. Eliot's comparison of the explicit meaning of a poem to a piece of meat which a burglar throws to a watchdog to keep him quiet;5 and certainly the explicit meaning of a Shakespeare play may sometimes be only what will keep his audience quiet for the time. Consequently, while every poet is subject to the limitations of his time, subject to what Shelley calls, in connexion with Calderon, "the rigidly defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition,"6 still, the central vision of the poem speaks a universal language, one which can get though all the barriers of time, space, and cultural differentiation. We may often feel, in reading an author who may seem to us at any given moment to be both compelling and wrong-headed—D.H. Lawrence, for example—that we care not whether he is right or wrong, but whether his imagination is alive or dead. This is not a safe guide to life, but is normal and healthy as an occasional reaction especially in literature. The general principle that it points to is that there are two forms of truth and of reality. There is the truth and the reality which are there,

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presented by nature and the objective world, and this kind of truth and reality is to be studied by evidence, reason, and experiment. Then there is the truth and reality which do not exist to begin with but are brought into being by a creative act, or else accepted by society as a religion is accepted, on a basis of revelation and prophetic authority. The language of poetry is the language of this second or created kind of reality. Poetry speaks the language of human concern, which is why the poet's world is still the world of ordinary perception and not that of science or philosophy. And yet, as Shelley insists, the fact that the poet's world is primitive does not mean that poetry is reactionary, but that it is inherently revolutionary. Shelley says that "poetry creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration."7 That is, we perceive the objective world out of habit and if we simply rest in that habit, the habit will become a form of inertia, and our unchanging view of the world will become the sense of the unchangeable, and this will be transferred to the social and political sphere and we shall come to accept tyranny and ignorance and slavery as inescapable forms of the human situation. Poetry according to Shelley represents the elemental human protest against this: it is the expression of simple human concern against being absorbed into an impersonal machinery which it has in fact created itself. Thus Shelley's view is very close to the conception that we associate with his wife's romance of Frankenstein, the story of how man can enslave himself to what he has created. Then again, because literature is born of a specific culture and a specific locale, most great literature is intensely localized. I know of no great literature written about an empire, with the very dubious exception of Virgil's Aeneid. William Faulkner, for example, is a great writer today, not because he is a citizen of a great power or speaks one of the world's major languages (though those factors are undoubtedly important for his reputation), but because he deals with a provincial and decaying civilization in Mississippi which most even of his fellow Americans know very little about. The writer has two centres of gravity: one in his own time and audience; the other in our time and in us. It is a mysterious but primary fact of literature that a poet remote from us in space and time and culture can still communicate his central vision to us, though we may admire him for reasons quite unintelligible to him or his age. Literature survives only by virtue of what is communicable across these barriers of culture. In the United States today there is a flourishing black

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literature written by Negroes for Negroes, and it is frequently said by them that this literature is for them and not for outsiders, who cannot begin to feel and experience what American Negroes have felt and experienced. One may sympathize with this attitude and yet realize that it is ultimately a fallacy, and that the literature in this culture which will survive will do so because it was so intensely of its own culture that it was able to communicate itself to others. For there is a direct ratio between the particular quality of a poet's imagination and his universal appeal. That, I understand, is to be one of the themes of this conference. Criticism, then, is, in the broad sense of the term, the cultural translation of literature, for all literature is to some degree translated. If we wish to appreciate Dante fully we must read him in the Italian that he wrote: nobody questions that. But it is impossible for any twentieth-century mind to react and respond to Dante as a thirteenth-century Florentine would do. (I am not of course assuming that thirteenth-century reactions were all alike, only that all of them, like all of ours, revolved in the same cultural orbit.) Consequently even for a Dante scholar, if he lives in the twentieth century, his Dante has to be to some extent a translated Dante. But there is a difference between a translated Dante and a kidnapped Dante, that is, a Dante who is simply judged by the extremely limited and provincial standards of the twentieth century. The function of historical criticism, the relating of Dante to his thirteenth-century Italian setting, is an attempt to insure that the translation which we must make shall be at least as accurate as is humanly possible. But the fact that it can be translated means that a poem is capable of growth: growth in time, growth in space, growth in culture, growth in language; and criticism is its growth. One of the wisest and shrewdest men of our time, the Argentinian writer Borges, has remarked that literature not only begins in a mythology but also ends in one.8 He says this in connexion with Don Quixote, who begins in the narrowest locale of all, the private prison of his own delusions, and ends by becoming a figure who haunts the imagination of the entire world. The roots of literature are in a specific culture, but its fruits are in a world without boundaries. A specific culture holds our loyalties together, and against all others; hence in our ordinary life in such a culture we are preoccupied with the anxieties of concern and of belief. Literature grows up among these anxieties and partakes of them, but it is the ultimate function of literature, and of the study of literature which is criticism, to get clear of them and deliver us from them. In

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ordinary life we are all inside the magic circle of our own language, our own religion, our own nationality. These things identify us, yet they enclose us too. We realize sooner or later that for us to maintain our identity we must have enemies, we must feel threatened and beleaguered, we must feel that we are confronting aliens. Cultures enrich themselves by what they include; they define themselves by what they exclude. One very honest attempt to deal with this problem, and one that has some relevance for us here, though of course a completely Western attempt, is E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India. There Forster describes how three great cultural complexes, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, each accept ideals of universal brotherhood; their better and more sensitive members believe in these ideals and struggle hard to achieve them. And yet in practice they all define themselves by exclusions, and those who do not wish to exclude anything run the risk of losing their identity, and having their total inclusiveness turn into its terrible opposite, the sense of a totally meaningless universe, the ironic vision of the absurd, which comes to Mrs. Moore in the cave. But what concern and belief cannot do, and what it is not their function to do, the imagination can do. It is in the imagination that the world becomes more intelligible, and communication proceeds without the obstacles of cultural difference. In almost all mythologies we have a distinction between levels of existence. There is a level of ordinary existence, which is described usually in myths of alienation, like the story of the fall of man, and there is a world above it, a paradisal world, which represents something of our own hopes and ideals. It is this upper world which, for the literary critic, is the world of literature and of the imagination. It is the world which Shelley describes as "that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world."9 It is the world where we may find what William Blake calls the spiritual forms of war and of hunting,10 a struggle without an enemy and a search without a victim.

14 The Social Uses of Literature

This is a transcription of a talk that Frye gave at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, held in Minneapolis, 23-24 November 1972. A forty-seven minute audiotape of the talk was produced by the Comptron Corporation, Kenosha, Wisconsin (cassette no. ET-io). An excerpt from the conclusion of Frye's address was published as "The Teaching of Literature" in Minneapolis 72: Convention Concerns, ed. Martha R. Ellison (Urbana, III: NCTE, 1972), 21-2. The questions Frye answered at the conclusion of his talk have been included here. Every major study, like the study of English literature, is the end of a prolonged social process, and one needs to get the whole of that social process in perspective, I think, to understand what is going on at the end of it. Literature develops out of what every human society has, a primitive verbal culture which must have existed for many centuries before there was any conception of writing. A primitive culture exists very largely of stories, and these stories have certain structural principles which make them show a family resemblance to one another. But as a society begins to take shape, a certain kind of story begins to crystallize at the centre. These are the stories which are thought of as being historically or literally true or as having a central and primary importance in explaining that society to itself—in explaining the nature and the destiny of the human situation and the social structure of the society and of its relationship to the world of nature that it is in. It seems to me simplest if we call this central group of particularly important stories the myths of that society and distinguish them from the legends and the folktales which surround them. The distinction is

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not in structure. Structurally, the myth and the legend and the folktale all seem to be identical. The difference is in social function. The myths at the centre tend to root themselves in a specific society. They draw a kind of magic circle around it, and within that society a verbal culture develops with a body of shared allusions, shared referents, shared belief, and shared imaginative experience. Legends and folktales belong to the more peripheral group of stories which are told, among other things, just for fun, and stories told for fun do not root themselves in a particular society. They tend to be nomadic and wander around the world interchanging their themes and their motifs. We can see the difference very clearly in the whole history of Western culture. The stories which have come down to us from the Bible—the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the story of Noah's flood, the story of the incarnation of Christ—have had a central importance for Western culture, and there are many other versions of creation stories and of flood stories which are structurally very similar but which are functionally different in their relation to Western society. The result is that as this primitive verbal culture begins to expand and ramify into literature we can see a distinction taking shape between two kinds of literature. There remains a large body of literature which descends from the legends and the folktales which are told largely for fun. They are for many centuries the stories told over and over and over again, or the same legends which are well known to their auditors. Then there is the more serious literature which recreates or in some other way deals imaginatively with this central body of mythical stories. In Western culture we have such poets as Dante and Milton who devote their main energies to recreating the central Christian story, and such writers as Shakespeare, whose comedies invariably introduce some theme from folktale or legend, like the bed trick in All's Well and Measure for Measure. As a society becomes more complex and as writing develops, other forms of social importance make their appearance in verbal forms. In a primitive community the poet is the central teacher because verse is the easiest way in which to remember things. In primitive society the professional poet is the walking encyclopedia who knows the legends of the gods and of the kings, the histories of battles won and lost, the lucky and the unlucky days, the proverbs, and all the things that it most concerns his society to know. If one looks, for example, at Elizabethan criticism, one sees there a constant, wistful, nostalgic recall of the legendary days when the poet was the lawgiver, when he had a central social function

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which he has now lost. The reason why he has lost it is that other forms of verbal culture have taken shape. Dante remains a major Christian poet, but he is not given the kind of authority that would be given to such a theologian as St. Thomas Aquinas, because the conception of truth has crystallized and has become ascribed to other verbal areas. The poet, therefore, competes with other areas of verbal structure, and in most societies there is the feeling that these other structures are more important than what the poet can do. In the Canterbury pilgrimage, for example, the Host turns to the Parson and asks him for a tale, but the Parson says rather bleakly, in an approximation to modern English, "I kan nat geeste 'rum, ram, ruf,' by lettre, Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre" [The Parson's Prologue, 11. 43-4]. And instead of telling a story he preaches an interminable sermon. This is, of course, quite consistent with the Parson's set of values. For him the verbal structures that have to do with the saving of souls and the expounding of doctrine are infinitely more important than the verbal structures that tell stories. As The Parson's Tale in our manuscript ends with Chaucer's recantation, we don't know what Chaucer himself felt about this, still less what the other pilgrims felt about it. But we do know that after a good many eloquent defenses, like those of Sir Philip Sidney, the poet was granted a certain limited, restricted, and rather subordinate place in verbal culture. His function was to provide what is essentially a kind of rhetorical echo to what were still regarded as the more important considerations of religion and politics. The poet is instinctively a person who makes statements which are not supposed to be true, and yet it is a mistake to speak of the poet as a maker of myths. The poet does not, strictly speaking, make myths; he makes his poetry out of myths, just as English poets make their poems out of the English language. The general assumption in most of the classical ages of English literature is that it is the function of poetry to use the kind of emotional resonance which is its peculiar virtue in order to reinforce the conceptions of truth which are expressed more directly and more accurately in other fields. This was the standard Christian view of the function of poetry, and it became the standard political view in both democratic and Marxist countries in our own time. This means, therefore, that serious literature is serious because it is fundamentally allegorical, that is, because it relates itself to something outside literature regarded by most people as of more immediate and pressing importance. Thereby, this more serious literature with its alle-

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gorical importance is contrasted with a type of literature which continues simply to entertain and which is rejected by many highbrows as escape literature and embraced by many lowbrows for the same reason. This is obviously not a satisfactory situation for any teacher of literature, but it is one we find confronting us still. In the nineteenth century, for example, the primacy of religious considerations has slackened a good deal, but there is still a feeling that the really serious writers (George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, and certain carefully selected parts of Dickens) are serious because they reflect the life around them. They don't just tell stories to entertain; they also give you some idea of what is going on in social, religious, and political circles in the nineteenth century. Other stories told merely to entertain, such as Alice in Wonderland, though they were very popular in their day and though they have never lost their popularity, are still something that the historian of literature finds it rather difficult to deal with. Some time ago I had to read Katherine Ann Porter's Ship of Fools, not in my opinion a very successful novel but a novel which struggles very hard to be a serious novel. Its attempt to be serious takes the form of an allegory, as in fact the title of the book suggests. The title of the book is taken from an allegorical, didactic poem of the sixteenth century. The setting is a ship going from Mexico to Germany in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power, and the theme of the book is an allegory of Nazism. Certain episodes, like the exclusion of a Jew from the captain's table, indicate the kind of thing that Nazism came to be. That is what really makes the book serious: its echo of a major political event in the twentieth century. Some time ago when I was stuck in an airport with my powers of concentration greatly diminished, I went over to the paperback section of the newsstand and bought myself a book called Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico, which is also a ship story. This is a story about a ship that gets turned upside down, killing most of the passengers and crew, but the small group of survivors have to make their way upwards, that is, toward the bottom of the ship. This is, again, a story told primarily to entertain. It's a thriller designed in its pacing to keep you turning the pages. It would not be regarded by many people perhaps as a profoundly serious book. But it is a kind of literature which depends on the structure of the story itself: it concentrates on that entirely. Consequently, I realized that, as this man was a professional writer and obviously no fool, at some point or other he would show an awareness of the fact that

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the kind of story he was telling had been told several hundred thousand times before. And finally on page 209 I found it. "Up had always been good. Down was bad. God and Heaven were up. Hell and the Devil were down. The road to damnation was the downward path. Resurrection was ascent. Man's whole history had been an ascent. His mythology created the dwellers underground as misshapen dwarfs and monsters. The creatures of the upper air were exquisite, graceful, winged fantasies of light." With a remark like that he places the structure of his story within the context of other stories of the same shape. In the same chapter the leader of this expedition, who is a clergyman, gets fed up with his God and commits suicide. The episode is not very convincing, but this is an Exodus archetype behind the story, and in a story based on the Exodus archetype you need a Moses figure who doesn't quite make it all the way. Naturally, one could point to other ship stories, such as Conrad's Lord Jim, which would be perhaps more centrally what one was looking for and which would have both the external allegorical interests and the inner constructive or archetypal interest. But the whole conception of a distinction between more serious literature, which reflects something outside, and the less serious, which tells a story for its own sake, clearly has something wrong with it. To understand what is wrong with it we need to go back to our body of primitive verbal culture. I said that myths differ from folktales and legends in that they take root in a specific society. They also differ from them in that they tend to stick together to form a mythology, whereas folktales and legends simply interchange their themes and motifs. Now mythology is a construct, and it relates to the fact that man lives in two worlds. He lives in the world of nature, the actual world around him, and he also lives in the world of his culture or civilization, the world he is trying to shape in his own way and for his own ends. Thus, there is a world around him, which is the world of fact, and has to be studied as a body of facts and phenomena, and there is also a world in which conceptions of wish and desire will always be relevant. Mythology, it is quite clear, belongs to the world of art and not to the world of nature. It is not a crude or a primitive form of science or philosophy. It usually takes rise in cultures in which conceptual thought has no social function. Eventually, as a mythology develops, it may start making statements about the external world. Thus, the general Biblical cosmology of Western culture which produced the Chain of Being also produced a view of the universe which held that the

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earth was stationary and at the centre of the universe and that the antipodes were uninhabitable. This is an area of course where science eventually takes over, and there is a long tension between those who realize that in scientific areas one has to rely wholly on experiment and observation and measurement and those who cling to their constructs and try to reconcile them with the emerging body of science. But in proportion as science develops it becomes obvious that the mythological construct is a symbolic one and that it has to do with the imagination and not with the world of fact. Our own mythological structure, I have said, has a Biblical basis, and it used the mythology of the classics as a kind of counterpoint against it. Now the fact that it was able to do that indicates how closely all mythological structures resemble one another. The Biblical story begins with Eve taking an apple from a serpent, and the classical story of the Trojan War begins with Paris giving an apple to Venus. One has the story of Lot's wife in the book of Genesis and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in classical mythology. One has Samson in one and Hercules in the other. And the whole of Ovid's Metamorphoses, stretching from creation to the last judgment, was used for many centuries as a kind of secondary Bible addressed to the imagination and dealt with by poets because, as its statements were not statements of compulsory belief, it left more flexibility to the imagination. We don't know very much about the religion of the English before Christianity but it must have been very similar to that of the Scandinavians, and the Scandinavian mythology, like the Biblical one, had a world tree and world-girdling serpent and a god hung on a cross as a sacrifice to himself. It had a creation and a last day and so on. In other words, a literature can develop from any mythology, but it is a historical fact that ours has developed from certain mythologies and not from others. Now as a mythology is an imaginative construct, it follows that man has made it. This is something that it takes man a very long time to realize. He tends to project his mythology onto his gods. He tends to assume that the heavens and the hells of his religion awaiting him after life are other forms of objective existence rather than projections from the romantic and ironic areas of his own imagination. He tends to think of the universe as something created rather than thinking of the conception of creation as a projection from the fact that man himself creates and makes things. In the course of centuries—I think there is a decisive

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change around the end of the eighteenth century—there came a growing sense that man had in fact created his own civilization, that he had created his own symbolic world, that he was responsible for his own laws and for all other phenomena of his civilization. This means, of course, that the status of the mythological construct which the poets use has to be reinterpreted. The world of mythology, which stretches from creation to last judgment and from heaven to hell, belongs not so much to the waking world, the world of fact which is explored by science; it belongs rather to the dream world, not so much to the world after death as to the world after dark. This fact gives, of course, to the kind of literature which we think of as popular and conventionalized and less serious a rather different scope and importance from what we have been considering it. We may think of the dream, for example, as an escape, as a world that we retreat into every night when we reshape reality according to our own liking, that is, unless we have anxiety dreams, where it works in reverse. The twentieth century has suffered greatly from the fact that Freud never had an anxiety dream.1 The art of writing has the great positive value that it enables these dream worlds to come together and to give us an insight into a structure in the human mind, which is below the level of consciousness, as well as above it. The coming of electronic media has of course greatly increased the amount of dream experience in life—the kind of escape experience where things take shape in terms of irrational combinations, as when a football game suddenly turns into a cigarette advertisement. We have an enormous number of experiences which are forgotten as soon as we have had them and which make up the whole background fantasy world which used to be inhabited by other things. If now we see ghosts or hear ghostly voices in the air, it means that somebody has left the television on. It is at this point that we begin to realize that the entire history of literature from the most primitive times until our own is recapitulated by every child who enters a classroom. He begins by listening to stories. If he's lucky, he listens to nursery rhymes and other forms of traditional literature which have remained unchanged for many centuries, partly through the very conservatism of children themselves. Then he begins to take on certain moral attitudes, and these are suggested to him by the total area of verbal experience with which he comes in contact. That is, the world of television and movies and the conversation of his classmates and what he hears at home are all a part of his verbal experience and are just as relevant to it as the books that he reads in classroom.

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So he begins to realize that he is building up certain moral, social, and political attitudes and that these are conditioned by the kind of social mythology that he runs into at every turn in his experience. We know, of course, that a great deal of this social mythology is wrong or phony; for one thing, a lot of it comes from advertising which has motives for suggesting things to him which are not altogether genuine. As we are all now born in a world in which we realize that our mythological structure is something we have created ourselves, the time dimension and the political anxieties connected with it—anxieties of change and anxieties of conservation—enter both literature and criticism. These anxieties, as I have just said, tend to polarize. That is, we tend to think in terms of an opposition of change and of conservation. But, of course, knowing what should be changed or what conserved is one of the central issues of all education. Within literature this polarizing of anxieties is contained within the subject. This is why the allegorical interest that I have spoken of as something external to literature is not good enough for a conception of literature. Within literature we have to deal with the mystery that a person may be a very great poet, for example, even if his social or political or religious views seem to us to be perverse. Even if he is in a legal or even in a medical sense certifiable, it doesn't matter; he may still be a great poet. The biographical information about his sanity has nothing to do with the coherence of his poetry. What the teaching of literature can do in its social aspect, I think, is to make us aware of our mythological conditioning, of the extent to which our views about society and politics and behind that what Tillich calls "the ultimate concern" of religion,2 the human situation and the destiny of man—of the extent to which that conditioning has filtered into our minds without our knowing it. Literature which is concerned with presenting imaginative models of experience can do what no other subject can do quite so well, I think, and that is to enable us to see just how these notions have got into our minds and what proportion they have and where they belong. On the university level there is a popular distinction between teaching and research. Research has an inherent tendency to specialize and build up compartments, and thereby it may give some illusion of withdrawing from social issues. But, of course, it doesn't do that, and in the area of teaching, where we are all united, we find that teaching is an area of communication where the medium of communication is a social vision. In all communication the first act, I suppose, is destructive. If you're

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going to communicate between village A and village B by building a road between them, the first thing you do is bulldoze. You cut through the underbrush. Similarly, where you are establishing a communication between a teacher and a student's verbal experience, the first effort is directed toward cutting down the underbrush of anxieties with which every individual surrounds himself, by which he protects himself, and which he regards as essential to his security until it is explained to him that this cannot be true. In this state of mind there is an instinctive tendency to judge literature by its content or by the truth or falsehood of what it says according to the reader's beliefs. This is the hangover of what I called the allegorical approach to literature, and it isn't good enough. In the areas of literature which are exemplified in popular literature, like the sea story that I mentioned a while ago, we find that these stories are told over and over again. We, therefore, discover that these stories are in a family and that the relationships among this family of stories give a significance which the individual story does not have. And so we begin to get glimpses of that vast area of the human mind which operates in terms of consciousness and awareness of the outside world but is also motivated by forces of wish and desire and repugnance. That is why the romances that I mentioned, such as Alice in Wonderland or science fiction or the nineteenth-century romancers who were regarded by most of us as writing kitsch and yet have suddenly reappeared among our paperback reprints, have a certain importance: they are evidence of the fact that the imagination constructs hypothetical worlds. And in constructing hypothetical worlds it builds models that enable us to understand the relationship between what is there and what could or should be there or what should not be there. At the top of literature are such writers as Dante or Shakespeare or Milton whose works are infinitely great, but they also belong in families. Although these works are infinitely great, the whole of literature is still greater than the sum of even its greatest parts, and even the greatest works of literature gain in impressiveness and in social significance through the resonance of context. Questions QUESTION: You said that Western culture and literature had suffered a great deal because Freud never had an anxiety dream. That got a big laugh, perhaps

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because it's not strictly true. I wonder if you'd explain why you think that and also the relationship between that and your point of view.

FRYE: Well, I quite concede that it's probably not true, but the reason why I said it is that Freud says it himself. I think that shows up in Freud's conception of the dream process. Freud is of immense importance to the theorist of comedy, but his own view of comedy remained on what I called the more ironic levels of comedy. That is, he thought in terms of an opposition of a reality principle and a pleasure principle, and for him reality included not only what is there in nature scientifically but also what man has constructed in his previous civilization. His reality principle was, to a very considerable extent, immovable, and the pleasure principle was a rather helpless reaction against it. If one turns to Shakespearean comedy, for example, one can see there a vision of the power of the wish-fulfilment principle in transforming reality. Consequently, I think that potentially Freud is immensely useful and suggestive to the theorist of comedy, much less so than to the theorist of tragedy because of his own statement that he didn't understand anxiety dreams. He knew that they happened, but he really wasn't aware of how they operated. For that, I suppose, one would need somebody like Nietzsche, whose mind was oriented in a tragic direction and who also understood the interconnection between dream and reality. QUESTION: You mentioned that you thought some of the popular literature was extremely important. There seems to be a trend these days to get into popular literature by approaching it through the formula. Do you think this is a valuable way of approaching literature or of any value at all?

FRYE: Well, I think there is a potential value in approaching popular literature in terms of its formula. The thing is that if the formula becomes an end in itself—if you say this is this author's gimmick and that's it— then it seems to me that you're making the formula a substitute for the literary experience itself. The real procedure involved is to say that this story is constructed according to a formula which you also find here and here and here and here. By establishing some kind of context for the story, you hook it on to others of its type and eventually to its ancestors. That is, you begin to get some insight into the literary tradition which has produced this particular formula. If that is done thoroughly and

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conscientiously, it doesn't matter too much where you start from as long as you start travelling. QUESTION: / would like to ask what you consider the other uses of imagination to be.

FRYE: I think that the imagination is essentially what Coleridge said it was, the constructive element in the human mind. Whatever constructs to that extent is imaginative. Consequently, the most obvious place to point to as the workings of imagination in society are the arts, not only literature but music, painting, architecture, and so on. But the whole of civilization is a construct in that sense, so the fundamental power behind the construction of civilization is imaginative. That is what Wallace Stevens is trying to get at when he talks about style and where he discusses in his poetry what it is in Spain that makes everything look Spanish [Description without Place, st. 7]. That means, I think, that the constructive power may operate in a great many fields, but one finds that actually the number of imaginative areas are pretty sharply limited. That is, we are in a world of bewilderingly complex communications today—television, radio, newspapers, and so forth—but nevertheless the agents of communication are still words and images and rhythms just as they were ten thousand years ago; so that one can say that the arts represent a pure or disinterested imagination or constructive power and that there are other elements which form the political and religious and other social structures of our society, which are to some extent forms of applied imagination. QUESTION: How do you account for the phenomenon today of increasing realism in children's literature and the increasing fantasy in adult literature?

FRYE: The tendency of adults to impose an adult mystique on children has been there from the beginning of time, and the tendency of children to produce the exact opposite of the adult mystique by way of response has been there from the beginning of time too. I think that our own day, as far as adults are concerned, has got to the end of a realistic cycle. We often raise the question of whether fiction has lost its reading public or not, and when a statement like that is made it usually means that fiction is changing its centre of gravity from one thing to something else. I think

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that we are moving from a reflection of an outside world to more and more a sense of the potential construct. That is what accounts for some of the things that I mentioned, things like science fiction or the cult of Tolkien or the revival of the nineteenth-century romancers, like George MacDonald and Rider Haggard and Bulwer-Lytton and others. As that happens, children naturally go into a realistic phase, as they went into a fantasy phase while their elders were realistic, just to make sure that the cycle will keep on turning and that life will always be interesting. QUESTION: How would you apply your formula to an American novel like Atlas Shrugged? FRYE: As I suggested in connection with Ship of Fools, I think that realistic novels usually reflect a good deal of the life of their time, and to that extent they have what I called an allegorical interest. The students dealing with this kind of material would need to have shown to them what kind of story this is. In such a novel like Atlas Shrugged the author is getting at them. There, I think, the teacher has a very real responsibility to explain just how the writer is getting at them and to encourage the students to work out for themselves why the story is being presented in this shape and in this form, and whether it would not be possible to present alternative views. QUESTION: I would like to know how you would handle the young generation today who have been raised on television media, which no longer give them the opportunity to utilize the imagination. Everything is fed to them through the senses, so that they no longer have to form a concept. FRYE: That is, of course, the situation that faces us all, and I think one has to realize, as I say, that in teaching literature the teacher has to be well aware that he or she is not just teaching literature. What he is in contact with is the entire verbal experience of his students, and he has to know that that verbal experience has been conditioned to a great extent by television. At the same time there are certain patterns and formulas in television that a teacher can get hold of. Bonanza is dead now, but when it was alive, it had certain formulas which connected it with the pastoral tradition and the Western story and so on. It is possible to lead a student from that kind of experience to other kinds of experience. There is a large body of students who are very ready to respond to that and to go on a

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journey with the teacher if he points out other areas. If one travels on New York subways these days, one finds more and more people with their noses in books, and one recognizes that the instinct behind that is a self-preservative instinct. The young don't lack self-preservation any more than their elders.

15 Canadian Identity and Cultural Regionalism

This is a paper that Frye wrote in connection with his work on the Canadian Radio-Television Commission. Rodrigue Chiasson, coordinator of the research and planning branch of the commission, had written Frye on 30 November 1970, summarizing the discussion with Frye the previous week in Ottawa and asking him if he would develop his ideas on the relationship between the themes of identity and unity—themes that Frye had "touched on" at the meeting. In a letter to Chiasson that accompanied the present reflections (dated 9 December 1970), Frye indicated that much of the essay treated obvious things but that he would "attempt to go on to say a few things about the 'civilizing' role of communications and about communications as a form of education." This untitled paper and the accompanying correspondence are in the NFF, 1988, box 7 5, fie 5-

The first point to get clear about the very unusual situation of Canada is that the two conceptions of "unity" and "identity" are quite different, almost a contrast. I was recently reading the letters of Wallace Stevens, and came across his remark that the imagination transforms reality, giving as his example the fact that people living in the United States become Americans. It struck me that no Canadian poet could have said this. People living in Canada may become Canadians up to a point, but up to a far more limited point. What with the immense east-to-west distance, in a country longer and narrower than Chile, what with the division in language, what with the divergence in historical and cultural traditions—what Goldwin Smith called "seven fishing-rods tied together by the ends"1—it seems to me that the feeling "Canadian" is a political and social feeling, but only very imperfectly an imaginative or cultural

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feeling. It is because of this that Canadians have such difficulty feeling their identity as Canadians. Their writers realize that it is no use trying to feel Canadian first and then try to write about the feeling, and hence they feel that the best they can do is to ignore the whole subject and simply write for the English-speaking market. I say English-speaking, because French Canada, at least in Quebec, is in a different situation. It seems to me that the essential cultural and imaginative feelings in Canada are regional and provincial. There is Newfoundland, turned outwards to the sea; there are the Maritime provinces, with their gentle pastoral landscape; there is Quebec with its strong pays feeling, with the small farms spread out along the St. Lawrence; there is Ontario with its curious contrast of the urban, mixed farming and summer cottage areas; there are the prairies, where the individual human being, especially when riding a horse, feels as though he were the highest point in the universe; and there is the British Columbian coast, with its tremendous mountains and trees. There are also great diversities within these groups: the Acadian French in the Maritimes, the English enclave in the Eastern Townships and Westmount, the mix of Ukrainian and Icelandic groups in Winnipeg that give such an unusual musical direction to the life of that city, and so on—all this is familiar enough. What I am saying is that the cultural and imaginative situation of French Canada in Quebec ought to be a norm for Canada generally, that the primary feeling should be regional and local, and that programming by the radio and television media should keep this in mind. The national feeling is more difficult to characterize, and for that very reason needs to be understood carefully. The political and social stance, so to speak, of the Canadian is facing east or west. Here he has the immense industrial power and the overwhelming population density of the United States on the one side of him. On the other side is the vast hinterland which lies behind every province except the Maritime ones, a land of vast lakes and rivers and islands, a sense of open space which counter-balances the southern feeling. If he faces south, he will become hypnotized by the United States; if he faces north he will think of the country as expanding into the north from the south, and will soon find himself a mere agent of expanding American capital. This last was the position of Diefenbaker after the 1957 election. When the Americans invaded Canada in 1812, they ran into a different ideology and some well organized guerrilla fighting, and consequently failed to conquer the country as ignominiously as they are now failing to

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conquer North Vietnam. So they opted for peace and an undefended border, with the result that Canada is today almost the only pure colony left in the world, colonial in psychology as well as in economic situation. Sometime in October The Globe and Mail ran a would-be thoughtful editorial about the curtailing of "freedom" as a result of the Canadian content regulations. There could hardly be any other country in the world in which "freedom" could be identified essentially with beggary— that is, making one's living by accepting handouts from a richer nation. This is because (apart from the economic situation) broadcasters, including apparently the C.B.C., have no social philosophy distinct from that of American capitalism. They have to treat the viewers primarily as consumers, not as participating citizens, and consequently they think of them as passive recipients of their programs. At the Winnipeg hearing one broadcaster even said, in a brief, that the television viewer was essentially an addict who would keep twisting the dial until he got his "fix." When the cultural and imaginative regionalism in Canada takes on a political cast as well, it becomes merely provincial. In extreme cases, as with certain extreme separatist groups in Quebec, British Columbia, and the Prairies, it can become a kind of squalid neo-fascism. On the other hand, when the national political consciousness attempts to become generally imaginative and cultural, it is apt to become confused by insoluble problems of identity. I think we can eventually work our way towards a national culture and imagination, but it needs a solid regional basis. It is wrong for broadcasters representing minority ethnical groups to develop a closed-circuit system, thereby trying to avoid the jurisdiction of the C.R.T.C. It is wrong, not because they are trying to avoid that jurisdiction, but because the whole community ought to be interested in what the Italians or Greeks or Scandinavians among them are doing and thinking. If not interested, at least their activity should be made available and accessible/The same principle applies to all programming that attempts to divide the educated or "serious" people from the rest of the community. The two-tier fallacy about society, that it is divided into people with "light" and "heavy" tastes, has no place in the world of 1970. To repeat what I said in Ottawa, unity is the opposite of uniformity. Canada has never put the pressure on its ethnical groups to become homogenized as the Americans have done, and I think their greater tolerance has paid off. I have been in Ireland, Belgium, Pakistan, and Scandinavia, all places where there have been strong separatist move-

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ments. In all of these except Scandinavia separatism has been an unmitigated and usually hideous disaster. It has never lessened or balanced hatred and prejudice, but has only continued to feed and nourish them. In Scandinavia the divergence in culture and imagination, with Norway turned outwards towards the west and Sweden eastward towards the Baltic, enabled the countries to separate politically on equal terms, with mutual respect, while still co-operating economically. But that took place before the First World War and before the rise of modern revolutionary ideologies. Such separatism is theoretically but not practically possible in Canada today. Besides, the magnetic pull of the United States would soon disintegrate a Canada which did not preserve its east-to-west continuity.

16

Icons and Iconoclasm

This is the second reflective essay to emerge from the November 1970 meeting of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission in Ottawa. (See the headnote to the previous essay.) Frye had indicated at the meeting that a key problem in the thinking about the media was the regeneration of forms and images. In his letter to Frye of 30 November 1970, Rodrigue Chiasson had asked Frye to reflect on the "iconic-iconoclastic cycle." In his letter accompanying the present essay Frye wrote, "I am sending along a second brief essay, on the general subject of icons and iconoclasm. It still keeps at a safe distance from the central question of the regenerated image, but I hope eventually to get a little closer to that." This paper and the accompanying correspondence are in the NFF, 1988, box 75, file 5.

For some time I have been wondering what it was that made the Hebraic tradition that produced the Bible so different from that of other civilizations. In most civilizations the main imaginative emphasis falls on visual symbols. Polytheism is impossible without a strong visual focus. In ancient cultures the gods are visualized on the analogy of social structures. They began as animals, sacred trees or stones or something cosmetic and intimate. As a culture grows in strength and complexity, they tend to become, on the analogy of that society, an aristocracy organized into departments of administration. Then they retreat to the sky, which is perhaps the central visual focus of human life, because of its largely unchanging quality. The conception of monotheism comes with the world-state, and all through history both the One God and the supreme ruler of an empire have been associated with the sun. Both the Egyptian Pharaohs and the Roman Caesars were associated with solar emblems,

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and the association continues in the crown, the salute, or ritual shading of the eye from bright light, and in such epithets as Roi Soldi for Louis XIV. In such a context there is generally a good deal of tolerance about doctrine, belief, and truth. The emphasis is thrown visually on ritual observance, and particularly on the acknowledgment of the supremacy of the ruler. In contrast, Hebrew culture was iconoclastic. That means that it shifted the emphasis from the eye to the ear, from god as the sun to god as the Word. With this shift the visual images were internalized. Hebrew history begins with Moses and the burning bush, but the bush is burning only to catch Moses' attention: what is important is the voice that comes from it, God proclaiming his name. This iconoclastic movement is both revolutionary and existential. The visual focus immobilizes the body and keeps it spellbound; the auditory focus provides a course of action. The visual god is there: the audible god is invisible, and is only to be manifested sometime in the remote future. The shift to the ear throws a correspondingly heavy emphasis on dialectic, and on the importance of belief. What was important about the Hebrews was not their belief that their god was the true god but that all other gods were false. The conception "false god," almost unintelligible to an educated Greek or Roman, is a part of the doctrine of the invisibility of the true god, and hence implies that all visual gods are idols. After Christianity was established, something of the same shift of emphasis took place within Christianity itself. In medieval Christendom there was a strong emphasis on the visibility of the church, on such visual foci as the monstrance in the Mass, and on the wealth of imagery connected with the glass and sculpture of the cathedrals. Again, Protestantism threw a strong emphasis on the Word, on justification by faith, on preaching, and on iconoclasm, which again means the internalizing of the traditional imagery. The more extreme Protestants disliked the theatre because again it was a visual focus: similarly with Pascal and the Jansenists. In our day we notice a strong iconic influence in the Hollywood commercial movies and in American television. There is a good deal of emphasis on the visual aspects of social unity. And just as crowds gather to see the Queen in order to see their own unity as a society reflected in her, so the most compelling television shows are things like the moon landings, Churchill's funeral, the Kennedy assassination and the like: these were of course major historical events in their own right, but they

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acquired an additional ritual dimension from being televised. We notice, by contrast, how much revolutionary and Marxist parts of the world depend on the radio. In Maoist China the radios start on the street corners at six in the morning, and in Cuba and in the Arab world the purely auditory appeal of the radio has a very important role to play in building up a will to social action, by internalizing the visual images of the social goals, and so directing them towards a future. I have often spoken of the iconoclastic mood of younger people in our own society, and I think it springs from the same cause: the sense that the present visual foci of American life that television presents, including more especially its commercials, represent a form of idolatry. I don't quite know where I go from here, except that it seems obvious that television will have to accommodate itself to a new iconoclastic sense. It should aim at the internalizing of its own imagery: that is at present a very vague phrase, but I hope to explore it later on. Advertising presents images as desirable to an audience in which the most intelligent and sensitive are acutely aware of the inadequacy of all images whatever as symbols of social ideals. There is another element of the situation too, which is the domestication of the visual icon. It has even been suggested that Hitler and Mussolini could not have achieved such power as they did in an age of television, because the visual image on the small television screen is so frequently ironic. I doubt that this is true, but it is true that all societies which have depended on visual symbols have also been very clever at distancing these symbols, or, as in churches or temples, putting them in a dim light. It is particularly with visual images that familiarity breeds contempt, and it is significant that the way to make almost anything ridiculous on television is to turn the sound off. I remember that the old silent movies tended strongly to be grotesque in comedy and fantastic in more serious themes. This was a deaf man's art, at the opposite extreme from the blind man's art of radio, where the hysterical and the hypnotic are always just around the corner. The film is the one real major art-form of our time: it has, with its greatest directors, solved the problem of the balance of eye and ear. It has taught a whole generation of people to use visual symbols, to think with them sequentially instead of merely staring at one after the other, and to follow visual programming that is not on the simplest and most naive levels of realism. As such, it affords a model for television, which is still limping along on the old staring principle.

17

Reviews of Television Programs for the Canadian Radio-Television

Commission

Frye's reviews of television programs for the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) have been divided into two groups. The first group, entitled "Reflections on November 5th," was dictated by Frye to his wife Helen after he had returned from a meeting of the CRTC research committee in Ottawa on 5 November 1971. He returned this document—the first eight reviews in wha follows—to the committee as a unit. A second group of reviews and reflections—nos. 9-20 in what follows—were written at different times, and most appear to have been mailed separately to the research committee during the early months of 1972. The copy-texts are the uncatalogued typescripts in the CRTC archives in Ottawa, which are in a file called "The Frye Diet."1 Frye's reflections contain occasional references to the members of the CRTC research com mittee (Rod Chiasson, Patrick Gossage, and Andre Martin), to comments made in the meetings of the committee, and to reports written by committee members in advance of Frye's viewing of the programs.

