Northrop Frye on Modern Culture 9781442677838

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 11

Northrop Frye on Modern Culture

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 The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions.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 Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis Paul Gooch Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye on Modern Culture VOLUME 11

Edited by Jan Gorak

U N I V E R S I T Y OF T O R O N T O PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © Victoria University, University of Toronto and Jan Gorak (preface, introduction, annotation) 2003 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 08020-3696-1

Printed on acid-free paper National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 Northrop Frye on modern culture / edited by Jan Gorak. (Collected works of Northrop Frye; v. 11) Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-3696-1 i. Civilization, Modern - 2Oth century. 2. Arts, Modern - 2Oth century. I. Gorak, Jan, 1952- II. Title. III. Series. CB428.F79 2002

909.82

02002-903698-4

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).

Contents

Preface xi Credits xv Abbreviations xvii Introduction xix The Modern Century i The Modern Century

3 I City of the End of Things 5 II Improved Binoculars 27 III Clair de lune intellectuel

48

The Arts 2 Current Opera: A Housecleaning 73

3 Ballet Russe 76

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Contents 4 The Jooss Ballet 79

5 Frederick Delius 83

6 Three-Cornered Revival at Headington 87

7 Music and the Savage Breast 88 8 Men as Trees Walking 92 9 K.R. Srinivasa's Lytton Strachey 96 10 The Great Charlie 98

11 Reflections at a Movie 103 12 Music in the Movies 108 13 Max Graf's Modern Music 112 14 Abner Dean's It's a Long Way to Heaven 113 15 Russian Art 114 16 Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye 115 17 The Eternal Tramp 116

Contents

vii 18 On Book Reviewing

123 19 Academy without Walls

126 20 Communications

234 21 The Renaissance of Books

140 22 Violence and Television

156 23 Introduction to Art and Reality

167 Politics, History, and Society 24 Pro Patria Mori

175 25 Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian

178 2.6 War on the Cultural Front

184 27 Two Italian Sketches, 1939

188 28 G.M. Young's Basic 194 29 Revenge or Justice?

195 30 F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West

197

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Contents 31 Wallace Notestein's The Scot in History 201 32 Toynbee and Spengler 202

33 Gandhi 209

34 Ernst Jiinger's On the Marble Cliffs 211 35 Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor 215

36 Cardinal Mindszenty 220

37 The Two Camps 222

38 Law and Disorder 224

39 Two Books on Christianity and History 226 40 Nothing to Fear but Fear 232

41 The Ideal of Democracy 235

42 The Church and Modern Culture 237

43 And There is No Peace 244

44 Caution or Dither? 246

Contents

ix 45 Trends in Modern Culture 248 46 Regina versus the World 262 47 Oswald Spengler 265 48 Preserving Human Values 274

49 The War in Vietnam 282 50 The Two Contexts 283 51 The Quality of Life in the '705 285 52 Spengler Revisited 297 53 The Bridge of Language 3*5

Notes 331 Emendations 381 Index 383

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Preface

This volume contains almost all of Frye's published articles pertaining to twentieth-century art, politics, and culture. For many readers the showcase of the volume will be Frye's Whidden Lectures, delivered at McMaster University in 1967—the centenary year of the Canadian Confederation—and subsequently published as The Modern Century. Other relevant material will appear in the interviews which make up a later volume of the Collected Works (currently in preparation by Jean O'Grady), particularly many references to Marshall McLuhan, clearly both a stimulus and an irritant for much of Frye's work on electronic communications media from the 19605 until his death, and to Oswald Spengler, a formative influence on his early mental development. This volume traces chronologically Frye's contribution as an arts reviewer and essayist, before moving to a similar compilation of his work as a political commentator and analyst. The exception to this rule is the position given to The Modern Century, which opens the collection. Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text, list all known reprintings in English of an item, and note the existence of typescripts and where they can be found in the Northrop Frye Fonds in Victoria University's E.J. Pratt Library. No prepublication typescript exists in the case of The Modern Century, although notes provided for his French translator clear up some problems of usage and meaning. The copy-text chosen is generally the first edition or the first printing for a journal contribution, which was often the only one carefully revised and proof-read by Frye himself. In some cases he did reread essays for inclusion in his own collections, such as The Stubborn Structure, which then becomes the source of the authoritative text. All substantive changes to the copy-text have been listed in an emendations list, with the source or explanation

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for the change given where necessary. Variants of particular interest— including some discrepancies between the typescript and the published version of Frye's broadcasts—are given in notes. The accidentals of the text reflect the general practice of the Collected Works in handling material from a variety of sources. That is to say, since the conventions of spelling, typography, and to some extent punctuation derive from the different publishers' house styles rather than from Frye, they have been regularized silently throughout the volume. For instance, Canadian spellings ending in -our have been substituted for American -or ones, hyphens have been deleted from some compounds, commas have been added before the "and" in series of three, and titles of poems have been italicized. Sometimes, where editors have added commas around such expressions as "of course," these have been silently removed to conform with the more characteristic usage in the typescript. Notes identify the source of all the quotations I have been able to track down; in the case of short Classical identifications, the section number, from the Loeb edition, has been placed in square brackets in the text. Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by [NF] following the note. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life dates and date of first publication are provided in the index. Acknowledgments Many people have helped me in the preparation of this volume. The articles were originally expertly typed or scanned at the Northrop Frye Centre by Naomi Savage and Alex Stephens. Ward McBurney prepared the index, and let me look at "Rock of Ages," his own very interesting tribute to Frye. I thank them and Margaret Burgess, who copy-edited the text with her usual thoroughness and first-hand knowledge of Frye matters and who also cheerfully saved me from a number of errors. Graduate assistant Ian Singer efficiently and rapidly tracked down a number of quotations and long-buried controversies for the notes. Jean O'Grady was extremely helpful about the direction of the volume and every detail in its preparation; nothing was too small or too large for her to help me with and I am extremely grateful for her kindness. Three anonymous readers had many expert suggestions and useful corrections to offer. Like anyone else who works on Frye, I have been fortunate enough to draw on Robert Denham's unmatched knowledge.

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The librarians at the Pratt library, University of Toronto, were invariably friendly and helpful to me on my visits to the Frye archive. The staff of the Penrose Library at the University of Denver offered me valued assistance. To everyone in the circulation and inter library loan departments I offer my warm thanks. Many of my colleagues have aided me in ways they may not have realized, but I must mention Jessica Munns, who kindly asked me to speak to our division on Frye and has always been the best kind of colleague, witty, irreverent, and lively. Bin Ramke and Robert Urquhart have also willingly exchanged views with me on these twentieth-century literary and cultural matters for a long time, often to my great advantage. George Hunter supplied me with some typically stringent critical commentary on my introduction. Alvin Lee was confident that I was the man for this job, and I hope I have fulfilled my considerable obligation to him; together with Barbara McDonald of McMaster, he supplied me some important facts about Canadian institutions. I don't think I shall ever fulfil my obligations to Irene Gorak, who has been an incisive critic and a benevolent guide to the process of making a critical edition.

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Credits

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint works previously published by them. We have not been able to determine the copyright status of all the works included in this volume, and welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments. British Broadcasting Corporation for "Communications," from The Listener (1970). Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for "Summation," from Symposium on Television Violence / Colloque sur la violence a television (1976). Indiana University Press for "The Renaissance of Books" and "Spengler Revisited," from Spiritus Mundi (1976). Oxford University Press Canada for The Modern Century (1967). Simon and Schuster, Inc. for the reply to a questionnaire, from Authors Take Sides on Vietnam: Two Questions on the War in Vietnam Answered by the Authors of Several Nations, ed. Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley (1967). © Copyright 1967 by Simon and Schuster. University of Toronto Magazine for "The Quality of Life in the '705," from the University of Toronto Graduate (1971).

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Credits

With the exception of the items listed above, all works are printed courtesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/ Victoria University.

Abbreviations

AC BG CW D DG DV DW El FS LN

LS

MC MD NF NFF

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. Collected Works of Northrop Frye The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. in i. New York: Knopf, 1939. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 5-6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936-1939: Unpublished Papers. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Northrop Frye Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library

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Abbreviations

NFCL Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. NFHK The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 1-2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. NFR Northrop Frye on Religion: Excluding "The Great Code" and "Words with Power." Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady. CW, 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. OE On Education. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988. RW Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1976. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. SR A Study of English Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. StS The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. WE Northrop Frye's Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O'Grady and Goldwin French. CW, 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Introduction

I The Phases of Northrop Frye's Cultural Criticism Northrop Frye liked to reflect that he was born in 1912 into a world where the King of England was also the Emperor of India, and lived long enough to see a Hollywood actor installed in the White House in 1981. The works collected in this volume have a similarly impressive temporal span: the earliest appeared in 1933, the year of Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration and the legalization of Joyce's Ulysses by the U.S. Supreme Court; the latest dates from 1986, as the beginning of the Iran-Contra scandal surfaced and Wole Soyinka became the first African Nobel Laureate in Literature. So Frye's commitment to writing about twentieth-century art, culture, and politics was no transitory one. He maintained it simultaneously with his emergence as a major Romantic scholar in Fearful Symmetry (1947) and as a synoptic and "scientific" literary theorist in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Because Frye achieved such eminence in the latter activities, the former have for many readers vanished from the picture, leaving only "the anaesthetic critic" of Frederick Crews or the depoliticized neo-Aristotelian of revisionist legend.1 From the writings on politics and art brought together in these pages we can assemble a very different Frye, a Frye intensely concerned with the opportunities for thoughtful critical intervention in the national life available to a Canadian intellectual in the 19305, a Frye keen to participate in the transformation of Toronto from a colonial outpost to a sophisticated cosmopolitan centre. They also show us a Frye unfailingly loyal to the ideal of "cooperation" so significant to twentieth-century Canadian life. These essays fall into three main groups. The first group extends from