A. Reflections on November 5th i. VTR St Jacques2 This film is an excellent illustration of some of the paradoxes involved in the implicit theories of communication which are held by people directly concerned with media. The animators obviously believe in the unstructured and spontaneous evocation of ideas and feelings from people. But as soon as they get their hands on a camera, someone drops the revealing remark that the camera is a way of seeing, and that it provides the direction of seeing. This means that there is no such thing as unstruc-

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tured communication: all communication comes to us through certain dramatic and rhetorical moulds. The only things that people say spontaneously are prejudices, that is, ready-made rhetorical formulas. The animators believe, quite seriously, that "women shouldn't hold jobs" is anti-social grousing, and that "the government doesn't give a damn about the working man" is the authentic voice of the public. It thus creates a difficulty for them when both sentiments come out of the same mouth. Someone wants to cut the former utterance, in the interests of dramatic consistency and unity; another wants to have it in, in the interests of dramatic variety. One has activistic overtones and is heading in the direction of censorship; the other is more liberal and democratic in tendency. The point is that they are both forms of dramatic organization. The crucial moment in this film came in the confrontation with journalists who found cameras being trained on them. One of the journalists spoke about the need for objectivity in his profession, and felt that this was being threatened when he found himself an item of news instead. It is easy to destroy his argument, as well as to notice the adroit and ironic reversal of roles. The animators clearly did not believe in objectivity as an end: for them, as for most activists, the only end to be aimed at is the consequence of the crucial decision at the beginning to choose a point of view. Nevertheless one can understand how important it is that objectivity and fidelity to the facts should be retained as an aim and ideal, whatever the theoretical difficulties involved. The real question the journalist was raising has to do with the fact that one's bias is not, in such contexts, the direction of creative energy, but that it is the source of one's weakness and liability to error and distortion. The journalist was right in feeling that some threat to his integrity was involved, and the obvious embarrassment of the animators showed that they recognized the fact. The way out of this impasse is not to continue arguing in the old terms of objectivity versus activism. From the journalist's point of view, he is objective and the animators are propagandists; from their point of view, he is propaganda for the establishment and they are telling it like it is. One can get no further along these lines. Both forms of media are dramatic and rhetorical, but there are two kinds of dramatic structure. One is the narrow and didactic type that permits of only one inference, or rather set of inferences, to be drawn from it. This is the type of drama that points insistently to a single moral. And there is the wider type of dramatic conception which enfolds a number of human phenomena in a structure which attains unity though variety, and which has its meaning inside itself, not reducible to a single external moral.

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2. Documentary on stealing and cheating

The absence of ethical criteria noted in this program is another effort at "objectivity." The social basis of the situation is the fact that under capitalism economic and social interests are to some degree separated. Acts of petty thievery are therefore easily rationalized, on a Robin Hood basis: if you can wangle a free long-distance telephone call you are promoting your own interests at the expense of the telephone company's profits, but that's only one interest against another, and there is no moral issue involved. This kind of glib cynicism about the profit motive is closely connected with the fact that advertising and economic interests hold the format of television together in our society. Advertising and propaganda, as I have said so often, are ironic arts, in that they say what they don't mean. In propaganda, which is the normal communication of totalitarian states, or of ours in emergency times, to look ironically at the propaganda defines one as an opponent of the society. The irony of advertising, on the other hand, tips a confidential wink to the viewer, who is not expected to take the statements literally but is being invited to join in a game. For the deeply disaffected in our society, advertising is propaganda, and one's response should be that of an enemy of "the system" and not of any player of games. Modern advertising grew out of the chaffering and haggling techniques of simpler times, when buyer and seller engaged in a ritual bargaining act, the eventual price being more or less what both had originally decided on. This kind of game was, obviously, a two-way dialogue. Television advertising is entirely a monologue relying on the power of a visual medium to hold the body motionless and, if possible, spellbound. The great proliferation of demands for participatory programs is evidence of a desire to get something of the old chaffering ritual back again into society. So advertising is becoming polarized between consumer participation on the one hand, and merging with the propaganda of "an establishment" on the other. This may seem a long way off from snitching a Coke bottle out of a vending machine, but I think the two things are connected. 3. Pandora's Box

Nudity in itself does not bother me, though I have some reservations about using a black girl as the entering wedge for nude programs. I think there is a covert appeal to the feeling that black girls are somewhere in

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between white girls and female animals, so that it does not matter too much. I think one should avoid the censorship approach to such questions, in spite of the immediacy of television as a presence in the living room. Censorship is negative and futile, and the better procedure is always to try to define the positive improvement in taste of which censorship is the negation. In English there is a most important distinction, the subject of a poem by Robert Graves, between nudity and nakedness.3 The nude is an intense visual focus on the body as the home of the soul (or the "personality," if one prefers), and consequently the nude is one of the central visual elements in both painting and sculpture. Nakedness simply means the body with its clothes off. Considering the very low quality of Pandora's music and dancing, I should say that her act represented nakedness rather than nudity. And nakedness belongs to the whole complex of things that constitute such a tedious problem in contemporary entertainment: what was called in our discussion4 the "bludgeoning" technique. This includes a great variety of things: the conception of entertainment as essentially some kind of shock or practical joke: the assumption that anything that shocks is somehow good for me; the further assumption that the concentration on obscenity, the nauseous, the brutal, and the like will either lead one to question the values of a "sick" social system or provide, as Dadaism tried to do fifty years ago, a sort of extreme unction for the bourgeois soul. In this perspective the cult of nakedness is a part of the assumption that all social roles and personae are disguises hiding some kind of normally unseen "reality." Once again, as above, there is no core to this onion: there is nothing concealed under one's persona except another persona. Once again, the effective tactics are not those of censorship or resistance, but of discovering the positive forms of the elements presented. The situation is a Narcissus one: contemporary man is supposed to look at what he formerly called the obscene, the nauseating, or the brutal and recognize them as reflections of something in himself. If, like Narcissus, he falls in love with the reflection, he becomes himself becoming obscene, nauseating, and brutal. This last is part of what I think of [as] the "Spenglerian syndrome." Spengler said that classical culture declined into the decadence of the late Roman Empire, with its brutal gladiatorial shows, its effete cult of the body in the baths, its nauseating luxuries (vomitoria, etc.), and the sadistic and other orgies that we know formed a part of slavery. In the

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background was a civilization of annihilation wars, dictatorships, rootless masses of people living on doles and handouts, and a cult of spectacle that occupied an immense amount of time, to say nothing of money. Spengler's view was that Western culture would inevitably decline in the same way. I don't think Spengler tells the whole truth about our age, but I think he isolated one essential aspect of it—that there is in our society a powerful will toward cultural decline. The brutality of some of our sports, including the sport of breaking up demonstrations, approaches the gladiatorial spectacle; the fetishism in the cult of the body, and many other things, show very disturbing Roman analogies. Any successful avoiding of this decline has to begin by recognizing the features of it. 4. The Nigerian Executions5

This horrifying exhibition awakes many echoes: for example, Samuel Johnson's opposition to the abolishing of public executions, on the ground that in a public execution the criminal at least had the comfort of an audience. This was true of the man who talked about his family. Here again there are certain dangers, such as the danger of becoming fascinated by such spectacles and demanding more of them, or of becoming accustomed to them and taking them for granted, or of feeling that they are only blacks anyway, and so (as above) it doesn't matter too much. The positive feature in this case is the fact that at least we see the worst of what is happening. When executions are secret they are kept out of sight and we are not offended by them, but we don't know what really happens. This scene brings us face to face with the real reason for demanding the abolition of capital punishment. It is not that one feels sorry for the criminal, but that one feels sorry for the society which is stuck with the utterly beastly business of putting people to death. 5. Monty Python6

This skit certainly represents one form of development in a more positive direction. There are certain devices that remind us that the television medium is a show, such as the freezing of the image into a still, which can be very effective in comedy, though less so if it becomes a rather tedious form of punctuation, as it does in the St. Jacques film. But the development of a form of comedy which parodies the conventions and cliches of television itself is certainly one way to develop a sense of

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flexibility in the viewer's mind. It is perhaps the only way to convey adequately the sense of television as a dramatic and rhetorical medium, concerned with putting on a show, even when, or especially when, it purports to give us the facts of life. I need hardly labour the fact that comedy of this kind is at the opposite pole from straight television comedies with their automatic laugh track, which is of course one of the cliches that this show parodies. I think that for the more deliberate Canadian mind this show is too fast in rhythm: there are too many sudden shifts in level, too many in-group jokes, too much agility in picking up allusion required, for this more solemn country. What I found particularly fascinating was the type of continuity, where a theme would be picked up by an unexpected and yet logical connection, often turning on some kind of pun or thematic association. The glancing allegory of this kind of humour—for instance, the association of Attila the Hun with a middle-class home-owner who has spent the day in predatory capitalism—is precisely the kind of thing that illustrates how television, like mass media in general, is a classless form of communication. That is, the difference between highbrow and lowbrow response, even if it is there to begin with, gets leveled out as the medium develops. 6. The NRC Computer

Everybody remarked on the curious schizophrenia between what this feature had to say and show, which was interesting enough,7 and its fascination with a talking head exuding the kind of prose that is to a literary critic what cold overboiled cabbage would be to a gourmet. This feature is at the opposite pole from the BBC skit [Monty Python]: it is honest, didactic, and grimly determined to convey a profitable message. What the computer itself can do in the way of fantasy and metamorphosis should have taken the show over, and this principle applies to all informational programs that get obsessed with the feeling that they have to convey information instead of presenting it. In the Anatomy I distinguish drama from epos, which is recited verse.8 Television is dramatic and not epic, and all recitations ought to be contained by a dramatic framework, not the other way around. 7. To See Ourselves9

This represents another genuine, though quieter and more conventional, method of evolving positive imagery in a Canadian environ-

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ment. For so ruminative and nostalgic a theme the television format was rather constricting: one often feels that such themes need the expansion in both time and space that a regular film would give. The interruption by commercials is a technical problem that demands somewhat low-keyed writing so that the interruptions are less irritating. (It was significant that so many of these spots were so defensive about the monotony of most television fare, and of how the programs they advertised had "that little touch of difference.") Many overtones of the theme, such as the gradual drying up of the railway as a national symbol and emotional focus, were very curtailed and sketchy. But this is one of the real ways in which television can be used "to see ourselves." The same is true of the Glenn Gould program,10 so far as I saw it, although there the hypnagogic effect of the crossing voices demands very exacting listening. Erik Erikson says that immigrants coming to the New World have no problem of identity, because they know what they are coming from. It is the second generation, he says, that has the trouble. My experience with Canadian students indicates that it is rather the third generation that has the identity crisis. The second generation reacts against its parents and plunges into conformity with the new ways; their children react against the new ways and try to find their way back to an older tradition. So I was interested in this story of a boy who tried to recreate his grandfather's way of life. In Canada, again, the pressure towards conformity is much less urgent than in the United States. That is why, I think, American identity crises get so hysterical, and why the pattern of life, especially in big cities, is so much more violent. So again I was interested to see how this crisis took a nostalgic, reflective and traditional form, and also—very typical of Canada—focussed on a symbol of communication. The same thing seemed to be true also of the Glenn Gould program. The amount of unsettled territory in Canada gives the nomadic image a peculiar intensity. A related problem, indirectly concerned with television, is the sense of panic engendered by the feeling of being at the end of the historical process, pushed along like a terminal moraine in front of a glacier. The dress of young people—the long hair of the boys, the granny dresses and shawls of the girls, the cowboy costumes, the miniskirts that reproduce the Elizabethan doublet and hose—indicate a certain emancipation from the historical process. The decline of the United States as the world's greatest and wealthiest power will also do a good deal to restore a better sense of historical perspective.

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I am not a devotee of Sesame Street: its Walt Disneyish cuteness and condescension to children get me down. However, there were one or two things about the program I saw to note. The use of animal figures is really a technique of using masks, and a mask is really a form of still shot: a face that does not change. I suppose their use has some point in indicating to children that everything that confronts them, especially other people, is some form of mask, the inner nature of which is indicated by the voice and its tones. The teaching techniques I think have a sound basis. McLuhan says that the content of a medium is the form of an earlier medium. This seems to me an unnecessarily inaccurate way of saying that the real units of communication have always been words and pictures, for which television is simply a new frame. Now of course words and letters, in the hieroglyphic stage, were also pictures, so that writing and drawing were originally the same art. Both Sesame Street and the science program brought out this original identity of word and image very clearly. There is a reversal of this principle that leads to some consideration of the interaction of eye and ear in television. Television is primarily a visual, and therefore a dramatic, medium. The etymology of the word "theatre" indicates its primitive connection with the eye. A visual or dramatic medium is "cool" in the sense that watching immobilizes the body. And while intense or continuous listening immobilizes one too, one of the most primitive and central forms of aural message is the command, the starting point of an action. Advertising used to try to incorporate this by pretending a kind of urgency: go right down to the store and demand Sudsy Soap. But of course this fell into the entropy that Andre12 mentioned as characteristic of all mechanical repetition. I said earlier that television is dramatic and not epic, or adapted to continuous recitation. But the entry of epos into drama gives it an air of urgency. The Air of Death13 program achieved this sense of urgency by introducing Stanley Burke, a well-known and respected lay-preacher. It also, by pre-empting another program, altered the ritual sequence of the daily program, and that also created urgency. Even more important, however, was the reversal of the principle that, as television is primarily a visual medium, words are really a form of imagery. It occasionally happens that certain images, such as a smoking chimney, become hieroglyphics, that is, messages charged with ominous

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portent (because practically all news is ominous in one way or another). This is the experience symbolized in the Bible by the "writing on the wall," where a riddling omen of disaster needed a prophet to interpret it [Daniel 5:5-28]. Another point about television, though most of the implications escape me at the moment, is that it is really a reduction of human life to a kind of ghostly or spiritual essence. In a modern house, if we see a ghost or hear a ghostly voice, we know that we have left the television on. This feeling of the disembodied is particularly strong when we see a television program involving someone whom we know to have died since the program was made. Hence, as in those Eskimo drawings that represent spirit-animals as well as real ones, one gets a curious sense of seeing a world that is alive and dead at the same time. Again, as in the film, the sense of continuity rests on an optical illusion, and what really stand out are discontinuous moments or episodes, whether the material conveyed is factual or fictional. This brings me to the central principle I am going on. In my other researches, notably on the Bible, I have become aware of the difference between visual and aural stimuli in society. A visual focus, whether of god or king, is conservative and authoritarian; an aural focus is revolutionary, creating the dialectic of idolatry. In Greek and Roman religion, as it developed, the visible order of nature became the symbol of an invisible world of law behind it; in the Biblical tradition the invisible world was "spiritual," which suggests the metaphor of air (pneuma) and of light. We can't see air; if we could, we could see nothing else. Hence in this tradition the invisible world becomes the medium for the creation or actualizing of reality, instead of a hidden world behind the visible one. Television being a visual medium, it has prompted the superstitious notion that there is a "real" world behind it; hence all the efforts to get at the unstructured, the immediate, the spontaneous, or other symbols of hidden reality underneath all the masks and personae. The attitude I take is phenomenological: for me there is never any persona except another persona. As Hamlet proves in its soliloquies, we dramatize ourselves to ourselves even when alone. This develops out of my study of Blake, whose central characters, Los, Urizen, Ore and the like, are not gods or separate personalities but states of human activity. For him, everybody spends his entire life within these states, which are collective or social states. The implication of Blake's attitude is that there is ultimately no distinction between literature and life as far as structuring is

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concerned. Literature may imitate life (the Aristotelian tradition), or life may imitate literature (Oscar Wilde), but there's no real boundary. The electronic media have made this for the first time utterly obvious, and this is the fundamental axiom I shall be adopting. B. Reflections on Television for the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, November i97i-March 1972 9. The Tenth Decade14

This show did quite well what it set out to do. It struggled valiantly with Pearson's lisp, Diefenbaker's jowls, and the general unintelligibility and flatness of Canadian politicians. I remember hearing one of the Cabinet Ministers featured in the show give an after-dinner speech, and thinking that it was rather reassuring that someone so fantastically dull could be in a position of authority. The Diefenbaker cabinet was the last government of which that was true: since then, the influence of television has brought a cult of personality into Canadian politics. It is also the influence of television that has slowly but steadily increased the amount of sheer gossip and personal conflict in politics. A generation ago, this kind of conflict was confined to the floor of the House of Commons; this program, however, making so conspicuous a feature of personal disagreements with Coyne, the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] Commissioner, and such items of slander as the rumours that Diefenbaker had Parkinson's disease (Diefenbaker seemed to want to give the impression that if he were suffering from anything it would be his own disease) showed how much the "news behind the news" is interpreted today simply as people getting mad at other people. The comment that Americans make lousy diplomatists, which came in as voice over and was then traced to Sevigny and settled on J.F. Kennedy, was very cleverly introduced, perhaps with a touch of malice. I was puzzled by Diefenbaker's reference to the difficulty the Opposition gave him, and his trying to hint that confidential information was leaked to them through the Civil Service. I always thought that it was the Opposition's job to collect such information, and one of the duties of the Civil Service to supply it—how else is an Opposition going to oppose? One could see, through the process of what in print is called reading between the lines, the Conservative resentment against the Civil Serv-

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ice's bland assumption that the Liberals are the only government party in Canada, though occasionally they have to rest up to let the Conservatives handle some unpopular issues, such as the scrapping of the Arrow plane.15 It was natural that a television show should fall back on television material, some of which was effective enough, such as the round-table discussion between Michael Barkway16 and Walker of Rosedale, with the latter looking so ineffably smug that one wanted to throw things at the screen. Similarly with the clips of the political speeches, which, from Joey Smallwood's talk about a Christian country to Caouette's harangues to the Quebec rednecks,17 told us exactly nothing at all, except that these politicians were trying to fog up the issues. As an educational program, the recapitulation of the events of the decade a year ago gives a curious sense of running at top speed to stay in the same place, like Alice in Wonderland. The churning up of emotional excitement over issues of unemployment and separatism is exactly the same as what goes on today, except that the issues are completely dead. The lesson of history, that there is nothing new under the sun and that we solve all problems simply by surviving them, might be rather discouraging to young people. The show tried hard to be fair to everybody. But one noticed the obsession of television with the newspaper function. What the show brought out was simply the headline news of ten years ago. Hindsight ought to develop a new dimension. Here there was little sense of history, except that Diefenbaker looked ten years younger in 1961 and a suppressed irony in having de Gaulle say only "vive les peuples libres." In verbal media the newspaper can be supplemented by the book or long article which can see the underlying trends. And surely what any viewer of this show would want to know would be primarily: what is the real cause-effect relation between political leadership and economic conditions? That is, was the unemployment situation in 1962 directly due to Diefenbaker's policies, or would the economic conditions have appeared anyway, because of our involvement with American economy and the like? The question I am raising, and would like to think about, is: is there a format within television corresponding to the kind of analysis one would get verbally from the essay or monograph? These words sound rather dull for television, but such books as Renegade in Power18 sold pretty well, and if television could do anything like this it would be a far more genuinely educational medium.

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A beauty contest is a narcissistic middle-class ritual: the contestants have the immobility, the fixed smiles, the mechanical responses, the sense of remoteness, of wax mannequins in a shop window, which have much the same social function. The function is that of the idols of a polytheistic religion, which project a society's idealized image of itself: thus the Barberini Juno is an image of a well-to-do Roman matron, the Aphrodite Kallipygos an image of a well-trained hetaira, and so on. This show had an air of what Thoreau would call quiet desperation about it:19 the historical perspective was there only to show that this contest was identical with its twenty-four predecessors. The implication was that our society can still muster a good many young women to go obediently through these routines as though the protest generation, to say nothing of Women's Lib, did not exist. A beauty contest has no direct relation to sexuality, even when the contestants appear in old-style bathing suits. Anything approaching contact would get their hair-dos rumpled. The emphasis is all on remoteness: of the performance of the finalists, only one, the Quebec girl, had an act that called for anything approaching human impact, the others being all distanced spectacle. The point is that the conception of "beauty" itself is a conforming and conventionalizing conception. As I've said elsewhere, when we speak of the human body as beautiful we mean the body of someone in good physical condition between eighteen and about thirty (read twenty-four for this contest).20 Thus a beauty contest reinforces the economic need for social norms in a mass market: you have to have a generally acknowledged standard of the right clothes, the right shape, the right sentiments, if goods are to be produced profitably and in large quantity. The nearest approach to the sexual was the orgasm rhythm in the planning of the program. It began with interminable close shots of everybody, the contestants, the judges, the sponsors, the ceremonial officers. This is known in the circles I frequent as Introducing the Head Table, and a most benighted operation it is. Then there was the stringing out of the events by the introducing of songs, clips of previous winners, and the like, the "suspense" engendered by the portentous build-up to announcements that were then yelled out in assumed hysterical excitement, the cliff-hanging remarks just before the commercials to coax the viewer back after them, the elaborate pretense that the judges had not made up

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their minds in advance, and the climax technique which fell on its backside when the winner at last emerged indirectly by elimination of the other four. One wondered why such inept devices were employed, until it began to emerge that what was utterly phony for the audience was quite real for the girls. This became evident when the Quebec girl clammed up on Canadian unity—an episode that would have been very funny if one hadn't felt so sorry for the poor youngster—and the subdued hysteria that broke loose at the end. So there was something akin to sexuality after all, though of a very dubious kind—a touch of sadism, a sense of vicarious (i.e., through the judges) [?], a suggestion that these girls were being picked over, like slaves in a market, and were kept utterly dependent by the promise of glittering rewards to the winner, and the final triumphant discovery that for all the mechanical behavior they had feelings after all, and could even be hurt. Ugh. The commercials played an unusual role, partly by accident. The products one was reminded of most vividly were processed meat and wax, and those in fact turned out to be the main sponsors of the show. Swift's, which advertised itself for some reason as "the break-through company" (maybe their sausages leak), talked about "pure ham" in a way that left some unexpected echoes in one's mind, and, more important, we could see that for many of the contestants, at least those who wanted to be models, a future awaited of being spots in these squalid interludes—a fate infinitely worse than life. Random reflections: why are Canadian voices so damn monotonous? And if these girls are being trained for show biz, why are their voices so totally ignored? They recite—their sentences—phrase by phrase—in a dull monotone—with a slight note—of query at the end—as though they were saying—hope that's all right. It's no earthly good trying to make protests against these shows, such as I suppose Women's Lib or other organizations might attempt. This morning on the subway I saw an advertisement for pantyhose for "pussycats," with a sticker on it saying "this ad is offensive to women." It's offensive to some men, too; but the point is that I had to examine it to make sure that it was a sticker—a sufficiently clever advertiser would have incorporated some such remark as part of his ad. I've said in my previous message that it's nonsense thinking that one can probe past a persona to find a "real" person underneath, and that all that's ever underneath is another persona. I think that's true, but one does move, in such operations, from the individual to the generic. One's

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dressed up opinions, on politics or religion or art or whatever, are what is individual about one; one's sexual drives or aggression tactics, which is [are] the kind of thing such probing "uncovers," are merely generic, or what one has in common with everyone else. In a beauty contest the emphasis is on the generic from the beginning, so there's nothing to uncover except an inner resistance to an outward conformity. Some unpleasant people, when faced with an immobile guard at Buckingham palace, can't resist trying to tease him to make him move. The Miss Canada Show was a teasing operation of this kind, especially towards the end, when the girls were being tested for "sincerity"—at least I think that was what was said. An hour and a half is one hell of a long time to watch a tease with so little strip. 11. Hart and Lome Terrific Hour21

The highlight of this program was the report of the secession of Baffin Island. This was in the tradition of poker-faced parody which seems to be very central to Canadian humour: its tradition goes back through Rawhide22 to Stephen Leacock. The accounts of the attempts to design a national flag, national anthem, and a distinctive language were extremely funny, and the half-suppressed smugness of the critique of Eskimo art was in a class of satire by itself. Perhaps the invention flagged a little at the end with the export of snow (except for the remark about supplying ice cubes to ecology-conscious drinkers), but I have seen very few programs I enjoyed more. The way in which all the cliches on current news turned up, such as the difficulties with the postal service, seemed to me brilliant, and to achieve what Rawhide did his best to achieve, the difficult feat of being both sharply pointed and good natured at the same time. The difference between this skit and the rest of the program was startling. When there is parody in a show, one is put into a frame of mind in which one takes the other features to be parody too. And apparently the interminable song of the two guitarists was to be taken straight. The opening feature, with the M.C. addressed voice-over by an American owner, was considerably better, though I didn't feel that the Hitler make-up made much of a point. The other skits were laboured and mediocre: the pantomime one with the parking tickets dismally feeble, and the press conference also seemed to be inane. One obvious reflection is that of the immense amount of sheer quan-

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tity of material required for television. I doubt if Lope de Vega himself could meet the demands of the medium. I also notice the fact, mentioned (I think by Patrick)23 that television is not simply a visual medium, but a medium of pointed and directed vision. This means that it cannot easily accommodate the standard aural forms. Looking at a singer, a pianist, a preacher, or other public speaker for a long period of time gets almost intolerable on television. One result of this, also mentioned in Ottawa, is the frantic mugging that goes on not only in television acting but in most television programs which require protracted individual appearances. This is partly why I am not yet sure whether that second song was to be taken straight or as parody.24 12. The Carol Burnett Show3-5 Television satire does not appear to have moved very far from straight television. The combination of skits, songs, and dances on this program simply added up to Grade B television light entertainment, and at no point seemed to indicate any special sense of the possibilities of the medium. I remember that thirty years ago people were discussing what killed vaudeville. For a time, when I was a student, whenever one went to the movies one got involved in an enormous series of live acts, which quite suddenly disappeared with the Depression. But, of course, entertainment forms of that kind don't die: they don't even fade away; they simply reappear in other media. The improvised acts in this show were passable, and there was some sharp observation in the one about the woman with the black neighbour, but again, it trailed off into farce. One needs a fair amount of satiric bite to put over an act of this kind, and these people were no Nichols and May.26 One phrase in the dialogue that I didn't understand was "here in Los Angeles." On the whole, the lack of new ideas made it clear that television performers are still too preoccupied with the medium to be able to look at the medium objectively. I am aware that it is asking a lot of them to expect them to do this. But the rather timid satire of the opening skit— reading summaries of imaginary programs—shows how far television has to go in self-confidence. And perhaps the tyranny of the ratings will make it impossible ever to achieve that self-confidence. It has always seemed to me that the old silent movies developed an extremely distinctive form of comedy around such figures as Mack Sennett and Larry Semon (both of who I believe were Canadians).27 In

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these comedies, while the action might be little more than pie throwing, the sense of physical movement was so utterly uninhibited that the action turned into a kind of grotesque ballet. The advent of talking pictures killed all this, and I may be in a very small minority in my admiration for these antiquated farces. During the parody of the Ironside show, there was again a certain uninhibited quality in the farce which made me wonder if television would not be a good medium for recapturing something of that knockabout spirit. Television is clearly a better medium for pantomime than for song, in any case. 13. Nobody Gets What They Want In looking at special features on serious subjects, one has to take account of the amount of material that television demands, and, of course, of the amount of money in the budget available. In the discussion in Ottawa the question came up of the fascination of television with the talking head.28 It seemed to me that in this show the reason for the paralysis of movement was sheer laziness. There were houses shown in the background, except that it always seemed to be the same house, whether the heads were talking about Vancouver or Montreal. But we didn't get a single glimpse of an interior, either of the new cooperative units or of the more slummy conditions referred to by the talking heads. The most interesting part of the program, naturally, was the exposition of the philosophy of cooperative housing itself. The desire to accommodate every age group from the twenties to the eighties, the sense of a need for a genuine community, for introducing something like a village pump into an urban environment, was very well worth hearing, even though one would gladly have dispensed with several hundred feet of wagging jaws in favour of a single glimpse of what really happens. And then, naturally, the reporter vulgarized and misinterpreted the whole point of the program by saying that the important thing about cooperative housing was the amount of money one saved, winding up with a commercial plug for the organization. There was no clear suggestion of the extent to which cooperative housing has to fight the sharks and parasites who were referred to politely as "developers." They should be called, I think, "speculators," which is also polite but more accurate. The title of the program, and the remarks made about the amount of real estate that the sharks are sitting on led one to expect a much more concrete and specific treatment of the

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tactics of the cooperatives. What kind of land is still available? What amount of money do they have [to have] to outbid the "developers"? To what extent is the holding of land, when it isn't straight speculation (i.e., for resale at a higher price) a matter of tying up property so that the cooperative cannot use it? We want a program on such a subject to come to grips with these issues, and not disintegrate into a lazy and unorganized sequence of monologues. Incidentally, I am still watching programs on a black and white set, and this was advertised as a colour feature, but it didn't look as though colour would have added anything at all to the program. Jane says that this program was competing with "South Pacific" on Channel 7.29 14. The Bold Ones** This is a very typical documentary show, and reminded me a little of a comment a friend of mine made about Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. He said that he read the book with great absorption, but if he hadn't known it was a documentary, rather than a work of fiction, he wouldn't have bothered to read it. The remark points up the difficulty that fiction writers have to face in the modern world, including writers for television. What little interest this program has was sustained by the fact that it was studying a genuine social problem, even though it told us nothing about that problem that anyone wouldn't have already known. The title was "The Bold Ones," but I don't know who was being bold. In spite of Patrick's very helpful notes,31 I still don't understand the technical reason for the extraordinary woodenness of some television acting. The scenes at the lunch table between the director of the Institute and the black executive's boss were undertaken by two competent actors, who were authoritative and relaxing to watch. But the doctors simply stood around without the slightest change of expression: they were, I suppose, masks symbolizing Scientific Objectivity. The guinea pigs were also fairly expressionless, and what they did would be covered by Dorothy Parker's comment about running the gamut of emotions from A to B. Some time ago I read a very bright and amusing article in, of all places, an airlines magazine. It was on the symbolism of baseball and football. It said that baseball was a pastoral, mom-and-apple-pie type of institution: its greatest achievement was to get back home, and its great figures had

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names like Babe Ruth. Football, on the other hand, was the product of aggressive American capitalism: its heroes are supermen in armour and its strategy is complex and esoteric. This article set me thinking about the rhythm of the two games. Baseball is, roughly, continuous in action: at times it gets to be something of a ballet. Further, one can see the whole game at once. Football is discontinuous in rhythm and extremely limited visually: the ball is normally where it's at, but the ball is usually buried in a mass of backs and legs, and the audience has to wait until things are set up again. This discontinuous and intensely localized rhythm seems to me the rhythm of television, as contrasted with that of, say, ordinary film. As I said before, there seems to be no technique of panorama shots on television. Everything is focussed on a limited area, as though the camera were saying "look at this." The discontinuous rhythm of football, with one down following another, reappears in television by way of commercials. But even apart from commercials, makers of television programs seem anxious to break the rhythm of the show itself into very short units. I noticed that in this feature particularly, where we were switched abruptly from one guinea pig to another, often with some final line which was left in mid-air, such as the statement that the singer's puzzle and the executive's confidential dossier were both fakes. It looks as though the North American attention span is reaching an all time low. 15. Midweek32

Not much to say about this program, except that it is further evidence, if one needed it, that talking heads and interviews are the easiest and cheapest forms of filling up time on television. I suppose the advantage that television has over the newspaper is that it can get to the personalities that newspaper readers think of as being "behind" the news. But even so, this type of talking newspaper format seems to me a bit more impoverished than the newspaper itself. Any form of writing, at least of reportorial writing, has a built-in sense of panorama about it: the mere desire to be objective, which every responsible reporter has, compels him to build up as broad and comprehensive a picture as possible of his subject. Television, with its sinuous snake-like movement, from one focus of vision to another, gives a strong sense of hunting for the reality behind the picture, but it also fails to find it so obviously that the viewer is baffled. Thus, I don't see why one needed to go to the Riviera to interview

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Lajeunesse33 and be told that everything he had to say was sub judice. The Stanfield34 interview was a little more interesting, and made me wonder whether such a figure, anchored as he is in the tradition of colourless Canadian waffle and snuffle, may not be the television personality of the immediate future. It is possible that the colourful television personality is a waning vogue, and that the intimacy of television technique may be bringing to the fore a new style which is also a very old one. The interview with the faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman was rather more interesting, though I thought Kay Sigurjonsson rather blew it by her inane questions about how she reacted to the suggestion that she might be a charlatan.35 Some faith healers are con men, certainly; but this woman clearly is not one of them. What gives some people healing powers is one of the great unexplained riddles, and I understand that a lot of research is being done on the matter in Soviet Russia. Of course this woman's followers were praise-the-Lord types who didn't want to know anything about the subject, but this is all the more reason for raising a few other questions. I think that both this and the Lajeunesse interview were examples of a kind of lukewarm-seat interview which is less offensive than the hot-seat kind, but no less irrelevant. The piece on the Lake Superior Park is a good example of how some issues are so lined up that there is really no difference between being objective and taking a side. In any question about the impartiality of news media, one has to remember that the old axiom about there being two sides to every question is sometimes just not relevant. I don't mean that there's nothing to be said for Weyerhaeuser, but that some "news" items are really just dramatic episodes. 16. [Untitled]

I have been watching certain programs, like The Tenth Decade and the Elizabeth I series,36 and it seems to me that I am just on the brink of acquiring certain conceptions about the characteristics, limitations, and possibilities of the television medium. The first thing that struck me about both programs was the total obliteration of the visual context. In the Elizabeth sequence, we saw the characters moving around in the room and hallways of some kind of palace, I suppose more or less Hampton Court, but we never saw the palace, nor did we get any notion of the general shape of where these confrontations were going on. Somebody would be sent to the Tower,

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and we would then see Essex or Cranmer in the Tower, but we never saw the Tower, much less a glimpse of Elizabethan London, though this latter I suppose would have been expensive. But the absence of visual context almost gave me claustrophobia in watching it. One was always peering into rooms or out of corridors: one never felt any real freedom of detachment. Such a sense of detachment and of visual context belongs to the spectacular. And it seems abundantly clear that television is not a spectacular medium. It is not just a question of size of screen: it is also something created by the simultaneous presence of an audience. I remember years ago seeing a television version of The Magic Flute, and feeling that this was precisely what television could not do. The stage doesn't necessarily give the detachment of visual context, but it does have its own substitute for that, a kind of forum of confrontation before an audience where the audience feels imaginatively detached. I noticed the contrast between the Elizabeth television series and Robert Bolt's play, Vivat! Vivat Regina!, which I recently saw in London. The same reflections apply also to The Tenth Decade, where they were accentuated by the use of television of its own earlier documents, as I mentioned earlier. I think I said in my previous report that what The Tenth Decade gave was a sense of history as entirely a matter of personalities. Certain people gossiping in Ottawa produced the Munsinger case, for example.37 Towards the end of the series a reporter asked that conscientious man Stanley Knowles38 what he thought of Lester Pearson as a political leader, and he replied with a list of bills that Pearson had got through Parliament during his tenure of office. With that answer, we were instantly plunged into the world of real history, of which barely a trace emerged within the program itself. I suppose the lack of detachment is one of the things that is meant by calling television an involving medium. It is also a "cool" medium, in the McLuhan sense, not just because of the low definition but because of the absence of any sense of exhilaration or exuberance, such as the stage and the cinema can so easily and so constantly produce. It seems to me very much a medium of objectified dream. In my efforts to look at the new colour set (not very successfully as yet because of the absence of cable) I felt that there was something wrong in the use of colour, and finally realized what it was. I don't dream in colour; I dream in black and white. Nowadays, if we see a ghost or hear ghostly voices in the air, it means that somebody has left the television on. That is not just an irresponsible

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comment: during The Tenth Decade I suddenly saw the face and heard the voice of a once very close friend of mine who has been dead for about seven years. It startled the breath out of me, and when I met his widow a day or so later, she was still in a state of shock. This could happen with the cinema, but I think all the imaginative overtones would be different, because of the physical presence of an audience. Certainly a lot of people, such as those who habitually look at late late shows, use television as a means of getting objectified and prefabricated dreams. So television really is what Susanne Langer, I think mistakenly, identifies with the cinema: "virtual dream."39 Where I go from there I am not sure. Psychologists have been recently doing a great deal of work on dreams, and it is beginning to look as though a person's mental health depended partly on preserving a balance between waking and dreaming life. They don't go so far as to say that we have to spend one third of our lives in bed mainly for the sake of being able to dream, but they do say that the inhibiting of dreaming, by drugs and the like, can very quickly produce emotional distress or even breakdown. Evidently a certain amount of experience where one is subject to reason, evidence, a set of given conditions (Freud's "reality principle"), along with a sense of limitation, finiteness, and frustration—all that has to be counterbalanced with a certain amount of fantasy experience where we create our own conditions according to certain psychological factors. So our lives become, as Yeats suggests, a continuous double spiral, with waking life going one way and dreaming the other. The creative and imaginative aspects of personality seem to be deeply connected with the dreaming direction. They say also that computers, when they are being deprogrammed, provide a remarkable analogy to human dreaming. It seems to me that television is able, as no medium of communication has ever been able to before, to alter the balance between waking and dreaming life by providing what is so close to an objectified dream world. This relation could be especially close with people who sit up late watching television, or who leave it on all day without paying any particular attention to it. If I am right, television increases, for some people, the element of fantasy in life, and the conception of events as having to give way to psychological forces. This is why it has so explosive an effect, on, say, black people, whose waking lives are so full of frustration and anxiety. During the period of youth unrest, it was even remarked that youthful philosophies of life bore a strong resemblance to Bonanza and other types of myth which feature confrontations between

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good guys and bad guys, where the frustrations and complications of ordinary life disappear like magic. I think, however, that the effect is produced by the form of the medium itself, and not by the content of specific programs. I don't quite know what to say about "All In the Family."40 I have noticed that every medium seems to have to recapitulate the history of previous media. The movie, when it began, recapitulated the most archaic and naive forms of popular drama. The same features reappear in the ham acting and the bellowing laugh track of this show. They were, of course, features of parody, but it is interesting that parody took this form. It is also a feature of primitive drama that the audience is never quite sure just what is funny and what is serious until they get an indication from the author. The parody and the underlying seriousness of the theme, brought out by the mother of the child at the end, were very uneasily related, and a more low-keyed treatment would have unified it much better. It should be quite possible to have it both ways, to make room for both parody and seriousness of theme, but the general impression left by this program was one of emotional dissonance unresolved. 17. XI Olympics41 I must say that I enjoyed this program very much. With all the ritual and symbolism, some of it a trifle phony, there was an atmosphere of good humour and relaxation that I found very attractive. The marching was extremely sloppy, as civilian marching always ought to be: I doubt if even an academic procession could do much worse. It was an inspired idea to turn loose an enormous mob of kids who could hardly stand up on their skates and have them release balloons. And the close-up of Avery Brundage, opening his jacket to scratch (or possibly to fish out his speech) was a gesture which said very clearly: "I'm 85, and to hell with the Emperor of Japan and the eyes of the world."42 As for the Emperor himself, he was so human and unmajestic a figure that one wonders how we ever came to fight him. The occasional shots of spectators, giggling Japanese girls and the like, made me feel better about the world generally. It was also, of course, a very cold day, which helps. I still think I have something about the role of television in both overstimulating and frustrating the fantasy-making side of the personality. One should be careful not to fall into Freud's fallacy of identifying the

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dreaming side of the personality simply with wish-fulfilment. I call it Freud's fallacy because Freud himself somewhere says he had never had an anxiety dream,43 and I think in general he grossly underestimates the role of anxiety in creating, not merely the nightmare-fantasy, but ironic and satiric dreams also. However, the Olympics show brings up another aspect of this. From primitive times—that is, as far back as investigation can stretch—human beings have been disciplined, that is, structured into social forms, by rituals. There are aspects of this from which it is possible to say that television is in the process of destroying the whole structuring of social discipline, and has made it necessary for us to look for other types of structure. On this basis, television, with its close-up techniques, tends to humanize ritual and makes it less inscrutable. For this reason I think it true to say, as is often said, that television can be a cooling and ultimately a democratic medium, once it gets psychologically absorbed. Dictatorships are built up on radio, because even if the individual citizen can turn off his radio, it is still blaring in the public square. But television, it seems to me, cannot achieve mass hypnotism in this way. The Chinese are trying to provide visual hypnotism by posters, and may keep on with it for some time. But for the most part the visual side of television remains under individual control. One can see the results in the extraordinary impatience and bad manners of young people today. They have been brought up in a society where most of the structuring rituals came to them through a mechanism that they can switch off as soon as they are bored. The day of President Kennedy's funeral, I was eating lunch in a New York hotel, with a Requiem High Mass going on behind me. Naturally, I wanted to turn it off, because I thought eating lunch was a hell of a time to be present at a Requiem Mass. Under normal circumstances I could have turned it off, and turned off with it the whole structure of church sacramentalism, military parades, schoolroom flag-saluting, and all the rest of it. Thus the television medium has it in its power to erode, if not actually to dissolve, the traditional structures of church, army, school, and parliament. Also the Bench: if a Mass can be televised so can a trial, and the process of getting rid of Joseph McCarthy by casting him as the villain of a soap opera series was extraordinarily ingenious (as I may have remarked before).44 The dissolving of the impressiveness of ritual has its warming and endearing side, as in this program: but it also has the danger of throwing populations adrift without any structures at all.

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The contrast between this show and the original Greek Olympics, which were so closely integrated with both religion and poetry, speaks for itself. I think the visual emphasis in television tends to minimize the potential impressiveness of the soundtrack. Commentaries on a news event like this are generally spoken in a dull, flat associative narrative without a flicker of rhythmical or sound interest in it. With the possible exception of hard-core pornography, I doubt if any arrangement of words is duller than ordinary television commentary. Then comes the commercial, and what we hear is: "We did not change the design for the sake of change; we improved it for the sake of improvement." At once we are in the world of impressive oratorical formulas, the world of Churchill's speeches and the Gettysburg address. (I am not speaking of values, of course, only of literary genres.) 18. [Untitled] I think I am arriving at some clarification, in my own mind at least, about the characteristics and potentialities of television as a medium. In trying to get this clear, the most difficult step is in separating television from film. Several of the programs I have watched, including L'Acadie45 (once is enough) are really film, sometimes NFB [National Film Board] films. I assume that the main differences arise from the smaller screen of television and the fragmentation of its audience. The main result of these differences is that the pan shot is less functional in television. The film as such has tremendous resources as a spectacular medium, and in the earlier part of the century the Americans, having the most money, developed this spectacular element particularly. Within the last fifteen years, the techniques of film making have greatly simplified, and much of the simplification has been the result of the influence of television on film. L'Acadie was a typical example of this. The television camera, being essentially an extension of one person's eyes, peers, squints, and pries; it is looking for a single visual focus. The focus is "where it's at," and television has a great deal to do with the obsession of the last few years with this phrase. If we ask what television does best in extending the individual's visual range, it seems clear that it is particularly good at, for example, football and hockey games. These are, as I suggested earlier, different from baseball in that they are specifically "where it's at" games, where it's at being usually where the ball or

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puck is. Focussing on the ball or puck also clarifies the pattern of opposition in the game being played: that is, it illustrates the strategy of one team confronting another. The result is that television tends to report everything as though it were some kind of football or hockey game, and the vogue for "confrontation" and polarized issues is a major social feature of society's effort to absorb the television way of seeing. Everything that is not confrontation, in such a film as L'Acadie, is taken as a mere disguise for what is. The essence of the situation is assumed to be some kind of hostility to whatever its equivalent is. In the coverage of Nixon's arrival in China, as someone remarked at lunch, the word "correct" was very frequently used. This word was essentially the expression of a baffled cameraman, probing for a glance or gesture or action that would indicate China's "real" attitude. In L'Acadie, I didn't mind the slanting of the photography, the fact that all the French faces were young and attractive and all the English ones old and stupid: that was part of the conception of the film. What bothered me rather more was that both "sides," French and English alike, lined up exactly as though they were taking part in some kind of pre-established ritual. The English obediently, even masochistically, fell into the stonewalling obstruction roles suggested for them; the French were presented as incessantly active and aggressive, except for certain pastoral interludes, designed to change the pace, where there was the usual reliance on the Romeo-and-Juliet technique of concentrating on a nice-looking boy and a nice-looking girl. Comparing the Moncton fracas with others I've seen and read about during the past few years, I think this tendency to fall into suggested roles, even when they're caricature roles, goes very deep, and that television has a lot to do with the fact. The preoccupation with the football-game technique in L'Acadie was almost grotesque. There was not a single glimpse of the city itself, except for the street signs at the corners of Queen and Princess and Bonaccord streets, which made a kind of in-joke. (They left out St. George and Bonaccord, which would have made a much neater point, besides being a more central corner.) A single glimpse of the layout of Moncton, with the railway running diagonally through it like a grimy Broadway, would have helped to explain how Moncton mayors get that way. (It must be forty years since my father remarked of the then mayor and aldermen that if you lined them up against a wall and blew their brains out you wouldn't even have a spot on the wall.)46 One glimpse of a row of shops or professional shingles, with names like Cormier and Arsenault and

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LeBlanc and Leger on them, might have given some notion of the community all this agitation was going on in. A glimpse of the inside of a school (where in my day French was started in Grade Nine, and was taught by English teachers who were mostly only a few pages in the grammar ahead of their students),47 or some indication of the religious set-up, with one Catholic church for the Irish and another for the French, along with some notion of how far the university agitation is independent of the Church or even anti-clerical—those things are not extras; they're central to the question. The program showed how separatism is a disease of the television decade. Anybody who has lived in the Maritimes knows that the Acadian is as different from the Lower Canadian as his English counterpart is from the Upper Canadian. The pull of the Acadian pays was strong enough to bring people back from Louisiana, but it wasn't the pays of the St. Lawrence Valley. The Moncton issue was presented as something that would have for its moral a kind of counter-Confederation movement centered on Quebec. English bigotry cannot destroy Acadian culture; it can only consolidate it. But a Quebec-centered counter-imperialism can destroy it very effectively, all the more effectively for preserving the language. I wish the makers of such films would realize that no event has any meaning without its visual context and without its historical context. This program was what Andre48 would call incestuous: it was begotten, born, and bred of the television medium. It looks dead now, for the same reason that no one wants to hear about last year's football games. The assumption throughout was that a person's "real" character is the one he would demonstrate on one side or the other of a polarized issue, and this assumption is preposterous. The confrontation issue, including football and hockey games, is a form of social ritual. The road to identity does not run through picking a side and sticking to it: an actor's identity is not with his role, even if he does identify himself with that role for brief and specific purposes. The road to identity runs through a growing awareness of role-playing, of understanding the extent to which one is playing ritual games in society. Television is a superb medium for catching the ritual element in social life. If we ask what the television programs are that everybody wants to see, they turn out to be crucial rituals, such as the Nixon landing in China, the Coronation, the funeral of Churchill, the first landing on the moon. (This last was a ritual in the sense that it was a planned social action where nothing unpredictable could have happened except disaster.)

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In the past, rituals were usually distanced: this means that they depended on illusion, and this in turn means that their function was to reinforce some kind of established ascendancy, whether of religion or social class. The television camera is too close and intimate for this. It is sensitive enough to pick up the "human" element in a ritual—the sort of thing I was trying to analyze about the televising of the opening of the Olympics. The real "moment of truth," or epiphany in Joyce's sense, is not the dramatizing of a polarized issue by some figure assumed to be hostile to the audience's values, as with the Archie Bunker who causes such hysterical responses in the audience (which I now understand to be live).49 It's rather the human wobble, the brushing off a fly or whatnot, which humanizes the ritual, and takes away the sense of the inscrutably impressive. This is the point of alienation, in Brecht's sense,50 the point where we understand that a show is going on. Ultimately, such understanding should be profoundly important for the development of a genuinely democratic sense, which can see the importance of ritual and yet sees too that it's just a show being put on. It will be very interesting to see how China handles the television phase of its development. Authority can be imposed by radio; but it tends to disintegrate when television becomes general and individualized. I understand that China at present uses television mainly for large audiences, which makes it indistinguishable from film, except for some of the hardware. In television, one wants, in general, a visual focus; but we don't need an auditory focus. Voice-over and similar devices taking advantage of the fact that sound isn't so definitely located as vision (what McLuhan calls auditory space) makes everything much more interesting and impressive. It is easy, quick, cheap, and lazy to provide an auditory focus too: in other words a talking head. To remove this means decentralizing the visual focus: in other words, to focus on a series or sequence of images symbolizing what is being talked about, or what T.S. Eliot calls objective correlatives.51 The capacity of film to present symbolic images of this kind is what makes the film the most impressive aesthetic medium in the world today, and television shouldn't lose that asset, even if producers have to work a lot harder to retain it. The core of the "real" person includes a knowledge of his own roleplaying, and a person with a strong sense of his own identity would go on to have some sense of the classification of these roles. That would bring literary criticism, which deals with the conventionalizing tragic, comic, ironic, romantic, and other shapes in experience, into the foreground of social consciousness. More immediate, a sense of one's iden-

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tity includes a sense of one's historical, geographical, and cultural context, and a readiness to take possession of that context. People, in short, ought to be proud of being what they are: if they aren't, something is very wrong. It seems to me that issues like this bilingual Moncton one, by opposing ritually the French and English, sow self-doubt in both sides, by making each feel like a half-truth. This was, naturally, more particularly true of the English in the film, and perhaps of the English in Canada generally. (I'm thinking of the national anthem, where the French version is doing all sorts of interesting things like "ton histoire est une epopee des plus brillants exploits," while the poor English can only repeat "we stand on guard," like the sentry in Pompeii about to be covered up with lava. I understand that the repetitions of this phrase have recently been cut from five to three, but it's still pretty fatuous.) I remember a woman in Maine I once met, who told me with such glowing pride of her Acadian ancestry, undisturbed by the fact that her French-speaking background was not represented in the schools or legislature of the state. I don't mean that the agitation is unjustified, only that beyond the pressure group is the common enterprise, and the common enterprise is where we move from the assuming of a role for tactical purposes into genuinely individual life.

19. Images of Canada*2 The chief thing I took away from Images of Canada was a rather depressed sense of the incompetence of Canadian photography. I had noted before how grotesque it is when one simply switches back and forth from an American program to a Canadian one on the dial. On the American program, however disastrous or dismal it may be as a program, the photography invariably falls into a series of framed pictures, with marginal space above the heads, which in general is very easy on the eyes to watch. Switch to the Canadian station, and we get a haphazard aim-andfire technique, with no shape or composition, no sense of the framing quality of the television screen, nothing but lines and angles projecting every which way into infinity. The interview with Creighton53 reached a new low in photographic absurdity. Creighton is not a handsome man: there is no reason why a historian should be. Further, he was not just babbling to make a noise: he was trying hard to work out something articulate and intelligent to say. That is hard work, as most people don't realize, and a person engaged in improvising articulate prose is bound to

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make grimaces and the like, in which case the camera should mind its manners and keep its distance. What this program did was to shove the camera halfway down Creighton's throat, producing a vast face full of spectacles, store teeth and lantern jaws, a physical assault that in any civilized country would be actionable. The technical incompetence annoyed me so much I could hardly concentrate on the program, which otherwise was interesting enough, even if it was a somewhat relentlessly interviewing program. Ramsay Cook54 is an able scholar in his own right, and could have been used for something more than just a feed. The choice of backgrounds, though there was real effort made to vary the surroundings, still reflected the agoraphobia that I noted previously as currently fashionable. The Brunet55 part of the interview was the most interesting from the point of view of diversity of background, though the little by-play between Lower56 and his wife (I suppose), on whether it was Mary or Elizabeth who had Calais written on her heart, was charming. In general, the program succeeded in transmitting the vision of Canada held by three very different men, but again transmitted it mainly through talk, and not through any consistent visual program. It was still bound to the question-and-answer format, and a visual imagination that tried to do a bit more than simply enter the three scholars' homes and offices, along with scenic glimpses of the Parliament buildings, would have transformed it into something with a genuinely lyrical quality. By lyrical I mean the sense of the viewer not so much hearing as overhearing the interior historical vision that prompted their talks. All three of them rose to moments of genuine eloquence, even beauty, but I wish the treatment of this had been less classroom-ridden.

18 Introduction to the Second Volume of Harold Innis's

"A History of Communications"

Frye, along with Andre Martin and Rodrigue Chiasson of the Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission, received permission in the 19805 to edit Harold Innis's "A History of Communications," an incomplete and unrevised manuscript of some 2000 pages. According to Ian Parker, editorial consultant for the CRTC, Frye wrote a general introduction to the history, later published as "Harold Innis: The Strategy of Culture" (EAC, 154-67), and the present introduction to what would have been the second of three volumes, had the Innis project not been aborted for want of funds and other reasons.1 The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 40, file 3. Innis taught economics at the University of Toronto from 1920 until his death in 1952. He became head of th department in 1937 and dean of graduate studies in 1947. His two seminal books were The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and Empire and Communications (1950). In this part of his work Innis is concerned mainly with the growth of printing and publishing in England and other European countries through the eighteenth century, and with the beginnings of American journalism. Here he is closer to the material in his published books and essays, except when his subject ramifies into the history of literature and philosophy. There are a few parenthetical references back to Elizabethan times, when there were no newspapers, and public opinion was formed, so far as the printing press helped to form it, by polemical tracts, explicitly, for the most part, on religion, but of course implicitly political. The Marprelate Tracts, attacking the episcopalian establishment, were a very effective piece of Puritan propaganda, and the government attempted to counter them by hiring well-known writers to reply—an early example

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of government using propaganda for its own ends, which, Innis notes, continued to Walpole's time in the eighteenth century. There were also the broadside ballads that he mentions, like those sold by Autolycus in The Winter's Tale [4.4.260-330], which were primitive tabloids, bringing news of curiosities, monstrous births, confessions of condemned criminals, and the like. In 1616 the momentous act of Ben Jonson in printing a collected volume of his plays, so that people could read them instead of risking the plague by going to a theatre, began the gradual shifting of the literary centre of gravity from the theatre to printed books. This process got another great boost in the eighteenth century when Fielding, disgusted by the frustrations of censorship, deserted the drama to write Tom Jones and other novels. Jonson's action indicated an unusual sense of the relation of literature to communications media that comes out in his play The Staple of News, mentioned by Innis. In the seventeenth century the Civil War deflected the social advance of verbal communications, but Eikon Basilike, a work of pious meditation purportedly written by Charles I during his imprisonment, was a piece of Royalist propaganda that did much of what his armies failed to do. Milton attacked it in Eikonoklastes, pointing out that one of its prayers had been taken from Sidney's Arcadia2 and that in any case King Charles was far from being the popular image of a saint and martyr, but by that time the damage was done. Milton also attacked the practice of censoring books before publication in Areopagitica, a work of epochal importance, even if much of that importance could hardly have been clear to Milton himself. It signaled the recognition of a new kind of social authority in the products of the printing press, an authority which seems to have no real power, but is nevertheless strong enough for all governments to be forced to come to terms with it sooner or later. What Milton prophesied, however, was delayed by the Restoration, where one typical figure, though not mentioned by Innis, is Roger L'Estrange, generally regarded as the first person in England to make a career of journalism, yet also a zealous Royalist censor under Charles II.3 On the Continent the grip of clerical bigotry and political absolutism was much tighter. Innis continually makes the point, explicitly and by implication, that the level of culture and civilization rises almost automatically with the degree of tolerance. In the seventeenth century Holland, because of its comparatively relaxed attitude, had a cultural significance out of all proportion to its size and population. Voltaire, as

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Innis notes, learned a great deal about the beneficial effects of tolerance from his stay in England, even though much of his patronage came from Frederick the Great. In Germany the decentralizing of authority, apart from Prussia, in small principalities and duchies meant that much of the growing articulateness of its culture, with the prominent exception of Goethe, took an increasingly nationalist form. Cultural nationalism is not, as we may see in Canada today, the same thing as political nationalism; but wherever an ascendant social group, clerical, aristocratic, or oligarchical, tries to maintain its own prestige by suppressing as much as it conveniently can of dissenting opinion, cultural developments are bound to seek allies in political pressure groups. In Great Britain, the Revolution of 1688 brings us near the eighteenth century, which is where the main action of this part of Innis's book lies, and which is a fascinating period for anyone interested in the links between culture and the techniques of communication. We have a new type of periodical in the Taller and Spectator of Addison and Steele, and later in Johnson's Rambler, featuring a blend of light and serious tones rather like the contemporary New Yorker. Later on we get the weighty critical reviews that formed a staple of serious reading through much of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Contemporaries of Innis saw the gradual disappearance of this type of periodical, along with many efforts to resist the trend and start new ones, few of them surviving except by subsidies from universities. In a totally different cultural area, the Methodist movement not only brought startling new techniques for reaching mass audiences, but, from John Wesley on, made full use of all the resources of print and publication to edify, instruct, even to amuse, those audiences. The eighteenth century was also the age of the political pamphlet, which, from Swift's Conduct of the Allies at the beginning of the century to Paine's Common Sense at the end of it, was a historical phenomenon of major importance, along with the pamphlets and papers that were a part of the struggle of Junius and the supporters of John Wilkes against the efforts of the oligarchy in Parliament to control public opinion. Defoe, after retiring from a long and full life of journalism, became our first major novelist. He exasperated a wide variety of people by various hoaxes in which (as in his Journal of the Plague Year, though that was a relatively harmless, i.e., non-political, example) one can never be quite sure where fiction stops and facts begin. This illustrates a principle of considerable significance: the distinction between fiction and fact is es-

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sential for the healthy growth of both literature and journalism, for complementary reasons, and everything in the shape of propaganda tends to blur that distinction. Much of the present volume is concerned with the discovery of new literary markets in this period. Selling books is a commercial as well as a literary enterprise, and this was the time when the major markets of literature were being defined. Samuel Richardson, starting out by writing model love letters for servant girls, soon found himself headed in the direction of the novel Pamela, and Pamela, with its successors Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, opened up a largely new middle-class market, where sometimes, as in contemporary soap operas, a series of instalments were brought to small towns and villages all over the country and eagerly discussed on arrival. Other writers identified markets for children's literature, for a public wanting general information, and so on throughout the whole range of bookselling. Children's literature is of particular interest: the eighteenth century shows the transition between the Protestant view that it was spiritually dangerous not to be able to read the Bible and the later nineteenth-century view that a complex society needed compulsory education in order to produce a large enough number of docile and obedient citizens. Sermons and devotional works throughout the period, as Innis notes, were generally very dull and out of touch with current intellectual life, but, no doubt partly for that reason, they were also often best sellers. In the United States it is even more obvious how intricately interrelated culture and periodical communication are: there, a lively and controversial, and sometimes very abusive press grew up before the really important literary works appeared. Here the great variety among the different colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, and the great (for those days) distances between them, fostered a good deal of independence. In the eighteenth, as in the twentieth century in a different way, someone "banned in Boston" could re-open in New York. Although the nineteenth century has not yet made its appearance in this manuscript, the vast scheme of Innis's project is beginning to show something of its real proportions, and perhaps we may risk a suggestion about the total shape of that scheme, even though some of it has become clear only since his death. We saw in the first volume4 how Innis's interests had expanded from silent to articulate communication. Man is a creature of very limited mobility, but with the help first of domesticated animals and then of machines, he can now move faster and farther than

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sound. Innis had studied in great detail the movements of trade and the techniques of transportation that brought Canada into being, and he went on to study the secondary movements of verbal communication that unite the country on equal terms with the rest of the world. Marshall McLuhan, we also saw, developed, partly through his study of Innis, the intuition that the entire history of writing had not only an origin in the silent communication of trade, but a conclusion in a gigantic expansion of human consciousness. He identified this latter with the electronic media, and used the metaphorical contrast of "linear" and "simultaneous" to express what he felt was coming.5 McLuhan is later than Innis, but even his books appeared before the invention of the microprocessor, and it now looks as though the road to the future of communications runs through computer science. Eventually, no doubt, we shall have machines that stand in the same relation to ordinary human brains that jet planes do to ordinary human feet. On the way there will be bitter struggles as entrenched authority grimly hangs on to its prerogatives and as pressure groups attempt to seize them. But even now, before we have entered that period, we can see that Innis's work is prophetic and not merely a scholarly vision of the past.

Ill

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19

William Butler Yeats

This is Frye's radio review of Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), and The Permanence of Yeats, ed. James Hall and Martin Steinmann (New York: Macmillan, 1950). Frye reviewed the books for CBC Radio on 28 May 1950. At the time he was preparing for the review, he recorded his impression of both books in his 1950 Diary (see Diaries, 345-6). The typescript is in the NFF, 1988, box 48, file 3.

We have more English poets nowadays than ever before, for the simple reason that a lot more people can read and write English. But major genius is still scarce, and so it attracts more attention. A poet able to rank with the great names of English literature today is one in ten million, whereas in Shakespeare's day he was one in ten thousand. So when he appears he is likely to have to spend a great deal of time lecturing to other people on how he does it, and he's in some danger of being buried before he dies under a pile of essays and articles and books and Ph.D. theses. But William Butler Yeats was a very great poet, and a fascinating and puzzling figure, so good books on him are still pretty welcome. Until recently there was only one good biography, the one by Joseph Hone that came out in 1943-1 Richard Ellmann's Yeats: The Man and the Masks, published by Macmillan, is the second one, and equally good. I think we still need Hone, but Mr. Ellmann supplements him with a lot of new material. He's had access to diaries and letters and other private papers in the possession of Yeats's wife, who is still alive, and has based a careful, thoughtful and very readable study on them. Yeats was born in 1865, and so for the first half of his life he was a late Victorian poet. We still know him best, I suppose, by what he wrote then,

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lyrics like "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," long narratives like The Wanderings of Oisin, and plays like The Land of Heart's Desire and The Shadowy Waters. But while he was writing these lovely and haunting poems, which are so full of Irish folk lore and seem to be so steeped in Irish scenes and memories, he was living mainly in London, and he was the centre of a group of English poets, meeting regularly at the Cheshire Cheese restaurant on Fleet Street. At the time Ireland was producing an astonishing number of the best writers in English, but most of them were expatriate. Either they went to London, like Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, or to Paris, like George Moore and James Joyce, later. Around the turn of the century Yeats began to get tired of being an expatriate. He felt that he ought to go back to Ireland and help organize a literary movement there which would be his contribution to the development of an independent Irish nation. Of all forms of literature, the most public and national one is drama, and the Irish have always shown a particular aptitude for drama, especially comedy. For the last 250 years practically every great comic dramatist in English literature has been an Irishman. So Yeats went back to Dublin and with a group of associates he organized the Abbey Theatre, the most remarkable literary movement of modern times. He dug John Millington Synge out of a Paris flat and made him go off to the Aran Islands to listen to the Irish peasantry talk. He got Lady Gregory, who was a retired widow in her forties, to discover that she had a talent for writing comedies. Yeats organized and argued and travelled and sat on committees and reconciled temperaments and steered his way around all sorts of political and religious cliques, and called in the police night after night to try to persuade the audiences to listen to the plays. The audience simply couldn't understand why an Irish play should deal with real Irishmen, instead of being propaganda for Ireland, and Yeats's own play, The Countess Cathleen, got vociferously booed. But in spite of all the difficulties, Yeats got and kept the Abbey Theatre going—I don't mean to imply that he did it singlehanded, but it probably wouldn't have been done without him. But Yeats didn't really get much involved in the Irish revolution. He was deeply in love with a famous beauty named Maud Gonne, and she was a fanatical nationalist, but even her influence never really made an agitator out of him. He's left us some wonderful poems on the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and on the Black and Tan terrorism after the First World War, but he always realized that his job was to write poetry, and that no other job was important to him. When the Commonwealth of

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Eire got established under de Valera, Yeats became a Senator, and sometimes spoke on public questions. He saw the significance of the trend toward dictatorship, and he did have a passing flirtation with the Irish Fascist Party, the Blue Shirts, but that only lasted a few days, and Mr. Ellmann is right in playing it down. He had a passion for aristocracy, and his whole life was affected by his constant desire to found or join some small and exclusive group that would be important to society, but it was never a conspiratorial group that he wanted. One of the strangest things about Yeats was the persistence of his interests in occultism. He had an uncle who was an astrologer; he joined a society that called itself the Order of the Golden Dawn and claimed to be Rosicrucian, and he got into the Theosophical movement when Madame Blavatsky was organizing it. He knew Madame Blavatsky, and he's left some amusing reminiscences of her, but he didn't last long in the Theosophical Society: he got thrown out for heresy. Later he turned to spiritualism, and when he married, which he did very late in life, he discovered that his wife had a faculty of automatic writing. What she wrote turned out eventually to be a complicated set of ideas about the future of the world, the after life, and the number of types of human personality. These speculations were supposed to have been dictated by spirits, and they form the basis of ideas in Yeats's poetry from about 1917 on. Their main point is that the age of Christianity is rapidly drawing to a close, and that it will be succeeded by a new pagan age of violence and terror. Everybody who studies Yeats has to bark his shins over Yeats's spirits, and Mr. Ellmann handles the whole subject with great tact and sympathy. But the main thing that emerges from Mr. Ellmann's book is his reason for writing it—Yeats's development as a poet. Not many even of the greatest poets have grown and progressed as consistently as Yeats did. He was always a contemporary poet. He was languorous and lovely in the age of Wilde and Swinburne: he was precise and sharp in the age of the imagists; he was subtle and allusive in the age of T.S. Eliot; he was full of sexual passion in the age of D.H. Lawrence and of social message in the age of the early Auden and Spender. That doesn't mean that he reflected his contemporaries: they reflected him, and are still learning from him. There's another Yeats offering, a group of essays collected by James Hall and Martin Steinmann. The volume is called The Permanence of Yeats, and is also published by Macmillan. There are twenty-four essays,

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with an introduction and a useful bibliography. Half the essays come from two literary magazines, the Southern Review and the Kenyan Review, but still the contributors include a large number of the best-known contemporary critics, and two very famous poets, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. The student of Yeats will have to have this book, as it's such a handy collection of current criticism. As for the general public, I'm not so sure. The idea of the book is apparently to show Yeats must really be a great poet or so many distinguished critics wouldn't be so anxious to write about him. That point's made, all right; but the trouble with most symposiums is that the contributors are apt to get more interested in talking to each other than about the subject. There's a lot of repetition, the same passages are quoted too often, and as most essays were written within a few years of Yeats's death in 1939, they have a kind of funeral obituary tone about them that may get you down. Still, W.H. Auden writes very well about Yeats's technique as a poet, Kenneth Burke is good on his structure of thought, and Allen Tate and W.Y. Tindall point out very crisply what nonsense some of the other people are talking. Of the twenty-four essays, about seven, I should say, were worth reading, which is a pretty fair average.

20 Laurence Hyde, Southern Cross, and

The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes

This is a talk that Frye read in the studios ofCBC Radio on i March 1952. Th two books reviewed were Laurence Hyde's The Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas Told in Wood Engravings (LosAngeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1951) and The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Peter and lona Opie (London: Oxford University Press, 1951). In his 1952 diary Frye wrote, "I was working at every odd moment to get my radio talk done, and finished it just on the nose. I wrote a bit more than usual and tried to read it a shade faster, with more variety of pacing and pitch. I think I may have partly succeeded. The writing jelled at the last minute, and I think I turned in a fair job on the Laurence Hyde book, considering that it's engravings and the radio's a blind man's medium. The nursery rhyme review wasn't bad either: better in some respects than the Forum article" (Diaries, 526). For Frye's "article"—a review of the same book—see "Turning New Leaves," Canadian Forum, 31 (February 1952): 258-60. The typescript of the present review is in the NFF, 1993, box 3, file 11.

The two books I'm talking about today haven't anything in common except that they're both, in very different ways, collectors' items. Laurence Hyde's Southern Cross is the first Canadian book, so far as I know, in which a story is told entirely by means of a series of pictures. The pictures are wood engravings, done on the grain end of the wood, not woodcuts, which are done on the flat side. The story is based on the atom bomb explosion at Bikini. A family of young Polynesians, a man and his wife and their little boy, are living happily and not bothering anybody when American battleships and planes arrive to announce that they're going to blow the island up and the natives will have to go somewhere

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else. One of the soldiers is a drunken ruffian who tries to rape the girl and is killed by the husband. As a result the three natives have to go into hiding on the island, not knowing what's going to happen. The bomb explodes, the man and his wife are killed, and the boy survives to grow up in whatever world the explosion has made. It wouldn't be fair to think of Mr. Hyde's book simply as a new way of telling a story. It takes a staggering amount of time and skill to make well over a hundred wood engravings, and yet, when he's done, any reader can turn over the pages and gobble up the story in a few seconds. There's no point in getting the book for your library unless you like the engravings themselves as separate works of art. In fact, the continuity of the story seems to me the one weak part of Southern Cross. I find it too close to the technique of the old-fashioned silent movie, with pan shots and close-ups following each other in regular succession. What I like best are the simple and rather formal designs, the palm trees and the waves beating on the surf, the glowing fires at night, the fish swimming in the sea, and, finally, the big sinister design of the explosion itself. For me the high point of the book comes in the series of pictures showing the killing of animals and fish by the bomb. That seems to me the kind of thing an engraver can do best, and the justification of Mr. Hyde's book. Man is a very frivolous animal, with a short memory and a limited imagination, and he can tie himself up in words to the point of persuading himself that dropping atom bombs on people he's never seen is a kind of shrewd move in an exciting chess game. He still needs something simpler, like pictures, to remind him of what dropping bombs on innocent people is really like. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes is an attempt to collect and comment on all the popular jingles and bits of verses that are usually learned in childhood. The phrase "nursery rhymes" is English; over here we usually speak of "Mother Goose." The editing has been done by a man and his wife, Peter and lona Opie, who are experts in the field. So here, in a book of over four hundred pages, you can find all the Mother Goose rhymes you're likely to know, with scholarly and bibliographical notes attached to each one. For instance, you can read: Diddlety, diddlety, dumpty, The cat ran up a plum tree.

and then learn from the notes that in a songbook dated 1609 there is another example of a cat taking refuge in a plum tree.

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A great many nursery rhymes, perhaps the majority, didn't begin as nursery rhymes. Some of them were just popular songs that happened to be remembered by some mother or nurse who had run out of threats or cookies. But once children hear a rhyme, they can establish a definitive text as promptly as any scholar. If the parent tries to vary the words, he's soon told that "he didn't tell it that way last time." I myself, reading through this Dictionary, found versions that were slightly different from the ones I'd been used to, and every time I resented it, and wondered where these editors had been brought up anyway. So there's a solid body of traditional verses, reprinted in all the Mother Goose collections without much variation. Some of them must be very old. The oldest seem to be the jingles that go with children's games. Something that looks very like a rhyme of this sort is quoted by Jesus in the Gospels, and a Latin version of "I'm the king of the castle" is in Horace a hundred years earlier. A few years ago some little boys in Brooklyn were found playing the old game of guessing how many fingers someone is holding up. The formula ran: "Buck, buck, you lousy muck, how many fingers have I got up?" Not very polite, perhaps; but why did they say "buck"? If you've seen the movie Quo Vadis, you'll remember the poet Petronius who lived in Nero's time, and Petronius says that little boys in his day played the same game to the words "Bucca, bucca, quot sunt hie?"—how many are there? Bucca means fatty, so the little Roman boys didn't need an extra insult. The wonderful song "London Bridge Is Falling Down" refers to a custom of killing someone and burying him in the foundation of a bridge to make it strong and to act as a guardian spirit: Set a man to watch all night, Watch all night, watch all night, Set a man to watch all night, My fair lady.

Nobody knows what "Who Killed Cock Robin" goes back to, or "The House that Jack Built," and nobody knows either how this lovely bit got into Mother Goose: I had a little nut tree, Nothing would it bear But a silver nutmeg And a golden pear;

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Or this: Gray goose and gander, Waft your wings together, And carry the good king's daughter Over the one-strand river.

A "one-strand river" must be a river with only one shore, like the ocean, or the river of death. Counting-out rhymes are mostly pretty old too. Languages spoken in Britain before the English came may survive in "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo/' which probably means "one, two, three, four," and in "Hickory Dickory Dock," which means "eight, nine, ten." Other rhymes bring bits of history, gossip and folklore down the ages with them. "Sing a Song of Sixpence" takes us back to the cook books of Shakespeare's time which give you recipes "to make pies so that the birds may be alive in them and flie out when it is cut up." "Little Miss Muffet" recalls a doctor of the same period who wrote an amazing eulogy of spiders, in which he said that a spider's skin is "so soft, smooth, polished and neat that she precedes the softest skin'd Mayds." He had a daughter named Patience who, if she was a normal daughter, probably disliked spiders. There are a great variety of nursery-rhyme types: some, as I've said, go with games; some go with various affectionate forms of assault and battery on the child like "This little pig went to market." Some are tongue twisters and a great number, like Humpty Dumpty, are riddles. Right now they're the only really popular poetry we have, and millions of people know "Hi diddle diddle" and "Jack and Jill" who have never read a line of Shakespeare or Milton. There are at least three reasons why they should be popular, and why they're the best possible introduction to poetry. First, they have a lot of nonsense words, and follow the child's own mental development, because a child babbles long before he tries to make his words mean anything. Second, they have a very strong rhythm, so strong that you can bounce a baby on your knee to the rhythm of "Ride a Cock Horse" or "Dance a Baby Diddy." A child who has that

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happen to him is beginning to learn what poetry is, an intense physical excitement like dance and song, not a lot of words in a book. Third, in nursery rhymes anything can happen and everything is funny. The child will soon enough be living in a world where no cows jump over the moon, but nursery rhymes give him a world that makes more childlike sense: How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, and back again.

21

Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, and

Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas

This was a review that Frye read over CBC Radio on 6 January 1952. About the review Frye wrote in his diary for that date, "I had good stuff, but must have sounded a bit flat after the other two. Barabbas is good, but after all it's nothing but crucifixion, stoning, flogging and torture all through, and I Promessi Sposi (1827) is, I think, really nothing but a muzzy and maudlin bore. Nothing takes hold. All I can remember is a remark that when tyrants force people to suppress their resentment, they actually feel less of it, which struck me partly because it was uncharacteristically incisive (Diaries, 468). The English translation of I Promessi Sposi was published byJ.M. Dent in London in 1951 under the title of The Betrothed. An annotated copy is in the NFL. The English translation of Barabbas, originally published in Sweden in 1950, was by Alan Blair (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1952). A copy is in the NFL.

The most famous of all Italian novels is the one that's called in English The Betrothed. It was written by Alessandro Manzoni and the first edition appeared in 1827. This translation, by Archibald Colquhoun, seems to be the first really trustworthy one. Earlier translators have either got winded and started cutting towards the end, or else they were fascinated by that curious lingo that Sir Walter Scott invented for his stories, where everybody from Richard I to the Young Pretender goes around saying things like "Ho, thou caitiff varlet." The translator has a note on Manzoni which tells us that The Betrothed has gone through five hundred editions; that an opera, three films and seven plays have been based on it; that Italian schoolboys start studying it at the age of nine; that there's a whole library of criticism of it, and that one can hardly pick up an Italian newspaper without seeing a phrase quoted from it. Also that Manzoni is a popular

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hero in Italy and regarded as one of her great patriots, mainly on the strength of this novel. I don't know that I quite see what all the shouting is about, and I think Italian literature must be rather short of good romances. I enjoyed The Betrothed very much, and if you like, say, The Cloister and the Hearth, or Lorna Doone, I think you would enjoy it too. But that's the kind of book it is. The scene is laid in North Italy, in or near Milan, in the year 1628. There's a pair of young lovers, peasants who got separated through the wiles of the villain. Two years and six hundred pages later, they are reunited. The devices to keep them separated include food riots, an epidemic of black plague, and a vow of virginity undertaken by the heroine in a moment of stress. So as you see its structure is the regular romance pattern. Manzoni did a lot of work on his history, and his big set scenes of riot and plague are well done. His characterization is simple but it's clear and consistent. His material isn't all digest: he sometimes leaves his story for thirty pages at a stretch to give you straight history. But you certainly get full value for your money. The novel is in part a study of social disintegration. There's all the chaos of Italy, which at that time was chopped into tiny states like the Balkans today; there's a social system where the ruling class are as often as not just gangsters; there are all the miseries of famine, plague and invasion. Manzoni is an intensely pious writer, and in that society the only real social order he sees is the Church. Two saints, one a friar and the other a cardinal, do all the effective good in the novel, and the moral of the book is that the only defence against evil is resignation to the will of God as it manifests itself in His Church. The thing that is socially valuable to society. The world merely blunders along from one calamity to another. There's a mystical anarchism in Manzoni that I dislike, on purely literary grounds. In a really great novel, like War and Peace or Don Quixote, a strong sense of the normal structure of society in the world itself is what holds the story together. I think that's true even if you take something on Manzoni's own level. In Lorna Doone, which is the closest English parallel to his book, the heroine is also held by bandits but the community of yeomen that the hero belongs to never loses its morale, and when it's had enough of the bandits, it wipes them out. Manzoni says he believes in a Providence that makes everything come out right for those who trust it. That's too handy a belief for a writer of romances: it helps him cut corners in his plot. Manzoni's plot turns on a scene in which the big bad villain gets converted into a saint by the tears of the

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shrieking heroine. No matter what his social or religious views are, the experienced reader of romantic novels knows corn when he sees it. I started reading Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas with all sorts of prejudices against it. For one thing, the author has just got the Nobel Prize, which isn't usually awarded to a writer until he's written himself out about fifteen years back. Then again, it had all the earmarks of being another one of those Gospel novels, like Ben Hur, or The Robe. So when I came to where Barabbas turned up on Sunday morning and found that the stone had been rolled away, I began leafing through to see how much more there was. I'm glad I kept on reading, because my first impressions were all quite wrong. Lagerkvist presents Barabbas as the first man redeemed by the death of Christ, but redeemed in a different way from everyone else, so that the Atonement is for him a mystery that baffles and eludes him. He never acquires any faith in Christ, but he has a restless curiosity about the man who died in his place that drives him to seek the company of Christians. They avoid him and treat him as a hopelessly lost soul. Christ becomes an obsession with him, so that he gives up a promising career as a robber and is condemned to the copper mines. There he falls in with a Christian, and allows the name of Christ to be scratched on his slave's metal tag. But when he's faced with martyrdom, he can't commit himself to saying he's Christian, so for a second time he escapes being crucified. Then he's in Rome during the fire of Nero, and hearing that the Christians are spreading the fire, he starts spreading it too, and is caught red-handed. It's his only definite act as a Christian, and of course it's all wrong. The other Christians are accused of the same crime, and are condemned on the evidence of his guilt. So Barabbas is crucified after all, an outcast from both the Church and the world, and at the moment of death he says into darkness, "To thee I deliver up my soul," not knowing who or what it is that he's speaking to. At the same time the reader can see what Barabbas can't see, that an uncompromising and yet completely benevolent power is pulling him steadily, out of the copper mines, over to Rome, on the cross, and finally out into the darkness. The story, then, is a parable of the struggle of Christ and Everyman. Nobody would tackle a theme of that size unless he was either a very accomplished writer or a very foolish one. Lagerkvist writes with the most confident craftsmanship: there's no question of this story's being just a lucky fluke. I haven't read anything else by Lagerkvist, but I want to, and I'll even overlook his getting the Nobel Prize if the publicity from it leads to having other books of his translated.