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1933 to 1945, marking Frye's emergence as a critic at large in reviews of Puccini, the Russian and the Jooss ballet companies, Surrealist exhibitions, and movies by Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney, usually in the pages of the Canadian Forum. The second phase begins in 1946, when he wrote an editorial commentary on the Nuremberg trials. At this time, as the editors of the Forum recognized, old alliances lost their authority in a world "cut in two by forces that are not primarily European, but Asiatic and American."2 As a member of the Forum's editorial committee—and managing editor from 1948 to 1950—Frye reshaped the journal's policy from the directly political position of his predecessor, George Grube, preferring instead to function as a commentator on what he called "public affairs."3 By focusing less on the policy implications of postwar political developments, he freed himself for the long investigation of cultural symbolism and political structures that culminated in the publication of The Modern Century. From this date until his death in 1991, Frye's career enters a third phase. He now pursues the implications for the scholar-humanist of a society where knowledge and leisure are no longer minority pursuits but everybody's business. Frye acknowledges the enormous investments in image and drama made by postindustrial societies that simulate works of art in their everyday transactions and ostensible commitment to an ideology of perpetual freedom. Frye is a shrewd critic of such societies, unwilling to swallow the message that the present is the measure of all things, but he is not involved in a futile rearguard battle on behalf of "high" art. Instead he attempts practical cooperation with other groups concerned with cultivating and educating the human capacity to structure the world—social and mental health workers, radio and television producers, scientists—and compares their constructions of the world with those of art. In this way, Frye maintains his commitment to the crucial evidence of the arts that he first assimilated through Oswald Spengler, Wyndham Lewis, and Andre Malraux. As the opening paragraphs of his lecture "The Academy without Walls" make clear, however, he liberalizes the message of these authors. He shares their recognition that the standard canon has disappeared in the light of the enormous past opened up for artists by museums, reproductions, academies, and the entire "culture industry," but Frye pledges his loyalty to "the educational process" as both the source and the public for a self-aware art. For him, as for Habermas, the educational structure provides a buffer zone of free discussion and cooperation not only against what Malraux, Lewis,

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or Spengler release to the artists's "will to power" but also against the "countercommunication" structures erected by media entrepreneurs like Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner. If these are not Frye's most charismatic contributions to criticism, they are the logical and moral fulfilment of the ideological commitment Frye made early in his career to Canadian cooperative socialism and his commitment to the power of the imagination to construct a world not reducible to conventional wisdom. II Constructive Criticism In 1963, in the broadcasts subsequently published as The Educated Imagination, with his credentials as a scholar and theorist well established, Frye told his audience that "Everything man does that's worth doing is some kind of construction, and the imagination is the constructive power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction for its own sake" (El, 50). Frye's broad emphasis on the world as the product of human construction positions him in the broad stream of cultural debate as established by Vico in the eighteenth century. In his rather narrower emphasis on what is "worth doing" and "the mind set free to work on pure construction for its own sake" Frye participates in the vision of culture as a specialized and emancipating human construction familiar to readers of Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?" Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism. Such a vision sees culture as an autonomous human production, not as a vehicle for patriot, politician, or promoter. For Frye, these terms represent the basic unit of critical analysis. In his essay "Frederick Delius" (no. 5, 1936), Frye emphasizes that art is its own community, and that to speak of Delius as "essentially English" or "deeply Northern" is to talk nonsense. He warns his readers that "a musician should be approached in terms of culture, not of race or nationality, and in Delius's case the appropriate cultural term is 'Romantic'" (84). Many years later, in A Study of English Romanticism (1968), Frye reiterates that "The word Romanticism is a cultural term" that "refers primarily to some kind of change in the structure of literature itself" (SR, 3, 4). For the purposes of critical analysis, "culture" thus initially demarcates the shared artistic conventions and structures of a movement or a period. Frye never abandons his view that the main task of the teacher or commentator must be "to help create the structure of the subject in the student's mind" (OE, 13; or, WE, 543).

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Frye's own rapid ascent up the educational ladder registers how far this program of educational expansion and spiritual enrichment had already translated into upward mobility for a talented minority. Yet his is a restless mind, perpetually suspicious of the monopolist tendencies the institutionalized imagination possesses. If we compare the views put forward by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy in 1869 with those Frye expresses nearly a century later, the grounds of his suspicion will become clearer. Arnold looks to culture as "a centre of authority" in an industrial, class-conscious, and faction-ridden Victorian England. He sees culture as an impersonal "idea of perfection . . . an inward condition of the mind and spirit." Arnold is careful to temper this Romantic inwardness with the educational, literary, and administrative activities of a Victorian state defined in terms of "the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals."4 If Arnold's program can be understood as synecdochic for the nineteenth-century effort to expand educational opportunity and political enlightenment, then it is also representative of the Victorian fear of inwardness unregulated by institutional restraint. This is something that it did not take Frye long to recognize. In his first critical book Fearful Symmetry, he remarks that Blake's conception of culture as the source of order in society and as more complete in its appeal than religion, may remind us to some extent of Culture and Anarchy; enough, at any rate, to make us wonder why so strongly "Hebraic" a thinker and despiser of the Classics as Blake should hold such views. Blake believed, like Arnold, that culture preserves society: he did not believe, as Arnold apparently did, that society preserves culture. Society to Blake is an eternally unwilling recipient of culture: every genius must fight society no matter what his age. Arnold's view of both culture and society is conservative, traditional and evolutionary; Blake's is radical, apocalyptic and revolutionary. (FS, 90)

For Frye, Arnold's program remained too mired in the Victorian respectability and common sense it purported to despise. The network of institutions that Arnold took for granted made his dissent from Victorian values too comfortable and complacent. For Frye, Arnold had elevated the local manners of his Rugby and Oxford into those of culture as a whole. At the beginning of Anatomy of Criticism, Frye pounces on

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Arnold's dismissal of Ruskin's allegorical interpretation of Othello in Munera Pulveris. What Arnold sees as only "a piece of extravagance" is for Frye a genuine attempt to re-envision the play. Frye comments: it is Arnold who is the provincial. Ruskin has learned his trade from the great iconological tradition which comes down through Classical and Biblical scholarship into Dante and Spenser, both of whom he had studied carefully, and which is incorporated in the medieval cathedrals he had pored over in such detail. Arnold is assuming, as a universal law of nature, certain "plain sense" critical axioms which were hardly heard of before Dryden's time and which can assuredly not survive the age of Freud and Jung and Frazer and Cassirer. (AC, id) "Plain sense" cannot survive the exegetical strenuousness of modern thought; nor can it penetrate the visionary core of canonical achievement. At the University of Toronto, Frye was lucky enough to find instructors for whom "plain sense" was not the ultimate arbiter of intellectual inquiry, and who could strengthen his own intellectual resolve to forge his alliances elsewhere. From them, he learned that the ancient universities did not hold a monopoly of intellectual production and creative achievement. Ill Canadian Cooperation When Frye's lifelong association with Toronto began in 1929, it appeared an unlikely site for the formation of an alternative model of cultural criticism. As Frye remembered it, to a newcomer Toronto was a repressive, orthodox, and homogeneous city where an ostensibly fervent alliance to the British Empire masked the machinations of American technology and capital that already threatened to control the city's future. Yet at Victoria College and in the larger university community, Frye found pockets of resistance. His entry as a probationary student and subsequent outstanding performance in the honour course as a student of English literature and philosophy are charted comprehensively in Northrop Frye's Writings on Education (2.000), edited by Jean O'Grady and Goldwin French. In the intense atmosphere of a collegiate university with the palpable but loosely defined religious connection the editors describe, Frye embarked on a course of study largely purged of the "electives" and devotion to the authority of "the textbook" that so

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bedevilled college education in North America.5 Here he could accordingly equip himself with enough knowledge of his subject to lay the foundations for the "scientific" study of literature exemplified in Anatomy of Criticism. The university also gave Frye access to intellectuals unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries but committed to systematic enquiry. As Frye recognized, most of his teachers had begun in fields other than English: John Robins had initially been a student of German, E.J. Pratt of psychol ogy, and the department head, Pelham Edgar, had taught French. If English at Toronto was a comprehensive, orderly field that marched from Beowulf to Hardy unimpeded by student choice or preference, its march was not an entirely linear one. Frye recalled how Robins would illuminate ballad tradition by referring to Hemingway, just as Edgar's Shakespeare lectures would break off to consider Woolf and James. Such methods licensed Frye's lifelong habit of seeing literature as an imaginary museum where authors were not separated by time, but united by structure. Moreover, it was a short step from the Robins who saw Hemingway and the poet of Sir Patrick Spens on a common plane to the Frye who could regard Charlie Chaplin as the logical fulfilment of devices and predicaments dramatized in Shakespeare's problem comedies. The University of Toronto that Frye entered just a month before the Wall Street crash did not subscribe to the more pessimistic tenets of early twentieth-century thought. Frye's teachers endorsed neither the ideas of cultural catastrophe bruited at this time by Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Huizinga, nor the dogmatic anti-romanticism so pervasive in modernist poetics. Robins's scholarship in the ballad tradition and Edgar's work as a student of Shelley acknowledged the way the Romantic imagination articulated in symbolic language the hopes of the new communities formed in the light of the late eighteenth-century revolutions. Through Pratt's poetry, Frye was invited to see Canada in terms of the same massive expansionary energies. Understanding the national culture demanded an understanding of the dynamism of industrial societies, not a retreat into the mythology of "the organic society" before the coming of the machine. Perhaps most important of all for a future culture critic, Toronto reversed the tendency of modern universities to produce specialist scholars. Some of the most distinguished academics in the university were figures who, like Harold Innis or Charles Cochrane, had started their scholarly careers in one field and redefined that area completely in