22 Reinhold Niebuhr,

The Irony of American History, an Herbert Butterfield,

History and Human Relations This is another of the book reviews that Frye did for CBC Radio. The date is unknown, but it was more than likely presented during 1952 or 1953 when Frye was reviewing other books for CBC. Niebuhr's book was published in New York by Scribner's in 1952; Butterfield's in London by Collins in 1951 and f 1993, box 3, in New York by Macmillan in 1952. The typescript is in the NFF file 11. The two books I'm talking about today have a lot in common: they are both by well known writers, and they both deal with history from the point of view of Protestant Christianity. Herbert Butterfield's History and Human Relations is the work of an English historian who is interested in religion, and Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History is the work of an American theologian interested in history. Mr. Butterfield is a professional historian and a good writer. Dr. Niebuhr has neither of these advantages, but he has others of his own. American history is ironic, according to Dr. Niebuhr, because it has not turned out the way that the great Americans of the Revolutionary period expected. To Jefferson, for instance, America was the new Promised Land: it was making a new beginning in history, and was avoiding the mistakes of the past by getting rid of kings and nobles. As far as possible America turned her back on the rest of the world and tried to work out her own destiny. She got very rich and prosperous, and this seemed like a reward for her merits. But now Americans have suddenly found themselves, not out of the world, but practically holding it up, like Atlas. They also find that their prosperity, which has given them this position, is the very thing that makes it hardest for them to hold their allies. Now if America strikes an attitude of outraged virtue, she will

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succeed in isolating herself, and if she does that she's done for. She has to realize that, with all her good will, a lot of the ideas she has cherished about her destiny are sentimental illusions, not very different from the illusions the Communists use as bait for mass support. The best American attitude for today is the one represented by Lincoln during the Civil War. Lincoln was sure of the justice of his cause, and he was convinced that the United States, like the world today, couldn't survive half slave and half free. But still he warned against self-righteousness, against assuming that those who were fighting the Union were sub-human, and so he adopted the Christian principle of malice toward none, and charity toward all. I don't quite know what to say about Dr. Niebuhr's book. There's nothing in it I really disagree with except its tone. That tone makes it an easy book to misunderstand. It makes it sound as though Dr. Niebuhr is an irresponsible intellectual taking advantage of democratic tolerance to try to persuade us that the case for democracy is full of holes. It makes it sound as though Dr. Niebuhr is so mistrustful of human nature that he thinks God would be more interested in the defence of our freedom if we were more doubtful about it ourselves. You have to read him pretty carefully to realize that these impressions aren't true. Now whatever the word irony may mean to Dr. Niebuhr, it means something simpler in literature. In literature we say that a man is ironic if he gives an impression of meaning something different from what he's saying. So if there's irony in American history, there's irony too in Dr. Niebuhr's prose style, a beam in his own eye, so to speak. Dr. Niebuhr is one of the leaders of American Protestantism, a man widely respected and looked up to. He's chosen the most important topic he could find to write on, the mixture of confusion and conviction that democrats feel when they are faced with the threat of war with totalitarianism. What he's given us is a series of rather perfunctory lectures. They have probably been written hastily; they certainly have been written badly. Their best quality is a kind of paradoxical wit, which would be fine if he were writing about Senator McCarthy or the Chicago Tribune, but he isn't. The beliefs he holds he doesn't present as great affirmations worth staking our lives on; he presents them as assumptions that his readers can take for granted. In Communism he's faced with something that democracy calls tyranny and that Christianity calls evil. Whatever it is, it's something that makes most of us feel that we have to oppose Communism no matter what the economic arguments in

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favor of it may be, and no matter what the deficiencies on our side may be. Dr. Niebuhr talks as though evil followed from a mistake in logic. "The inhumanities of our day," he says, and I quote, "[...] are due to an idealism in which reason is turned into unreason because it is not conscious of the contingent character of the presuppositions with which the reasoning process begins."1 You see, you go wrong about the contingent character of your presuppositions, and there you are with your fake trials and slave camps and mass executions. Now I certainly don't want Dr. Niebuhr to go on and on about the horrors of Communism. But it seems to me that a book on this subject ought to ring with conviction, not just gabble with plausible arguments and begged questions. For a man who tries to follow the Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles this book is emotionally immature: it is, in a very real sense, frivolous. The best that anyone could do with the subject would still be none too good. This is not the best that Dr. Niebuhr can do, and it is too bad. Professor Butterfield uses the word "tragic" instead of ironic about our situation, but he gets to the same destination as Dr. Niebuhr by his own road, which is the study of history. He's discovered that it takes a good deal of Christian charity just to be an honest and competent historian. After any great struggle it's usually the winners that survive to write the history, and the history they write is at first pure melodrama. They exult and gloat over their victories; they see saints and heroes on their side and black villains on the other. In our day we have a development of this kind of thing called official history, where the history of recent events is based on whatever documents the Foreign Office chooses to release. Mr. Butterfield's essay proving that all official history is propaganda is to my mind the best essay in the book, because it's the most concrete in its subject and the one where his own integrity as a historian is most concerned. Gradually, it becomes clear that real history can never be a melodrama, and that it's the historian's job to try to understand both sides. He doesn't lose his moral sense by doing this; on the contrary, he begins to see that moral issues are truths and not half-truths. The next stage is to realize that just as history isn't melodrama, so it isn't a simple pattern like a chess game. The historian who studies the career of Napoleon is apt to feel, because he knows what happened next, that if he had been Napoleon he could easily have avoided Napoleon's blunders. The third stage is the most difficult. The historian always has his own contemporary point of view. He may, without knowing it, use a prejudice in his own mind to arrange the facts he's studying, and then say that the

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facts of history prove the truth of his prejudice. He's put in a telephone call to the past, and thinks he's got an answer because he's got his nickel back. So good history writing represents a very considerable effort of disciplined intelligence. It's an effort that makes the historian understand in his own way what Christianity means by love: not self-hypnotized or rose-coloured illusions about people, but a clairvoyant vision of what people are combined with an enthusiastic interest in them. Mr. Butterfield sets all this down in a simple, candid, attractive style, and I can recommend his book to anyone interested in the subject of history and human relations. The one thing he leaves out is the subject of Dr. Niebuhr's book: the inescapable irony in the human situation. Men are always, at every stage in history, involved in melodramatic conflicts; they are always projecting evil on an enemy of some kind, and rereading history to justify themselves. The ideal historian, who has finally got rid of all passion, pride and prejudice, doesn't exist, and if he did exist he'd be the Recording Angel.

23

Josef Pieper,

Leisure: The Basis of Culture

In a letter to David Cook, dated 17 October 1985, Frye wrote that he was asked to review Pieper's book for "an American journal," but "then they decided that it wasn't the kind of book they wanted discussed in their columns" (NFF, 1991, box 3, file i), so the review was never published. Immediately under the title Frye typed "Leisure, the Basis of Culture. By Josef Pieper. Translated by Alexander Dru with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot. Pantheon Books. 169 pp. $2.75." The date is unknown, but it is no earlier than 1952, the year the Pantheon edition was published. The typescript is in the NFF, 1993, box 4, file 3, alongside a number of other papers Frye wrote in the 19505.

In possessing consciousness, man has an advantage over animals at least as great as animals have over plants. Instead of merely adapting himself to his environment, he can transform his environment, and can satisfy not only his needs but his wants or desires as well. Thus his consciousness fulfils itself in work, and modern life has stressed the moral duty to work until it has reached, in Marxism, the conception of the triumph of the worker as the ultimate destiny of men. Yet this plausible and appealing conception seems to destroy both liberty and culture wherever it is realized. The reason is that in this view of work man is still regarded as a clever animal, whose consciousness carries out the orders of subconscious wants, just as a monkey's desire to eat a banana will force him to solve engineering problems to get one. The desire may be individual or social, but the monkey with his banana and the bee with his honeyed thigh represent the laissez-faire and communistic aspects of the same principle. However (to supply a missing but essential link in Dr. Pieper's argument), man's consciousness includes the awareness that he is going

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to die, and society geared for total work or total competitive scramble becomes, unlike an insect state or a colony of apes, possessed by an increasing panic based on clock time, "work for the night is coming"1 being its constant motto. When a man refuses to employ his consciousness as a function of his animal being, and turns it directly toward reality, trying to ask himself disinterested questions about reality, he has performed a fateful revolutionary act. He has refused to work, not because he is lazy, but because he wants to do something specifically human with his consciousness. The renunciation of work in favor of something more important is what Dr. Pieper means by leisure, and he will have none of the attempt to come to terms with the moral pressure to work by calling the philosopher an "intellectual worker." The Greek word for leisure is schole, the root of our word school, and the author traces the association of culture and leisure in Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible (the Septuagint translation of the first two words of the verse in the Psalms, "Be still, and know that I am God" is scholasate, "have leisure"). The basis of the conception of leisure in Plato is the symposium: Dr. Pieper does not mention Plato's deep interest in an ideal state in which every man is absorbed by a specific job, and does it under the dictatorship of an intellectual worker. Leisure so defined is very different from most of the things called leisure, and one wishes that the author had made the distinctions clearer. It is not rest, not slothfulness (psychologically akin to frantic busyness, as he shows) and above all not distraction, or breaking the rhythm of a hysterical production of goods by a hysterical squandering of them. Dr. Pieper founds his case on the traditional distinction between liberal and servile (i.e., utilitarian) arts, and, like Newman before him, he avoids all the intricate problems of casuistry raised by what one may call the social tactics of leisure. How far, for instance, does leisure depend on Veblen's non-productive "leisure class," who have to be supported by the rest of the community?2 Or, on the other hand, how far is it true that no one can really be a disinterested philosopher if he owes his leisure to a privileged place in a class structure? How does one demonstrate that one has the capacity for leisure? If one has it and supports oneself, what is wrong with being an " intellectual worker" as far as one's social position is concerned? These and other questions come to mind, and perhaps they prove how suggestive the author is, but let us return to what he does say. The gospel of work implies that we look at both nature and ourselves

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solely in terms of productive capacity, so that everything we get out of nature, including the philosophy of the intellectual worker, we owe to our own energy. (A link between dialectical materialism and metaphysical idealism, of the "man is the measure of all things" variety, appears dimly in Dr. Pieper's argument, but is not made explicit. It would be interesting to know how far Lenin's attacks on Berkeley, for instance, were an attempt to shout down precisely this difficulty in Marxism.) As soon as we begin to philosophize in a state of leisure, we look at the world and ourselves as data, as something given to us, and we begin to wonder, and to ask the unanswerable child's questions that start with "why?" Philosophizing develops from wonder, and in wonder there is a certain recovery of innocence, a renunciation of pride. Philosophy is a love of wisdom, and we do not love what we possess, except as self-love. We become disinterested when we love something apart from what we can clutch and grab, and wisdom begins in backing away from the muddle of passion-goaded dither that is servile work, and thus making order, quiet, balance, and an uncritical exposure of an open mind to an independent reality a part of our experience. But as this experience is not possessed by us, though it possesses us, we find our intelligence assimilating to a universal intelligence, and the wisdom that we love turns out to be God. In losing the panic of clock time we have been brought to conceive a timeless being. The link between working society and the leisure that seeks God is remembering the Sabbath, the setting aside of specific times, not for rest, but for freedom from servile work and for the worship of the gods. The holiday (i.e., holy day) and its cult are the focus of the leisurely revolution by which religion transforms society into the pattern of its own vision of eternal peace. Christianity opposes to Marxism a conception of life rooted in leisure and reason which moves outward from the holy day and tries to prevent all social classes, especially the proletariat, from being totally possessed by servile work. This is linked with the aim of "deproletarianizing" society expressed in the encyclical Quadragesima Anno.3 Now if one simply stopped there, one would be involved in the paradoxes of quietism: Molinos' doctrine that to act is to offend God4 is not far from an antithesis of leisure and work. In Christianity contemplation is ultimately the same thing as charity, and Dr. Pieper's thesis needs, to complete it, a theory of liberal work, showing how leisure reenters the active world and informs its activity. This is all the more necessary

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because modern glorifiers of labour are by no means incapable of distinguishing free from servile work. Even Carlyle made it clear that drudgery was not what he meant by work any more than "dandyism" was, and Ruskin and Morris, especially Morris, drew the inference that real work was a sequence of creative acts in a free life. One of the freshest and most attractive pictures in English literature of a world at leisure is Morris's News from Nowhere, the vision of a Marxist with no religious attachments whatever. The artist needs leisure, for genius cannot be driven to servile work like a machine, but the proof that he is an artist is still in his work. The philosopher needs leisure, but he needs it to build up a habit of philosophizing, and the result of that is work. One is disappointed to find that Dr. Pieper's second essay, "The Philosophical Act," mainly repeats the thesis of the first one, in more conventionally Thomist terms, and relying on arguments drawn from the chain of being which the reader may not find very cogent. Such a sentence as "And that is why an animal's environment is limited: because the essence of things is concealed from it"5 may make one wonder whether the production of circular verbalisms may not be one of the occupational hazards of leisure. The book, which has been admirably translated and is written with great charm, seems to me a straightforward piece of Catholic apologetics. This means that I disagree with Mr. Eliot, who has done the book the great commercial service of writing an introduction to it, and says it is nothing of the kind. He argues that philosophy outside the Roman communion would still be a "genuine" philosophy for Dr. Pieper, though not a true one.6 But this hardly gets us very far: besides, Dr. Pieper does not commit himself on the status of non-Roman philosophy: he merely says that philosophy will freeze into a static system unless it keeps a "window open" on theology, and that for the modern world a nonChristian theology is not practically possible. It is at this point that the problem of reconciling theology with philosophy, to which Mr. Eliot draws attention, shows up in Dr. Pieper's argument. Neither the author nor his introducer clearly says that theology and philosophy cannot be reconciled on equal terms. There is no such thing as academic theology: all theology is part of the strategy of a church, and has the rationalizing of that church's claims as one of its primary interests. The philosopher as lover of wisdom, however, is by definition academic: he wants to preserve the innocence of his initial wonder, and wants to see his philosophy unfold, not follow the pattern of something

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else, even the "great tradition"—for Dr. Pieper, like Mr. Eliot, follows the fashion of making this phrase a euphemism for approximate orthodoxy. He will keep a window open on theology, and will understand the relation of the wisdom he loves to a divine Logos, but he will subordinate the Church's interpretation of that Logos to his own love of it, and will try to understand, rather than to commit himself dialectically. The dilemma of the uncommitted philosopher (beautifully expressed in Berdyaev's Solitude and Society and one of the organizing themes of Simone Weil's Waiting for God) is as acute as ever in spite of all the efforts of neo-Thomists and the more ham-handed Kierkegaardians to isolate it as "humanistic," "aesthetic," and so forth. It may be possible to Christianity to have its God and eat Him too, but it is not yet possible for a Christian philosopher to choose either the committed religious or the disinterested intellectual path and still get all the benefits of both.

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24 Convocation Address:

Acadia University

Frye presented this address at Acadia University, 6 May 1969, on the occasion of his receiving an honorary D. Litt. degree. The typescript is in the NFF, 1988, box 3, file ca.

I know that I speak for all my distinguished colleagues when I say how delighted and proud I am to have the great honour of becoming a graduate of a university whose other graduates include so many of my lifelong friends. May I also extend my sincerest congratulations to all of you who are being graduated this year. In these days of continuous education, the first degree is not so crucial an event as it was, but it is still an important crisis, like the first child; and there is even a chance of its developing into a permanent attachment, like a first marriage. A generation ago, a Convocation address followed the form set by the last scene of a romantic comedy. You were the heroes and heroines, who had won through all difficulties, and in this final scene of applause and bows, with everybody on stage at once, the assumption was that you would live happily ever after. Today, the occasion of a Convocation address is more like the first scene of something out of the theatre of the absurd. There's a loud and confused action going on: nobody knows how it started or what it's all about or how it will end, but we assume it will end sooner or later, if only because we can't afford to pay the actors overtime. I have just come from the Berkeley campus in California.1 Last term was a term of constant demonstrations, buildings seized, police on the campus, tear-gas, forcible evictions, and the burning of the English auditorium, probably by an arsonist. This term things are very quiet.

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Naturally this is a source of great dismay to the local SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], which is looking around for some issue to stir things up again. The most hopeful one at the moment is a social science professor, who's written an article that they just might get away with calling racist, so they can demand that he be fired. Of course, accusing professors of racism is pretty old hat by now, but from SDS's point of view it's better than nothing. Everybody is trying to analyze the causes of student unrest, and everybody hopes to make an even profounder analysis than the next man. It would take more time than I have just to list the suggested causes: the Vietnam war, the atom bomb, the psychology of overcrowding, permissive upbringing, and so on and so on. I think there are causes, but I'd like to look at a few effects. For what the student unrest superficially appears to be is partly what it is: a highly contagious epidemic of hysteria that simply has to be lived through until it stops. My guess is that it will end as suddenly as it began, with nothing much accomplished or permanently changed. A number of Black Studies programmes will be started; a good many students will be sitting on new committees, bored to the teeth; academic credit for military training will be largely dropped; universities will stop taking on classified research, or at least will stop calling it classified research. If these are regarded as major gains, well and good, but they could have been achieved without any seizures of buildings or looting of files or provoking of police action. Out of all the hysteria and the destruction, the embittered feelings and wrecked careers and smeared reputations, and the centuries of wasted time—out of all this not one good thing has come. At its centre are the full-time agitators, for whom agitation has become a hooked drug that they can no longer live without. Near them are the idealists, some of whom sincerely believe that they are getting an education this way more practical and "relevant" than the one the university offers them. They keep going with slogans and bromides about the sickness of society. When I see the almost psychotic state that some of these students have got themselves into, I think of a sentence I once read in a cookbook: "Brains are very perishable, and unless frozen or precooked, should be used as soon as possible." The rest of the students endure the agitators much as the rest of society endures strokes, with resignation and perhaps guilt feelings, but with no loyalty or affection. What has happened? Precisely what has happened to most revolutionary movements of modern times. The students' revolution, like so many

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others, has got caught in the bind of its own tactics, and its practice is now going the opposite way from its original ideals. It seems to me admirable that students should want to take part in the running of the university, and excellent that if they hate the Vietnam war or race prejudice they should say so, loud and clear. I agree with everything the most militant student can say about the idiocy of a society that keeps making hostile and aggressive gestures at a time when a serious war would wipe out the human race. At nearby Stanford, students are demonstrating against the university's involvement in war research, and when it was pointed out to them that it was not always easy to say just when research would or would not have military importance, one girl denounced this as hypocrisy and said that the university should do nothing whatever that could possibly have evil consequences. There is a kind of innocence in having so little knowledge of good and evil as that, and one sympathizes with the feeling even if the expression of it is not much more than a tantrum. But when it comes to tactics, we have professors recklessly smeared as "racists," which is McCarthyism all over again; we have intimidation and threats, which is Fascism all over again; we have exhortations to keep on smashing and shouting until a great victory is won over something or somebody, which is the Pentagon's view of the Vietnam war all over again—in short, we have a repetition of all the dismal fatuities that have made life hell in this century since before these students were born. A good many student radicals realize this; but it is one thing to know that one has to cut loose from all tactical binds if one is ever to face one's real ideals again, and another thing to do it. Revolutions are started, though they are seldom finished, by people of conviction. Nothing is more tedious than other people's convictions, and the most natural response to tedium is apathy. But apathy, on the part of a majority, means that democracy is no longer a matter of majority rule, but is simply a state of enduring the tyranny of organized minorities. It is no good talking of "backlash": a society that does not believe in itself is fundamentally helpless, no matter how much backlashing it does. There are two myths that mankind must have. I call them myths because I'm a literary critic, but I mean by a myth, in this context, a shaping and controlling vision of human life. One is a myth of concern: the vision of values and standards and loyalties, of things to believe in that affect our sense of destiny. This is what man needs as a social being, and it is what used to be supplied by Christianity and by the love of

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one's country. For Americans, and for Canadians as well, a central part of it was a revolutionary belief in democracy and equality. The real dynamic of democracy is an inclusive one, and it moves toward dissolving the barriers against excluded or depressed groups, whether they are blacks or Eskimos or students or women. The old middle-class and white-ascendancy stereotypes are no longer strong enough to hold society together, and of course they were never good enough. But the recovery of its own democratic tradition is the key to the present identity crisis on this continent. The myth of concern is the vision of faith and loyalty: truth for it is socially established: it is not rational or verifiable. But man is not only a social being: he also faces an objective world, an order of nature, and from his study of it he learns detachment, objectivity, suspension of judgement, tolerance for different opinions, and respect for the kind of truth that depends on evidence. He can also apply these qualities to the study of himself and his own works. Out of this comes the myth of freedom, which is what the university is about. The university has never claimed, and has no right to claim, that it can also satisfy man's deeper concern, his need for faith and loyalty. Perhaps it is suffering now for not having sufficiently insisted on this. Freedom without concern can, it is quite true, become a lazy and selfish parasite on a power-structure. But concern without freedom can equally well become the most squalid of tyrannies, contemptuous of truth and with no moral principles beyond its next tactic. The university is the centre of all effective resistance to this, and behind the university stands the democratic majority. As graduates of Acadia, your example will be the university in the eyes of others wherever you are. Every class before you, probably, has been charged with the duty of defending the university's values in society. But you may well be the first class to understand the importance, for the university, of what is said in the gospel, that when a strong man armed guards his house, his goods are in peace [Luke 11:21].

25

Convocation Address:

McGill University

Frye presented this address at McGill University, 9 June 1983, on the occasion of his receiving an honorary D.D. degree. The typescript is in the NFF, 1988, box 48, file i.

I want first to express the deepest gratitude and sense of obligation both for myself and for my two colleagues, to the Senate of McGill University for the great honor they have conferred on us. Secondly, I want to congratulate those of you who are being graduated, as well as all those whose help and support have made the occasion possible for you. Those in religious studies may perhaps particularly feel that whether they have fought the good fight and kept the faith or not, they have at any rate finished the course. Those of you who are taking your first degree today are here for what seems to be one of the crucial rituals of life, sometimes nearly on the level of your birth, your marriage, and your death, with the advantage of being the only one of these four events in which you are sufficiently conscious to understand anything of what is going on. I have just come from the fiftieth-year reunion of my own class of 1933 at Victoria College. We were a class of just over three hundred, and the number at the reunion was just over a hundred and fifty. Even allowing for those whose relation to the year was one of marriage rather than graduation, that seems to me an impressive testimony to the strength of the social bonds forged in the sharing of college life. Why is the act of graduating so significant? We should notice first of all what kind of act it is. It is a ritual, and most rituals are deliberately created events, closely allied to games, forms of play rather than work.

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Work, the philosophers tell us, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy exhibited for its own sake. We speak of the performance of music as playing, although anyone who has tried it knows how gruelling the work that leads up to the playing has to be. We also speak of even the most terrible tragedies as plays. In your later years it may be the moments of play at college that you will remember most fondly and nostalgically: the footballs games, the dances and parties, the shows you went to or helped put on, the long conversations over coffee. At the same time you know very well that you have not been on a playground: it was the work you did that held it all together. But right now this is one specific instant where you pass from graduand to graduate, even though you know, and we all know, that you are the same person the minute after that instant that you were the minute before it. The ritual emphasizes a point of time in a way that shows us that time itself has a shape and a significance in life, and that life itself is not just one clock-tick after another, as it was to the despairing Macbeth. A ritual relates our life in time to those two primary moments of birth and death, the moment of entering the world and the moment of leaving it, and it makes us realize how every moment in between is the death of the past and the birth of the future. The emphasis in graduation is on the birth of a new kind of future. The phrase alma mater is not, or need not be, an empty cliche: some kind of rebirth, of deliverance from a sheltering maternal body, is what is being pointed to. Some students, even of those who are able to attend, prefer to take their degrees in absentia. They have little sympathy with organized rituals, and feel that they would be simply part of a captive audience where the supply of well-meant advice greatly exceeds the demand for it. They do not respond to being told that they are now going out into the real world, and must always remember to wear their rubbers when it snows. But at least I am not telling you that you are going out into the real world, because I don't believe it. I think that most people find the year after graduation something of an anticlimax, a narrowing and circumscribing of the sense of reality rather than an entrance into it. Many of you now emerging from graduate programs will recall the shock of being geared into a tough, competitive, professional graduate school. Whatever its interest and challenge, something was lost of that elusive quality that we call liberal in education. So I would say that you are going out of the real world, to try to transmit some of that reality to the

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disorganized and often nightmarish fantasy known as life in the twentieth century. At university, whatever you may possess or lack in wisdom, you are compelled to assume the social attitude of the wise man, detached from society but not withdrawn from it. You have been in the position of Moses, seeing the Promised Land from a high mountain but not entering it. I imagine that Moses was the only person who ever really saw the Promised Land: as soon as you invade and conquer it, it turns into something else. I said that a graduation ritual was a deliberately created event: I did not say that it was a pseudo-event. Pseudo-events are such things as leadership conventions in political parties, which are blown up by the news media: it is the interlocking developments in technology, engineering, medicine, law, religion, the sciences, literature and other arts, along with their social consequences, that make up real history. These are the activities that are directly reflected in and by the different departments of the university. Those of you who are now getting your first degree have been taking part in a community in which the intellect and the imagination have a continuous function. What is called a liberal education is the gaining of a vision of what human society could be like if these specifically humane factors, the intellect and the imagination, were always operating and always functional. Such education is an acquiring of a vision of the real life in historical time that so often gets submerged in distraction and routine. Those of you who are getting graduate degrees have been learning to integrate the university's vision of society with the ordinary life of society. Whichever category you are in, God bless and keep you, and in your later lives try to make a habit of remembering something about your time here. Your time here was a mixed experience, but at the centre of it were those brief flashes of insight, often not reaching full consciousness, when you felt, not perhaps that you had got it all together, but that there was something there that was all together, and that you were a part of it.

26

Convocation Address:

University of Bologna

This address was presented on the occasion of Frye's receiving a L.H.D. degree—his thirty-sixth honorary degree at the time—from the University of Bologna, 24 April 1989.

This occasion is so great an honor for me personally, and so gracious a gesture of good will to Canadian writers, scholars, and universities, that all I can do is express my deepest appreciation and gratitude, for myself and for my Canadian colleagues. To say more on such a point would be tedious. In the year 1319 Giovanni del Virgilio, Professor of Literature in the University of Bologna, offered Dante the fourteenth-century equivalent of an honorary degree, a ceremony of being crowned with a laurel wreath. His admiration for Dante was genuine, but he had one reservation: why did so learned and scholarly a poet not write in Latin instead of in the vernacular? Dante declined the invitation, on the ground that he wanted such an honor only in the context of his rehabilitation in Florence, which never came. However, he sent his friend two Latin eclogues to make it clear that his choice of Italian for his major works did not imply any lack of appreciation for Latin. Del Virgilio was raising a central critical issue, though, as professors of literature will, he got the context wrong. Perhaps he felt isolated, occupying a chair of literature in a university emphasizing law and medicine, and envied his colleagues their possession of a technical vocabulary and a response of experts. Similar feelings account for a large number of pseudo-complications in literary criticism today. Dante in any case had already dealt with the subject of the vernacular in his De Vulgari Eloquentia,

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and he knew all about poets who sought out educated audiences and addressed them in a special language. He was more interested, however, in the Provencal poets, with their French and Italian followers, writing in the highly allusive and figurative trobar clus convention.1 All through history there has been a difference of emphasis between a more public and a more private aspect of communication, especially in literature and the arts. Freud says that the main operations of the dream are condensation and displacement, and we find the same operations in literature, though they function very differently there. We have "displacement" when poets employ techniques of realism, or address themselves to as large and unselected an audience as possible. We have "condensation" when they employ difficult metaphors, allusive language, and recondite erudition, and when they seek out a small audience prepared to grapple with these difficulties for the sake of the heightened intensity of experience such poetry may provide. We have the extreme of displacement when some government obsessed by an ideology, like Stalin's Russia or gang-of-four China, insists that all writers confine themselves to producing simple illustrations of those obsessions. We have the extreme of condensation, probably, in Finnegans Wake, where we never enter the objective world at all. A difference of emphasis continues in much less extreme situations. In nineteenth-century France there was the public tradition represented by Victor Hugo, and the more esoteric symboliste poets of whom the most typical is Mallarme. In twentieth-century Italian painting there was the contrast of the public-directed art of "futurism" under Marinetti and others, and the "hermetic" surrealism of Giorgio di Chirico. In literature there has been a parallel contrast between a more public tradition deriving from Carducci and a more private one represented by, for example, Ungaretti. A similar if more subdued variety of appeal is still with us. Pasolini, contemplating twentieth-century Rome and wondering how life could have undone so many, presents a very different kind of poetic experience from Montale's dizzy towers of metaphors. The private emphasis demands more critical and scholarly attention and gives the reader a more co-operative role; the public one is closer to a rhetoric that the reader understands more readily at first and subjects himself to. Of course there are always those who want to pervert this difference into a contest in which one is claimed to be better than the other. Sometimes this gets to a point where terms like "mere popularizer" and "rhetorical demagogue" are thrown in one direction and "elitist" and "self-

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indulgent romantic" are thrown in the other. Such extremes are most common when young poets are trying to get attention by issuing manifestoes saying that they are for this and against that. Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia is unfinished and outdated by his own practice in the Commedia, but it deals with two questions of genuine critical concern, even if they seem at first contradictory questions. He begins by dividing languages into the primary and secondary, those we learn in infancy and those we acquire by education. One is natural speech, the other structured speech with a specialized vocabulary. The former, Dante says, is the "nobler" of the two, being one step closer to the speech that God gave Adam in Paradise. But after making this distinction, his argument apparently goes in the opposite direction. In Italy the "natural" speech is some form of local dialect, and what is needed for first-rate literature, Dante feels, is a standard Italian, which is lacking because there is no imperial court in Rome to provide a place for it to develop. Like everyone in his day, Dante assumed that the genres and dictions available in literature formed a hierarchy with an aristocracy at the top, and that the aristocratic forms were those most fitting for a discriminating audience. The canzone, for example, is "nobler" than the ballate, and the eleven-syllable line "nobler" than the seven-syllable one [bk. 2, chap. 3]. By this time we seem a long way from the opening assertion that one's native speech is "nobler" than the more structured language taught us at school. But if we turn to the Commedia we can see how completely that poem resolves the contradictions in Dante's argument. Nothing could be "nobler" for Italian readers than having so gigantic a work immediately intelligible in their own language; yet it is of course a work that repays the most exhaustive and detailed study. Dante's argument about natural or native language, fragmentary as it is, resembles the question that, centuries later, Wordsworth in England raised in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800). Wordsworth was the first major English poet to set up his headquarters outside the London area, and he was looking for a poetic speech that would transcend the distinction between simple and sophisticated readers. He quotes an eighteenth-century poem with the line "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire," meaning "the sun rose," and proposes getting rid of this kind of trade slang that substitutes the conventional signs of the poetic for genuine poetic speech.2 On the other hand, Wordsworth did not want to write in dialect, like Burns, or use the kind of speech that merely

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represents the lower end of the social scale. In modern terms, the issue could be put something like this: what kind of poetic language is appropriate for poetry in an ideally classless society? Surely poetry should speak the language of humanity itself instead of developing one more specialized language in a pluralistic culture. More elite-minded poets, such as Valery, raise the complementary question. The musician, Valery says, has a set of sounds at his disposal that exist only in music, whereas the poet must use the same words that everyone uses. We cannot stop readers from reacting to ordinary words in an ordinary way, so how can poetry provide the intensity of verbal experience that is its distinctive social function to provide? For Valery, only by developing what amounts to a special language.3 Either emphasis carries its own risks, and not everyone can rise above the difference by writing on the level of the Commedia. This situation has always been with us, but with all the resources for communicating words and pictures brought by twentieth-century technology, a distinction in literary criticism, in the context of huge mass audiences, has expanded into a question affecting the whole quality of human life, perhaps even its survival. As a sign of the coming of this new factor, we may take Marconi's achievement of sending wireless messages from France to England at the beginning of the century, after which he attempted the far more difficult and important feat of communicating with Canada (or what is now Canada). In Canada, with its sparse population, immense area, and the physical obstacles separating each part of the country, communication has always been a major preoccupation. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison both lived a good deal in Canada; the building of railways and bridges and canals has formed much of Canadian history, and a fair number of Canadian intellectuals have been philosophers of communication theory.4 The revolution begun by Marconi, or at least symbolized by him, brings a general principle into culture. The more highly developed the technology, the more introversion it creates in society. The jet plane and automobile are more introverted than the train or the bus; the computer is more introverted than the floor of the stock exchange; the film is more introverted than the stage drama, and television more introverted than either. I remember, when the first radios came to my community, when the proud possessor of a radio would be the centre of a small group assembling in his parlor listening to the few stations that were intelligi-

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ble through the static. Every boy in town was making a "crystal set" and exchanging information and instructions with other boys. But after the invention of the transistor, the radio became as portable and private as a wristwatch. About the time transistors appeared, I read a science fiction story in which, in some future nightmare-world, everyone walked around with their ears covered by machines that totally isolated them from the world outside them. A few years later this grisly fantasy became a matter of common observation on our streets. Introversion in itself, however, does not greatly affect the distinction we have been making between the more public and the more private aspects of the arts. In some quarters the distinction levels out: devotees of a rock singer, for example, show a curious mixture of cult and mass reaction. But the distinction still exists in an electronic environment, where my late friend and colleague Marshall McLuhan tried to characterize it in the metaphors of "hot" and "cool" media. A radio is a "hot" or involving medium because a great deal of data is provided in the medium and the listener has nothing to do but listen; black and white television is "cool" because it gives him less definition and more to fill in by himself. Cool media correspond to the more private aspects of our cultural tradition; hot ones to those more public and directly rhetorical in emphasis. But it soon became obvious that such metaphors as hot and cool really describe the quality of response to a medium even more than the characteristics of the medium itself. Radio is a hot medium for McLuhan, but if one leaves a radio on all day without listening to it, there is not much heat left in it. The technological context expands McLuhan's distinction into a larger contrast between an active and a passive response. An active or creative response fosters both public and private emphases; a passive one moves toward a systematic destruction of both. The primary element in an active response is selection, the free choice of what one will experience in communication. This freedom of choice obviously depends on the degree of freedom of choice in society. Some societies suppress many dimensions of communication on various political or religious pretexts. Elsewhere there may be unrestricted access to thirty or more television stations, but competition and reverence for ratings soon reduces this to minor variations of much the same repertory. Yet it is clear that an industrial high-technology society can put an immense amount of potential experience, both of the arts and of every other form of communication, into individual hands. The technical developments of the last two decades, cassettes, videotapes, and the like,

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give access to far more musical, pictorial, and literary material than was available to anyone in even the recent past, and this variety of access is reflected in the variety of cultural influences brought to bear on our arts, our lifestyles, our clothing and food. There is also a passive response to the communication media, and here too we see a difference between the "hot" involving response and the "cool" detached one. But passivity takes both in pathological directions: the hot response toward hysteria, the cool one towards apathy. Radios blaring from every street corner are a regular feature of dictatorships: the appearance of feverish political activity that results is deceptive, because it is really produced by a hypnotizing and sleepwalking outer pressure. The "cooler" medium of television, on the other hand, may reduce its viewers to a catatonic trance by its brief bursts of continuity and the interruption of commercials, which are what Bertold Brecht would call an alienation device.5 We can see the dead end of this in the horrifying stories of people being robbed and beaten on busy streets in the middle of the day while staring crowds stand around with their hands in their pockets. The world for them has turned into a huge television screen: they see what is going on, but their participation in it is paralyzed. In Canadian communications philosophy McLuhan was preceded by the economist Harold Innis, who spoke of the "bias" of communication, meaning that whenever a new form of communication arises, it creates a power struggle in society to get control of it.6 Those who succeed in doing so naturally want everything it can communicate to serve their own interests. This means that in every age writers and artists have to struggle for a greater freedom of expression than most of the authority in their society is willing to give them. The twentieth century has seen an unparalleled number of writers, artists, and intellectuals harassed, imprisoned, exiled, sent to concentration camps, murdered, or driven to suicide by power-maddened governments. Such tyranny has popularity on its side, because shouting slogans and predictable formulas is clearly much easier than reading or thinking, and gives an immediate illusion of doing something. And when a tyrant wishes to distract attention from his incompetence by bawling for the death of a heretical or "blasphemous" writer, he gets a ready response, because, while any form of anticultural activity may be pleasurable, bigotry is positive fun. There can be nothing more deeply satisfying, for a great many people, than to feel justified in murdering someone for writing a book one does not even have to read.

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In Dante's world of the Avignon Papacy, the suppression of the Templars, the Guelph-Ghibelline struggles, and the infighting of Blacks and Whites in Florence that made Dante himself an exile, Giovanni del Virgilio's view that learned poets should write in Latin rather than Italian sounds a trifle frivolous, however interesting in itself. But there are many schools of critical theory today discussing issues that seem to me equally frivolous in a world where writers and artists confront a mass hatred for human intellect and imagination. The powers of darkness denounced in all three sections of the Commedia were not only evil in themselves, but, if they had had their way, would have prevented us from ever possessing any work of Dante's in either Latin or Italian. In our world technology has immensely increased the potential strength of both sides; and while the active and creative response to our cultural tradition begins with the power of choice, it must soon move on to develop also some power of resisting its better organized enemies.

Appendix The Social Context of

Literary Criticism

The following note appears at the beginning of the typescript for this 1968 address. "(This is reproduced from the typescript of a public address delivered under the auspices of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University on April 18. It has not been published nor is it likely to be published in exactly this form, hence it is not available for further reproduction or for quotation, but is simply distributed for the convenience of members of Cornell University.)" This note is the only one of its kind among Frye's typescripts. For the relation of this talk to The Critical Path see the introduction to the present volume, pp. xxviixxviii. Frye also gave a talk entitled "The Social Context of Literary Criticism" on 30 October 1969 at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., and on i November 1969 at Wells College in Aurora, N.Y. The typescript of the present talk is in the NFF, 1991, box 38, file 4.

For some time I have been concerned with the question: what is the total subject of which literary criticism forms part? The usual answer is the one suggested by the library of Congress classification. The total subject, according to this, is literature, of which criticism is a subdivision. But as I understand criticism, literature, as read or studied, is identical with criticism, and hence there is no residual or non-critical area of literature. The fact that a book about Dickens is called criticism and a novel by Dickens is called English literature, fiction, is of no help whatever to me. I can imagine no context in which the novel, once written, can exist which is not a critical context. There are some people who assume that "reading for enjoyment" is a different activity from criticism, but, speaking as a critic, I am glad that I am not of their company. The notion that criticism is a minor subdivision of some larger subject

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called literature is implied in what I have called the jackal theory of criticism. According to this, within literature there are people of primary ability, that is, the creators, the poets, dramatists and novelists; and people of secondary importance, the critics, explaining their work to the public, even though, as Byron said of Coleridge, they may not always be able to explain their explanation.1 Thus criticism is confined to a supporting role, like the ground crew of an air force, who can nevertheless be blamed for all failures in flight. However good a scholar a critic may be, on this view, he can never be more than a second-class writer or thinker, because the basis for his writing is the writing of what by definition are greater men. I suppose such a view would be repudiated today whenever it was expressed as bluntly as this, but it survives all the more effectually as an unrealized assumption, and any sensitive teacher can see for himself what psychological damage it continues to do in our graduate schools, and in these precocious days even earlier. When I first strayed into the field of critical theory, I was startled, even shocked, to realize how general was the agreement that criticism had no presuppositions of its own, but had to be "grounded" on some other subject. The disagreements were not over that, but over the question of what the proper subjects were that criticism ought to depend on. There were the various critical determinisms, ranging from Thomism to Marxism, and there was an establishment view that the proper basis was a mixture of history and philosophy, on the assumption that every work of literature is what Sir Walter Raleigh said Paradise Lost was, a monument to dead ideas.21 myself was soon identified as one of the critics who took their assumptions from the wrong subjects, namely, anthropology and psychology. I have always said that criticism cannot take presuppositions from elsewhere, which always means wrenching them out of their real context, and must work out its own. But mental habits are hard to break, especially bad habits, and, because I found the term "archetype" a useful one, I am still often called a Jungian critic, and classified with Miss Maud Bodkin, whose book31 have read with interest, but whom, on the evidence of that book, I resemble about as closely as I resemble the late Sarah Bernhardt. I make this personal introduction because there is still a good deal of confusion about the basis of criticism. The strong centrifugal drift away from criticism into other subjects, which had set in at least as early as Coleridge, continues in our own day. Sometimes this drift represents a genuine expanding of the scope of criticism, or even, as with my Toronto

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colleague Marshall McLuhan, a new mosaic code. But it often takes the form of treating the work of literature as an illustration of something outside literature. When the whiteness of Moby Dick is explained as a Lockian tabula rasa, or Alice in Wonderland discussed in terms of her hypothetical toilet training, one is reminded of the example from natural history made by medieval preachers. The bee carries earth in its feet to ballast itself when it flies, and thereby reminds us of the Incarnation, when God took up an earthly form. The example is ingenious and entertaining, and only unsatisfying if one happens to be interested in bees. Naturally such practices have produced a reaction from critics who see the futility of trying to base their professional scholarly competence on an amateur enthusiasm for something else. Hence the number of cautionary treatises on the limits of criticism, the business of criticism, the legitimate concerns of criticism,4 and the like, reminding critics that they should be careful not to do too much [of thel various things that they are not effectively doing at all. Within the last twenty years, students of literature have gained immensely in confidence and sense of direction. But criticism is still vulnerable to external attack in a way that no other academic subject is, except to the extent that religion is an academic subject. The determinists are out of fashion now, but we still have the critical dropout, who laments the shame of our graduate schools' preoccupation with literature instead of current events. The word in the desert, T.S. Eliot reminds us, is most beset by voices of temptation,5 and, for younger students in particular, a commitment to literature, critical or practical, has still many hazards surrounding it in this violent and troubled country. In trying to think about this situation, I find myself turning, almost automatically, to the two classical "defences" of poetry in English literature, those by Sidney and Shelley. Both works are familiar, but I should like to look at them again, not so much for what they say as for what they imply about the social context contemporary with them. In that aspect they may help us to clarify our view of our own social context. It is obvious that a defence of poetry, whoever writes it, is also a critic's confession of faith. Defence implies attack, and both defences are conceived as rejoinders to a theoretical attack on poetry. Sidney's essay is usually associated with the Puritan tirades of his day, in particular Gosson's School of Abuse; Shelley takes off from his friend Peacock's satire, The Four Ages of Poetry. The attacks are not as obsolete as they look; Peacock's thesis, for instance, without Peacock's wit and

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paradox, turned up more recently in Sir Charles Snow's account of the two cultures.6 In most Elizabethan criticism we find some reference to the poet as having been dispossessed from a greater heritage. Sidney stresses this theme less than many of his contemporaries, but still it is there, attached to the common Renaissance assumption that in all human achievements the greatest are the earliest. In a distant past, even before Homer, a period associated with such legendary names as Musaeus, Linus and Orpheus, along with Zoroaster in religion and Hermes Trismegistus in philosophy, the poet, we are told, was the lawgiver of society, the founder of civilization. The reference is, of course, to what we should now call the conditions of an oral or preliterate culture. An oral culture depends heavily on memory, and the obvious instrument of verbal memory is verse, the simplest and most primitive way of conventionalizing verbal expression. The poet in an oral culture is, if not technically the lawgiver, certainly the educator, the man who knows. That is, he is the man who remembers, and consequently knows the traditional and proper formulas of knowledge. He knows the names of the gods, their genealogy and their dealings with men; the names of the kings and the tribal legends, the stories of battles won and enemies conquered, the popular wisdom of proverbs and the esoteric wisdom of oracles, the calendar and the seasons, the lucky and unlucky days and the phases of the moon, charms and spells, the right methods of sacrifice, appropriate prayers and formulas for greeting strangers. In short, he knows the kind of thing that we can still see in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. The characteristics of oral poetry are familiar, the most familiar being the formulaic unit, the stock epithets and the metrical phrases that can be moved around at will in a poetic process which is always close to improvisation. An oral culture is, necessarily, a highly ritualized one, and oral poetry has strong affinities with magic. There is magic in the great roll-calls of names, like the Greek ships in Homer or the elemental spirits in Hesiod, in the carefully stereotyped descriptions of ritual and councils of war, in the oblique and riddling epithets like the AngloSaxon kenning, the sententious reflections that express the inevitable reactions to certain recurring human situations. Magic means secret wisdom, the keys to all knowledge, as becomes more obvious when the poet's repertory of legend expands into a vast interlocking epic cycle. The Elizabethan critics (Sidney less than, for instance, Chapman) sensed a kind of encyclopedic synthesis in Homer, and they had the same kind

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of sentimental admiration for it that many people in our day have had for the cultural synthesis of the Middle Ages. The ideal of universal knowledge achieved in and through poetry has continued to haunt poets and critics ever since. Oral formulaic poetry has a driving power behind it that is very hard to recapture in individually conceived and written poetry. The sinewy strength of Homer is the despair of imitators and translators alike: the style is neither lofty nor familiar, neither naive nor ingenious, but passes beyond all such distinctions. We can get a clearer idea of the effect of such poetry, perhaps, from another formulaic art, the music of the high Baroque. In an intensely formulaic composer, such as Vivaldi, the same scale and chord passages, the same harmonic and melodic progressions, the same cadences, appear over and over again, yet the effect is not monotony but the release of a self-propelled energy. One of the keenest sources of pleasure in listening to poetry or music is the fulfilling of a general expectation, of a sort that is possible only in highly conventionalized art. If a particular expectation is being fulfilled, when we know exactly what is going to be said, as in listening to something very familiar, our attention is relaxed, and what we are participating in tends to become either a ritual or a bore, or possibly both. If we have no idea what is coming next, our attention is tense and subject to fatigue. The intermediate area, where we do not know what Pope will say but do know that he will say it in a beautifully turned couplet, where we do not know in a detective story who murdered X but do know that somebody did, is the area of closest unity between poet and audience. So far as it is a technique, Homer's energy can be matched by the later poets of a writing culture, but the kind of general expectation he raises is based on something that hardly can be. This is the total empathy between poet and audience which arises when the poet is neither the teacher of his audience nor a spokesman for them, but both at once. Such a poet needs to make no moral judgments, for the standards implied are already shared. We cannot even call him a conservative, for that is still a partisan term, and in every judgement or reflective statement he does make he is formulating his hearer's thought as well as his own. With the rise of writing techniques a major shift in cultural values sets in. Writing means, among other things, the development of prose, of verbal expression organized syntactically rather than rhythmically. With prose, philosophy ceases to be oracular and proverbial and becomes dialectical, depending on sustained argument and sequence. A mythical

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habit of mind is displaced by a more logical one. We now realize, thanks to such studies of Plato as Eric Havelock's,7 that Plato's attack on poets in the tenth book of the Republic means exactly what it says: that the language of poetry leads not towards truth but towards illusion, and that poetry, specifically Homer, must be rejected as the primary instrument of education. Something parallel must have happened in Hebrew culture around the Deuteronomic reform, something which transformed a mass of legends and oracles into a sacred book. In Plato's argument poetry is being rejected not merely as the primary mode of thought and learning, but as an encouragement to social action. For the oral poet is also concerned with the ritualized acts, what Yeats called the ceremony of innocence [The Second Coming, 1. 6], around which social activity revolves in an oral culture. Plato considers the poet's version of reality to be inferior, not merely to the philosopher's, but to the artisan's or craftsman's as well. Most devaluations of poetry ever since, whether Platonic, Puritan, Marxist or Philistine, have been attached to some version of the work ethic which makes it a secondary or leisure-time activity. With writing, in any case, the language of prose and reason comes to be regarded as the primary verbal expression of reality, however reality is conceived. This assumption is so firmly established in Sidney's day that he raises it only by implication. It is accepted that no poet can be regarded as having, in religion, the kind of authority that the theologian would have; and in history and morals too the language of poetry falls short of the language of what is considered literal truth. Some of the narrower Puritans were particularly obsessed with the values of a writing culture: religion for them was derived from a book; it was spiritually dangerous to be an illiterate, yet the religion had to be understood from the book in the plainest possible terms. Hence the attitude of such pamphleteers as Gosson, who demanded to know why Plato was not right, and why anything which is admitted to be fabulous should still have a claim on our attention.8 Gosson is something of a straw man in Sidney, if he is there at all, and the sense of social threat is not very oppressive. In any case Sidney follows the general line of argument which had descended from Aristotle, that the truthful statement is also the specific and particular statement. Poetry withdraws from particular statements: the poet never affirms or denies, and thus is able to combine the example of the historian with the precept of the moral philosopher. As compared with the historian,

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the poet gives us the recurring or essential event: as compared with the moralist, he tells us not the essential but the existential truth, the kind of truth that can only be presented through illustration or parable. The general liberal position of Sidney is contained within the framework of assumptions of his day, which were of course mainly Christian ones. The ultimate aim of education, in the broadest sense, is the reform of the will, which is born in sin and headed the wrong way. Truth, by itself, cannot turn the will, but poetry in alliance with truth, using the vividness and the emotional resonance peculiar to it, may move the feelings to align themselves with the intelligence, and so help to get the will moving. Thus the function of poetry is rhetorical or persuasive. When writing techniques develop in society, the central oral figure becomes not the rhapsode but the rhetor, and for Sidney the poet's training is very similar to the orator's rhetorical training, as laid down by Cicero and Quintilian. Rhetoric, said Aristotle, is the antistrophos, the answering chorus, of truth [Rhetoric, 13543]; and whatever genuine social function the poet has depends on the consonance between his rhetoric and the rational disciplines, with their more exact relation to fact and truth. The same conception of poetry as an emotional support is applied to social action, more particularly military courage, where poetry is discovered to be, not a corrupter of courage, but "the companion of [the] camps."9 One principle that is emerging here, of which Sidney is himself imperfectly aware, is a distinction between what the poet says and what he illustrates or shows forth. What he says is of limited importance: whatever it is, other forms of verbal expression say it more accurately. He is, of course, greatly prized for his capacity to make sententious statements, of the kind that readers and schoolboys copied out in their commonplace books. But the more admirable the sentence, the more it is an echo of what we already know in a different way. What is distinctive about poetry is the poet's power of illustration, a power which is partly an ability to popularize and make more accessible the truths of revelation and reason. Hence the importance of the tag ut pictura poesis: poetry is a speaking picture. Gerard Manley Hopkins draws a distinction between a poet's "overthought," or explicit meaning, and his "underbought," or texture of images and metaphors.10 But in a writing culture a poet's underthought, his metaphorical or pictured meaning, tends to become his real thought, and to some degree even separates from the explicit statement. When we look at the social function of Shakespeare, we realize that

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Elizabethan culture is till very largely oral, and that the existence of a poetic theatre is evidence of the fact. In Shakespeare we see a good deal of the poet's original oral educating function still going on, most obviously in the histories. Shakespeare also shows the identification with the audience's attitude that the oral poet has. On the level of explicit statement, or what the play appears to be saying, he seems willing to accept the assumption, or implication, that Henry V was a glorious conqueror and Joan of Arc a wicked witch, that Shylock is typical of Jews and Judaism, that peasants are to be seen through the eyes of the gentry, that the recognized sovereign is the Lord's anointed and can cure diseases in virtue of being so, and many other things that the modern critic passes over in embarrassed silence. With Shakespeare we are still many centuries removed from T.S. Eliot's comparison of the explicit meaning of a poem to a piece of meat that a burglar throws to a watchdog to keep him quiet.11 But there is clearly something in the uncritical social postulates of Shakespeare that has to do with soothing popular anxieties and keeping a vigilant and by no means unintelligent censorship from getting stirred up. I am not of course speaking of a conscious policy on Shakespeare's part: I am merely applying to him a principle which extends to all poetry. Questionable or dated social attitudes, as expressed in what appears to be the surface meaning, do not affect the real meaning of poetry, which is conveyed through a structure of imagery and action. The Elizabethan critics were less contradictory than they may at first seem to be in saying, on the one hand, that the poet popularizes the rational disciplines, sugar-coats the pill, provides instruction for the simple, and, on the other hand, that great poetry is a treasure trove of esoteric wisdom which poets hid in parables "lest by profane wits it should be abused."12 Both these views of poetry can be understood through the same axiom of ut pictura poesis. Spenser, for instance, attempted in The Faerie Queene "a continued allegory or dark conceit"13 which could return proportionate rewards for a good deal of work. At the same time it is clear that his friend Gabriel Harvey regarded the poem, with its use of magic, medieval romance, the fairy world, the folk play of St. George, and in general of what he called "Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo,"14 as a concession to the middlebrows. The more completely the techniques of writing and the mental disciplines they create pervade a community, the more difficult it is for the poet to retain his traditional oral functions. Prose becomes fully mature

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and in command of its characteristic powers, and thereby begins to break away from poetry, which has nothing like its capacity for conceptual expression, and has a limited tolerance for the abstract language which is now becoming even the ordinary language of educated people. Ambiguity, which simply means bad or incompetent writing in any logical or descriptive context, is a structural principle of poetry. In proportion as scientific and philosophical pictures of the world develop, the starkly primitive nature of poetic thought stands out more clearly. For poetry attempts to unite the physical environment to man through the primitive categories of analogy and identity, simile and metaphor, which, as Shakespeare's Theseus remarks, the poet shares, not with the rest of civilized society, but with lunatics and lovers [A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.78]. These categories are essentially the categories of magic, and the figure of the magician, who, like Orpheus, can charm the trees by his song, is a figure of the poet as well. The function of magic, said Pico della Mirandola, is to "marry the world" (maritare mundum),1^ and this naive anthropomorphic image remains close to the centre of all poetic metaphor. But magic no longer seems contemporary with the rest of thought. Such are some of the paradoxes that Peacock dealt with in his brilliant satire The Four Ages of Poetry. According to this, poetry began in primitive times as "the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society."16 The chief form of primitive poetry was, Peacock says, panegyric, which points to the identification of the poet with his community that we find in oral cultures. Poetry has its greatest flowering, or golden age, in the times immediately following, where habits of thought are still close to the primitive. But as civilization develops, Plato's prophecy becomes fulfilled, and the poet becomes more and more of an atavistic survival. "A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward."17 Peacock's essay is in part a comment on the rise of the Romantic movement, particularly on such features as its interest in the ballad and other forms of primitive verbal culture, its use of superstition and magic as poetic imagery, its withdrawal from urban culture and its tendency to seek its subjects in the simplest kinds of rural life. But everything that Peacock says about the age of Wordsworth and Coleridge applies far more to the age of D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. He illustrates a stage

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of poetry in which the poet has lost the traditional function inherited from pre-literate days, and as a result has become separated from society. Yet the very isolation of the modern poet indicates a turning point in literary history. The poetic habit of mind, however primitive, is coming back into society, insisting on being recognized for itself and on being accorded some degree of autonomy and independence from the logical habit of mind. We are first made aware, however, of the decline of the sense of the social relevance of poetry since Sidney's time, except insofar as it has become assimilated to the mental outlook of a writing culture. Sidney's case for the poet depends on a body of generally accepted social ideas and values. As society becomes more confident about these values, the help of the poet in publicizing them becomes less essential, and his role more curtailed. For Sidney the poet is, for example, potentially a religious influence. He accepts the Christian conception of two levels of nature, an upper level of human nature as God originally planned it, man's unfallen state, and a lower level of physical nature which is theologically "fallen." When he says that poetry develops a second nature/8 he is thinking of the power of the poet to present the ideal of the unfallen state in its most vivid possible form, as a speaking picture.19 But in a later age, under Boileau's influence, the mysteries of religion are thought to be too high for the poet's ornamentation: on the other hand, the puerilities of heathen mythology are too low, and the poet should outgrow his hankering for them. Of the traditional qualities of oral poetry, the one that chiefly survives, in the age of Pope, is the sententious, the capacity to formulate "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" [An Essay on Criticism, 1. 297]. The high value set on this aspect of poetry continues well into Victorian times. But otherwise the elements that make Homer the cornerstone of our poetic tradition are precisely the elements that come to be most despised. Catalogues and lists and mnemonic verses of the "Thirty days hath September" type, quoted by Coleridge,20 are now regarded as poetry's lowest achievement; the formulaic unit becomes the cliche; the reverence for convention, of doing things because this is the way they are done, gives place to a law of copyright and a cult of uniqueness. The poet's role of telling his society what his society should know is even more drastically inverted. In this connexion Peacock makes the comment: "As to that small portion of our contemporary poetry . . . which, for want of a better name, may be called ethical, the most distin-

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guished portion of it, consisting merely of querulous, egotistical rhapsodies, to express the writer's high dissatisfaction with the world and everything in it, serves only to confirm what has been said of the semibarbarous character of poets, who from singing dithyrambics and To Triumphe/ while society was savage, grow rabid, and out of their element, as it becomes polished and enlightened."21 The most intellectually tolerant of critics, studying the ideas or opinions of Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Robert Graves, or Wyndham Lewis, is bound to be puzzled, even distressed, by the high proportion of freakish and obscurantist views he finds and the lack of contact they show with whatever the ideas are that actually do hold society together. In the twentieth century an important and significant writer may be reactionary or superstitious: he may even be a bloody-minded kook, like Celine. The one thing apparently that he cannot be is a spokesman of ordinary social values. The popular poems of our day are usually poems of explicit statement, continuing the sententious tradition, but such poems seem as a rule to be out of touch with the real poetic idioms of their times. Recently in an interviewing program on the Canadian radio, a Toronto hippie remarked that the world would have no problems left if everyone would only read Kipling's "If" and live by it. One feels that in our day a remark of that kind could be attached only to a substandard poem. Those who express the ideas and symbols that hold society together are not the poets; they are not even the orators who succeeded them, so much as men of action with a power over the sententious utterance which operates mainly outside literature, and who usually arise in a revolutionary situation. Such men of action include Jefferson, and later Lincoln, in this country, and the great Marxist leaders, Lenin and Mao. In spite of the close affinity between metaphor and magic, one might have thought that, as the authority of science established itself, poets would become the heralds of science, as they had earlier been the heralds of religion. Many great poets, such as Dante, had in fact absorbed and used most of the essential science of their day. But after about Newton's time it became increasingly clear that poets were not going to make much more than a random and occasional use of imagery derived from science, or even from technology. What had attracted earlier poets to the science contemporary with them was clearly a certain schematic and mythical quality in it, associations of seven planets with seven metals and the like, which science itself had outgrown. This schematic quality

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survived only in a kind of intellectual underground inhabited by occultists, theosophists, mystagogues and scryers, yet, curiously enough, this was where many poets turned for intellectual support. Further, as we see in Yeats, such interests are so triumphantly vindicated in the poetry itself that it seems clear that they are connected with the actual language of poetry, and are not simply a removable obstacle to appreciating it. The relation of poetry to religion has been much closer, and many modern poets have been most eloquent in their support of the Christian religion. One wonders whether that may not be connected with the fact that Christianity is the most primitive in its mythology of all the higher religions, at least in the forms in which they reach us. Shelley begins his answer to Peacock by neatly inverting the hierarchy of values implied in Sidney. Sidney is concerned to show that poetry is a genuine instrument of education, along with religion, morality and law, but their claim to be educational is prior and unquestioned. Shelley put all the discursive disciplines into an inferior group of "analytic" operations of reason. They are aggressive; they think of ideas as weapons; they seek the irrefutable argument, which keeps eluding them because all arguments are theses, and theses are half-truths implying their own opposites. Some of the discursive writers are defenders of the social status quo: not only do they fail to defend it, but they exasperate and embitter a society in which the rich get richer and the poor poorer. There are also liberal and radical discursive writers: they are on Shelley's side and he approves of them, but being only the other half of the argumentative disciplines, the amount of good they can do is limited. The works of imagination, by contrast, cannot be refuted: poetry is the dialectic of love, which treats everything it encounters as another form of itself, and never attacks, only absorbs. This view of poetry cannot be affected by the notion that Peacock pretends to accept, that mankind progresses through reason to greater enlightenment, and that poetry, like the less interesting types of religion, is committed to the values of an outworn past. The metaphor of creation, if it is a metaphor, is not new with the Romantics, and most of the better Elizabethan critics understood what is meant by "creative" very well. But in Sidney's day it was accepted that the models of creation were established by God: the city, the garden, the code of law, the essential myths themselves, were part of a divine revelation. For Shelley, man has made his own civilization and is responsible for it, and at the centre of his creation are the poets, whose work provides the models of human

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society. Thus poetry once again, as in primitive times, becomes mythopoeic, but this time its myths embody and express man's creation of his own culture, and not his reception of it from a divine source. Shelley says that poetry is "that to which all science must be referred."22 There is a reality out there, a reality which is given and has in itself no moral significance, which science studies, and there is the reality which does not exist to begin with, but is brought into being through a certain kind of creative activity. This latter kind of created reality does have moral significance, and enters into everything that, since Shelley's time, we have learned to call concern: into man's questions about his destiny and situation, the meaning of his life and death, his relation to past and future, to God and to society. The articulating of concern cannot base itself on science or any discursive discipline, nor can it any longer echo or support what they say. The mythical confronts the logical, evaluates it and assimilates it to the concerns of human existence. If it encounters an important scientific conception, like evolution, it can neither argue with it nor expound it: it can only throw up a mythical analogy to it as Bernard Shaw does, or a mythical repudiation of it, as D.H. Lawrence does. Consequently it is no good attaching a pejorative meaning to the word "primitive." Poetry which is not primitive is of no use to anybody: every genuine work of the imagination comes out of the most primitive depths of human concern. I say "depths" because of all the subterranean and oracular imagery in Shelley. Poetry for him comes from an area which, though superior to consciousness, is metaphorically hidden and underneath, in what we now call the subconscious. Because this oracular power has assumed the authority formerly ascribed to God's revelation, it is surrounded with a good deal of resonant rhetoric about "that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man."23 Such a formulation may tend, in later Romantics, to lead to a certain amount of displaced racism and an unhealthy emphasis on the immense difference between those few who are born geniuses and the rest of us mediocrities. The implications in Shelley, despite the rhetoric, are more interesting. Shelley says that our perception of given reality, the world out there, tends to become habitual, hence a pernicious mental habit develops of regarding the unchanging as the unchangeable, and of assimilating human life to a conception of predictable order. But poetry, says Shelley, "creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by

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the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration."24 Hence the poetic and the revolutionary impulses are interdependent. No genuine change in society can take place except through realizing that the imagination, which conceives the form of society, is the source of the power of change. This conception of poetry as essentially and primarily revolutionary is, of course, inconsistent with the Marxist view of revolution. Marxism returned to the view of Sidney, that poetry's social function is to echo and to support the more accurate and less emotional approaches to truth made by the discursive verbal disciplines. The bourgeois culture of Shelley's day took the same view, in a much more naive form. Hence Shelley's phrase "unacknowledged legislators."25 The poet's social function is still his primitive oral function of defining and illustrating the nature of the society that man is producing; but nobody realizes it. Every great poem is a product of its time, and is consequently subject to the anxieties of its time. It is an implicit part of Shelley's argument that an authentic reading of poetry reads it by its imaginative "underthought" and not by its explicit conformity to contemporary prejudice, or what he calls, in connexion with Calderon, "the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition."26 If, for instance, we read Dante's Inferno as a poem conforming to or coming to terms with contemporary anxieties about a life of unending torment after death awaiting most of those who do not make an acceptable deal with the Church, then, from Shelley's normal point of view, writing such a poem could be an act of treachery to the human race far lower than anything done by Dante's three traitors, Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot, all of whom must have acted from better motives. But, of course, we read the Inferno through its imagery and action, as a representation of the actual life of man. Reading all poems in terms of their presented or illustrated meaning, we come to realize that there are no dead ideas in literature. The imagination operates in a counter-historical direction—it redeems time, as Shelley says— and literature exists totally in the present tense as the total form of the verbal imagination, or what Shelley calls "that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world."27 The lightning flash of this phrase illuminates the critic's pans asinorum, the bridge leading from the secure routines of explicating the unique values of the individual poem over to the other shore of criticism. Ever since Plato the question has been raised: in what sense does the poet know what he is talking about? The poet seems to have some

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educational function without being himself necessarily an educator. He knows what he is doing, but qua poet can say nothing beyond his poem. Hence the need for the educational aspect of his function to be taken over by someone else. In oral days he had only the rhapsode, who, as Socrates demonstrates in the Ion, really knows nothing at all. With the rise of writing and more sequential forms of thinking the critic appears as the social complement of the poet. In Sidney's view of poetry the critic retains his traditional role as judge, as a spokesman for society's response to poetry. But Shelley's conception of it makes the critic rather a student of mythology. The whole subject of which criticism forms part, then, on this view, is the study of how society produces, responds to, and uses its myths, or structures of concern, in which the poetic structures are central. This subject has not yet been defined, but it embraces large segments of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, history, and comparative religion, as well as criticism. We still habitually read poetry through its indirect or illustrated meaning, and critics have developed very subtle techniques of doing so. Something has to be allowed here for the influence of the film, with its vivid emphasis on symbolic detail. We tend also to assume, with Auden, that if a poet seems to be "silly like us" [In Memory of W.B. Yeats, 1. 32!, God pardons all poets who can write well. This situation has not changed much since Shelley's time, and it would be premature to attempt a third defence. But the cultural changes of the last two decades or so make it obvious that we are beginning to move into a different cultural orbit, and one which is recapturing many of the qualities of preliterate culture. The revival of oral poetry is the most obvious of these new factors: poetry read or recited to groups which is close to improvisation, usually has some kind of musical accompaniment or background, and often takes the form of commentary on a current social issue. When we think of contemporary poetry, we think not so much of a small group of great poets as of a kind of diffused creative energy, much of which takes fairly ephemeral forms. It used to be assumed that every creative effort worthy [of] the name was aiming at permanence, and so was really addressed to posterity, but this notion does not have the prestige it once had. This situation is so new that the critical values it implies are not yet absorbed. Of the poets of the previous generation, perhaps Wallace Stevens, with his studiously oblique avoidance of direct statement, is the most widely respected today: in the last year I had five graduate students proposing to write doctoral dissertations on him, and managed to

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talk only three of them out of it. In contrast, Vachel Lindsay seems to be a neglected and patronized figure; yet the spirit of a great deal of poetic activity today is closer to Lindsay than to Stevens. Poetry which addresses a visible audience must win the sympathy of that audience, and hence a surface of explicit statement, embodying social attitudes that the audience can share, comes back into poetry. Of the characteristics of an oral culture that are once again with us, one is what Wyndham Lewis recognized, and deplored, as the "dithyrambic spectator."28 Such poetry demands a consolidation of social opinion. We shall not, I hope, go so far as to retribalize our culture around formulaic units, as China is now doing with the thoughts of Chairman Mao. But a similar oral context, and a similar appeal to immediate emotional response, is obviously reappearing in our literature. Our society appears to be in a revolutionary phase in which the revolutionary side of the movement has been more successful than the Marxist movement of thirty years ago was in capturing the loyalties of creative and articulate people. The revolution of our time is not, like Marxism, directed at the centres of economic power: it is rather a psychologically based revolution, a movement of protest directed at the anxieties of privilege. It does not fight for the workers against the exploiters: it attacks and ridicules the work ethic itself. It does not see Negro segregation or the Vietnam war merely as by-products of a class struggle: it sees the fears and prejudices involved in these issues as primary, and the insecurity that inspires them as the real enemy. A revolutionary movement of this kind is one in which the arts can play a central and functional role. A Marxist writer who finds his enemy in capitalism has to construct a literary analogue or illustration to a philosophy, like Sidney's poet. But in the situation around us the artist has an enemy that he can recognize and deal with in his own terms: the enemy of anti-art, the psychological defences of advertising and propaganda which occupy the place of the arts if they are not dislodged. The author of a play designed to shock or outrage us with, say, the Vietnam War is engaged in a direct moral struggle with the newspaper photograph or the political speech that is designed to accustom us to it. A militant art of this kind can never find itself in the position of a Marxist artist after the revolution takes place, suddenly required to turn from protest to panegyric. The revolution it fights for can never "take place." It is permanent revolution in the strictest sense, society engaged in a perpetual critique of itself, reforming

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and reclarifying its own mythology, its own troubled and inconsistent but still crusading vision of what it might be. All kinds of people are involved in this situation: I am saying only that the social function of the artist in it is getting a little easier to see. Some issues which a generation ago were largely literary conventions have now become expanded and clarified as social issues. Take for example, the conception of the obscene expression. The celebrated four-letter words raise few eyebrows today, because the taboo on them never was based on much more than reflex. The real obscenities of our time, the words no self-respecting person would seriously use, are the words that express hatred or contempt for people of different nationality, religion, or skin color, and the taboo on them is founded on a more solid idea of what is socially dangerous. Every new movement in its turn has its attendant dangers, and the dangers of a revived oral culture are the dangers of mob rule, a confusion of sincerity with prejudice, and a tendency to rationalized destructiveness which is endemic in the boredom of an affluent society. One obvious result of the revival of oral poetry is an increase of anti-intellectualism. Poetry can never be as abstracted from concern as music, and while a separation of music into classical and popular is socially accepted, a similar separation of poetry would be, I think, disastrous. There are both mythical and logical habits of mind in the world now, the cultural presuppositions of an oral as well as of a writing culture, and the critic has to understand both and neglect neither. It is fashionable to speak of the lineal habit of mind derived from writing as something no longer with it, but, left to itself, this tendency would go in the direction of the "think with your blood" exhortations of the Nazis a generation ago. The critic's social context, therefore, is not merely the social context of poetry: he has also an obligation to work for all forms of a sympathetic public response to literature. I have suggested that the revolutionary attitude of our time is directed primarily against the anxieties of a privileged society. Some of its impetus derives from the resentment of the underprivileged, and some from the self-criticism or disillusionment of the already privileged. Ours is an age where a revolutionary drawing of lines may occur at any time for any reason. But such events are the crises and not the ordinary process of history, and, of course, not all anxieties are reactionary ones. There is much that is action and much that is only activism, genuine issues and phony issues, protests aiming at reform

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and protests aiming only at protest. These matters are complex, and I am not competent to pronounce on them. But I have a suspicion that one sign of the phony issue is a tendency to attach itself to a mental attitude similar to those underlying the attacks on poetry that Sidney and Shelley resisted. The anxieties of privilege are usually thought to be centred on the past, and to take the form of a dread of change. But this feeling, when it exists, may be a disguise for a deeper fear which is future-directed. I said that Sidney's case for the poet depended on a body of socially accepted values. Shelley's defence assumes a society in which accepted values are continually being re-examined and recreated. All genuine work in society helps to do this, and the value of poetry is partly that it shows most clearly how genuine social work is focussed on the present moment. All forms of study and education increase the significance of the present moment, but for the experience of the creative arts the present moment must be not merely significant but also pleasurable. There are also in society, however, those who are victims of the society caused by the lack of solid or permanent values. This anxiety can no longer look back to the past, but is forced into a view of progress, assuming that genuine social work is directed toward reaching such values in the near future. Science and technology progress and develop, and so help to create the sense of a rational order that is just about to become clear. Such a feeling has of course nothing to do with either science or technology, but is a social mirage, like flying saucers. There is thus a collision between two social attitudes. One sees the significant and pleasurable moment as, at best, a distraction from the future-directed work of society. We require from our public leaders the abstracted gaze of the car driver, looking forward to the imminent. This attitude often comes to us in a donkey's-carrot form: we can attend to the significant moment as soon as some particular social hurdle is got over first. The appeal seems plausible until we start noticing that there is a series of hurdles, and that the series never comes to an end. The Puritans were more realistic in seeing that the temporary hurdle could only be life itself, and could only be surmounted by death. In the society of our day the unhappiest people are those who, in Sir Charles Snow's phrase, have the future in their bones:29 who convince themselves, every night, that Godot will infallibly come tomorrow. The opposed view is that the significant and pleasurable moment is the centre of real activity, and the activity which postpones this moment the real distraction. There is thus some truth in the connection of the poet

The Social Context of Literary Criticism

365

as an obstacle to progress, in Peacock's ironic sense of the word. The energy with which literature devotes itself today to techniques of absurdity, fantasy, and the dissolving of identity is part of its fight against the hallucination of a coming order, and it is a very curious critical illiteracy that makes us speak of such techniques as "avant garde." The centre of the anxiety of privilege, as we keep searching for it, seems to be first a fear of the significant moment, then a fear of pleasure itself, and then, perhaps, a fear of taking the privilege which is ours by right, and is not gained at someone else's expense. We can probably never define so elusive a phantom, but what it is trying to hide from our view is what Sidney calls the golden world that poetry offers us for nature's brazen one, and what Shelley calls the common universe of which we are portions and percipients.30

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Notes

Introduction 1 "The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye's Notebooks," in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Work, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 19-38. See also Dolzani's introduction to The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964-1972: The Critical Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Cf. my briefer outline of the ogdoad in the introduction to Northrop Frye's Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), xl-xlv. 2 "The Book of the Dead," 27. 3 See NB 1.9-10. NF's Romanticism essay is in SE, 9-83 4 NB 3.30. 5 "Work in Progress," (TEN, 338-9). The anthology project was originally initiated by Harcourt, Brace and World, which changed its name to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1970. 6 Major British Writers, gen. ed., G.B. Harrison, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959). 7 For the several reasons the project was abandoned, see no. i, n. i, below. 8 "Work in Progress," (TBN, 334). 9 Letter in NFF, 1988, box 57, file 6. 10 Correspondence, 2:623. 11 "Turning New Leaves," Canadian Forum, 26 (December 1946): 211-12; rpt. as "Orwell and Marxism" in NFCL, 204-6. 12 "George Orwell," Canadian Forum, 29 (March 1950): 265-6, rpt. in RW, 399401; and Foreword to 1984 (Don Mills, Ont.: Bellhaven House, 1967), vii-xii. NF's Foreword was also a CBC talk. 13 Diaries, 229-30 (1950, par. 41). 14 "George Orwell," in RW, 400.

368 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26

27 28

29

Notes to pages xx-xxvi

AC, 238. See, e.g., AC, 331. See WP, 280-1, 309; EAC, 14,20; and MM, 80,177, 300,301. PJ.M. Robertson, "Criticism and Creativity VI: George Orwell and Northrop Frye," Queen's Quarterly, 92 (Summer 1985): 374-84. This essay appeared in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58-73. This essay was published in Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (July 1953): 271-7. See AC, 172-6. See also NB 8.298. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1922. The Tractatus, which exists in a tenth-century manuscript, has been dated as early as the first century B.C. It takes its name from de Coislin, the French nobleman who owned it. Diaries, 365 (30 May 1950, par. 384). NF intended to devote the entire day to the writing of his Milton talk, but he was interrupted in the morning and did not get down to writing until after lunch. "I worked very hard all afternoon on the paper," he wrote in his 1950 Diary, "but my writing remains obstinately slow. I must never do this again. Of course, I find working over Milton again in a broad public way a good deal of a bore, but writing is invariably slow & painful for me no matter what it is. I wish I could rearrange the exits in my brain, which now is like the C.P.R. Hamilton station, where the trains have to leave the main line and back in" (Diaries, 381). He finished typing his 2,500 words five minutes before he was to leave for the broadcast studio. During this period NF wrote two other essays that he drew on for his theory of symbols in AC: "Levels of Meaning in Literature," Kenyan Review, 12 (Spring 1950): 246-62, and "Three Meanings of Symbolism," Yale Review, 9 (1952): 11-19. NF encountered Beattie's poem when he was "reading around," as he says, in the period of Blake in the 19405 ("Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility," Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 [Winter 1990-91]: 157). In "Myth, Fiction, and Displacement," however, NF does say that "archetype" is a "word that has been connected since Plato's time with the sense of a pattern or model used in creation" (FJ, 25). The commentary on NF's understanding of archetype is large, but see especially Eugene Williamson, "Plato's Eidos and the Archetypes of Jung and Frye," Interpretations, 16 (Fall 1985), 94-104; and Thomas Willard, "Archetypes of the Imagination," in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 15-27. LN, 613. The CRTC had been created in 1968. It was renamed the Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission in 1976. The unedited transcripts of these two discussions are in the CRTC library in Ottawa. The transcripts have been typed and inserted in a black notebook

Notes to pages xxvi-19

30 31

32 33

369

binder, along with the minutes of the meeting of 19 December 1968. The transcripts of the discussions with NF, called "interviews," exist in three different typescripts (122 pp.). A second black notebook, entitled "Conversations about Canadian Fundamentals," contains 103 pp. of excerpts from the material in the first notebook. For an account of NF's work on the CRTC, see Ayre, 329-31, 351-62. The agenda sent to the research committee for the gathering on 5 November indicated that the meeting would be a discussion of the "first ingestion of Dr. Frye's 'diet.'" The collection of papers for this part of the research committee's work has been collectively given the title "The Frye Diet" in the CRTC archives. NF essentially abandoned reviewing in 1960, writing only two reviews after that time. "Mythos and Logos" was published in a booklet entitled The School of Letters, Indiana University: Twentieth Anniversary, 1968 (Bloomington, Ind.: N.p., 1968), and rpt. in the Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 18 (1969): 5-18. i. Rencontre: The General Editor's Introduction

1 Geoffrey Hartman thinks Harcourt dropped the project because the company was scooped by the Oxford anthologies; Paul Fussell, that the format was wrong for a market that was becoming increasingly attracted to separate paperbacks; and John Ayre, that "Frye and his editors became preoccupied and failed to enforce deadlines," along with the "shrinking college market and the indomitable Norton" textbook series (267). Part of the reason the series was abandoned seems also to have been a change in editors at Harcourt. Ron Campbell, who had been an editor in the college text department moved to head the school series. His replacement, Gordon Fairburn, took over the project, and when he left after a short time, his assistant, Liz Hock, tried to keep it going. Such discontinuity in editors doubtless helped doom the series. 2 Hopkins makes the distinction in the preface to the manuscript book of his poems kept by Robert Bridges. See Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Gardner (London: Penguin, 1985), 7-11. 3 Chaucer, The Assembly ofFowles, 1.1. 4 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in The Critical Tradition, ed. David Richter (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), 154. 5 The Complete Poems of John Skelton, Laureate, ed. Philip Henderson (London: Dent, 1931), 265 (st. 26). 6 Divine Poems, Poem 4,11.1-8, in William Dunbar, Poems, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 8. 7 Preface to Eneydos (1490), in Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.P. Collier, 1938), 25.