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subsequent work. As an economic historian Innis had won great acclaim with the publication of The Fur-Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (1940). These books viewed the history of Canada in terms of the "staple" products developed by its various regions. In a final series of monographs, Empire and Communications (1950), The Bias of Communication (1951), and Changing Concepts of Time (1952)—all so important for Frye's own The Modern Century—Innis engaged with communication systems and their function as the hidden engine of Canada and all modern technologically driven societies. Cochrane's first book, Thucidydes and the Science of History (1929), exhibited all the virtues of scholarly caution, apparently resisting the innovations by which P.M. Cornford transformed the canonical ancient historian into a tragic poet and ritual dramatist. Yet Ernest Sirluck's memory of a Cochrane who "was eager to talk" and "felt somewhat isolated in his department, which is why he would stand in the cloister outside his office hand rolling cigarettes . . . hoping to find someone interesting to talk to,"6 is consistent with the professional identity of a scholar who, over a decade later, would publish the massive multidisciplinary study Christianity and Classical Culture (1940). The most innovative scholars at the University of Toronto cultivated habits of slow maturation culminating in massive production, production that often moved far beyond their initial field of inquiry. There was much here for the embryonic cultural critic to learn from, in a university culture that was itself neither genteel nor specialist. Like many members of the university, Frye found a venue for his earliest efforts as a cultural commentator and literary journalist in the Canadian Forum, a monthly journal launched in October 1920 as a successor to the University of Toronto's The Rebel. The Forum's hostility to "doctrines, whose authority springs mainly from their length of days," aligns it with iconoclastic twentieth-century journals like The Dial or The Egoist. Frye would have agreed with the opening editorial announcement that "Too much of our news is coloured and distorted, before ever it reaches the Canadian press. Too often our convictions are borrowed from London, Paris, or New York. Real independence is not the product of tariffs and treaties. It is a spiritual thing. No country has reached its full stature, which makes its goods at home, but not its faith and its philosophy." The emphasis on imagination and mind as the origin of any lasting spiritual emancipation is one that Frye and the founders of the Forum shared, as well as the commitment to "freer and more informed

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discussion of public questions."7 The same suspicion of the monopolizing habits of official cultural agencies that motivates Frye's criticism of Arnold drives the Forum's critiques of Canadian politics under Bennett or King. For many of the Forum's leading contributors, this "real independence" would arrive only through what C.B. Sissons, a member of the Classics faculty at Victoria College, called in the journal's first number "The Rise of Cooperation in Canada." Only by sharing national resources and expanding welfare and educational services to the broadest possible numbers of Canadians could a society independent of Britain or the United States be built. In its early years, regular contributions by J.S. Woodsworth, Frank Underhill, and F.R. Scott laid a platform for a socialism rooted in cooperation, clearing the path for the journal's subsequent overt affiliation with the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) and the Commonwealth Co-operative Federation (CCF). These were political solutions for Canadians who wanted to resist encroachments of American capital and imperial patronage without taking the route pursued by Russia. The preference for public ownership and socialism achieved by parliamentary representation, as well as a constituency whose urban base largely consisted of teachers, academics, and preachers, ran parallel to the path chosen by the British Fabians. Just as important for Frye, many of the journal's contributors shared the Fabian commitment to public education and the extension of cultural suffrage. Sandra Djwa has marshalled considerable evidence to show how the Forum served as a significant force in disseminating modernism as poetic practice and aesthetic program to Canadian readers.8 The cultural pessimism of modernism, on the other hand, was not easy to reconcile with the Forum's politics of cooperation. In this respect Frye, always a sceptic about the modernist cultural platform, probably learned much from two writers whose roots were not Canadian at all, but who did much to proselytize for a cooperative and culturally progressive Toronto. The regular contributions of Barker Fairley and Eric Havelock to the Forum are arguably the basis of the projections about Toronto and Ontario as laboratories for the enlightened cultural policy Frye will outline over three decades later in "Academy without Walls" (no. 19,1961) and "The Renaissance of Books" (no. 21,1973). Frye often spoke warmly of Fairley, professor of German at the University of Toronto and a member of the Forum's editorial board from its earliest days, who widened his own horizons and those of the entire

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country. Fairley had argued vigorously for a journal whose constituency would be the nation, not the university community. A native of Barnsley, a brilliant graduate of the German department at Leeds University, and a lifelong student of Goethe, Kleist, and Herder, Fairley shared none of the anti-Romantic assumptions of Eliot or Pound. The most significant feature of Fairley's work for Frye lay in his view of Romanticism as the last great popular movement, as one that could still enrich the spiritual life of the twentieth-century world. Fairley translated the Romantic belief in the creative potential of the community into an intensely practical program for educating the Canadian public in the arts. In the first number of the Forum, Fairley's "A Peep at the Art Galleries" reported on his renewed contact with the London art galleries. On returning to one of the world's great cultural capitals, he felt excitement tempered by reservation. If the paintings he viewed at London's avantgarde galleries exhibited remarkable technical proficiency, they were also "all a little too coldly conceived, too intellectual, too theoretical." Fairley knew that such heavy emphasis on form and theory ran entirely opposite to the legacy of Romanticism. He argued that theory is not enough to produce great art. It is only one side of the story and the other side is some objective world in which the theory can lose itself, find itself, dissolve itself. Call it what you will. The place for theory in the finished work is that of the skylark that loses itself in the blue, heard but not seen, forgotten yet flooding the air with melody. In many of these modern paintings the theory sits on the fence and croaks. Or it just stares at you coldly, which is still worse.9

For well over twenty years, Fairley regularly attempted to convince his readers of the fusion of imaginative power and passionate social concern he found in Joseph Conrad, O.M. Doughty, and Hugh MacDiarmid, but which he found strangely wanting in much modern art. He attempted to embody these qualities in his own creative work, which ranged from a Lawrentian playlet on the fishermen of coastal Yorkshire to lyrics reminiscent of Blake's sketches in their visionary simplicity. Frye's debts to Eric Havelock, who joined Victoria College as a teacher of Classics in 1929 and whose commentaries on everyday events in Toronto and the larger direction of world politics appeared in the Forum throughout the 19305, are more difficult to evaluate. At first

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glance one of Havelock's earliest contributions to the journal, "As It Strikes an Englishman," evokes the same intimations of the Oxbridge mind in exile that Frye found so irksome a feature of his term as senior academic and administrator at Victoria. Similarly, Havelock's pastoral advice to Canadians that they come to "learn in time how much of human progress is symbolized in the majestic initials U.S.S.R." is not something Frye would at any time have swallowed eagerly.10 Yet Havelock did make several major contributions to Frye's political education. He recognized that twentieth-century society moved in a direction antithetical to the drift of Marxist prophecy. In modern conditions of mechanized labour the proletariat is not the revolutionary vanguard; rather, the middle-class citizen is the major actor for the social thinker to understand. Havelock knew that the conditions of middleclass citizenship had also changed, in ways that made voting anything but a purely rational action: symbolism relayed through a mass-circulation journalism moulded political attitudes more continuously than reasoned argument in a modern culture. The intellectual's task was not only to raise the standard of political literacy, but also to explore the functions and needs public symbols supply in modern societies. Accordingly Havelock's articles used local controversies like the naming of a ferry boat to underscore the value of the longstanding legacy of cooperation for Toronto's civic identity. Finally, Havelock emphasized that only the time-honoured liberal education in letters and eloquence enabled modern citizens to understand the politics of persuasion and symbol that dominated modern societies. Havelock ridiculed provincial efforts to make vocational education the dominant paradigm for Ontario's children. He emphasized that education was too necessary for modern citizenship to be left to market forces. In "The Philosophy of John Dewey" he took issue with the effort to launch Dewey as the great demystifier of Western philosophy. Rather, Havelock emphasized that Dewey was the apologist for Americanism and all its systematic exploitation of masses, markets, and raw materials. Cultural hegemony was no longer solely a matter of gunboats and missionaries, but was now carried by newspapers, textbooks, and images. Consequently, Dewey's significance was less as a thinker than as an entrepreneur in thought, as a North American Cecil Rhodes whose staple commodity was the intellect. Against Dewey's exploitation of mental capital, Havelock set about his own task of understanding the motives of political actors and the deep drives that controlled their actions, of relay-