370

Notes to pages 20-30

8 "Spenser in affecting the ancients writ no language" (Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries, no. 116). 9 "Epistle," prefaced to The Shepheardes Calender, in The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1898), 14. 10 Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 10:472. 11 "But Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike" (Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Cowley," 404). 12 NF is quoting the first lines of The Sun Rising and The Canonization. 13 Conversations with Drummond (recorded 1618-19; pub. 1833), in Ben Jonson's Literary Criticism, ed. James D. Red wine, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 170. 14 For Eliot on Donne, see "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 241-50. 15 Samuel Johnson, "Cowley," in Lives of the English Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), 1:14. 16 Preface to The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (1668), in Poems, ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 11. 17 For Johnson's critique of Cowley's Pindaric odes, see "Cowley," in Lives of the English Poets, 1:35-40. 18 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 4, in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 450. 19 Down's Jig appeared in Robert Greene, Menaphon (published with Thomas Lodge, A Margarite of America), ed. G.B. Harrison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), 48-9. The shepherd Doron proposed that if his companion would "sound a roundelay... he would sing a song, which he carolled to this effect." NF quotes two of the five stanzas. 20 "The Printer to the Reader," Hughes, 210. 21 "The Verse," Hughes, 210. 22 The phrase comes from Nostradamus: "De brique en mabre seront les murs reduits, / Sept & cinquante annees pacifiques: / loye aux humains, renoue 1'aqueduict, / Sante, temps grands fruicts, ioye & mellifiques" (Century 10, Quatrain 89). 23 The statement was recorded by John Aubrey in his Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 3°824 "For Posture, Dress, Grimace, and Affectation, / Tho' Foes to Sence, are harmless to the Nation" (John Dryden, To My Ingenious Friend, Mr. Henry Higden, Esq; On his Translation of the Tenth Satyr of Juvenal, in The Poems of

Notes to pages 30-42

25 26

27

28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35

36 37

371

John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958], 465 [11.1011]). How far one reads in Dryden before finding ordinary two-syllable rhymes depends on the edition of Dryden one is using. This poem dates from 1687, by which time Dryden had written more than one hundred poems, including some of his best known (Annus Mirabilis, Absalom and Achitophel, MacFlecknoe, Religio Laid, The Art of Poetry). Before he wrote the poem to Hidgen, Dryden had rhymed "nation" with other multi-syllable words on at least a dozen occasions, the earliest in 1763. Either NF is exaggerating or he is using an edition of Dryden that did not order the poems chronologically. Samuel Johnson, "Milton," in Lives of the English Poets, 1:78. "If natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poetry and other arts may with the same pains arrive still nearer to perfection." These are the words of Eugenius, one of the four debaters in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in The Critical Tradition, 169. "Defence of the Epilogue; or, An Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age," in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 1:163. See Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (New York: Garland, 1970; orig. pub. 1735). De sacra poesi Hebraeorum. "I... have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts—the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other" ("To the Public," prefaced to Jerusalem, Erdman, 146). "Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language" ("Preface to Lyrical Ballads," in The Critical Tradition, 303). See Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets." Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930), 163 (bk. 4,11. 930-8); "hav" is one of Bridges's "simplified" spellings. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), 451. In October 1817, J.G. Lockhart, writing for Blackwood's magazine, began a series of attacks on Keats and others, labelling them members of the Cockney school of poetry, i.e., poets of no social rank. On Eliot's views on the dissociation and unification of poetic sensibility, see his essay "The Metaphysical Poets." "It is in the long run bluff to use our vocabularies except for comic purposes" (The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator [London: Chatto and Windus, 1931], 4).

372

Notes to pages 44-57

38 "Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now, I've been speaking in prose without knowing it! How grateful am I to you for teaching me that!" (Monsieur Jordain to the Philosophy Master in Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman, act 2, sc. 4). 39 A Hundred Sundrie Flowres (1573); republished as The Poesies of George Gascoigne (1575). 40 "To cut out this scene!—but I'll print it—egad, I'll print it every word" (The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan [London: George Bell and Sons, 1883], 474 [act 2, sc. 2, final 1.]). 41 "Rhetoric is the antistrophos of dialectic," the first sentence of Aristotle's Rhetoric. 42 John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), 1:808. 43 John Dryden, "Preface to Sylvae," Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1962), 2:20. 44 "But talking and Eloquence are not the same: to speake, and to speake well, are two things. A foole may talke, but a wise man speakes, and out of the observation, knowledge, and use of things" (Timber; or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, in Benjamin Jonson, Workes [London: R. Meighen, 1640], 117). 45 The Scholemaster, bk. 2, sec. under "imitatio." The interpolation is NF's. 46 Robert Greene, The Carde ofFancie, in The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse by Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 4:25-6. 47 From Bacon's "Dedication" to his Essays (1625). Blake annotated the passage in his own edition of the Essays (1798 ed.), and Pope quoted the line in "The Design," prefaced to his Essay on Man. 48 NF quotes selections from the first half of Bacon's "Of Studies" (1597). 49 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul JordanSmith (New York: Tudor, 1955), 30. 50 From a sermon preached 29 January 1626. The passage NF quotes begins the second, rather than the final, paragraph. See John Donne, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 367. 51 Ibid., 368. 52 John Awdeley, The Fraternitye of Vacabondes, ed. Edward Viles and F.J. Furnivall (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 3. 53 Samuel Butler, "A Scold," in Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 307-8. 54 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 4. 55 From Spectator paper no. 106, in Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, et al., The Spectator (London: Dent, 1907), 2:90.

Notes to pages 57-68

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56 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: New American Library, 1961), 6 (chap, i, last par.). 57 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveler, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958): 2:210. In quoting the Latin epigram, "Virtue directs itself to the stars," Nashe is playing on sidera and "cider." 58 Thomas of Reading, in The Novels of Thomas Deloney, ed. Merritt E. Lawlis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 332-3 (chap. 13). 59 Conversations with Drummond, 170. 60 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, 3rd ed. (London: J. Knapton, 1722), 113 (pt. 2, sec. 20, par. 2). 61 "A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," Essays of John Dryden, 1:124. 62 "A Defence of the Epilogue," 175. 63 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Peter Dixon and John Chalker (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1967), 295. 64 Jonathan Swift, "A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately enter'd into Holy Orders," in Irish Tracts, 1720-1723, ed. Herbert Davis, and Sermons, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 72-3. 65 Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Cowley," 404-5. 66 The Heart of Midlothian, in The Works of Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge, Mass.: Jenson Society, 1906), 7:196. NF's interpolation. 67 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 379 (bk. 5, chap. 9). 68 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Dent, 1901), 2:204. 69 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Modern Library, 1928), 43-4. 70 Letter to Bernard Barton, in The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library), 876. 71 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Pater Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 24. 72 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987), 373 73 The Way of the World, in The Comedies of William Congreve, ed. Eric S. Rump (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1985), 392 (act 5, sc. i). 74 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays (vol. i of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill), ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 169. 75 Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (New York: New Directions, 1954), 22. NF's interpolations. 76 Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study (London, Faber and Faber, 1952). 77 Sir Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 14.

374

Notes to pages 69-95

78 Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D'Arthur, ed. Janet Cowan (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1969), 2:426. 79 The Shaving of Shagpat, in The Works of George Meredith (Westminster, Eng.: Archibald Constable, 1898), 25:139. 80 "His Imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the pettiest kind—it is an Imagunculation [little imagination]. How excellently the German Einbildungskraft expresses this prime & loftiest faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one, in eins Bildung. Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic Power" (The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. 3,1808-1819, Text and Notes, ed. Kathleen Coburn [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957], entry 4176). Coleridge apparently mistook Einbild for Eins + bild (one image). Although he used "esemplastic" in the subtitle of chap. 13 of Biographia Literaria, he did write "esenoplastic" in his notebooks. 81 Divine Poems, Poem 3,11.1-2, in William Dunbar, Poems, 7. 82 Venerable Bede, A History of the English Church and People, trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1955), 127. 83 NF quotes the first line of the untitled poem. 84 Venerable Bede, A History of the English Church and People, 247. 85 Augustine, City of God, bk. 3, pt. 26, and bk. 4, pt. 4. 86 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad: In Four Books, bk. i, 1. 32. Gaius-Gabriel Cibber, father of the poet laureate, had sculpted the two Statues of the Lunatics over the gates of the Bedlam Hospital. 87 John Milton, Areopagitica, Hughes, 743. 88 Preface to The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley, 7. 89 Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711), par. i. 90 Samuel Johnson, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 83. 91 A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), a satire on Bolingbroke. 92 "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" (1791), in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 7th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881): 4:175-6. 93 "A Defence of Poetry," in Shelley's Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 27. 94 "They came forth to war, but they always fell" (The Poems of Ossian, trans. James Macpherson [New York: Edward Kearny, n.d.], 197). 95 See Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (New York: Vintage Books, 1943). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 96 See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, rev. ed. (New York: Knopf, 1928), 1:104-13. An annotated copy of the 1932 ed. is in the NFL. 97 In 1924 D.H. Lawrence received a ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where he

Notes to pages 95-114

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hoped to realize a longstanding desire to start a Utopian community named Rananim. 98 For the "great city," see the opening lines of Canto 74; for the "paradise terrestre," see Notes for Canto 117 et seq., The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), 445,820. 99 W.B. Yeats, A Vision, rev. ed. (New York: Collier, 1966), 210. 100 From Vico's cyclical theory of history and Bruno's dialectical concept of nature, Joyce learned how to reconcile the principles of unity and diversity: "the same anew," or "the seim anew," as Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1958), 215. Variations of the phrase appear as "the same returns" (18), "remews the same" (134), "the same renews" (226), "And Sein annews" (277), "This aim to you" (510), and (in an anagram for Shem and Shaun) "The sehm asnuh" (620). NF later remarked that Vico's ricorso transforms "the cyclical return into something more like a spiral expansion, which I think is hinted at in Joyce's recreation of Vico's 'the same anew'" ("Comment by Northrop Frye to Peter Hughes's Essay," Yale Italian Studies, i [Winter 1977]: 92). NF is responding to Hughes's "Vico and Literary History," published in the same issue of Yale Italian Studies. 101 The Anatomy of Melancholy, 427. 102 "Then rose the seed of Chaos, and of Night, / To blot out order, and extinguish light, / Of dull and venal a new world to mould, / And bring Saturnian days of lead and gold" (Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, bk. 4,11. 13-16). 103 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub with Other Early Works, 1696-1701, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 104. 104 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Major Works, ed. C.A. Pa hides (Penguin: Harmondsworth, Eng., 1977), i°i (?*• !/sec- 33)105 The reference is to C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 106 "I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this triviall and vulgar way of coition" (Religio Medici, in The Major Works, 148 [pt. 2, sec. 9]). 107 These are the first two lines of an anonymous lyric set to music by Henry Purcell in 1695 for The Indian Queen. 108 The phrase is from the last stanza of Emily Dickinson's Because that you are going (Poem 1260). 109 One of the sonnets in Griffin's Fidessa, More Chaste than Kind (1596). no One of several variations of St. 7, or in some versions st. 6, of the traditional Scottish ballad Bonny Barbara Allen (or Allan).

376

Notes to pages 115-41

111 "Water to water, ark again to ark, / From woman back to woman: / So each new victim treads unfalteringly / The never altered circuit of his fate, / Bringing twelve peers as witnesses / Both to his starry rise and starry fall" (Robert Graves, To Juan at the Winter Solstice, 11.13-18). 112 Religio Medici, 143 (pt. 2, sec. 6). 113 "A Memorable Fancy," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Erdman, 35). 114 See p. 52, above. 115 The Anatomy of Melancholy, 167-8. NF's interpolation. 116 The first four lines of a hymn by Joseph Addison, set to music by C. Southgate. 117 Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama (London: Macmillan, 1925), 522. 118 "Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God" (Religio Medici, 81 [pt. i, sec. 16]). 119 Thomas De Quincey, Joan of Arc, The English Mail-Coach, and The Spanish Military Nun, ed. Carol M. Newman (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 69. 120 The opening lines of "The Third Quarter" (chap. 3) of Dickens's The Chimes (1886). 121 Letter to J.H. Reynolds, 19 February 1818. 2. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 1 That is, the first two papers that NF had written for Edmund Blunden, one on Chaucer's early poems and the other on Troilus and Criseyde. See the introduction to the present volume, p. xix. 2 See "A Reconsideration of Chaucer," SE, 442-4. 3 Ibid., 449-67. 4 The charge that Chaucer lacked "high seriousness" was lodged by Matthew Arnold in "The Study of Poetry," in The Great Critics, ed. James Harry Smith and Edd Winfield Parks, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1960), 637. 5 The idea of the Marriage Group originated with an article by George Lyman Kittredge, "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage," Modern Philology, 9 (1912): 435-676 Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions (1809). 7 Frederick Tupper, "Saint Venus and the Canterbury Pilgrims," The Nation, 97 (1913): 354-6. 8 Frederick Tupper, "Chaucer and the Seven Deadly Sins," PMLA, 29 (1914): 93-128. 3. George Orwell i Lome Thompson Morgan, The Permanent War; or, Homo the Sap ([Toronto]: Workers' Educational Association, 1943).

Notes to pages 144-6

377

4. Shakespeare's Comedy of Humors 1 Jonson's Every Man in his Humour (1598) established the English "comedy of humours," in which each character embodies a "humour," or vice, such as greed, lust, or avarice. As NF notes in par. 11, Jonson explains the theory of humours in Every Man Out of His Humour (1600). 2 "To the Reader," The Alchemist, in Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 5:291. Cf. Jonson's remark in Timber, or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter: "The true Artificer will not run away from nature, as hee were afraid of her; or depart from life, and the likenesse of Truth; but speake to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the vulgar somewhat; it shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams, of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers" (London: R. Meighan, 1640), 2:99-100. 3 Here NF cancelled the passage in italics: "... Jonson's theory, which Jonson formulated when he was most closely associated with Shakespeare; the two men obviously had the highest respect for each other as artists, and one wonders...." 4 Here NF cancelled the following sentence: "The contrast between a ponderous learned Jonson and a quick and relatively illiterate Shakespeare comes to us mainly from Fuller, who got it from an abortive seventeenth-century joke cycle." Either before or after NF cancelled the passage, he made the following change: "... illiterate Shakespeare is the basis of an abortive seventeenth-century joke cycle & comes to us chiefly from Fuller." 5 This sentence, a holograph addition, replaced the following cancelled sentence in the typescript: "Most characters in both sets of comedies are flat, and are intended to be so, and whenever Jonson attempted rotundity he usually got it, at least in the six great comedies we are concerned with here." 6 "The surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Moliere; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens" (George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Back to Methuselah, in Collected Plays with Their Prefaces (London: Bodley Head, 1970), 5:258. 7 Portions of this paragraph were incorporated into AC, 163. 8 Shaw's criticism of Shakespeare is scattered throughout his work. NF may well have had in mind "Better than Shakespear," in Shaw's Preface to Three Plays to Puritans; rpt. in The Complete Prefaces, Volume i: 1899-1913, ed. Dan H. Laurence and Daniel J. Leary (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1952), 76-84. 9 "Bernard Shaw Abashed," Daily News [London], 17 April 1905. The reference is from Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century

378

10

11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19

20

Notes to pages 146-9

(New York: De Capo Press, 1972), 2:696-7. Cf. Shaw's remark, "If he [Shakespeare] could be consulted as to the inclusion of one of his plays in the present series he would probably choose his Hamlet because in writing it he definitely threw over his breadwinning trade of producing potboilers which he frankly called As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and What You Will" (George Bernard Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces[New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962], 2:xcii). "The comedies ... have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertissement only of the elite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy" (Walt Whitman, "A Thought on Shakespeare," in Prose Works, 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 2:558. Following the quotation from Whitman, NF cancelled this sentence: "They are certainly 'non-acceptable/ for instance to Mr. Wolcott Gibbs of the New Yorker, and while Mr. Gibbs's school of Shakespearean criticism has not been heard from much since Thomas Rymer died, one expects that he says openly what many others feel inarticulately." Here NF cancelled this sentence: "Further, Shakespeare, for all his technical skill, never worked in a vacuum and never amused himself with stunts." Here NF cancelled the following sentence: "After two thousand years of post-Aristotelian dramatic activity, one might almost expect that Aristotle's views of dramatic form, like his views of the generation of animals, would be re-examined in the light of fresh evidence." Here NF cancelled the following clause: "which is a dry bald summary of all the essential facts about comedy which has been ignored by most Shakespearean critics." This scene is in Plautus's The Asses. Following the sentence here, NF cancelled these words: "Mr. Gilbert Norwood's book on Plautus speaks of this scene as a kind of ecstasy of bad taste, but..." Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 178-9. NF refers to the scene in AC, 164. This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 164. This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 164-5. Here Frye cancelled the passage in italics: "... stage, and the moment at which this new society crystallizes is the moment of the comic resolution. Its appearance..." "The characters [ethe] of comedy are (i) the buffoonish, (2) the ironical, and (3) those of the impostors." NF's source for the Tractatus was Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an Adaptation of the "Poetics" and a Translation of the "Tractatus Coislinianus" (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 226; "ethe" is Cooper's addition. To the three comic character types, NF added a fourth in AC, 172: the agroikos or churl.

Notes to pages 149-56

379

21 On the miles gloriosus, see AC, 163. 22 The theory of humours is defined by Asper (Ben Jonson himself) in "After the Second Sounding," Every Man Out of His Humour, in Ben Jonson, 3:431-2 (11. 87-114). 23 "The ruling Passion, be it what it will, / The ruling Passion conquers Reason still" (Epistle III: To Allen Lord Bathurst, 11.155-6). 24 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 104. 25 This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 168-9. 26 This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 174-5. 27 This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 174-5. 28 Here NF cancelled the passage in italics: " . . . the gods are provoked by human complaints to descend ..." 29 Here NF cancelled the passage in italics: "... complicated, but such things generally are. The plots ..." 30 Portions of this paragraph were incorporated into AC, 170. 31 Shaw had died on 2 November 1950, four weeks before NF presented his paper. 32 Here NF deleted the following sentence: "This attacks a fear in us so deep— a much deeper fear than the relatively cosy and sociable bogey of hell—that we find real pathos, the rejection of Falstaff or the death of Quixote, almost intolerable." 33 Irving, a leading British actor of the late nineteenth century, was known for his striking and subtle performances of Shakespeare. 34 See AC, 164. 35 This paragraph was incorporated into AC, 165-6. 36 Here NF cancelled the following sentence: "Ironic comedy, or comedy near the negative pole, presents an inversion of what we feel to be the rightful social order; yet it is inherent in the real social order." 37 Comedy is "an imitation of life, a mirror of the times, and an image of truth." According to the Roman grammarian and biographer of Virgil, Elio Donate, the quotation originated with Cicero. 38 See AC, 178. 39 Here NF deleted the following sentence: "Lyly's play of Campaspe, for instance, introduces Plato, Aristotle and Diogenes; but the first two are bores, and Diogenes, who is not a philosopher at all but an Elizabethan clown of the malcontent type, steals the show." 40 See AC, 169. 41 The thesis is advanced in "The Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays," chap. 9 of The Quintessence oflbsenism (New York: Brentano's, 1928), 211-34. 42 Here NF cancelled the following two sentences: "In his preface to Getting Married he remarks that the reason why it observes the unities is that all comedy does when it gets to a certain pitch of concentration. But what this means is that comedy of his type tends to a form which occupies the same

380

Notes to pages 156-70

amount of time to pass on the stage that the audience consumes in watching it: this defines an essential characteristic of the symposium form." NF incorporated this passage, with slight changes, into AC, 286. 43 Heauton Timorunmenos, 1. 77. Cicero quotes the line inOn Duties, 1.30. 5. The Writer as Prophet 1 This well-known maxim is from James I's The True Law of Free Monarchies. 2 Introduction to bk. 2 of The Reason of Church Government (1642) (Hughes, 671). 3 Here NF cancelled the following sentence: "This is what he has to say in his great pamphlet Areopagitica, which starts out by defending the freedom of the press against censorship and ends with a vision of England as 'a noble nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.'" 4 Here NF cancelled the following sentence: "This brought him again into public life." 5 Here NF cancelled the passage in italics: "Oliver Cromwell's army wasn't so much Puritan as Independent, more like the modern Congregationalists, and the Independents stood for the modern principle of the separation of Church and state, as the Puritans did not. This meant that they were a bit " 6 Hughes, 898. In his typescript, NF shortened the quotation by cancelling a portion of it. 7 Jonathan Swift, Irish Tracts, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), 111. 8 Ibid., 112. 9 "A Short View of the State of Ireland," in Irish Tracts, 10. 10 NF apparently has in mind the following remark from Pope's letter to Swift, dated 18 June 1794: "If I writ this in verse, I would tell you, you are like the sun, and while men imagine you to be retir'd or absent, are hourly exerting your indulgence, and bringing things to maturity for their advantage. Of all the world, you are the man (without flattery) who serves your friends with the least ostentation" (The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956], 1:231-2). 11 Ubi Saeva Indignatio I Ulterius / Cor Lacerare Nequit. / Abi Viator / Et Imitare Si Poteris / Strenuum Pro Virili / Libertatis Vindicatorem ("He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more. Depart wayfarer, and imitate if you are able one who to the utmost strenuously championed liberty"). 12 "I have finished my Travells, and I am now transcribing them; they are admirable Things, and will wonderfully mend the world" (The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 3:87).

Notes to pages 171-84

381

13 "Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds" (Erdman, 636). 14 A Descriptive Catalogue (Erdman, 549). 15 A reviewer for The Examiner wrote that Blake was an "unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement" and whose catalogue exhibited "the wild ebullitions of a distempered brain" (Blake Records, ed. G.E. Bentley [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969], 216). 16 The phrase is from the last line of what has become known as Blake's hymn "Jerusalem," which comes from his Preface to Milton (Erdman, 95-6). 17 "Why, Sir, Fleet-street has a very animated appearance; but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing-cross" (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, entry for 2 April 1775). 18 George Bernard Shaw, Preface to The Irrational Knot, in The Complete Prefaces, Volume i: 1899-1913,181. 19 See no. 4, n. 41. 6. The Literary Meaning of "Archetype" 1 The session—on Comparative Literature—was chaired by Renato Poggioli of Harvard University. See PMLA, 68 (April 1953): 125-6. 2 Dante uses the word in his letter to Can Grande della Scala, where he says, "To elucidate ... what we have to say, be it known that the sense of this work [the Commedia] is not simple, but on the contrary it may be called polysemous, that is to say, 'of more senses than one,'" "Epistola X," Translations of the Later Works of Dante, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1904), par. 7. 3 In the margin here there is a question mark, with the comment, not in NF's hand, at the bottom of the page, "This would seem only a 'unit of meaning/ at most a unity." 4 NF seems to be referring to Plato's account of the enchanting lyrical power of the rhapsode in the Ion (533d~543e), but he might also have in mind Plato's view of the emotional effects produced by the chanting bard (bk. 10 of the Republic, 6o4e-6o8b) or the relationship between word and thing that is examined throughout the Cratylus. 5 The allusion is to Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711), 11.130-5. Six years later NF entitled one of his essays "Nature and Homer" (FI, 39-51). 6 The tradition NF catalogues here begins with the conventional story of Adonis, a favourite of Aphrodite, who was killed by a boar while hunting. The pastoral lament is picked up by Theocritus in his Idylls (4th cent. B.C.) and is continued by Bion's The Lament for Adonis (an elegy of uncertain date), Moschus's The Lament for Bion (ca. 100 B.C.), and Virgil's Eclogues (4237 B.C.). Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) is modelled on Theocritus and Virgil, among others. The nineteenth-century versions of the pastoral lament that NF has in mind are Shelley's Adonais (1821), an elegy for Keats;

382

7

8

9 10

11

12

Notes to pages 184-90

Arnold's Thyrsis (1866), an elegy for Clough; and Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1867), an elegy for Lincoln. The sea archetype could come from any number of Conrad's "sea" stories, such as Lord Jim (1900); the garden of paradise archetype is from W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904); the albatross, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Baudelaire's L'Albatros (ca. 1842); the bateau ivre from Rimbaud's poem of that title (1871); the tower and winding stair, from Yeats's two volumes with those titles (1928 and 1933); the Dantean ascent, from Eliot's AshWednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); and the leviathan, from Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851). NF may have in mind Coleridge's statement about the reconciliation of opposites in chap. 14 of the Biographia Literaria (1817); in any case, the phrase was not original with Coleridge: Louis S£bastien Mercier used the expression as a chapter title (no. 348) in his Tableau de Paris, vol. 4 (1782). In the margin here is the following note, not in NF's hand: "surely much faster process at times." The king's son, Nanki-Poo, in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885), is condemned by the Lord High Executioner after Ko-Ko, the guardian of the attractive Yum-Yum is first condemned for becoming engaged and then released. In the end of this genial satire, the Mikado, the emperor, proves merciful. The Sacaea was an annual Babylonian festival in which a condemned prisoner was permitted to play the king's role for five days, after which he was stripped of his kingly garments and put to death. NF no doubt first encountered the Sacaea in Frazer's The Golden Bough. Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Moffat Yard, 1916), a book that first appeared in German in 1911-12 as Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. By 1946 the book had appeared in its 4th English edition. Jung substantially revised the book in 1952, and in 1956 a new translation by R.F.C. Hull was published as Symbols of Transformation. The Hinkle translation with its original title was reissued in 1991 as Supplementary Volume B in the Bollingen Series of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Exactly when NF read the book is unknown, though it is certain that he read the Hinkle translation long before Symbols of Transformation was published. Written above the reference to Jung's book is the query, not in NF's hand, "title?" See AC, 116. 7. Literature and Language

i The other two were the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association at the University of North Carolina in 1959, where NF presented his paper on "Literature as Context: Milton's Lycidas" (FI,

Notes to pages 190-210

383

119-26), and the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the Federation Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes, held in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 1969, where he read his paper "Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism" (no. 13 in the present volume). 2 Although NF has clearly written "right in," the context suggests that he may have intended to write "to write in." 3 The epigram attributed to Frost: "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." 8. Blake's Jerusalem 1 NF's holograph addition at this point: "Jerusalem physically separated." 2 On the Hindu expression "the drunken monkey" see Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works (Almora: Advaita Ashrama, 1926), 1:174. The drunken monkey is also associated with the Buddhist view that in order to advance along the eight-fold path to samadhi one must, through concentration, rid the mind of the distracting thoughts that continually jump from branch to branch in the consciousness. 3 See Jerusalem, pi. 32,1. 48; pi. 36,1. 56; pi. 56,1.10; pi. 72,1. 46. Blake also uses the word "vegetable" in his address "To the Christians" (Erdman, 231). 4 The expression appears six times in bk. 2. 5 NF's holograph addition at this point: "Reuben-Mandrake-Oedipus." The reference is to "He [Scofield] is like a mandrake in the earth before Reubens gate" (pi. 11,1. 22). 6 NF's holograph addition at this point: "Demonic trinity." 7 NF's holograph addition at this point: "Consolidation of error." 8 "I give you the end of a golden string, / Only wind it into a ball: / It will lead you in at Heavens gate, / Built in Jerusalems wall" (pi. 77 [Erdman, 231]). 9 NF's holograph addition at this point: "Age & youth interchangeable." 10 A reference, apparently, to Los's mustering of tempests in chap. 4: "He siezes his Hammer every hour, flames surround him as / He beats: seas roll beneath his feet, tempests muster / Arou[n]d his head, the thick hail stones stand ready to obey" (pi. 86,11. 34-6 [Erdman, 245]). 11 As indicated in the headnote, the last three paragraphs are from the second Jerusalem typescript, at the end of which is this holographic addition: "Myth is synchronic history; history is sequential myth." 9. The Present Condition of the World 1 NF's holograph note in the margin: "America as the archetypal (world's oldest) country." 2 The 1919-39 Armistice. 3 "Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—" (Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, sec. 56,11.15-16).

384

Notes to pages 212-39

4 "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy" (Hamlet, 1.5.165-6). 5 The Norns were the three fates of Scandinavian mythology; Thule was the Greek and Latin name for a region variously identified as Iceland and Norway, among other places. 6 H.G. Wells, An Outline of History (1920). 7 Herman Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (New York: Alliance Book Corp., Longmans, Green, 1939). 8 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Roger Shattuck (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987), 63. 11. Criticism and Society 1 The famous wager in Fragment 418 of Pascal's Pensees, based on his theory of expected value. Pascal argued that if one believes in God, there are two possible results: either God exists or He does not. If He does not, nobody wins. If He does, the stakes are infinite life. Since the potential winnings are infinite, it is more rational to believe in God than not because such belief has greater potential value. 2 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958), Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Status Seekers (1959), John Keats, The Insolent Chariots (1958), and William Whyte, The Organization Man (1956). 3 "Concern" becomes a central concept in NF's thought from the mid-1960s to the end of his career. In CP he distinguishes between the myth of freedom, the generally liberal principle in society, and the myth of concern, the generally conservative principle. He abandons this distinction in his later work, where the opposition is between primary concerns (those things that are essential for an abundant life) and secondary concerns (ideologies). For "concern" in this sense, see WP, chap. 2, and MM, 21-2,44-5,58,71,88-9, 101-3,119-20, and 267-8. The existentialist concern that NF expands on in this entry derives chiefly from Heidegger's Besorgen. See Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 83-4. 4 The line is a refrain at the end of the first two stanzas of the "Apology" to Morris's The Earthly Paradise (1869-70). 12. Articulate English 1 NF also mentions that he has used the concept of displacement elsewhere, which is a reference to AC (1957). 2 "Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the margin. Poetry is

Notes to pages 239-52

385

when some of them fall short of it" (The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Sir John Bowring [Edinburgh: W. Tait, 1838-43], 10:444). NF uses the Bentham remark in AC, 263. 3 AC, 51-2,136-8,155-6,188,190. 4 The colleague was James Reaney. In 1957 Jay Macpherson had asked Reaney to talk to her students at Victoria College about creative writing, which he had been teaching at the University of Manitoba. One of Reaney's projects was to have students look at present-day Winnipeg literature to see if they could find patterns corresponding to those in Grimm's robberbridegroom story. Macpherson told NF about Reaney's paper describing the project; NF read it, and the next day he met Reaney in Queen's Park, suggesting that he publish the paper in College English. Reaney never followed through on the suggestion (James Reaney to Robert D. Denham, 22 April 1999)5 NF is referring to the theories of poetic subject matter and diction that Wordsworth outlines in his Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), as well as to the Appendix Wordsworth added in 1802. 13. Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism 1 Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.," in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 1150-1201. 2 T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 3-11. 3 See AC, 165-75. 4 Thomas Love Peacock, "The Four Ages of Poetry," in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 763-4. 5 "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog" (T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England [London: Faber, 1933], 151). 6 A Defence of Poetry, in The Critical Tradition, 345. 7 Ibid., 354 8 "For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end" (Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote, in Dreamtigers [New York: Dutton, 1970)] 42). 9 A Defence of Poetry, in The Critical Tradition, 347. 10 "And the two Sources of Life in EternityU Hunting and War" (Milton, pi. 35,1.2 [Erdman, 135]). See also Jerusalem, pi. 38,1. 31 (Erdman, 185).

386

Notes to pages 259-78 14. The Social Uses of Literature

1 "It is dozens of years since I myself have had a true anxiety-dream. But I remember one from my seventh or eighth year, which I submitted to interpretation some thirty years later" (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey [New York: Avon, 1965], 622). 2 Tillich's definition of religion as "ultimate concern" appears throughout his work. See, e.g., Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957), 1-4,62, and Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63), 1:2111515. Canadian Identity and Cultural Regionalism i Goldwin Smith, Reminiscences, ed. Arnold Haultain (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 421. 17. Reviews of Television Programs for the Canadian Radio-Television Commission 1 The holograph manuscript of "Reflections on November 5th," in Helen Frye's hand, is in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file 3. The final page of this manuscript is typed, apparently by NF himself. NF made a few corrections on the holograph dictation, and these were incorporated into the CRTC typescript. There are only minor differences, none substantive, between the two. Helen Frye's "TV," for example, appears as "television" in the CRTC version. 2 An experimental film, directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, that uses videotape recording (VTR) and closed-circuit television to stimulate social action in a poor district of Montreal. A citizens' committee, formed in the downtown neighbourhood of St.-Jacques, was given a VTR unit, which it used to record people's problems and concerns. After viewing the edited tapes, people recognized their common problems and began to talk of joint solutions. Produced by George C. Stoney in 1969 in the "Challenge for Change" series. 3 Robert Graves, The Naked and the Nude, in Collected Poems (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 141. 4 That is, the discussion with the CRTC staff on 5 November 1971. 5 A news story on CBC television's "The National." 6 Monty Python's skit on "the village idiot," a BBC production. 7 This last clause is in NF's handwriting, inserted into HKF's script. "Everybody" refers to the members of the CRTC research staff. 8 AC, 248-9. 9 To See Ourselves was a series of half-hour film dramas produced by CBC and

Notes to pages 278-87

387

based on stories by both well- and lesser-known writers. This particular drama, produced by David Peddle and aired on 7 October 1971, was based on Peter Taylor's Watcha Gonna Do Boy ... Watcha Gonna Be? In 1971, the series aired at 9:30 P.M. on Thursdays. 10 A CBC Glenn Gould program on the North was one of the programs reviewed at the 5 November CRTC meeting. 11 Sesame Street, imported from the U.S., had been carried on the CBC virtually since its beginnings in 1969. It aired weekdays from 11:00 A.M. until noon. 12 Andre Martin, a member of the CRTC research department. 13 A CBC documentary on air pollution in Dunnville, Ont. 14 A series of eight one-hour film documentaries made under the supervision of executive producer Cameron Graham, The Tenth Decade charted the political decade up to the Centennial year, and the Parliamentary conflict between John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson as leaders of the two major parties. The Diefenbaker-Pearson years had come to an end. Beginning just after the election of Robert Stanfield as the new Conservative Party Leader, the program treated the major events on the Canadian political scene up to April 1968, when Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister. In this program political colleagues and historians examine the personalities of the two men who led Canada during her tenth decade. The series aired on Wednesdays from 27 October to 22 December 1971. 15 In 1959 Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker cancelled the controversial Avro Arrow (CF-1O5) airplane. 16 Barkway was a journalist who wrote for the Southam News Service. 17 Joseph R. (Joey) Smallwood (1902-92) was the premier of Newfoundland from 1949 to 1972. Real Caouette (1917-76) was the leader of Quebec's Social Credit Movement. 18 Peter C. Newman, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963). 19 "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden, par. 9). 20 WTC, 138-9. 21 A CBC variety television show by Lome Michaels and Hart Pomerantz, aired on 19 November 1971. 22 "Rawhide" was Max Ferguson's popular radio show; it began in 1947 in Halifax, moved to Toronto in 1949, and continued from Halifax in 1954, when Ferguson returned to the Maritimes. 23 Lope de Vega (1562-1635), known as "the Phoenix of Spain," was the prolific playwright and pioneer of Spanish drama, author of as many as 1,800 commedias and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces. Patrick Gossage was a member of the CRTC research department.

388

Notes to pages 287-94

24 The song by Cat Stevens, popular singer at the time, was meant to be taken straight. 25 NF viewed the program that aired on 23 November 1971. 26 Mike Nichols and Elaine May gained great popularity in the late 19505 with their satirical radio skits. 27 Sennett was born in Danville, Quebec; Semon, in West Point, N.Y. 28 NF is referring to the discussion with the CRTC research department following the viewing of the television programs on 5 November 1971. 29 "Jane" refers to Jane Widdicombe, NF's secretary. South Pacific was a popular Rogers and Hammerstein musical; the Hollywood version (1958), starring Mitzi Gaynor, won an Academy Award. 30 This was a dramatic series. The episode NF saw was aired on CTV, 2 December 1971. 31 Patrick Gossage had prepared notes on the program in advance of its showing. 32 Midweek, a companion to the Weekend television show, was a CBC public affairs roundup that aired on Thursday evenings from 10:00 to 11:00 P.M. It ran from September 1971 to May 1972. 33 Marcel Lajeunesse, Canadian intellectual historian. 34 Robert Lome Stanfield (b. 1914), premier of Nova Scotia, who had become national Conservative Party leader in 1967. 35 Kuhlman (1907-76) was a well-known evangelist and faith healer. By the 19705 she had become a celebrity, and in 1970 she established a Canadian office of the Kathryn Kuhlman Foundation. Kay Sigurjonsson was one of the anchors for Midweek. 36 These two programs aired on 26 January 1972. 37 A reference to an affair that Pierre Sevigny, associate mininster of national defence, had with Gerda Munsinger between 1958 and 1961. Munsinger, who was said to be a security risk, returned to her home in Germany and Prime Minister John Diefenbaker reprimanded Sevigny. 38 Knowles (1908-97) was a respected member of Canada's Opposition. He represented Winnipeg North Centre for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party from 1942 to 1958 and from 1962 to 1984. He used his legendary knowledge of parliamentary procedure to promote social justice. 39 See Langer's Feeling and Form (1953), where she develops the theory that the arts can be classified according to the virtual fields they occupy. NF had reviewed the book almost twenty years earlier. See "Art in a New Modulation," Hudson Review, 6 (Summer 1953): 313-17; rpt. in NFCL, 111-16. 40 NF viewed episodes of this situation comedy on 20 and 27 January 1972. 41 This program was broadcast on CBC television on 2 February 1972. NF's report was received at the CRTC on 10 February.

Notes to pages 294-305

389

42 Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympics Committee, 195272. The 1972 Winter Olympics were held in Sapporo, Japan. 43 See no. 14, n. i. 44 The reference is to the televised hectoring and character assassination by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of many innocent citizens in 1953, when he was chair of the powerful Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy was formally condemned by the Senate in 1954. 45 A National Film Board production showing the struggle by Universite de Moncton students in the late 19605 to bring bilingualism to New Brunswick. 46 NF grew up in Moncton, N.B. 47 NF himself had gone to school in Moncton. 48 Andre Martin. See n. 12, above. 49 Archie Bunker was the loud-mouthed bigot, played by Carroll O'Connor, in the popular television series All in the Family. 50 See no. 26, n. 5. 51 T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 124-5. 52 Images of Canada, a series of historical documentaries, outlined the development of Canada's cultural and social history. Produced in consultation with Ramsay Cook, the series started with only two programs in 1972. NF viewed the first, 'The Craft of History," produced by George Robertson. Donald Creighton, Arthur Lower, and Michel Brunei talked with Cook about the influence of Canada's past on its present, and about historians' interpretations of the past and their consequent influence. NF viewed the program on 21 March 1972; the typescript is dated 22 March. 53 Donald Grant Creighton (1902-79), professor of history, University of Toronto, 1927-71. 54 Ramsay Cook (b. 1931), professor of history, York University. 55 Michel Brunei, a historiographer of French Canada, who taught at the Universite de Montreal. 56 Arthur Reginald Marsden Lower (1899-1988), Douglas Professor of Canadian History, Queen's University, 1947-59. 18. Introduction to the Second Volume of Harold Innis's "A History of Communications" 1 Letter of Ian Parker to Jean O'Grady, 9 February 2000. 2 See Milton's Eikonoklastes, in Hughes, 793. 3 L'Estrange actually appears in three places in chap. 7 of Innis's manuscript (Ian Parker to Jean O'Grady, 9 February 2000). 4 That is, the first of the projected three volumes of Innis's history of communications.

390

Notes to pages 306-41

5 See "Harold Innis: The Strategy of Culture," in EAC, 165. 19. William Butler Yeats i Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1943). 22. Review of Niebuhr and Butterfield i The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner's, 1952), 149. 23. Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture 1 The title of a familiar hymn: words by Anna L. Coghill (1854) and music by Lowell Mason (1864). 2 See Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). 3 An encyclical on "Reconstruction and the Social Order," issued by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931. 4 Miguel de Molinos (1640-96) was the founder of quietism, the doctrine that psychic self-annihilation is the means of attaining purity of soul, perfect contemplation, and inner peace. 5 Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 119. 6 "He [Pieper] is himself a Catholic philosopher, grounded on Plato, Aristotle and the scholastics: and he makes his position quite clear to his readers. But his writings do not constitute a Christian apologetic—that, in his view, is a task for the theologian. For him, a philosophy related to the theology of some other communion than that of Rome, or to that of some other religion than Christianity, would still be a genuine philosophy. It is significant that he pays a passing word of approval to the existentialism of Sartre, on the ground that he finds in it religious presuppositions—utterly different as they are from those which Dr. Pieper holds himself" (Introduction, ibid., 15). 24. Convocation Address: Acadia University i NF had been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley during the spring semester, teaching a course on literary symbolism and delivering the Beckman Lectures. See Ayre, 322-3. 26. Convocation Address: University of Bologna i An esoteric form of twelfth-century Provencal poetry, characterized by ingenious rhyming and technical virtuosity, both of which were apparently more important than having something to say.

Notes to pages 342-52

391

2 William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" in The Critical Tradition, 306. 3 Paul Valery, "Poetry and Abstract Thought," in The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York Pantheon, 1958), 52-81. 4 NF has in mind at least Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

5 What Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt

(alienation effect) was achieved by

presenting the familiar world in an estranging or unfamiliar way in order to arouse the spectator's critical judgment. Brecht frequently commented on the alienation effect in his writings. See, for example, "Kleines Organon fur das Theater" in Uber eine nicht-aristotelische Dramatik (Berlin: Frankfurt a.

M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1957), 150, where Brecht defines

"Verfremdungseffekt

(V-Effekt)"'; the essay appears as "A Short Organum for the Theatre," trans. John Willett in Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. Toby Cole (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961). 6 See Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). Appendix: The Social Context of Literary Criticism 1 "And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, / But like a hawk encumber'd with his hood,— / Explaining metaphysics to the nation— / I wish he would explain his Explanation" ("Dedication" to Don Juan, 11.13-16). 2 "The Paradise Lost is like the sculptured tombs of the Medici in Florence; it is not of Night and Morning, nor of Lorenzo and Giuliano, that we think of as we look at them, but solely of the great creator Michael Angelo. The same dull convention that calls the Paradise Lost a religious poem might call these religious statues. Each is primarily a great work of art; in each the traditions of two eras are blended in a unity that is indicative of nothing but the character and powers of the artist. The Paradise Lost is not the less an eternal monument because it is a monument to dead ideas" (Sir Walter [Alexander] Raleigh, Milton [London: Edward Arnold, 1922], 88). 3 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). 4 The first two "treatises" are book titles by Dame Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) and The Limits of Literary Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1956). The third "treatise" does not exist as a book title. 5 "The Word in the desert / Is most attacked by voices of temptation" (Burnt Norton, 11.158-9). 6 Sir Charles P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 7 Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963)-

392

Notes to pages 352-65

8 As stated by NF on p. 349, above, the occasion of Sidney's Defence of Poetry (1583; pub. 1595) was to refute Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse (1579), a Puritan attack on poetry. Most of Gosson's arguments against poetry were drawn from Plato. 9 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in The Critical Tradition, 151. 10 Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to A.W.M. Baillie (14 January 1883), in Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 105. 11 See no. 13, n. 5. 12 An Apology for Poetry, 158. 13 The phrase comes from the opening lines of Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefatory to The Faerie Queene. 14 Harvey's description is in a 1580 letter to Spenser. See no. i, n. 10. It is possible, however, that Harvey intends "Hobgoblin" as a reference not to The Faerie Queene but to himself. 15 "Magicam operari non est aliud quam maritare mundum," from Pico della Mirandola's Conclusiones, Philosophicae, Cabalisticae et Theologicae, posthumously published in 1495. 16 "The Four Ages of Poetry," in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 764. 17 Ibid., 763-4. 18 An Apology for Poetry, 138. 19 Ibid. 20 Biographia Literaria, in The Critical Tradition, 323. 21 "The Four Ages of Poetry," 764. 22 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 353. 23 Ibid., 341. 24 Ibid., 354. 25 Ibid., 356. 26 Ibid., 345. 27 Ibid., 347. 28 See Lewis's The Dithyrambic Spectator, published together with The Diabolical Principle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931). 29 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,11. 30 "Her world [nature's] is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden" (An Apology for Poetry, 137). "Poetry ... reproduces the common Universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it urges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being" (A Defence of Poetry, 354).

Index

Works are indexed under the name of the author; the date given is that of first publication. Abbey Theatre, 310 Acadia University, 333, 336 Acadians, 298, 300 Acadie, L' (TV program), 296-8 Adam, 342 Adams, Henry Brooks (1838-1918), 93/94 Adams, John (1735-1826), 95 Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 57,120, 304 Adonis lament, 184 Advertisements, 212, 362; "offensive to women," 285; rhetoric of, 280, 296; on television, 272, 275, 279, 284, 285, 290, 345 Air metaphor, 281 Air of Death, The (TV program), 280 Alazon, xxi, 148-9,153,154,155,156; in Shakespeare, 157 Alchemy, 248 Alexander the Great (356-23 B.C.), 93 Alfred, King (849-99), 45/ 77/ 82 Allegory, 96,255-6; as approach to literature, 243,244, 260,261, 264; cultural, 232 All in the Family (TV program), 294, 299

Alliteration, 9,22 Allopathy, 105 Alma mater, 338 American Constitution, 211 American literature: black, 250-1; drama, 155-6,218; limitations of, 214; satire, 213 American Revolution, 173 Anagnorisis (cognitio, recognition), 152 Anagogy, xxii Andersen, Hans Christian (1805-75), 179, 240 Anglican Church, 129 Anglo-Saxon. See Old English Animals, 109, 325 Anne, Queen (1665-1714), 166 Anthropology, and literary criticism, 182,186,243, 348, 361 Anti-intellectualism, 363 Aphorisms, 45, 53 Aphrodite Kallipygos, 284 Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225-74), 92, 210,255. See also Thomism Arab countries, 272 Archer, William (1856-1924), 178 Archetype: in criticism, xxii, 184-5, 186-9, 348; meaning of, 184

394 Architecture, 263 Ariel, 119 Ariosto, 191 Aristophanes (ca. 44&-ca. 388 B.C.), 156; Acharnians, 149,152; Clouds, 149 Aristotle (384-22 B.C.), 45, 55,71, 192, 326; as critic, 147; on rhetoric, 49,246, 353; on verbal structures, 193-4, 352~3; Aristotelian criticism, 145,182,183, 282 Arminius (1560-1690), 215 Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 118,184; on culture, 129, 233; Culture and Anarchy (1869), 230 Art. See Painting Arthur, Prince (1486-1502), 82 Arthurian legends, 82-3 Arts: as imagination, 263; role of in revolution, 362-3 Ascham, Roger (1515-68), 51, 52,129 Astrology, 101,107, 248 Astronomy, 248 Atom bomb, 313-14, 334 Attila the Hun (ca. 406-53), 278 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907-73), 249, 311; on Yeats, 312, 361; For the Time Being (1944), 94,127 Audience, influence of, 292,293 Augustan literature, 33, 90 Augustine, St. (A.D. 354-430), 98; City of God (412-27), 80 Augustus, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (63-14 B.C.), 80, 83, 215 Aureate diction, 15-16,40 Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 36, 62,69; Pride and Prejudice (1813), 57,129 Automation, 222-3 Avro Arrow, 283 Awdeley, John (fl. 1559-77): Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), 56

Index Bacon, Sir Francis (1561-1626), 128, 244, 93; Advancement of Learning (1605), 53; Essays (1597-1625), 53-4 Baffin Island, 286 Ballads, 34-5,47,186,187; broadside, 303; rhythm in, 10 Barberini Juno, 284 Barbour, John (ca. 1320-95), 13 Barkway, Michael, 283 Barnes, William (1801-86), 15, 20 Baseball, symbolism of, 289-90, 296 Basire, James (1769-1835), 171 Battle ofMaldon, The, 72-3 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67), 184 Beattie, James (1735-1803): The Minstrel (1771-74), xxii Beauty: conventional notion of, 284; beauty contests, 284-6 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906-89): The Unnamable (1960), 239 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-49), 115 Bede (Baeda, or "The Venerable Bede") (673-735), 75-6,77 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827), 132 Belgium, 268-9 Belief, professed and actual, 231 Bell, Alexander Graham (1847-1922), 343 Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold (1867-1931), 63, 69 Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 67; on poetry, 239 Beowulf, 45-6,48,72,76,78-9,90, 94, 119 Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1874-1948): Solitude and Society (1938), 329 Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), 234

Index Berkeley, George (1685-1753), 65, 327 Berkeley, University of California at, student protest movement at, xxvii, 333-4 Bernhardt, Sarah (1844-1923), NF does not resemble, 348 Bestiaries, 116 Bible, 47, 48,175,181,195,200,202, 221, 254,270, 305, 326; air metaphor in, 281; importance of in education, 240; language of, 36,45, 203; and literature, xxiii, 75,76-7, 96; and myth, 194; on nature, 199; pastoral symbolism in, 184; popular formulas in, 187; prophecy in, 281; Western mythology and, 257-8 Biography, and literature, 243-4,26o Birth, 337, 338 Blackmore, Richard Doddridge (1825-1900): Lorna Doone (1869), 319 Blacks, 336, 362; attitudes to, 275-6, 277; TV and, 293; black studies, 334 Blackwell, Thomas (1701-57), 33 Blake, Catherine (nee Boucher) (1762-1831), 172 Blake, William (1757-1827), 9, 33, 63, 90,116,123,130, 252; his characters as states, 281; on Chaucer, 138; NF's study of, xvi; as prophet, xxii, 170-6,181; rhythm in, 38, 39, 40; on sexual energy, 127; text and design in, 203-4; Europe (1794), 127; America (1793), 127; Jerusalem (Prophecy) (1804-20), xxiii, xxiv, 5, 34,196-204; "Jerusalem" (hymn), 176; Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), 127; Prophecies, 34, 38; Songs of Innocence (1789), 174-5; Songs of Experience (1794), 174-5 Blank verse, 17

395 Blavatsky, Madame Helena Petrovna (1831-91), 107,248, 311 Blunden, Edmund (1896-1974), xix, xx Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313-75): Decameron (1358), 133 Bodkin, Maud (1875-1967), 348 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severimus (ca. A.D. 480-524), 101; Consolation ofPhilosophy, 77 Boileau (Boileau-Despreaux), Nicholas, (1636-1711), 356 Bold Ones, The (TV program), 289-90 Bolingbroke, Viscount (Henry St. John) (1678-1751), 87,166 Bologna, University of, xxvii, 340 Bolt, Robert Oxton (1924-95): Vivat! Vivat Regina! (1971), 292 Bonanza (TV program), 264,293 Boredom, 223-7 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986), 251 Boswell, James (1740-95), 60 Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956), on alienation, 299, 345 Bridges, Robert (1844-1930), 21; Testament of Beauty (1929), 39, 40,203 British Columbia, 267,268 Bronte, Emily (1818-48): Wuthering Heights (1837), 129 Brown, Norman O. (b. 1913), 233 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-82), 54, 66; on hierarchy, 106; on nature, 121; on sex, 109,115 Browning, Robert (1812-89): rhythm in, 11,42; The Bishop Orders his Tomb, 83; The Grammarian's Funeral (1855), 41-2; The Ring and the Book (1868-69), 37 Brundage, Avery (1887-1975), 294 Brunei, Michel (b. 1917), 301 Brutus, Marcus Junius (85-42 B.C.), 360

396 Buffoon, xxi, 148-9 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, 1st Baron Lytton (1803-73), 264; Zanoni (1842), 69 Bunyan, John (1628-88), 66; The Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84), 220 Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 67,127, 128; on art as man's nature, 88; social ideas of, 129 Burke, Kenneth, 312 Burke, Stanley (b. 1924), 280 Burns, Robert (1759-96), 20, 33,75, 342 Burton, Robert (1577-1640), 66; Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 54, 55,99-100,118,119 Butler, Samuel (1613-80), 56; Hudibras (1663), 31, 50 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902): Erewhon (1872), 213 Butterfield, Sir Herbert (1900-79): History and Human Relations (1951), 321, 323-4 "Butterslide" view of history, 26,126, 233. See also U-shaped view Byron, George Gordon, Baron Byron of Rochdale (1788-1824), 161, 244, 348; Gothicism in, 91-2; Don Juan (1819-24), 16, 42 Caesar, 270 Caesar, Gaius Julius (ca. 100-44 B.C.), 81 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro (160081), 249, 360 Calvin, John (1509-64), 129 Campion, Thomas (1567-1620), 21, 109,113,114 Canada, 304; communications in, 343, 345; English and French in, 297, 298, 300; ethnic culture in, 190; historians of, 301; humour

Index in, 286; identity in, 278-9; Innis on, 306; myth of concern in, 336; national anthem in, 300; national character in, 278; nationalism and regionalism in, 266-9; politics in, 212, 282-3, 291; speech in, 285; TV photography in, 300-1; and the U.S., 207. See also North America Caouette, Real (1917-76), 283 Capitalism, 143,216,219,275, 278, 290; Marx on, 210; overproduction in, 214 Capital punishment, 277 Capote, Truman (1924-84): In Cold Blood (1966), 289 Carducci, Giosue (1835-1907), 341 Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 67, 70, 128; on work, 328; Past and Present (1843), 89-90; Sartor Resartus (1833-34), 65, 230 Carol Burnett Show, The, (TV program) 287-8 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-98), 240; Alice in Wonderland (1865), 69-70,129,165, 200, 256, 261, 283, 349 Cassius (Gaius Cassius Longinus) (d. 42 B.C.), 360 Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di Novilava (1478-1529): The Courtier (1528), 49, 52 Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), 82 Caxton, William (ca. 1422-ca. 1491), 19,47 CBC, 268; NF's reviews for, xx, xxvii Celine, Louis-Ferdinand (1894-1961), 357 Celts, 82; poetry of, 33 Censorship, 276, 303-4 Centrifugal meaning, 192 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547-1616):

Index Don Quixote (1605-15), 150,153, 251, 319, 379n- 32 Chaos, 103-4 Chaplin, Charles (Charlie) (18891977): The Great Dictator (1940), 149 Chapman, George (ca. 1559-1634), 350; Eastward Ho (1605), 128; trans. Iliad (1598-1608), 17 Character books, 55 Character types, in comedy, 148-54, 245 Charles I (1600-49), 161,162; Eikon Basilike, 303 Charles II (1630-85), ill, 163, 303 Charles, Edward Stuart (Young Pretender) (1720-1788), 318 Chartres Cathedral, 210 Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), 9, 33 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345-1400), 6, 1,9,29, 35> I"/112,118,173,191; language of, 19; rhythm in, 11,12, 13-14,16-17; House of Fame, xix, 102,131,134,136; Legend of Good Women, 109,134; Troilus and Criseyde, xix, 101,131-9 passim; trans. Boethius, 77,133 - Canterbury Tales, xix-xx, 12,104, 105; decorum in, 57; General Prologue, 69,116; Man of Law's Tale, 98; Monk's Tale, 78; Nun's Priest's Tale, 100; Parson's Tale, 46, 55-6,66, 134-5,135-6/ 255; Retraction, 135-6; Tale ofMelibee, 133-4,136; Tale of Sir Thopas, 34,134,136; tales and their relationships, 132-9; Wife of Bath's Tale, 117 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (18601904), 154 Chemistry, 248 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (18741936), 92; on Chaucer, 134 Chiasson, Rodrigue, xxvi

397 Chicago Tribune, 322 Children, literature for, 263-4, 3°5 China, 209,220, 224; literature in, 341; media in, 272,295,297,299; Nixon in, 298; propaganda in, 362 Chirico, Giorgio de (1888-1978), 341 Christianity: absorption of pagan symbolism by, 74-5; and Communism, 322-3; and history, 80-1,86, 323, 324; in Lagerkvist's novel, 320; and leisure, 327-8; and literature, 46,75-9,96,194,255, 353, 356, 358; and love poetry, 109-10,113-14; in Middle Ages, 230,231,246; modern, in America, 211-12, 213, 231; and myth of concern, 335; and nature, 108; pastoral symbolism in, 184; in politics, 210; visual and auditory emphases in, 271. See also Church, Christian; Protestantism; Roman Catholic Church Church, Christian: Manzoni on, 319; medieval view of, 94; and pacifism, 218; and politics, 219; Reformation view of, 84; and Roman Empire, 80; role of, 220 Churchill, Charles (1731-64): The Ghost (1762), 31 Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965): funeral of, 271, 298; oratory of, 296 Church of England: Milton and, 161, 244; Swift on, 170 Churl, xxi Cibber, Colley (1671-1757), 81 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 B.C.), 59,67, 353; as model, 50, 52, 83, 247; De Oratore, 49 Civilization: as imaginative construct, 263; as natural state, 86-7; nature and, 257 Civil Service, 282

398 Civil War, American, 322 Classic or model, 248 Classics, 47, 48; importance of teaching mythology of, 240; literature of, influences English poetry, 21; mythology of, and Bible, 258. See also Greece, New Comedy, Rome Cloud of Unknowing, The, 46 Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819-61), 39, 40, 203 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (17721834), 172,186,230, 348, 355, 356; on imagination, 26,71, 263; on nature, 121; Biographia Literaria (1817), 53; Kubla Khan (1816), 66, 124; Lyrical Ballads (1798), 34; Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), 184; (1800 version), 35; Coleridgean criticism, 182 Collins, William (1721-59), 33 Colquhoun, Archibald, 318 Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506), 98 Comedy, 138; character in, xxi, 148-54; and experience, 129; Irish writers prominent in, 146,176, 310; Jonsonian and Shakespearean, 144-7; of manners, 144; romantic, 333; structure of, 147-8,152-3; on television, 277-8; and tragedy, 131-2; vision of, 154-9; wishfulfilment in, 262 Comic strips, 150 Commercials. See Advertisements Commonplace books, 53 Communication, 260-1,273-4,280; in Canada, 343, 345; expansion of means of, 344-5; Innis on, 302-6, 345; private and public, 341-2, 344 Communism, 209; Niebuhr on, 322-3; and 1984,143; persecution of, 208; religion and, 214; sup-

Index port for, in U.S., 218-20; theory of, 224 Comparative literature, xxiii, 184, 190-1 Computers, 278, 293, 306, 343 Concern: myth of, 335-6; mythology relates to, 234, 359 Concrete poetry, 44 Condensation, 341 Conditioning. See Mythology, social Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu) (551-479 B.C.), 95 Congregationalists, 38on. 5 Congreve, William (1670-1729), 146, 176; The Way of the World (1700), 66, 132 Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), 184; Lord Jim (1900), 257 Consciousness, 325-6 Conservative and radical, as movements in English poetry, 8-9, 36, 43-4, 63-4 Conservative Party (Canada), 282-3 Conservative view of society, 126-7 Contemporary literature, 43-4, 48, 361-2 Convention, 183-4,186, 245; effect of, 351 Convocation, 333; NF's addresses at, xxvii Cook, Ramsay (b. 1931), 301 Cooper, Lane (1875-1959): An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (1922), xxi Cooperative housing, 288-9 Copernicus, Nicolas (1473-1543), 98, 128 Cosmology, 257-8; four-level, 106-9, 112,116,121,124; literature and, 97-109; reversal of, 120-6 Couplets, 30, 351 Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 25-6, 34,85

Index Cowper, William (1731-1800), 123 Coyne, James Elliott (b. 1918), 282 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop (1489-1556), 292 Crashaw, Richard (16137-49), 24, 25-6, 34 Creation, human and divine, 121, 258-9, 358-9; creation myth, 125 Creighton, Donald Grant (1902-79), 300-1 Criticism, literary, 194; contemporary, 340, 346; function of, 247-52, 299; modern schools of, 182-3; psychology and, 188; relation to literature, xxv, 236, 243-5, 347~8; relation to other subjects, xxv, 229-30, 348-9; social context of, xxiv, xxv-xxvi, 234-5, 349, 361, 363; and teaching of English, 239-42. See also particular schools Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658), 162-3, 169 CRTC: NF's work for, xxvi; policies of, 268 Cuba, 272 Culture: and nature, 257; one's own and foreign, 251-2 Cycles: of history, 79-80, 93-4; imagery of natural, 73-4, 78; and mutability, 103 Cynewulf, 45 Dadaism, 186, 276 Daniel, 85; Book of, 84 Daniel, Samuel (1563-1619): Defence of Rhyme (1603), 21; Musophilus (1599), 5 Daniells, Roy (1902-79), xxii Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 81, 95, 139, 210, 230, 254, 255, 261, 357; cosmology of, 97, 98,102,106,107, 248; language of, 340-1, 346; on

399 love, 111,112; on polysemy, xxii, 182,189; Purgatory in, 184; translation of, 251; De Vulgari Eloquentia, 340-1, 342; Divine Comedy, 132, 342, 343, 346; Inferno, xx, 142, 360 Darwin, Charles (1809-82), 180; Descent of Man (1871), 244; Origin of Species (1859), 89, 244 David, King, 101 Davies, Sir John (1569-1626): Orchestra (1622), 103 Death, 337, 338; as poetic theme, 115 Decorum, in literature, 57-8 Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731), 55, 61,69; A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), 304; Robinson Crusoe (1719), 128 De Gaulle, Charles Andre Joseph Marie (1890-1970), 283 Deism: Blake on, 200; contemporary, in North America, xxiv, 210-15, 217-20 De la Mare, Walter (1873-1956), 37 Deloney, Thomas (ca. 1560-1600), 58, 128,129 Del Virgilio. See Virgilio Democracy, 129; and apathy, 335; ideals of, 336; Niebuhr on, 322; in North America, 216; poetry and, 255; Shaw on, 179-80 Denham, Sir John (1615-69), 29 Depression, the, 209, 287 De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859) 70, 124-5 Detective stories, 30, 241, 351 De Valera, Eamon (1882-1975), 311 Developers, 288-9 Dickens, Charles John Huffham (1812-70), 69, 91,129,178, 241, 256, 347; The Chimes (1845), 125; David Copperfield (1850), 150; Little Dorrit (1855-57), 232; Oliver Twist (1837),

4OO

129; Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), 232 Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (183086), 112 Diefenbaker, John George (18951979), 267, 282,283 Discursive writing. See Prose Disney, Walt (Walter Elias) (190166), 280 Displacement, 241, 341 Documentary criticism, 185,243,245 Donne, John (1572-1631), xxii, 18,19, 23-5; cosmology of, 102,119; on love, 114; satire in, 30; sermons of, 54-5; sexual imagery in, no, 111, 115 Don Quixote. See Cervantes Douglas, Gavin (14757-1522), 9 Douglas, Lloyd (1877-1951): The Robe (1942), 320 Drama, 61,67, 232; history of, 176, 303; humour in, 294; meaning in, 274; printed and oral, 48; real world and, 158-9; rhetoric in, 66-7, 83-4; ritual and, 187-8. See also Comedy; Tragedy Drayton, Michael (1563-1631), 85; Poly-Olbion (1612-22), 17 Dream, 70,186, 341; and literature, 187,188; and mythology, 124-5, 259; and television, 292-4; wish and anxiety in, 295 Dream of the Rood, The, 79 Druids, 91; Blake on, 200,201 Dryden, John (1631-1700), 9, 30, 31, 63; on language, 51; on progress, 86; his prose style, 59-60; Absalom and Achitophel (1681), n; Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), 32, 59; The Hind and the Panther (1687), 119 Dunbar, William (14567-1513?), 9,16, 18,74

Index Duns Scotus, Johannes (ca. 12651308), 128 Dystopia, xx Ear, symbolism of. See Hearing and seeing Earth-mother goddess, 114 Eden, garden of, 78,107,197 Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1931), 343 Education: for leisure, 225,226; liberal, 232-3, 338, 339; in Middle Ages, 48-9; in North America, 211, 212, 214-15; poetry and, 361; of prince, as literary genre, 68; in Renaissance, 49-52, 353; and social mythology, xxv, 230-3; and student unrest, xxvii Edward I (1239-1307), 91 Egypt, Pharaoh in, 270 Eighteenth century: attitude to poetry in, 27, 32-4; change of mythological view in, 258-9; ideas of, 87-8; literature of, 27,48, 53,67, 90,122, 304-5 Eiron, xxi, 148-9,150-2,154-5, *56, 157 Elements, theory of, 102,104 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-80), 69, 256 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965), 9,42, 90,109, 299, 311, 312, 328, 329, 349; on explicit vs. real meaning, 249, 354; on metaphysicals, 24; on Romantics, 37; rhythm in, 39; social views of, 93,127; tower imagery, 184; on tradition, 245; Ash-Wednesday (1930), 112; Burnt Norton (1935), 103; The Cocktail Party (1950), 152,158; East Coker (1940), 75; Four Quartets (1935-42), 108; Gerontion (1920), 39-40; The

Index Hollow Men (1925), 75; Little Gidding (1942), 25,92, 95; Sweeney Agonistes (1932), 43; The Waste Land (1921), 39, 40, 94,102 Elizabeth I (1533-1603), 17,77, 85, 160, 301 Elizabeth II (b. 1926), 271 Elizabethan age: communications in, 302-3; oral culture in, 354; program about, 291-2 literature of, 26,47-8,85-6,115, 186; decorum in, 57-8; drama in, 139,147-8,151; and idea of role of poet, 46, 49, 254-5, 350-!> 358; ut pictura poesis view, 246, 353, 354. See also Renaissance Ellmann, Richard (1918-87): Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948), 30911; and Feidelson, eds., The Modern Tradition (1965), 229-30 Elyot, Thomas (ca. 1490-1546): The Governour (1531), 50 England: Blake on, 173,176,204; history of, 160-1,163,166; Milton on, 162. See also Great Britain English (discipline): teaching of, 236. See also Literature, teaching of English (language), 238; character of, 5-8; history of, 4-6,15-16,19-20, 38-9, 40-1 English literature: excellence of, 33; expansion of, 309; history of, xvxviii, 3-130. See also Great Britain Engraving, wood, 313-14 Epic, 68 Equality, as North American value, 336 Erasmus, Desiderius (ca. 1466-1536): Adagia (1508), 53 Erikson, Erik Homburger (1902-94), 279 Eros, and Thanatos, 114-15

401 Eskimos, 281, 336; art of, 286 Essay, as literary genre, 65,176 Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux) (1566-1601), 292 Euphuism, 52-3,67-8,116 Euripides (ca. 480-406 B.C.), 152; Alcestis, 152 Eve, 83,258 Evil, 106 Evolution, 108; and mythopoeic world picture, 234, 359; progress and, 89; religion and, 213; Shaw on, 180. See also Progress Existentialism, 233 Exodus, 257 Ezekiel, Book of, 199 Fabian socialism, 129,177 Fairies, in English literature, 90, 117-18,119-20,197 Fairy tales, 187, 240 Faith healing, 291 Fall of man, 83 Falstaff, 145,150,153, 379n. 32 Fantasy literature, 263-4, 3^5 Fascism, 209, 218-19, 335 Faulkner, William (1897-1962), 250 Fawkes, Guy (1570-1606), 75 Fiction: realism and fantasy in contemporary, 263-4; real life ar*d, 289, 304-5. See also Novel Fiedler, Leslie A. (b. 1917): An End to Innocence, 229, 233 Fielding, Henry (1707-54), 61; on the novel, 57; Tom Jones (1749), 62, 303 Fifth monarchy, 84 Films. See Movies Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80): La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874), 232 Folk songs, 43 Folk tales, 96,187, 240,253-4,257; myth and, 248-9

402

Football, symbolism of, 289-90, 296-7, 298 Ford, Henry (1863-1947), 216 Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (18791970), 150; A Passage to India (1923), 252 Four-level cosmos. See Cosmology Franco (Bahamonde), Francisco (1892-1975), 218 Frazer, Sir James George (1854-1941): The Golden Bough (1907-15), 187-8, 200-1 Frederick II, the Great (1712-86), 304 Freedom: British culture and, 130; Milton on, 161-2,164-6; myth of, and the university, 336 Free verse, in Milton, 29 French (language): influence of on English language, 4,7,15; teaching of in Canada, 298 French literature, 69,190-1, 341; influence of on English literature, 10,17,21,29, 32,191 French Revolution, 173; ideas of, 87, 88,89 Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), 124, 244; and anxiety dreams, 259, 261-2, 294-5; on dream, 341; on ego, 126; on reality principle, 293; Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. 1930), 233; Freudianism, 127,188 Frobenius, Johannes (1460-1527), 94 Frost, Robert (1874-1963): on poetry, 191 Fry, Christopher (Harris) (b. 1907): The Lady's Not for Burning (1949), 158 Frye, Herman Edward (1870-1959), 297 Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912-91): his style, xxviii

Index projected works: ogdoad, xv-xvi, xviii-xix; Rencontre, see under works speeches: "Blake's Biblical Illustrations" (1982), xxiii; "George Orwell" (1949 or 1950), xx-xxi; "Literature and Language" (1974), xxiii; radio reviews, xx, xxvii; radio talks on the writer as prophet, xxii; "Shakespeare's Comedy of Humors" (1950), xxi, xviii; "The Social Context of Literary Criticism" (Cornell, 1968), xxvii-xxviii works: Anatomy of Criticism (1957), see below; "The Archetypes of Literature" (1951), xxii; "The Argument of Comedy" (1949), xxi; "Articulate English," xxv; "Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy" (1953), xxi; The Critical Path (1971), xxv, xxvii-xxviii; "Criticism and Society," xxv; The Educated Imagination (1963), xxv; Fearful Symmetry (1947), xv, xxiii; The Great Code (1982), xv, xxiii; "Leisure and Boredom" (1963?), xxiv; "The Literary Meaning of 'Archetype'" (1952), xix, xxii; Merton College essays, xix-xx; "Mythos and Logos" (1968), xxvii-xxviii; notebooks, xv; 'The Present Condition of the World" (1943), xxiv; "Rencontre: The General Editor's Introduction," xv-xviii; "Romanticism" (1933), xvi; The Stubborn Structure (1970), xxiv; A Study of English Romanticism (1968), xv; 'Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism" (1969), xxv; Words with Power (1990), xvi, xxii Anatomy of Criticism (1957), xxiii,

Index xxv, 278; archetype in, xxii-xxiii; comedy in, xxi; irony in, xx; literary history in, xv; ogdoad and, xv; Rencontre and, xviii Fuller, Thomas (1608-61), 377n. 4 Future, 338; mirage of, 364; Futurism, 341 Galbraith, John Kenneth (b. 1908): The Affluent Society (1958), 232 Galen (Claudius Galenus) (ca. A.D. i3O-ca. 201), 105 Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564-1642), 98 Gallico, Paul (1897-1976): The Poseidon Adventure (1969), 256-7 Gascoigne, George (ca. 1534-77), 47 Genesis, Book of, 87,99, 258 Genre, 183-4,185, 245, 342 Geography, 237 George I (1660-1727), 166 George, St., 74 Georgian poetry, 37 German (language), 7,15,71 Germany: culture of, 304; Nazism in, 212, 215-20 passim Gibbon, Edward (1737-94): Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (177688), 84,92 Gibbs, Wolcott (1902-58), 378n. 10 Gilbert, Stuart (1883-1969): James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1952), 68 Gilbert, William (1540-1603), 128 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836-1911) and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842-1900), 42; The Mikado (1885), 158,188 Globe and Mail (Toronto), 268 God: modern American view of, 213-14; as wisdom, 327 Gods, 270; false, 271 God That Failed, The (1949), 129

403 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (17491832), 304 Gog and Magog, 81 Golden Age, 78,80,221 Goldsmith, Oliver (17307-74), 176 Gonne, Maud (1866-1953), 310 Gorboduc (1561), 81 Gospels, 315 Gossage, Patrick, xxvi, 287, 289 Gosson, Stephen (1554-1624): School of Abuse (1579), 349, 352 Gothicism, 90-2 Gould, Glenn (1932-82), 279 Gower, John (i33o?-i4o8), 12,111; Confessio Amantis (1390), 109 Graduation, college: significance of, 333, 336, 337-9 Grammar, 48,49; in learning to write, 237-8; and meaning, 194; in speech, 238 Graves, Robert von Ranke (18951985), 276, 357; The White Goddess (1948), 114-15, 201 Gray, Thomas (1716-71), 33, 35; The Bard (1757), 91; Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1751), 6 Great Britain, 209; characteristics of culture of, 128-30; history of, 4-5; legendary history of, 81-3 Great Chain of Being, 106,257 Greece, ancient: culture of, 127-8, 220; literature of, as model, 20; Olympics in, 296; religion in, 108, 271, 281; Spengler on, 93 Greek, 71; influence on English language, 39 Greene, Robert (1558-92), 26; Card of Fancy (1584), 52-3 Gregory, (Isabella) Augusta, Lady (1852-1932), 310 Greville, Sir Fulke, ist Baron Brooke (1554-1628), 68, 85

404

Griffin, Bartholomew (ca. 1579-1602), 113 Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812-15), 241 Gurus, 45 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider (18561925), 264; She (1887), 69 Hakluyt, Richard (15527-1616), 128 Hall, James (b. 1917) and Martin Steinmann (b. 1915): The Permanence of Yeats, 311-12 Hamilton, Ont., 368n. 24 Harbage, Alfred (1901-76): As They Liked It (1947),147~8 Harcourt, Brace, projected anthology of English literature, xvi-xviii, 3-4 Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), 9,154; The Dynasts (1904-8), 120; The Return of the Native (1878), 62; Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), 123 Harvard, NF at, xxi Harvey, Gabriel (ca. 1550-1631), 21, 354; on Spenser, 21 Harvey, William (1578-1657), 105 Havelock, Eric Alfred (1903-88), 352 Hawes, Stephen (ca. 1475-1511): The Pastime of Pleasure (1512), 14-15 Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 32 Hearing and seeing, 204, 270-2, 280, 281, 287, 299 Hebrews, 82; culture of, 127-8,270-1, 352; poetry of, 33. See also Jews Hegelianism, 129 Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976): Was Heisst Denken? (1954), 195 Hell, nature of, xx-xxi Henry VII (1457-1509), 82, 84-5 Henry VIII (1491-1547), 82,85,128 Heraclitus (ca. 540-0. 480 B.C.), 45 Herbert, George (1593-1633), 25, 44, 129

Index Hercules, 258 Hermes Trismegistus, 350 Hero figure, 73,79,150 Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), 113 Hesiod (8th century B.C.), 44, 350 Heywood, Thomas (15747-1641), 139 Hinduism: image of drunken monkey in, 198 Hirohito, Emperor of Japan (190189), 294 Historical criticism, 182,183,185, 251 History, 237,246; Christian view of, 86; and criticism, 243, 348, 361; historian's task, 323-4; lesson of, 283; medieval theories of, 79-81; mythical shapes in, 82-4, 91-5,126, 383n. 11; personalities and, 292; poetry and, 352-3; progressive view of, 219-20; real, 339; sense of, 279 Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945), 209, 216, 218, 272, 286 Hoby, Sir Thomas (1530-66), 52 Hockey, 296-7,298 Holland, 303 Homeopathy, 105 Homer (8th c. B.C.), 46, 67, 72,183, 193, 352; eighteenth-century attitude to, 33; medieval attitude to, 81; style of, 350-1, 356; Iliad, 44, 81, 200; Odyssey, 44,125 Hone, Joseph (1882-1959): W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939 (1943), 309 Hood, Thomas (1799-1845), 8 Hooker, Richard (1554-1600), 54,129 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89), 9,10,18, 36,112,128; on inscape, 127; on overthought and underthought, 353; rhyme in, 42; on sprung rhythm, 11,26 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65-8 B.C.), 315

Index Housman, A(lfred) E(dward) (18591936), 30, 37,123 Howe, Irving: Steady Work (1966), 229, 233 Hudson, W(illiam) H(enry) (18411922): Green Mansions (1904), 184 Hugo, Victor Marie (1802-85), 341 Humanism: atheistic, 213; tenets of, 20-1,22, 28, 50, 56, 68, 83-4, 93, 247 Hume, David (1711-76), 65 Humours: comedy of, 149-50,153, 157; theory of, 56-7,104-5,108-9 Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-95): Evolution and Ethics (1893), 126 Hyde, Laurence (b. 1914): The Southern Cross (1951), 313-14 Iambic pentameter, 10-12 Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906), 146,154; Shaw on, 178 Iconoclasm, 271-2 Identity, personal, 285-6, 298, 299300. See also Persona, Role Images of Canada (TV program), 300-1 Imagination, role of, 127,235, 252, 261, 263, 266; Shelley on, 358, 359-^0 Imitation, 183,186 Immigrants, 279 Incarnation, 349 Independents (in English Civil War), 38on. 5 India, 153 Industrial Revolution, 222 Innis, Harold (1894-1952), xxvi; on communications, 302-6, 345 Innocence and experience, 174-6,197 Ireland, 268-9; contribution to English literature, 67,146,176, 310; Swift and, 166-8; Yeats and, 310-11 Irish (language), influence on English, 40-1