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ing his discoveries to his readers in a lucid and unpatronizing prose. Whatever their differences in style and concern, Fairley and Havelock both assume the existence of a public capable of comprehending, weighing, and acting on its deliberations. Neither endorses the embattled modernist assumption that cultural questions can only be conveyed by a solitary outsider to a small group of fervent disciples. This complex legacy of cooperative socialism, synoptic scholarship, and visionary thinking shaped Frye's subsequent efforts as a cultural critic. It enabled him to filter out some of the authoritarian and elitist assumptions of high modernism, while still acknowledging that form and convention remain the necessary conditions for artistic utterance and critical understanding. This committed Frye to a position that acknowledged the power of art, while recognizing its interplay with the larger complex of representations available in society as a whole. Finally, it led him to recognize that the "distinctly Canadian" could never really dislodge itself from the larger issues that threatened the stability of the world outside Canada. In a way Kant or Schiller might not have appreciated, the loyalties of a twentieth-century cultural critic were always to what might be called humanity—to a public not so much educated as capable of education—however much he might owe to his local roots. IV Frye's Beginnings The years immediately preceding Frye's earliest essays in this collection were peculiar "stop-go" ones for cultural criticism. T.S. Eliot's contributions to The Dial between 1920 and 1929, Edmund Wilson's journalism for The New Republic, and Gilbert Seldes' The Seven Lively Arts (1924), all signal a collective shift away from a narrowly classical yardstick for artistic achievement. For Eliot in the 19208 an abrasive, insolent music hall performance by Little Titch or Marie Lloyd was a more enriching cultural event than a Gilbert Murray translation of Euripides performed by Sybil Thorndike at the Old Vic for a self-approving audience. Wilson's quest for an alternative to the genteel tradition led him to Tennessee sharecroppers, New York burlesque shows, and Hopi snake dances. Seldes paid this alternative culture almost rapturous tribute in The Seven Lively Arts, where he celebrated the twin commitment to craft and anarchy embodied in a Chaplin movie or a Catskill revue. With its vaudeville acts, burlesque shows, and silent movies, early twentieth-century

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culture in the United States was clearly developing along non-Arnoldian lines. By 1929, as Frye began his undergraduate education, this emancipating moment was about to end. The Wall Street crash curbed the exuberance of the decade, eroding all hopes of stable prosperity within an unrestrained capitalism. In 1933, as Frye signalled his own dissent from the conventional pieties of patriotism, Eliot spelled out the cultural implications of his new loyalties to Anglo-Catholicism, monarchy, and classicism. In the lectures he delivered at the University of Virginia that year on "Tradition and Modern Literature" Eliot celebrated tradition, not as the innovative, sceptical artist of The Sacred Wood, but as a reactionary Christian, nostalgic for a homogeneous community. When they appeared a year later as After Strange Gods, Frye could hardly have welcomed the fortress culture severed from the twentieth century that Eliot erected for his Southern audience. Nor could he have enjoyed reading Eliot's assessment that "the chances for the reestablishment of a native culture are perhaps better here than in New England. You are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialized and less invaded by foreign races; and you have a more opulent soil."11 This was not a usable past for a Canadian critic. Frye's own position is sharply opposed to Eliot's. Where Eliot links culture to custom, creed, and region, Frye constructs his own tradition from very different sources. Having already noted the patterns of imagery shared by the anonymous ballad writers and an emerging Romanticism, he now found these images surfacing again in the new works he reviewed for the Forum. As his inventory of buried cities, enchanted gardens, and demonic machinery expanded, he began to wonder whether what Eliot called "heresy" in his lectures was the route to a lost truth. Frye also began to formulate an alternative model for the needs that art met and the conventions that it forged to meet these needs. In "Poetry and Drama" (1951) Eliot renewed his claim that "It is a function of all art to give some perception of an order in life, by imposing an order upon it."12 In contrast, Frye saw dramatic production in terms of a shared endeavour that welds artistic skill to community practice, reminding his readers that "music and drama are the two great group art forms; that is, they are ensemble performances before audiences" (88). Art's origins, its specific manifestations in concert hall or gallery, and its continuing existence among future audiences, all rely on the cooperative labour of participant and public.

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To Frye, Eliot is ultimately an Arnold in Yankee's clothing, always hankering for a metropolitan sophistication even as he purports to despise it. When Eliot reviews London opera for The Dial, he regrets its survival as "one of the last remainders of a former excellence of life, a sustaining symbol even for those who seldom went."13 Frye knows that the Versailles most familiar to his audience will be the Versailles of the divisive peace treaty, not the Versailles of le roi soleil, and he sets about understanding how opera and ballet can expand the perceptions of citizens who belong to that volatile and divided world. Ultimately, his criticism seeks to estimate the function of ballet for a cooperative modern culture, not as Eliot's monument to high living. Frye argues that ballet belongs to a family of "dynamic arts appealing . . . to a group consciousness . . . depending on group production and group response" (79). For Frye, high art and an expanding audience are not necessarily contradictory, and no unpassable gulf separates Stravinsky from Disney. Frye never believes the group must necessarily slide into the mob, and this is a view shared by few early twentieth-century writers on art. Eliot's community is always ready-formed; for Frye, the whole challenge of art comes from the way its cooperative undertakings perpetually expand the horizons and the hopes of the communities responsive to it. Yet just as Barker Fairley recognized the anxiety that was the underside of Canadian sublimity, Frye also acknowledges the "primitive fears of an uncanny and hostile world" (88) that shadow the Utopian potential of human communities. This acknowledgment does not lead Frye to endorse Eliot's neoclassicist "order." Instead, he proposes an imaginative synthesis that fuses Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Greek ritual to resurrect "the spirit of life and growth that died when the year died, and rose again at the year's rebirth." He then moves outward to his own audience, adding that the Greeks "were cursed with that, and we are born under that curse, but we and our children don't have to keep on applauding gangsters and allowing them to tear us to pieces with bombshells to the end of time. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" (91). The quotation from the dislodged visionary-socialist Shelley indicates the gap between Frye's loyalties and those of many of his contemporaries. Frye understands culture as plot as well as imagery, and its plot takes on the shape of a collective hope and commitment to action, a deep identification with the imagery of a reborn world in garden, forest, or city. Such imagery promises the restoration of a beneficent pattern to the world through the construction of images congruent

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with our most benignly Utopian desires. In the political world of the 19303, Frye sees only natural depravity actualized on the theatre of world politics. The cyclic structures of drama and art, on the other hand, hint at the self-renewing powers of humanity. Unlike Eliot, the Southern Agrarians, or the contributors to F.R. Lea vis's Scrutiny, Frye does not see "the organic society" as demarcating the sole horizons for any valid cultural projections. He knows that Canada's existence is inseparable from the expansive energies that forged Blake and the industrial revolution alike. Frye's is a world where the imagined cities of Plato, the green world of Shakespeare, and the cartoon fantasies of Disney can exist on a common axis, as so many signals of a permanent hope for a renewed society. By the late 19305, North American intellectuals estranged by Eliot were looking for deliverance in quite different directions. To this group, Edmund Wilson embodied a powerful alternative to Eliot's example. The publication of After Strange Gods in 1934 crowned Wilson's own disenchantment with Eliot's leadership. Only a year later, Wilson journeyed to Odessa to begin his quest to redefine the relationship between politics and letters. In a trail-blazing essay on "Marxism and Literature" (t-937) f Wilson argued that "in practising and prizing literature, we must not be unaware of the first efforts of the human spirit to transcend literature itself."14 Throughout this period, in such essays as "Flaubert's Politics" and "A.E. Housman" (1937), Wilson showed how nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists repeatedly arrived at the very brink of imagining the extinction of the existing social and political order but stopped short of supplying any vision of a new society. After a battery of preliminary sketches published in The New Republic, Wilson's blueprint for this transformed society, To the Finland Station—arguably the last great nineteenth-century historical novel—appeared in 1940. Wilson welcomed Russian Communism as the logical terminus of a rational, scientific, progressive, bourgeois nineteenth-century Europe. For this ultimate fulfilment of humanity's emancipation, he looked to Michelet, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the heroes of To the Finland Station, whom he fused in a kind of Balzacian comedie humaine. With its panoramic sweep and clearly-defined dramatic conflicts, Wilson's version of "the modern century" wrestled the responsibility for progress from a bourgeoisie that had lost its way. The torch of the future passed to men of action, not artist-dreamers. Frye could hardly have viewed the emancipation Wilson delivered as

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much preferable to imprisonment under Eliot. For one thing, he saw in Communism the resurgence of unchecked institutional power, not the first chapters in a saga of social liberation. In "War on the Cultural Front" (no. 26, 1940), he describes Russian Communism as "a religious movement complete with bible, church, heretics, apostles, saints, martyrs, and shrines" (185). If he could concede—as he did repeatedly later—the accuracy of the Soviet assessment of Western economic and political institutions, Frye could see nothing to welcome in the political machinery Communism had constructed. This he consistently characterized as a recrudescence of Papal authoritarianism with its imperialism, hagiography, and orchestrated confessions. His short commentary on "Gandhi" (no. 33, 1948) regrets the fate of the politician apotheosized, and derives consolation from the fact that a murdered Gandhi at least "avoided being pushed, along with Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, into the modern pantheon of legendary heroes, infallible and impotent, who can be invoked to endorse any kind of action, however at variance with their teachings" (210). For Frye, Wilson's supremely rational interpretation of modern history ignored its nightmare atmosphere. Secondly, Frye could not see the profit in Wilson's implied directive "to transcend literature itself." For Frye, literature and art were the foundation stones for any plan to emancipate society. The gap between Wilson's view of Russian Communism and Frye's is a gap between a critic who interprets a culture by its doctrinal propositions and one who interprets it by its images. Because Wilson scarcely registers awareness of the vast grip that symbols exert over human consciousness, he ends up blessing Lenin's rapacity for power. Frye's own practice leads him further and further into the fund of images and myths of human societies. These he comes to see as what Malinowski would call the "charters" for their aspirations. Their stories about the origins, collapse, and subsequent renewal of human sociability are familiar to readers of Frye's later The Secular Scripture (1976) and The Myth of Deliverance (1983). But they are embryonically present in his early essays on Disney and Chaplin. To say this is to recognize the distinct orientation of Frye's cultural criticism and begin to make its originality more explicit. It is the concern with imagery and the attempt to read the modern world's scattered images as a coherent, dialectical narrative of deliverance that raise Frye's essays in this volume above the level of a series of well-informed, tightly-written, and energetically conceived reports on politics and literature. As he acknowledged on many occasions, it was Oswald Spengler