405 Irony, xx; in advertising and propaganda, 275; in comedy, 155-6; meaning of, 322; vision of, 154 Irving, Sir Henry (1838-1905), 153 Islam, 247 Isocrates (436-338 B.C.), 54 Italian (language): Dante and, 340, 342, 346; influence on English literature, 32,191; rhyme in, 8 Italy: literature of, influences English, 4,17, 21,29; Manzoni's study of, 319; NF in, xxvii; painting in, 341 James I (1566-1625), 160-1 James, Henry (1843-1916), 58,62,129 James, William (1842-1910), 129 Jansenists, 271 Japan, 217, 294 Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826), 321, 357 Jesus, 180; birth of, 80; Blake's interpretation of, 197; modern American attitude to, 211; teachings of, 98 Jews, 162,220; persecution of, 216, 218; Judaism, 217. See also Hebrews Job, Book of, 158,184 John, King (1167-1216), 128 Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), 9, 63,129, 146,173, 230; on executions, 277; ideas of, 86,87; on metaphysicals, 24, 26; on Milton, 31; prose style of, 60-1; on Sterne, 63; Lives of the Poets (1779-81), 26, 86; The Rambler (1750-2), 304; Rasselas (1759), 87-8 Jonah, 220 Jonson, Ben (1572/3-1637), 7-8, 51, 75,147; character in, 150,156; comedy in, 144-7, H8,155/157; on Donne, 24; humours, theory of, 149-50; on rhyme, 21; on Sidney, 58; on Spenser, 20; The Alchemist

406 (1612), 84,139,145,150,151,155, 158; Bartholomew Fair (1631), 145, 150,155; Epicene, or The Silent Woman (1616), 149; Every Man In His Humour (1601), 151; Every Man Out of His Humour (1600), 56,149; The Magnetic Lady (1631), 152; The Staple of News (1626), 303; Volpone (1607), 132,150; Works (1616), 47-8, 303 Joyce, James, 63, 299, 310; Finnegans Wake (1939), 41,94, 95,125, 341; Ulysses (1922), 57, 68,125 Judas Iscariot, 360 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961): NF and, 348; literature and, 188 Junius, Francis (1589-1677), 304 Juno, 284 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) (ca. A.D. 6o-ca. 136), 93 Keats, John (1795-1821), 65,173; on ideal society, 126; on poetry, 244; Endymion (1818), 41; The Fall of Hyperion, 36; Hyperion (1820), 36;

odes, 37,115 Keats, John (b. 1920): The Insolent Chariots (1958), 232 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (1917-63), 282; death of, 271, 295 Kennings, 10 Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630), 98 Kierkegaard, S0ren Aabye (1813-55), 127, 329 King, Edward (1612-37), 244 Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936), 128; //, 357 Knowles, Stanley (1908-97), 292 Kuhlman, Kathryn (1907-76), 291 Lagerkvist, Par Fabian (1891-1974): Barabbas (1950), 320

Index Lajeunesse, Marcel (b. 1942), 291 Lake Superior Park, 291 Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 64-5,172 Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864): Imaginary Conversations (1853), 70 Langer, Susanne K. (1895-1985), 293 Langland, William (ca. 1330-0. 1386), 19,128 Language, xxiii, 71; and comparative literature, 191; conditions for flourishing, 41; Dante on, 342; ordinary and poetic, 125-6 Latin (language and literature), 4-5, 50; Dante and, 340, 346; history of, 83-4; influence of on English language, 14-16; influence of on English literature, 20-1,28, 32, 38, 191 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (18851930), 95, "6, 249, 311, 355, 357, 359; The Plumed Serpent (1926), 90 Leacock, Stephen (1869-1944), 286 Legends, 240, 257 Leisure, xxiv, 224-7; Pieper on, 326-8 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870-1924), 327, 357; influence of, 209 L'Estrange, Sir Roger (1616-1704), 303 Letters, as literary genre, 65 Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898-1963), 107 Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair (1885-1951), 213 Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882-1957), 42, 357, 362 Liberalism, 211,218 Liberal Party (Canada), 283 Liberty. See Freedom Library of Congress, 347 Light verse, 30 Lincoln, Abraham (1809-65), 322, 357; Gettysburg Address, 296

Index Lindsay, Vachel (1879-1931), 362 Linguistics, 191 Linus, 350 Literal meaning, 245 Literature: and criticism, 347-8; and dream, 341; history of, 234,245; and life, 281-2; like painting (ut pictura poesis), 246, 353, 354, 356; local and universal in, 250-2; makes human world, 240, 241-2; meaning in, 185-6,192-5; and moral status of author, 249,260, 357; and mythology, 71-4, 95-7, 248-9, 251, 252, 253-4; NF's theory of, xxiii; oral, see Oral literature; pastness of, 250; popular, 187,188, 191, 255-6, 259,261, 262; primitive, 187,188; social function of, xxvxxvi, 189; as total construct, 184-5, 188, 360 teaching of: as coherent structure, 236-42; as criticism, 229, 236; in North America, 247; and total verbal experience of student, 25961,264. See also Comparative literature Locke, John (1632-1704), 60, 65,129, 349 Logic, 48, 49 Logos, 329 London: Blake on, 173-4, !75; as literary centre, 19, 342 Louis XIV (1638-1715), 29,271 Louis XVI (1754-93), *73 Love poetry, 68; conventions of, 109-15 Lower, Arthur Reginald Marsden (1899-1988), 301 Lowth, Bishop (1710-87), 33 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Cams) (ca. 99-55 B.C.), 97 Luther, Martin (1483-1546), 215, 244

407

Lyly, John (15547-1606), 129; Campaspe (1584), 379n. 39; Euphues (1578), 52 Macaronic verse, 16, 40 MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Murray Grieve) (1892-1978), 20 MacDonald, George (1824-1905), 71, 264; Phantasies (1858), 69 Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527): The Prince (1532), 49 Macpherson, James (1736-96): Ossian poems, 9, 33, 34,90, 91,92 Madrigal, 27 Magic, 350, 355 Maine, Acadians in, 300 Major British Writers, xvii Mallarme, Stephane (1842-98), 341 Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471): Morte Darthur, 69, 85-6 Mandeville, Bernard (1670-1733): The Fable of the Bees (1714), 31 Manet, Edouard (1832-83), 86 Manzoni, Alessandro (1785-1873): The Betrothed (1827; trans. 1951), 318-20 Mao Tse-tung (or Zedong) (18931976), 357' 362 Marconi, Guglielmo, Marchese (1874-1937), 343 Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979), 233 Marinetti, Emilio Filippo Tommasi (1876-1944), 341 Maritime provinces, 267 Marlborough, John Churchill, ist Duke of (1650-1722), 166 Marlowe, Christopher (1564-93) 28; Dr. Faustus (1604), 47, 99,155; Tamburlaine (1587), 155 Marprelate Tracts, 302 Marriage, 337; Milton on, 162; Shaw on, 179

408

Martin, Andre (b. 1925), xxvi, 280, 298 Marvell, Andrew (1621-78), 24 Marx, Karl (1818-83), 126,177, 210; influence of, 209; Das Kapital (1867), 178 Marxism, 127,129,272; its attitude to literature, 246,255, 352, 360, 362; mythology of, 230, 231,233; theory of, 325, 327; Marxist criticism, 182, 348. See also Communism Mary, Queen (1516-58), 301 Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-87), 91 Masks, 280 Masque, 187 Mathematics, 194,236 Maugham, William Somerset (18741965), 179 May, Elaine (b. 1932), 287 McCarthy, Joseph Raymond (190957), 295, 322; McCarthyism, 335 McGill University, 337 McLuhan, Herbert Marshall (191180), 299, 345, 349; on content of a medium, 280; on hot and cool media, 292, 344; on linear vs. simultaneous media, 306; Understanding Media (1964), 229,233 Media: history of, 294; hot and cool, 280, 344, 345; mass, 278, 282; objectivity in, 273-4. See also Technology; Television Melodrama, 155 Melville, Herman (1819-91): MobyDick (1851), 184, 349 Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis) (18801956), 213 Meredith, George (1828-1909): Modern Love (1862), 112; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), 129; The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), 70 Metaphor, 193

Index Metaphysical poetry, 24-6; Johnson on, 61 Methodism, 304 Michaels, Lome (b. 1944), 286 Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti) (1475-1564), 171,172 Middle Ages, 19,21; Chaucer and, 135; Christianity in, 210, 230, 231, 246,271; concept of Christendom in, 80-1; as cultural ideal, 92, 351; education in, 48-9; literary theory in, 182; literature of, 69,76,77-8, 186; mythology of, 233; Trojan War and, 81; view of history in, 94 Middle English, 15,19; influence of, 191; rhythm in, 10-11 Midweek (TV program), 290-1 Miles gloriosus, 149,153-4,154-5 Military establishment, university and, 334, 335 Mill, James (1773-1836), 67 Mill, John Stuart (1608-74), 67; On Liberty (1859), 129, 233 Milton, John (1608-74), 9, 26, 36, 54, 90, 92, 96,125,130,154,173, 254, 261, 316; cosmology of, 97, 98-9, 102,103,104,106,107,108,112, 118-19; on England, 84; language of, 38; on language, 50, 51; as prophet, xxii, 160-5,168-9,170, 172,181; rhyme in, 28-9; rhythm in, 11, 39,43; satire in, 30-1; style of, 55, 66; Arcades (1632), 103; Areopagitica (1644), 54,84,162, 303, 38on. 3; Comus (1634), 75,81,102, 112,119,163; Eikonoklastes (1649), 303; Epitaphium Damonis (1640), 83; History of Britain (1670), 83; // Penseroso (1645), 118-19; L'Allegro (1645), 119; Lycidas (1637), 6, 61,75, 163,184,244; Nativity Ode (1645),

Index 28,120,163; Paradise Lost (1667), 5, 26,28-9, 38, 55,77, 86, 98-9,108, 118,152,164-5, *66/176, 348; Samson Agonistes (1671), 29; Sonnets, 30-1, 43; Tetrachordon (1645), 30-1 Miss Canada Beauty Contest, 284-6 Modern age: cultural decline in, 277; explosion of influences in, 344-5; persecution of artists in, 345-6; revolution in, 362-4; ritual in, 295-6, 298-9, 299 Modern literature: influence of Spengler on, 94; social ideals in, 95; themes in, 90. See also Contemporary literature Moliere, (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622-73), 146,149,150-1; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1671), 44; Tartuffe (1664), 156,158 Molinos, Miguel de (1640-96), 327 Moncton, bilingual strife in, 297-8, 300 Monmouth, Geoffrey of (1100?1154), 81-2, 83 Monotheism, 270 Montale, Eugenio (1896-1981), 341 Moody, Dwight Lyman (1837-99), 176 Moon, landing on, 271, 298 Moore, George Edward (1873-1958), 310 Morality play, 155 More, Ann (d. 1617), 25 More, Sir Thomas, St. (1478-1535): Utopia (1516), 68,128, 213, 222 Morgan, Lome Thompson (b. 1897): The Permanent War; or, Homo the Sap (1943), 141 Morley, Thomas (1557-1603), 27 Morris, William (1834-96), 9,15, 36, 70,71; his view of history, 92;

409 Earthly Paradise (1869-70), 234-5; News from Nowhere (1891), 328; The Wood beyond the World (1894), 69-70 Moses, 271, 339 Movies, 148,150,187, 212,225, 259, 271, 343, 361; history of, 294; as major art form, 272,299; silent, 272, 287-8, 314; TV and, 290, 293,296. See also Media Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (175691), 132,146; The Magic Flute (1791), 158,292; The Marriage of Figaro (1786), 158 Munsinger, Gerda (fl. 1966), 292 Musaeus, 350 Music, 48,263, 343, 363; baroque, 351; natural harmony and, 101-2; as play, 338; rhythm in, 10, 25,27; transcends tragedy and comedy, 158 Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945), 272 Myth, xvi, 351-2; and concern, 359; of concern and of freedom, 335-6; and criticism, 361; dream and, 124-5; history and, 82, 383n. 11; as human construct, 257-9; importance of study of, 240-1; and literature, 71-4, 95-7,125,192,193, 248-9, 251, 252, 253-4, 255; revival of in i8th century, 33; and science, 234; types of, 230-4; myth criticism, 183 social: as conditioning, xxvi; literature and, 260; open and closed, xxv, 231-3; relation to thinkers, 210. See also Cosmology Mythos, 192,193; and dianoia, 185 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769-1821), 93,173,188,198, 201, 323

4io Narcissus figure, 155,198,276 Narratives. See Stories Nashe, Thomas (1567-1601): The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), 57-8, 63 Nature: Blake on, 199,201; Christian view of, 108; and civilization, 257; deistic attitude to, 210; harmony of, 101-2; and idea of "natural society," 87-8; literature and, 184; poets' view of, 109,115-17; Romantic view of, 121,122-4; study of, 336; Wordsworth on, 241-2 Nazism, 209, 212,256, 363; in Germany and North America, 215-20 passim Negroes. See Blacks Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar) (A.D. 37-68), 83, 84, 315, 320 New Comedy, 147,149,152. See also Plautus, Terence New Criticism, 183,239,245 Newfoundland, 267 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801-90), 67,127, 326; on history, 93 Newman, Peter C. (b. 1929): Renegade in Power (1963), 283 Newspapers, 225, 263; TV and, 283, 290. See also Media Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 102, 120,129, 357 New York, 179 New Yorker, The, 304, 378n. 10 NFB (National Film Board), 296 Nichols, Mike (b. 1931), 287 Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971): The

Irony of American History (1952), 321-3, 324 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (18441900), 94,195; relation to Nazism, 209,215; and tragedy, 262

Index Nigeria, 277 Nineteenth century: education in, 305; history in, 92; ideas of, 126 literature of, 37, 63, 67,112,129, 356; and concept of serious literature, 256; drama in, 178; realism in, 96; romance in, 70-1, 261, 264 Nixon, Richard (1913-94), in China, 297, 298 Nominalism and realism, 128 Norman Conquest, 4, 6 Norse poetry, 33 North America, 290; Deism in, 210-15; education in, 247; interwar culture of, 216-20; World War II and, 207-9 Norwood, Gilbert (1880-1954), 378n. 14 Novel, 232; development of, 55-7, 61-4, 69,176; influence of on drama, 145. See also Fiction Nudity, 275-6 Nursery rhymes, 10, 74, 259, 314-17 Objectivity, in the media, 274-5 Obscenity, 363; in entertainment, 276 O'Casey, Sean (John Casey) (18801964), 146,176 Occam. See William of Occam Occultism, 107, 358. See also Theosophy Octosyllabics, 10-11 Old English literature: influence of, 191; mythological outlook of, 72-9; poetry of, 9-10,14,22-3, 33, 45-6, 350 Old Testament, 33,40, 41,174 Olympics, 294-6 Ontario, 267 Opera, 146,158,187 Opie, lona (b. 1923) and Peter

Index (1918-82): The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), 314-17 Oral literature and culture, 44-5,193, 246, 350-1, 352, 356; modern revival of, 43,247, 361-2, 363 Oratory, 49,247, 353 Original sin, 94 Orosius (fl. ca. 5th c. A.D.), 77 Orpheus, 350, 355; and Eurydice, 258 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50), 129; Animal Farm (1945), xx, 140; 1984 (1949), xx-xxi, 140-3 Ossian. See Macpherson Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.-A.D. 17), 20,111,114,202; Metamorphoses, 80, 258 Oxford, 90; NF at, xix Oxford, Earl of (Edward de Vere) (1550-1604), 244 Oxford, Earl of (Robert Harley) (1661-1724), 166 Oxford Movement, 91 Pacifism, 218 Packard, Vance Oakley (1914-96): The Hidden Persuaders (1957), 232; The Status Seekers (1959), 232 Pagan festivals, 74-5 Paine, Thomas (Tom) (1737-1809): Common Sense (1776), 304 Painting, 263; Blake and, 171-2; contemporary, 341; evolution in, 234; fashion in, 226; and literature, 246, 353, 354 Pakistan, 268-9 Parker, Dorothy (Rothchild) (18931967), 289 Parmenides of Elea (fl. 5th c. B.C.), 195 Parody, 286,294 Pascal, Blaise (1623-62), 271; his wager, 231

411 Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1922-75), 341 Past, 338 Pastoral, 20, 68,184,186,244 Paul, St., 54,75 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866): Four Ages of Poetry (1820), 32-3, 89, 247-8, 349-50, 355-7, 358, 365 Pearl, The, 13 Pearson, Lester Bowles (1897-1972), 282, 292 Pedant character, 149 Pembroke, Earl of (William Herbert) (1580-1630), 244 Penelope's web, 103 Percy, Thomas (born Piercy) (17291811): Reliques ofAntient English Poetry (1765), 33 Permanence of Yeats, The. See Hall, James Persona, 276, 281, 285 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (130474), 17,111 Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter) (d. A.D. 66), 315 Phelps, Arthur L. (1888-1970), xxii Philistinism, 217, 352; in U.S., 214-15 Philosopher, in comedy, 156 Philosophy: and criticism, 243, 348, 361; Pieper on, 326-9 passim; and poetry, 246, 351-2 Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973), 234 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Comte (1463-94), 355 Pieper, Joseph (1904-97): Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1952), xxv; 325-9 Pindar (ca. 522-ca. 440 B.C.), 26 Planck, Max Karl Ernst (1858-1947), 104 Plato (ca. 428-ca. 348 B.C.): on leisure, 326; and New Criticism, 183,239; on poetry, 352, 355, 360; symposium form in, 50, 59,156; on verbal

412

structures, 193-4; Ion, 361; Republic, 68,157, 352; Symposium, 157 Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 250-184 B.C.), 146,147/148,150,151,153. 158; Casina, 150 Play, 337-8 Ploughman's Tale, The 128 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49), 43 Poetry: and biography, 243-4; centrality of, 239; as concerned, 250; cosmology and, 107,108-9, 12°, 122; does not progress, 248; explicit vs. real meaning in, 249, 353-4; "fairy world" and, 117-20; genres of, 68; history of English, 8-44; language of, 15, 342-3; as model of humanized world, 127; and nature, 115-17; and nursery rhymes, 31617; pastness of, 360; primitivism in, 89,91, 355-6, 359; revival of oral, 43, 247, 361-2, 363; role of poet, 44, 46, 49, 76, 96,121-2, 246-7, 254-5, 350-65. See also Love poetry Polysemy, xxii Polytheism, 270, 284 Pomerantz, Hart, 286 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 9, 21, 26, 63, 81,149,170; couplet form in, 30, 351; on nature, 183; satire in, 31-2, 56; sententiousness in, 356; on Swift, 168; The Dunciad (1728), 48,101; An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), 31; Essay on Criticism (1711), 7, 356; Essay on Man (1733-74), 32, 87; The Rape of the Lock (1712), 30, 31-2, 33, 35, H9 Popular literature. See Detective novel; Literature, popular; Thriller Pornography, 296 Porter, Katherine Ann (1890-1980): Ship of Fools (1962), 256,264 Poulterer's measure, 17

Index Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885-1972), 9, 37, 51, 355, 357; on rhythm, 39; social ideas of, 95,127; view of history in, 92,93,94; ABC of Reading (1934), 92; Cantos (1917-59), 40; The Spirit of Romance (1910), 92; trans. Seafarer, 9 Prairie provinces, 267, 268 Present, valuing of, 364 Primitivism, 32-3, 34, 89-92,145,248, 355-6, 359. See also Literature, primitive Printing: advent of, 47-8; Innis on, 302-6 Progress: distrust of, 90-1, 95; as donkey's carrot, 364; and evolution, 89; North American view of, 213-14, 220 Propaganda, 212, 275, 302-3, 305, 323, 362 Prose: history of English, 46-71; rhythm of, 239; Shelley on limits of, 358, 359; types of, 44-6, 58-9; viewed as more truthful than poetry, 96, 246, 351-2, 354-5, 360 Protestantism: and Bible, 305; in England, 85; iconoclasm in, 271; in U.S., 322. See also Reformation Provencal poetry, 341 Proverbs, 45, 53, 246 Psalms, 17,120 Psychoanalysis, and literature, 188 Psychology, 109; and literary criticism, 182,186, 243,244, 348, 361 Ptolemy of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 90-168), 97 Publishing, Innis on, 302-6 Purchas, Samuel (ca. 1577-1626), 128 Puritans, 47,161,162,169,217, 364, 38on. 5; and poetry, 349, 352 Pythagoras, 45

Index Python, Monty, 277-8 Quadragesima Anno, 327 Quantitative metre, 20-1 Quebec, 267,283,284,285; separatism in, 268,298 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) (A.D. ca. 35-ca. 100), 49/ 247, 353 Quo Vadis (movie), 315 Rabelais, Francois (ca. 1494-0.1553), 16 Racine, Jean (1639-99), 185 Racism, 335, 359 Radical view of society, 127 Radio, 212,263; in Canada, 267; comedy on, 150; dictatorship and, 2 95/ 299/ 345; NF on, see Frye, speeches; as social medium, 272, 343-4 Raleigh, Sir Walter (15547-1618), 348 Rand, Ayn (1905-82): Atlas Shrugged (1957), 264 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (14831520), 171,172 Rauschning, Herman (b. 1887): The Revolution of Nihilism (1939), 217 Ravel, Maurice (1875-1937): Bolero (1928), 34 Rawhide, 286 RCMP, 282 Reade, Charles (1814-84): The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), 319 Reading, process of, 192-3 Realism, 69,96,214, 263-4, 341; and nominalism, 128 Reality: two types of, 234,249-50, 257, 359; and university education, 338-9 Reaney, James Crerar (b. 1926), 241 Reason, 358

413 Reformation, 84,93 Religion, 352; and criticism, 361; and poetry, 13,22, 356, 357-8; preChristian, 72; teaching of, 349; as ultimate concern, 260 Renaissance, 84,93,220; education in, 49-52, 353; literary theory of, 68, 145,155. See also Elizabethan age Research, 260 Restoration: ideas of, 85-6; literature of, 29-30, 59-60, 66-7,86,155, 303 Revelation, Book of, 84,200 Revolution, in modern times, 334-5, 362-4 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-92), 90, 171 Rhetoric, 56, 353; avoidance of, 59; in English prose, 48-55 passim, 66-8, 70 Rhetorical criticism, 182,183,185, 239, 246-7 Rhyme: in couplets, 30; "disappointment" rhyme, 19; in Donne, 23-4; in English poetry, 8,21,23,25; obtrusive, 41-2; in Shakespeare, 28 Rhythm: in couplets, 30; in English poetry, 9-14,17-19,21, 25, 26-9, 39; in nursery rhymes, 316-17; obtrusive, 42-3 Richard I, Coeur de Lion (1157-99), 318 Richardson, Jonathan, the elder (1665-1745), 61; Clarissa (1755), 305; Pamela (1755), 305; Sir Charles Grandison (1755), 305 Rimbaud, 0ean Nicolas) Arthur (1854-91): The Drunken Boat (1871), 184 Ritual, 186, 337-8; and drama, 187-8; in modern life, 295-6,298-9 Roles, 276, 298,299 Roman Catholic Church, 47,84,135;

414 and philosophy, 328-9; view of history, 92 Romance, 186; characteristics of, 68-9; dream and, 187,188; in eighteenth century, 33; in Manzoni, 319-20; in nineteenth century, 96, 264; in Victorian and modern age, 70-1 Roman Empire: analogy of with modern age, 276-7; and Christianity, 80-1, 84 Romantic movement, xvi, 63,203; characteristics of poetry of, 34-7, 115; cosmology of, 119; idea of nature in, 121-4; °n poet's role, 121, 358-9; primitivism in, 32-3, 355; prose in, 64-5,66,70; and subconscious, 359 Romaunt of the Rose, The, 112 Rome, ancient, 220; culture of, 127-8; religion in, 108,271, 281; Spengler on, 93. See also Caesar Rosenberg, Harold (1906-78): The Tradition of the New (1960), 233 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-82): House of Life (1870; 1881), 112 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), 64, 87,129 Royal Academy, 171 Royal Society, 59 Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 94; on civilization, 126,127; his view of history, 92,93; on work, 328; The Stones of Venice (1851-53), 92, 93 Russia, 209,220; Communism in, 214, 219, 224; literature in, 341 Ruth, Babe (1895-1948), 290 Ryland, William Wynne, 171 Rymer, Thomas (1641-1713), 378n. 10 Sabbath, 327 Sacaea, Festival of, 188

Index Saintsbury, George Edward Bateman (1845-1933), 138 Samson, 258 Sandburg, Carl August (1878-1967): Fog (1916), 192-3 Sankey, Ira David (1840-1908), 176 Satire: in eighteenth century, 30-2; shortcomings of American, 213 Saul, King, 101 Scandinavia: mythology of, 258; religion of ancient, 72, 73; separatism in, 268-9 Science, 364; advance of, 210, 211; Blake on, 198; and mythology, 72, 97,234, 257-8; and poetry, 248, 357, 359; teaching of, in elementary schools, 237; and tragedy, 152 Science fiction, 71,241,261, 264, 344 Scotland, dialect literature in, 19-20 Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 91; language of, 318; The Heart of Midlothian (1818), 62; The Lay of the Last Ministrel (1805), 91; Waverley (1814), 89 Scotus, Duns. See Duns Scotus SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), 334 Seafarer, The, 9,76 Semon, Larry (1889-1928), 287 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger (ca. 4 B.C.-A.D. 65), 59 Sennett, Mack (1884-1960), 287 Separatism, 268-9, 29& Sesame Street (TV program), 280 Sevigny, Pierre (b. 1917), 282 Sexual drives, 286 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), X 7/ 47/ 85,118,119,130,138,139, 157,176,185,187, 261, 309, 316; as artist, 160; characters in, xxi, 147-8, 150,151,152; comedy in, 144-7, 157-9, i84, 262; explicit meaning

Index in, 249, 353-4; fairies in, 33,197; life of, 244; in ogdoad, xviii-xix; rhythm in, 7,11, 27-8, 29, 39; Shaw on, 178 works: All's Well that Ends Well (1623), 96,146,150,154,254; As You Like It (ca. 1603-4), 146,153; The Comedy of Errors (1594), 157; Cymbeline (1608), 81, 83; Hamlet (1604-5), «/ 47, 48,104-5, 151,155, 281; Henry IV (1598-1600), 215, 226; King Lear (1604-5), 5°, 81,96, 151,154; Love's Labour's Lost, 27-8, 156; Macbeth, 118,158, 338; Measure for Measure (1604), 96,146,151,156, 157, 254; The Merchant of Venice (1600), 101,153,157; The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), 145,150, 154; A Midsummer Night's Dream (ca. 1596), 75,119,157, 355; Much Ado about Nothing (1600), 146,150, 153; Othello (1604), 154; The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601), no; Sonnets (1609), in, 114, 244; The Taming of the Shrew (1623), 109,148,153; The Tempest (1611), 145,152,154, 158-9; Troilus and Cressida (1609), 81,83, 91,139,154,156; Twelfth Night (1600), 157,158; The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592-93), 27; The Winter's Tale (1611), 27, 28, 145,153,158, 303 Shape poems, 44 Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), 59,129, 310; on comedy, 146; and evolution, 153,234, 359; as prophet, xxii, 170,176; on Shakespeare, 146; Androcles and the Lion (1912), 179; Arms and the Man (1898), 149,179; Back to Methuselah (1921), 180; Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), 180; Candida (1933), 179;

415 Getting Married (1910), 179, 379n. 42; In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939), 90,156; Heartbreak

House (1919), 179; Immaturity (1931), 177; John Bull's Other Island (1907), 179; Major Barbara (1907), 152,179; Man and Superman (1903), 180; Misalliance (1911), 179; Mrs. Warren's Profession (1898), 178-9; The Quintessence oflbsenism (1891), 156; Saint Joan (1924), 180,181; A Village Wooing (1934), 181; Widowers' Houses (1893), 178 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (17971851): Frankenstein (1818), 250 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 32,161,184, 249; on function of poetry, 250; on one great poem, 252; Defence of Poetry (1821), 89, 125-6, 245-6, 247, 252, 349, 358-61, 364, 365; Prometheus Unbound (1820), 35-6,123,125,127 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (17511816), 176; The Critic (1779), 48 Shock tactics, in entertainment, 276 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 30,47; on Chaucer, 14; on language, 50; on poetry, 186; on Spenser, 20; Arcadia (1590), 50, 58, 68-9,71,184, 303; A Defence of Poetry (1595), 54, 245-7 passim, 255, 349~5Q, 352-3, 356-65 passim Sigurjonsson, Kay, 291 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 13 Sir Patrick Spens, 10 Sitwell, Dame Edith Louisa (18871964): Facades (1922), 43 Skelton, John (ca. 1460-1529) 9,14, 16,18, 25 Sky-father god, 114,123 Slavery, 222 Slavic countries, 247

416 Smallwood, Joseph R. (1902-92), 283 Smart, Christopher (1722-71), 9, 63; A Song to David (1763), 33, 34, 42 Smith, Goldwin (1823-1910), on Canada, 266 Snow, Sir C(harles) P(ercy) (1905-80), 364; on two cultures, 350 Snow White, 119 Social vision, as product of education, 232,260, 339 Socrates (469-399 B.C.), 361; as eiron, 156,157; on poets and philosophers, 246 Song of Songs, 113 Sonnet, 17,18 Sophocles (ca. 496-405 B.C.), 185; Oedipus Rex, 150,152,185 Sorel, Georges (1847-1922), 209 Southampton, 3rd Earl of (Henry Wriothesley) (1573-1624), 47, 244 South Pacific (movie) (1958), 289 Southwell, Robert (1561-95), 85 Soviet Union, 291 Spanish Civil War, 218 Spectacle, 292 Spectator, The, 48, 57, 304 Speech, and correct grammar, 238 Spender, Stephen (1909-95), 129, 311 Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), 233, 276-7; The Decline of the West (1918), xvi, 93-4 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552-99), 35,80, 90,119,125,128,191; Arthur in, 85-6; language in, 19-23; on love, 113; Amoretti (1595), no; The Fairie Queene (1590-96), 19,21-3,50, 51-2, 66,68,74, 83,118,184,354; Mutabilitie Cantoes (1599), 103,106; The Ruins of Time (1591), 79; The Shepheardes Calender (1579), 20,68,184 Spinoza, Baruch de (or Benedictus) (1632-77), 121

Index Spirits: elemental, 119; theory of, 105 Sprat, Thomas (1635-1713), 59 Sprung rhythm, 11,26 Sputnik, 231 St. Jacques (video), 273-4, 277 Stalin, Joseph (losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879-1953), 341 Stanfield, Robert Lome (b. 1914), 291 Stanford University, 335 Status symbols, 225-6 Stealing, 275 Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729), 304 Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946), 63 Stephen, King of England (ca. 10971154), 128 Sterne, Laurence (1713-68), 64; Tristram Shandy (1759-65), 63 Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955), 361-2; on imagination, 266; Description without Place, 263 Stories: structure in, 240-1; types of, 253-4/ 256-7, 261 Stream of consciousness technique, 63-4 Structure, in literature, 241 Student protest movement, xxvii, 293-4, 333-6 Subconscious, 359; Romanticism and, 124. See also Unconscious Sublime, 122,126 Sullivan, Sir Arthur (1842-1900), 146 Sun symbolism, 188, 270-1 Superman, Shaw on, 180 Surrealism, 341 Surrey, Henry Howard (15177-47), 9, 16-19, 47/111 Swahili literature, 190-1 Swedenborg, Emmanuel (1688-1772), 107, 248 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), ideas of, 86, 87; as prophet, xxii, 165-70,172, 181; prose style of, 60; satire in, 31;

Index and theory of spirits, 105; The Conduct of the Allies (1711), 304; Drapier's Letters (1724), 48,167; Gulliver's Travels (1726), 60, 69,87, 165-6,170, 213; Journal to Stella (1710-13), 168; A Modest Proposal (1729), 60,167-8 Swift's Meat Packers, 285 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (18371909), 42-3,70, 311 Symbolisme, 341 Symbols: critical approaches to, 183-4; m description of hidden mental processes, 65; universal, 188-9. $ee also Archetypes Symposium form, 156-7, 326 Synge, (Edmund) John Millington (1871-1909), 176, 310; Riders to the Sea (1904), 40-1,150 Tate, (John Orley) Allen (1899-1979), 312 "Talking heads," 288, 290, 299, 301 Tarn o' Shanter (1791), 118 Taste, 229 Tatler, The, 48, 304 Taylor, Jeremy (1613-67), 54 Teaching, at university, 260 Technology, 357; effects of, 343-6, 364. See also Media Television, 225,259,263; in Canada, 267,268; characteristics of, as a medium, 277-301 passim, 343, 344, 345; influence of, 282,293-4,295~6/ 297; literary patterns in, 264; NF's reports on, xxvi; visual imagery in, 271-2. See also Media Temple, Sir William (1628-99), 168 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-92), 9, 21, 36-7,123-4,129; In Memoriam (1850), 244; Northern Farmer poems (1865-69), 20

417 Tenth Decade, The (TV program), 282-3, 291-3 Terence, Publius Terentius Afer (ca. 190-159 B.C.), 146,147,148,151, 156 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-63), 69, 256 Thanatos, 114-15 Theocritus (fl. 270 B.C.), 20,184 Theodoric the Ostrogoth (455-526), 77 Theology, and philosophy, 328-9 Theophrastus (ca. 372-0. 287 B.C.), 54/55 Theosophy, Yeats and, 311. See also Occultism Thinking, Heidegger on, 195 Thomas, Dylan (1914-53), 108; Under Milk Wood (1954), 67-8; A Winter's Tale (1950), 43,115 Thomism, 329; Thomist criticism, 182, 348 Thomson, James (1834-82): City of Dreadful Night (1874), 120-1 Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62), 284 Thrillers, 256 Tillich, Paul Johannes (1886-1965), on ultimate concern, 260 Time, and ritual, 338 Tindall, William York (1903-81), 312 To See Ourselves (TV program), 278-9 Tolkein, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892-1973), 71,119, 264 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich (1828-1910): War and Peace (186369), 319 Tottel's Miscellany (1557), 17-18 Tourneur, Cyril (15757-1626), 28 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889-1975), 233 Tractatus Coislinianus, xxi, 147,148 Tradition, 329; in criticism, 248; in

4i8 human history, 127; in literature, 190-1, 245 Tragedy, 68,73,157; characters in, 154-5; Chaucer on, 78; and comedy, 131-2,150,151,152,153,154, 157; as genre, 185; pity and fear in, 154; as play, 338; theory of, 262 Translation, 191, 251 Trilling, Lionel (1905-75): Beyond Culture (1965), 229, 233 Trojan War, 258; and Britain, 81,83, 85,9i Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 256 Truth: in myths of concern and freedom, 336; in poetry and in other verbal structures, 96,193-5, 246, 352-3, 360; and rhetoric, 49; two types of, see Reality Tudors, 82 Tupper, Frederick (1871-1950), 138 Twain, Mark (Samuel Longhorne Clemens) (1835-1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 63, 165 Twentieth century. See Modern age Twentieth-century literature. See Contemporary literature; Modern literature Tyrwhitt, Thomas (1730-86), 14 U-shaped view of history, 84; inverted U, 92. See also Butterslide Unconscious, collective, 188 Underhill, Evelyn (1875-1941): Mysticism (1911), xvi Ungaretti, Giuseppe (1888-1970), 341 United States; assimilation in, 266, 268, 279; and Canada, 207,267-8, 269,283; decline of, 279; movies in, 296; myth of concern in, 336; national character in, 282; NF's critique of, xxiv; Niebuhr on

Index history of, 321-3; press in, 305; slavery in, 222; social mythology of, 231; television in, 271-2, 300. See also American literature; North America Unity: and identity, 266; and uniformity, 268 University: barren scholarship in, 214; effect of student protest movement on, 334; and myth of freedom, 336; relation to society, 339; teaching of literature in, 239; teaching and research in, 260. See also Student protest movement Utopias, 68,156 Valery, Paul (1871-1945), on poetic language, 343 Value judgments, xx Vaudeville, 287 Vaughan, Henry (1621-95), 24 Veblen, Thorstein (1857-1929), 326 Vega Carpio, Lope Felix de (15621635), 287 Venus, 112 Verdi, Giuseppi (1813-1901), 146 Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 94 Victoria College/University, class of 1933 at, 337 Victorian literature. See Nineteenthcentury literature Vietnam War, 268, 334, 335, 362 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70-19 B.C.), 20, 68,183,184; on Britain, 4; medieval attitude to, 81; Aeneid, 250; Fourth Eclogue, So Virgilio, Giovanni del (fl. 1319), 340, 346 Visual images. See Hearing and seeing Vivaldi, Antonio (1678-1741), 351 Voltaire, Franqois Marie Arouet de

Index (1694-1778), 303-4; on Britain, 5; Candide (1759), 213 Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (181383): and Hitler, 209; Shaw on, 178; Tristan und Isolde (1865), 178 Wallace, Lewis (1827-1905): Ben-Hur (1880), 320 Waller, Edmund (1606-87) 9,29 Walpole, Sir Robert (1676-1745), 303 Wanderer, The (1729), 76 War, 225,226; and American way of life, 215. See also Military establishment War of 1812,267-8 Warton, Thomas the younger (172890), 90-1 Weaver, Robert (b. 1921), xxii Webb, Beatrice (1858-1943), 177 Webb, Sidney (1859-1947), 177 Webster, John (ca. 1580-0.1626), 28 Weil, Simone (1909-43): Waiting for God (1949), 329 Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (18661946), 89; Outline of History (1920), 213 Wesley, John (1703-91), 304 Westerns, 241 Wheel of fortune figure, 78 Whigs, 166,169; Whig interpretation of history, 128 Whitehead A(lfred) N(orth) (18611947): Science and the Modern World (1925), 233 Whitman, Walt (ca. 1819-92), 67,147, 157,184 Whyte, William H. (1917-99): The Organization Man (1956), 232 Widdicombe, Jane (b. 1943), 289 Widsith, 76 Wilde, Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900), 176, 282, 310,

419 311; The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (1889), 244 Wilkes, John (1727-97), 304 William III (1650-1702), 167 William of Occam (ca. 1285-0.1349), 128 Winnipeg, 267 Wisdom, 327, 329 Wit, 30 Women, 336; liberation of, and beauty contests, 284,285 Wood, William (1671-1744), 167 Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (18821941), 63-4 Word, The, 271 Words: interrelations of, 194-5; ° television, 280 Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 9, 80,172, 355; on language of poetry, 6-7, 35,203, 342-3; on nature, 122-3, 241-2; The Excursion (1814), 37; Lyrical Ballads (1798), 34; The Prelude (1850), 36-7; Preface to 2nd ed. of Lyrical Ballads (1800), 6-7, 35, 203, 241-2, 342-3 Work: Pieper on, 325-8; and play, 337-8; servile vs. fulfilling, 221-4; work ethic, 362 World War I, 208, 269 World War II: causes of, 215-16, 218-19; and its consequences, 207-9. See also Nazis Worlds, two. See Reality, two types of Writing, xxviii; effect of, 45-6,193, 203,246,259, 351-2, 361; hieroglyphic, 280; teaching of, 237-9, 241 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503-42), 9, 16-19, 23, 42,47,I" Wycherley, William (1641-1715): The

Country Wife (1675), 56 Wyclif, John (ca. 1330-84), 84

Index

42O

Xenophon (ca. 430-352 B.C.): Cyropaedia, 68 Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), xxii, 18,70,75,90,92,112,118,119, 127,249, 352, 357, 358; double spiral image in, 293; life and development of, 309-12; tower imagery in, 184; his view of history, 93,95,127; The Countess

Cathleen (1892), 310; The King's Threshold (1904), 127; The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), 310; The Shadowy Waters (1900), 310; A Vision (1925), 94; The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), 33, 310 Yoga, 213 Yoruba literature, 190-1 Zoroaster, 350