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who inspired Frye to see the world as so many imaginative constructs and to understand the centrality of artistic evidence for the aspiring cultural critic. Spengler's cultural criticism, with its ambitious aim of plotting the geopolitical unconscious of an epoch, had first captured Frye's imagination when he read The Decline of the West (1919-22) and "practically slept with Spengler under my pillow for several years" (270). Yet Frye's is a Spengler with a difference, a virtuoso of visionary narrative, not a gloomy determinist. Frye reverses Spengler's assumptions about the long winter about to descend over the modern century. In Frye's eyes, this nightmare technopolis is one option for modern society, but it is not the only option. For Frye draws very different conclusions from the vast gulf that separates culture from nature, arguing that its existence shows that nothing is determined in human affairs, even though "everything contemporaneous in a given society is related" (181). Although Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man (1927) saw this as Spengler's own bleak capitulation to the spirit of the age, Frye discerns in his encyclopedia of cultural symbolism an order undetectable to those caught between the dogmas of Wall Street and Red Square. Ultimately, The Decline of the West enabled Frye to forge the latent affinities between twentieth-century technological and artistic styles in The Modern Century. Reading Spengler encouraged Frye to develop the historical parallels that elevated analogies between Classical Rome and modern Europe from guesswork to creative intuition. This schema for the "seasons" of cultural development allowed him to see the past at work in the present, to juxtapose Chaplin's problem comedy period with Shakespeare's. Far from being a capitulation to Zeitgeist, Spengler's book liberalized Hegel's geist. If it is Spengler who awakened Frye's power to see the created world as so many imaginative constructions and established the centrality of the arts for cultural analysis, then it is Frye himself who makes the connection between Spengler and less drastically pessimistic theorists also concerned with culture as a system of symbolic thinking. Much of this thinking occurs beneath the level of the conscious mind. As Emile Durkheim recognizes in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), tne exchange of coloured paper for goods and services belongs to the sans dire, the "taken-for-granted" features of everyday social reality in Paris or London. But it is no less binding for all that, as bankrupts and forgers rapidly discover. To see modern culture as a spectacular instance of symbolic breakdown—as Eliot, Benda, Hulme15 and a host of twentieth-

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century social thinkers had done—is to overlook how many such symbolic encounters proceed successfully in a single day. P.M. Cornford's From Religion to Philosophy (1912) and The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914)—whose influence Frye's work frequently acknowledges—taught him how culture shapes the way people think, regulating and ordering the exchange of symbols into a structure that in turn is actualized in a system of social performances, obligations, celebrations, and crises. Cornford plotted the categories of Greek thought, penetrating the distinct and specific meanings that "tragedy" or "history" took on for its citizens. He showed how the Greeks deployed images from the natural and cultural world in their religious speculation. At the end of the road that stretches from Plato's cave to the Platonic republic come the communities the people of antiquity inhabited and—most important of all for Frye's theory of culture—that they wanted to inhabit. These were the communities they celebrated in the festivals and rituals Cornford saw as the origins of Greek literary genres. In effect, Frye puts the contributions of Durkheim and Cornford to two main purposes. First of all, he shifts the syntax of cultural criticism from the indicative (these are the symbols and images we circulate in such-and-such a society, these are the symbols that circulated in one such canonical culture) and the imperative (these are the symbols we must use in such-and-such a society) to the optative (this is the kind of society we hope for and these are the kinds of symbols we use to transmit our hopes). Second, he strings the images of a culture into episodes within a larger plot: what we hope will happen is not always what happens, and our fears, no less than our hopes, control our stock of images and our narrative structures. When Frye inspects how these symbols and structures operate inside literary genres and institutions—as in the festivals of ancient Greece or medieval Europe—he sees them as charged with the great moments of hope and fear for a society, as vehicles for entertaining speculation about polls and cosmos that are tabooed in the larger state. Unlike Eliot or Leavis, Frye does not think this image-making power can only operate in certain closed societies. Two of the most compelling essays in this collection, "The Great Charlie" (no. 10,1941) and "The Eternal Tramp" (no. 17, 1947), locate this power as alive and well in a commercial cinema designed to entertain the industrial masses. Frye's Chaplin functions as an emissary for a turbulent American comic dissidence. To Chaplin, "the man who is really part of his social group is only half a man" (101).

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Frye interprets Chaplin's comedies as updated reworkings of the religious ordeal enacted in pageant cycles or the visionary images of religious painting. This time, however, it is the soul of the West, as in Spengler, not the individual soul, that Frye sees as the disputed entity. The dark shadow of contemporary Europe descends over The Great Dictator, even down to the ineffectual German opposition to Hitler. In Monsieur Verdoux, Frye must confront one of his own traumas: the meaning of the great crash, an event he saw as so significant in his own experience. In Verdoux the Bluebeard, a man superfluous for international capital, Frye sees the victim turned revenger, a man able to turn the economic system against itself with murderously successful results. But Verdoux's is a Pyrrhic victory that only drags the world further into bloodshed. It is the outsider—the Huck Finn or the tramp—whose nonconformity offers the germs of a more humane alternative to existing society; in the tramp's detachment from social expectations, Frye perceives the potential for new deliverance. By 1948, Frye was ready to present "The Argument of Comedy" as an extension and elaboration of ideas he had worked out in his reviews of Chaplin. The Forum's continuous faith in what it called "the common man" received perhaps one of the most powerful and original tributes as Frye recast the argument, imagery, and protagonists of comedy in terms of his hopes for a new world purged of tyranny. V Frye and Modern Culture By 1946, as ideological divisions between East and West widened, an independent Canadian response to political events became harder to maintain. Yet this often precarious, vituperative atmosphere did not stifle sustained debate about cultural policies inside the Forum. Despite unsettled leadership (between 1946 and 1950 editorial responsibilities passed from Eleanor Godfrey to George Grube, to Frye himself, and finally to Alan Creighton) and an understandably uncertain response to the politics of a nuclear age, the Canadian Forum continued to keep alive the ideal of cultural cooperation. Even as cold war rhetoric often hardened within its own pages, the journal entertained discussions on the provision of national and provincial libraries and the role of UNESCO, and expanded its arts reviewing to include discussion of radio and music programming. In the university at large, the new structures of citizenship regnant in

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the postwar world did not go unexamined. Harold Innis's pioneering studies of global communication pointed to the dangers of American dominance in this sphere. For Innis, a global communications industry controlled by American media like Time and Newsweek constituted the greatest threat to the rational public discussion on which the Forum had staked its hopes for Canadian democracy throughout the 19305. In The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (1951), a new translation of Prometheus Bound accompanied by a lengthy and speculative commentary, Eric Havelock, now a member of Harvard's Classics department, used the evidence of Classical antiquity to ask new questions about the modern state. From the many permutations of the Prometheus myth, Havelock detected the fear that humanity might not be at the centre of creation at all, and the suspicion that "we are a temporary event. .. the territory on which we have a foothold is like a boulder on a mountain slide."16 What did the acceptable instruments of measuring social reality—individual, city, nation—mean in a world dominated by two vast ideological systems? From 1946, Frye's own topical, terse commentaries maintain a close and lively concern with unfolding events in the postwar world. They consider the strained border relations between the United States and Canada, the potential stress points of world politics, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the metamorphosis of the United States from anarchist comedian to global policeman, and the sexual habits of the North American male. Frye also periodically reviews the efforts of Karl Lowith, Reinhold Niebhur, F.S.C. Northrop, and Arnold Toynbee to synthesize politics, religion, and science into a non-Marxist philosophical history. He is not slow to expose the ideologically driven energies that fuel so many of these works. Paradoxically, the period that saw "the end of ideology" was also the period in which Frye's awareness of ideology as a social force—as a set of symbols designed to elicit collective allegiance and thus to fix the shape of the future—was at its peak. At this time, Frye's method of understanding the overall direction of social reality through interpretation of its images took on an even sharper significance for a Cold War society where local symbols now assumed strategic significance. In a context where large "general histories" all too often seemed a covert means of making the world safe for the American way of life, Frye's is a sceptical voice. Many readers will consider Frye's The Modern Century as the crown of these labours. In January 1967, Canada's centenary year of federation, Frye followed Robert Oppenheimer, Sir Ronald Syme, and Anthony

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Blunt as Whidden lecturer at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The series had originated in 1954 as McMaster's tribute to the Reverend Howard P. Whidden, described by the University's principal in 1967 as "a man of striking appearance, unusual dignity, deep Christian conviction, and ready tolerance" (3). Whidden shared Frye's Protestant faith, and his commitment to public service and to Canadian academic excellence. By 1967, the reach of the Whidden Lectures stretched far beyond Canada. Their subject matter engaged with the twentieth century's panic and fear as well as its widening educational opportunities and expanding democratic structures: the series included lectures on apartheid, avant-garde art and the Spanish Civil War, colonial elites, and nuclear weaponry. So it is perhaps not surprising that this was for Frye not simply a celebratory occasion, but an opportunity to extrude the spiritual pattern from the mass of wars, technical innovations, and artistic experiments in a Western-dominated world between 1867 and 1967. Possibly uniquely in his canon, Frye's cultural analysis of the twentieth century frequently moves against the grain of his hopes for the century. In his first lecture Frye identifies "the alienation of progress" (11) as the latent feature that saps the morale of the modern citizen. His second talk anatomizes the various realisms that have made modern art a resistance movement dedicated to overcoming this pervasive selfestrangement. In his closing address, Frye offers his hopes for an "open mythology" (65) able to respond to modernity's collective desires and fears without transforming them into structures of domination. Through the free discussion of the stories that matter for societies Frye seeks to maintain twentieth-century Canada's commitment to cooperative democracy and the visionary imagination. He wants to avoid the opportunistic muddle his Canadian Forum columns repeatedly found so unsatisfactory in the daily operations of democracy. He hopes also to steer clear of the violent solutions to ideological impasse so characteristic of the twentieth century. The three chapters of The Modern Century show Frye at his most versatile: as cultural diagnostician, historian of the avant-garde, sceptical analyst of the new communication technologies, and educator-humanist. He continues his search for the institutions that can licitly command a Canadian intellectual's loyalty in the twentieth century. These questions of loyalty bring Frye wheeling back to his earliest essays in cultural criticism, when the brazenly patriotic call of "King and Country" made pressing and irrational claims on a young intellectual's allegiances.

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There were also more immediate reasons for reconsidering these questions. Only two years previously, McMaster teacher and Canadian philosopher George Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965) had announced the demise of Canadian national sovereignty. Grant's lament was occasioned by the fall in 1963 of John Diefenbaker, the Canadian prime minister, after a controversy about national defence policy. Since 1957, Canada's participation in NATO had committed the country to a nuclear defence. By 1963, however, Diefenbaker appeared undecided about the purchase of the nuclear warheads on which his own administration had staked national security. Many political commentators ascribed the ensuing crisis to the prime minister's Hamlet-like capacity for indecision. Grant, however, interpreted it in terms of a national trauma, arguing that Canadians were now indistinguishable from the Americans whose presiding ideology of a mastered nature and a managerial political system they completely shared. With what sometimes appears like a certain grim relish, Grant described an imminent epoch of global U.S. domination in which questions of national loyalties would be ultimately irrelevant for Canadians. Grant did not stop at describing Canada's long slide into Americanism since the Second World War. He tracked the origins of American technocracy to the Lockean "contractualism" that effectively severed politics from moral categories. By this point, of course, Grant was on his way to estrangement from any political system at all, with the possible exception of that which prevailed in Classical antiquity. Given the popularity of Grant's book in Canada, his was not a testimony that Frye could afford to disregard, even though Grant's analysis ran counter to Frye's own understanding of what nationalism meant in the modern age. When Grant invoked the normative properties of the nation, he ignored how often twentieth-century nationalism had functioned coercively. When Grant spoke of the traditional loyalties that bind subject to city and nation, he raised not only the shaping values but also the specific conditions of the Athenian city-state to permanent authority. Canada could never have been conceived in a world where the organic society was the ruling model of civil association. Grant was not among the audience for the Whidden Lectures, but his passionate pessimism shaped an important strand of Frye's argument. When Frye described the unease in "the emotional relation to the future" (18) that unpredictable rapid change brings to the modern citizen, he may also have had another Canadian thinker in his sights. In

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Explorations in Communication (1960), The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1963), and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan, a teacher at the University of Toronto since 1946, argued that electronic communications media transformed our understanding and experience of social reality completely. Where conventional literacy supplied us with a linear, progressive understanding of events, requiring us to consider one thing at a time through our own unique screening patterns, television offered "simultaneous sharing of experience" and put "a premium on togetherness."17 Everything in existing educational institutions and teaching practices, however, militated against the togetherness McLuhan discerned in his global village of the future. Consequently, he called for an end to classrooms and educational institutions as currently constituted, adding that it was "misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter" (Explorations, 3). By 1967, McLuhan's message had achieved international visibility. How was Frye to respond to a vision of the educator's role so contrary to his own? What had he to offer to counter Grant's rousingly patriotic lament? In the future McLuhan and Grant describe there is little room for agency. Yet Frye's first lecture reminds his listeners that the civilization of the modern century "is probably the first civilization in history that has attempted to study itself objectively" (8), and the Protestant corollary that man is responsible for his creation. The first lecture establishes, however, that all the items of humanity's social mythology—family, nation, city, religion—appear to have slipped away from the grasp of the late twentiethcentury citizen. Even the human constructions Frye favours—images, stories and mythologies—function only as self-protecting, other-destroying illusions in this lecture, which opens with images of alienation drawn from Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost and closes with brief, suggestive comments on the social fears dramatized in Waiting for Godot and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Torn between Beckett's and Albee's variations on a shared malaise, the modern person, resident in a city precariously poised "at the end of things," suffers only a deep paralysis of the will. The second lecture, "Improved Binoculars," rallies from this bleak portrait. Frye offers the diverse strands of "the modern" as a cohesive, international period style rationally designed and executed to salvage the world as a human construction accessible to human understanding. Moving across centuries of experimental art from Giotto to Cage, Frye

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posits a coherent objective among artists: that of delivering back to the human being "the forms he had created" (31). Frye acknowledges that human groups fear no one more than the gift-bearer, but emphasizes that such fear derives from the wholesale dependence on the myths of "stupid realism" (33) imposed by the communications industry on modern citizens. Against these he pits the dynamic realism, perpetually adjusting itself to changes in consciousness, space, time, and environment, that propels the work of Turner, Eliot, or Joyce. Each of these artists elicits the audience's participation in the construction of illusion. Each shares a modern tendency to prefer "the imperfect work engaged in history to the perfected masterpiece that pulls away from time" (39). This is not true, Frye thinks, of television or electronic media as currently organized. Unlike McLuhan, from whose The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media he borrows much of his imagery at the same time as he annihilates its historical argument and its technological determinism, Frye sees television as more market than rite. He deplores its continuous incitements to consumption. He sees its advertisements and rituals as only "counter-communication," not the expansion and redefinition of our categories of perception he finds in the best modern art. The closing example he draws from Genet's The Balcony, however, raises issues to be revisited in his last lecture. Genet's world admits authority only in parodic form, and it is the crisis of authority that Arnold himself recognizes as the central problem of modern society in Culture and Anarchy. Frye has thus positioned himself to reopen the questions raised in a book that appeared just ninety-eight years before his own lectures. Like Arnold, Frye recognizes the existence of three major social tiers. In "Clair de lune intellectuel," he identifies these as the political, economic, and leisure spheres. Frye argues that the leisure sphere now enjoys the same structural importance for modern societies as the political and economic spheres did for previous societies. He returns to the galleries, museums, and exhibitions that were his beat in the Ontario of the 19305. These activities are now no longer retreats from a world governed by industry, but are themselves "a rival form of society" (48) and "a structure of education" (59). Frye emphasizes that his preferred "structure of education" cannot end when its recipients reach twentyone, and that it cannot reach the status of "a rival form of society" just by drilling an elite with great thoughts from the past. Instead, Frye sees the university as the site for learning the "myths of concern" that, in A Study of English Romanticism, a volume published a year after The

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Modern Century, he defined as "society's view of its situation and destiny" (SR, 16). At its initial level, concern equates with conformity, the local pieties Grant saw as the basis of civil society, but which Frye's first lecture recognized as superseded by the modern conditions that produced Canada. In his last lecture, Frye defines myth as a "reservoir of possibilities of belief" (65), and thus as a storehouse for all the conceivable constructions a common concern about the future might take. He concludes that The world we see and live in, and most of the world we have made, belongs to the alienated and absurd world of the tiger. But in all our efforts to imagine or realize a better society, some shadow falls across it of the child's innocent vision of the impossible created world that makes human sense. If we can no longer feel that this world was once created for us by a divine parent, we still must feel, more intensely than ever, that it is the world we ought to be creating, and that whatever may be divine in our destiny or nature is connected with its creation. (68-9)

The last paragraphs of Frye's book elevate the Utopian constructions of culture into the modern century's moral imperative. In this deeply introspective volume, so concerned with the ceaselessly transforming identity available to a Canadian born in the modern century, Frye finds a lasting authority in the images and narratives of the liberating visionary culture he first began to detect when he discussed Chaplin, Delius, and Disney in the Canadian Forum. For as long as these images survive and fertilize so many consciousnesses in Canada and across the world, it is always premature to voice a "lament for a nation." VI Towards a Public Culture: Absorbing Imagination When Frye's critical career began, one of the principal challenges artists and intellectuals faced was that of constructing a usable past, of selecting from a now infinitely expandable legacy imagined as a "museum without walls." This museum housed all the monuments and experiments considered most valuable for a talented minority. By contrast, Frye's later work, written at a time of mounting tension between the warring nuclear empires of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., acknowledges the imperative to argue on behalf of an absorbable future for a whole community. The postwar world is, as Frye submits in the closing pages of

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The Modern Century, the world of the tiger, where predatory appetites and destructive tendencies have free rein. It is also a world where in the West, at any rate, the tiger has disguised itself as the gift-horse, offering goods, services, and leisure for all who are able to afford to tune in to its continuous barrage of electronically produced counter-communication. A surfeit of aggression and desire faces the contemporary citizen at every turn. What can the humanities offer as a more tolerable version of society? One of Frye's toughest assignments is to maintain the intellectual momentum for the project of cooperation in a period of affluence, inflation, and limitless but well-concealed potential for destruction. In the 19305, as Mussolini and Hitler rose to power and unemployment figures and hunger marches lengthened, apologists for the Utopian imperative had a fairly captive audience for their message. These are not the conditions Frye faced in the last thirty years of his life, however, as a managerial society disguises market conditions as Utopia itself. How can Frye's continued commitment to the values of Canadian cooperation maintain its persuasive power even as its institutional presence fades from national politics? What answers has Frye to the challenge of American ideology as it saturates Canadian airwaves? Frye's arguments for cooperation rest on four main pillars. The first strand of Frye's critique comes with his analysis of society as it is, an analysis that emphasizes the psychological and social destructiveness of the order managerial society tries to persuade us at every moment to take for granted. Second, Frye makes a quiet but unwavering restatement of the value possessed by traditional means of communication— books, images, and works of art. Third, Frye reconceptualizes the social function of the images and narratives dispersed through such agencies, stringing them together into a larger narrative of "the world man is trying to build out of nature" and of the identity crises he encounters every day in the neurotic order he is encouraged to accept as natural. Fourth, Frye recasts the university not as an elite finishing school or factory for knowledge production, but as a site for the preservation, construction, performance, interpretation, and transmission of the alternative social realities that can rescue human society from alienation. One of Frye's few ventures into the orthodox history of ideas, "Tenets of Modern Culture" (no. 42, 1950), recognizes the dominance of the United States in modern civilization and the consequent dominance of American social thinking in the world. Too bad, then, that for Frye,

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American social thinking is so deeply antisocial, amounting to no more than the unbridled pursuit of self interest. Frye summarizes its central axioms as a belief that "the chief end of man is to improve his own lot in the natural world, and the essential meaning of human life is the progressive removal of the obstacles presented by nature, including atavistic impulses in man himself" (238). Such assumptions for Frye have their logical terminus not in a participatory democracy but in a "managerial dictatorship" (238) that promises to maximize the satisfaction of everintensifying predatory habits and appetites. Yet even in this essay Frye is as concerned as ever with the means by which such a self-destructive machinery manages to appear self-evidently natural for its citizens. Frye points to the "vast and ruthless irony" (242) that controls its communication systems, the scapegoating rituals of its machinery for justice and governance, and "the sense of imminent apocalypse" (238) that overtakes so many people in their pursuit of the illusions they call life, liberty, and happiness. Frye's social analysis rests on understanding society's systems of meaning. His introduction to Art and Reality: A Casebook of Concern (no. 23, 1986) judges that "nine-tenths of what we call reality is not some ineluctably existing group of objects or conditions 'out there': it is rather the rubbish left over from previous human constructs" (167). This emphasis on social reality as constructed and reinforced by cultural symbols dates back to his earliest essays when, as we have seen, he was more likely to discuss the arguments for and against war in terms of a symbolic event like the Oxford Union debate on "King and Country" than through a detailed analysis of imperial foreign policy. So in some senses, Frye was always a semiotician avant le signe, intensely interested in the social rituals—trials, coronations, book bannings—of the modern world. Frye's assessment of postindustrial society is a harsh one. He sees the violence against nature that sustained nineteenth-century society as moving inward in the late twentieth-century, first of all through the perpetual solicitation of television "markets" and then by means of a perpetual cycle of drama disguised as "news." Like Raymond Williams/8 Frye sees the late twentieth century as a uniquely "dramatized society," exposed to more dramatic productions in a year than any previous society in a lifetime. This continuous spectacular performance conceals for Frye "an undercurrent of hysteria . . . a hysteria I had heard before" (286). The unbridled forces unleashed on contemporary audiences fan "a

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deliberate creation of hysteria, which takes such forms as violent language, a constant suppression of dissent, shouting slogans, breaking up meetings, invoking emergency measures to get rid of troublemakers" (291). From this perspective, the Vietnam war merely replays on a massive scale the scapegoating rituals that have erupted in American culture throughout its history, in the "Red Scare" of the early twentieth century, in the Nuremberg trials, and in the McCarthy hearings. Frye's inspection of the modern century's cultural symbolism moves from political critique to psychological diagnosis: Spokesmen on both American and Russian sides of the armaments race have said that there is no sense in an atomic war, nothing is to be gained by it, and that no rational person would start such a thing. Such statements do not reassure us . . . : a century that has seen Hitler and Stalin, besides many similar phenomena, knows that too many of the people who seek power within society are insane, and that such insanity is contagious and not isolating. (171) The "rubbish left over from previous human constructs" (167) includes, most dangerously of all, the eagerness to use new technology to recycle old dramas of prohibition and revenge previously transmitted in "laws .. . myths and stories about the traditional gods and heroes, magical formulas, proverbs, and the like" (321). Yet Frye continues to insist on the liberating potential of myth and narrative. In their recurring images and stories, Frye finds traces of latent affinities between culture and nature. He notes in them a property he calls "concern," but emphasizes that concern itself may either lock groups together in the defence of their identity ("This is a story about the purity of the Teutonic race and about the threat you Jews present to it") or may look beyond immediate realities to the "myths of deliverance" Frye finds in Measure for Measure and Monsieur Verdoux. Unlike Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), Frye does not attach this alternative layer of meaning to any occult properties in the stories themselves, nor does he entrust it to the custodianship of an interpretative community. (Frye's mistrust of experts and elites is one of the most constant and most appealing features of his cultural criticism.) The distinctive feature of narrative for Frye rests in its capacity for transformation, exemplified in the metamorphosis that takes Monsieur Verdoux, against all odds, from crime story to indictment of the world-as-it-is, and that,

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with similar unexpectedness, propels Measure for Measure from captivity narrative to myth of deliverance. For Frye, Shakespeare's drama serves as ordeal and emancipation, not one or the other. In this way it brings our contemporary canons of behaviour to the clean light of accountability, before reconceptualizing them through an act of imaginative charity. This crystallizes in Frye's own modification of reception theory. For Frye any valuable work enjoys a dual identity, the first of which a reader construes "like other plays," the second of which releases "an exploding force in the mind that keeps destroying all the barriers of cultural prejudice that limit the response to it" (MD, vii). Such a view of narrative sees it ultimately as a release of benign and transforming energy, a counterforce to the merely repetitive momentum of a contemporary society that drives its audience only into a cul de sac. Having defined the cultural function of narrative and its internal dynamic, Frye next considers the authority enjoyed by the book—the principal medium for narrative up to the arrival of television and cinema. Is any book only the monument to dead ideas and slow thinking proclaimed in Marshall McLuhan's influential The Gutenberg Galaxy? In "The Renaissance of Books" Frye emphasizes that the authority of books does not reside completely in their factual content, since an afternoon in any secondhand bookstore is an object lesson in the obsolescence of factual knowledge. Yet books do educate the reader, in ways no author can ever have anticipated. Frye reminds his audience that reading has historically fostered much less introverted habits than those encouraged by the electronic media now said to have superseded it. "When society still contained a number of illiterates, or habitual nonreaders," he observes, "a village community, say, would form around a man who could read aloud to them the news . .. and current literature" (150). As Frye argues, the authority of even factual or polemical works rests not so much in the certainties they embody as in the habits of cooperation they foster among their readers. In Frye's words: The written expository treatise looks at first sight like a dictatorial monologue, but this is a misunderstanding. Nothing of the hypnotic rhetoric of speech to a present audience is left in it: the author is forced, by the nature of his medium, to put all his cards on the table, to take his reader into his confidence, to appeal to nothing but the evidence of the argument itself. And so, however often it may fail in meeting the standards prescribed by its own physical shape, the expository or thesis-book remains the normal

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unit of impersonal social vision, and the normal medium by which communication draws us together into a community. (154-5)

The intersubjective properties of reading, the habits of verification and rebuttal any book promotes, the way the book can mean nothing if unaccompanied by the collaboration of its audience, all bolster Frye's claims for the educative properties and the outward-looking direction of reading. Similarly, when Frye turns to imaginative literature, he tracks its history in terms of collective memory as well as individual skill: the conception of literature develops as a body of great traditional themes held in common. Chaucer, Shakespeare, the writers of Greek tragedy, all draw their materials from well-known sources, and their assumption is: this story may have often been told, but I'm telling it better, so you won't need to refer to any other versions except mine. (152)

These assumptions are incentives to increase the artist's talent; but the conditions of reading, composition, and performance hardly validate such claims. In fact, late twentieth-century works like Michel Butor's Passing Time (1961) or Don DeLillo's Mao 2 (1991) jettison altogether claims to better their predecessors and acknowledge rather that they can only "mean" anything in relation to a stream of antecedent narratives. More and more contemporary fiction rests on the cooperation of its readers to situate it in an ocean of narrative as a precondition for understanding its own distinctive properties. The potential for chaos in these conditions does not escape Frye. It is at this point that the central institutional importance of the university moves to the centre of his cultural analysis. Frye's university is the production centre for new art and the largest and most disinterested preservation archive for the art of the past. Organizationally, it can function as a theatre for the production of mind at work through its exhibitions and readings, its interdisciplinary forays, and its commitment to lifelong learning. The university is where individuals can, in an age of panic, learn the patience necessary for the steady construction of creative skill and critical judgment that Frye still sees as the only sure means of human fulfilment. Frye's last works seize the idiom of the time at a stage of his life when he might easily have rejected it. He imagines the late twentieth-century

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university as an institution for learning about the structures of reality in a postmodern society where the structuring of reality, rather than the production of commodities or the refining of raw materials, enjoys a centrality unthinkable when his career began. It is in the university that we can learn that "gods are really human constructs" (324) and that "practically all the reality we wake up facing is a human construct left over from yesterday" (327). Most important of all, it is in the university that a joint commitment to the enlightened habit of creative scepticism can be renewed, where we can learn that our myths of order and ultimately our social reality itself are, like art, "hypothesis from beginning to end, assuming anything and verifying nothing" (320). Frye began his career attempting to slay the monsters constructed by the sleep of reason: nationalism, Fascism, and Communism. His final efforts in cultural criticism rejoice in the endlessly transformative property of the grammars that encode social reality. Just as important, however, is Frye's emphasis on the university as the site where the capacity to read these codes must be transmitted to a community pledged to continuous education and discussion. VII Frye and Contemporary Cultural Criticism Frye's most significant contributions to the study of cultural criticism are arguably fourfold. First of all, he recognized that, even with the enormous expansion of cultural media and educational opportunity in the twentieth century, cultural theory habitually lagged behind the demographics of modern society. In short, it remained an elite activity. Second, he transferred the primary site of cultural activity from its official agencies in Oxford or Harvard to the constructive powers of the mind, realizing that it was not only among "primitive" societies that myths, narratives, images, and metaphors shape the course of social action. Third, Frye refused to see these as evidence of humanity's will to regression, but instead saw in them the store of emancipating narratives all societies have entrusted with their hopes for a better future. Hence the role of a cultural critic was not to patronize provincials, mobilize malcontents, or even to promise to "raise" outsiders to metropolitan sophistication. Rather, it was to enable as many people as possible to identify the major constructs—the great families of myths and narratives that circulate in any human society—and to explore the "reservoir of possibilities" (65) for emancipation in each. Frye's fourth contribution,

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therefore, was to translate the Kantian objective of enlightened autonomy in the human consciousness into the necessary conditions of citizenship in twentieth-century society. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that these essays reveal a Frye who resembles Jiirgen Habermas or Raymond Williams in the recognition that understanding and rebuilding our means of communication is a necessary prelude to understanding and rebuilding our worlds. This may be an unexpected turn of events for a critic who has often been seen as disengaged from the burning issues of his time. Yet an editor can hope it is only the first of many misleading assumptions about Frye that a collection like this can begin to redress.

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The Modern Century

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1

The Modern Century 1967

The Modern Century: The Whidden Lectures, 1967 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967). Originally presented at McMaster University on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 17-19 January 1967, at 8:00 P.M. in the university's new Athletic Centre. Frye wrote a summary of the lectures for a brochure outlining their content to the university community and attendance was high (see NFF, 1988, box i,file x). After their delivery, E.T. Salmon, principal of University College, McMaster, wrote back to Frye thanking him "in the name of the University for the splendid series of lectures which you gave us," adding that "We have had any number of complimentary remarks passed upon them" (NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7). The Oxford University Press edition also included the following foreword by Dr. Salmon, dated February 1967: The Whidden Lectures were established in 1954 by E.C. Fox, B.A., LL.D., of Toronto, the senior member of the Board of Governors, to honour the memory of a former Chancellor of McMaster University. The Reverend Dr. Howard P. Whidden, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S.C., was a man of striking appearance, unusual dignity, deep Christian conviction, and ready tolerance. Born in 1871 in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where his family had settled in 1761 after three-quarters of a century's residence in New England, he attended universities in both Canada (Acadia and McMaster) and the United States (Chicago), and also served as a minister of Baptist churches in both countries (in Ontario, Manitoba, and Ohio). From 1913 to 1923 he was President of Brandon College, Manitoba, then an affiliate of McMaster University, and for part of that period (1917-21) he represented Brandon as a member of Parliament in the Canadian House of Commons at Ottawa. He was appointed administrative head (Chancellor) of McMaster University in 1923 and in 1930 became, in a manner of

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The Modern Century

speaking, its second founder when he directed its transfer from Toronto, where it had been established since 1887, to Hamilton. His broad educational outlook and effective leadership resulted in the University's burgeoning greatly in its new location, and Dr. Whidden was able to retire in 1941 with the comforting conviction that he had built both wisely and well. He died in Toronto in 1952. The selection of a Canadian scholar to be the Whidden Lecturer in 1967, the year of Canada's centennial, was inevitable. And that the choice should fall on H. Northrop Frye, the first person ever to be named by the University of Toronto as its University Professor, was almost equally inevitable. His reputation as one of the most significant of contemporary literary critics is worldwide and securely established. It is a cause for pride to academic circles in his native country that he should be the subject of a special volume, issued by the Columbia University Press just over a year ago. A graduate of Toronto and Merton College, Oxford, he made his mark some twenty years ago with a penetrating study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry; and since that time a steady stream of books and articles from his pen has made his name one of the most familiar and most respected wherever the study of English letters is seriously pursued. He has lectured in scores of universities throughout the English-speaking world and has received honorary doctorates from many of them. For the 1967 Whidden Lectures he chose as his theme The Modern Century, the century in which, as the saying goes, Canada came of age. He did not restrict his vision, however, to the literary and creative activities that have occurred in this country over the past one hundred years. Rather, he attempted to relate Canadian developments to those of the world as a whole- and it was a stimulating and exciting exercise to accompany him as his purview ranged over other countries, other continents, and other cultures. That the perspective of the many hundreds who had the privilege of hearing him was deepened and broadened, there is not the slightest doubt. McMaster University is now very pleased to publish the lectures in book form so that an even wider audience may share in the rewarding experience of learning the views of a distinguished Canadian on man's spiritual and intellectual adventures since 1867. Frye judged these to have been among his best delivered and best received public lectures. Four pages of typescript notes concerning the French translation clarify some, of Frye's dense allusions and emphases in this work and these have

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been drawn upon where appropriate for explanatory comment (see NFF, 1988, box 62, file i).

Author's Note The operation of giving the Whidden Lectures for 1967 was made pleasant and memorable by the hospitality of McMaster University and my many friends there. To them, as well as to the extraordinarily attentive and responsive audience, I feel deeply grateful. I am indebted to the Canada Council for a grant which enabled me to work on this and other projects, and to Mrs. Jessie Jackson for her preparation of the manuscript. The lectures were delivered in the centenary year of Canada's Confederation, and were originally intended to be Canadian in subject matter. I felt, however, that I had really said all I had to say about Canadian culture for some time, with the help of about forty colleagues, in the "Conclusion" to the recently published Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (1965). Hence the shift of theme to a wider context. I have tried to make my Canadian references as explicit as possible, for the benefit of non-Canadian readers, but have not invariably succeeded. For example, the titles of the three lectures are titles of poems by well-known Canadian poets: respectively, Archibald Lampman, Irving Lay ton, and Emile Nelligan.1

N.F. Victoria College in the University of Toronto January 1967 I City of the End of Things The Whidden Lectures have been a distinguished series, and anyone attempting to continue them must feel a sense of responsibility. For me, the responsibility is specific: I have been asked to keep in mind the fact that I shall be speaking to a Canadian audience in the Centennial year of Confederation. I have kept it in mind, and the first thing that it produced there was what I hope is a sense of proportion. The centenary of Confederation is a private celebration, a family party, in what is still a

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relatively small country in a very big world. One most reassuring quality in Canadians, and the one which, I find, chiefly makes them liked and respected abroad, when they are, is a certain unpretentiousness, a cheerful willingness to concede the immense importance of the nonCanadian part of the human race. It is appropriate to a Canadian audience, then, to put our centenary into some kind of perspective. For the majority of people in North America, the most important thing that happened in 1867 was the purchase of Alaska from Russia by the United States. For the majority of people in the orbit of British traditions, the most important thing that happened in 1867 was the passing of the Second Reform Bill, the measure that Disraeli called "a leap in the dark,"2 but which was really the first major effort to make the Mother of Parliaments represent the people instead of an oligarchy. For a great number, very probably the majority, of people in the world today, the most important thing that happened in 1867, anywhere, was the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, the only part of the book actually published by Marx himself. It was this event, of course, that helped among other things to make the purchase of Alaska so significant: another example of the principle that life imitates literature,3 in the broad sense, and not the other way round. There is a still bigger majority to be considered, the majority of the dead. In the year 1867 Thomas Hardy wrote a poem called 1967* in which he remarks that the best thing he can say about that year is the fact that he is not going to live to see it. My own primary interests are in literary and educational culture. What I should like to discuss with you here is not Canadian culture in itself, but the context of that culture in the world of the last century. One reason for my wanting to talk about the world that Canada is in rather than about Canada is that I should like to bypass some common assumptions about Canadian culture which we are bound to hear repeated a good deal in the course of this year. There is, for instance, the assumption that Canada has, in its progress from colony to nation, grown and matured like an individual: that to be colonial means to be immature,5 and to be national means to be grown up. A colony or a province, we are told, produced a naive, imitative, and prudish culture; now we have become a nation, we should start producing sophisticated, original, and spontaneous culture. (I dislike using "sophisticated" in an approving sense, but it does seem to be an accepted term for a kind of knowledgeability that responds to culture with the minimum of anxi-

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eties.) If we fail to produce a fully mature culture, the argument usually runs, it must be because we are still colonial or provincial in our attitude, and the best thing our critics and creators can do is to keep reminding us of this. If a Canadian painter or poet gets some recognition, he is soon giving interviews asserting that Canadian society is hypocritical, culturally constipated, and sexually inhibited. This might be thought a mere cliche, indicating that originality is a highly specialized gift, but it seems to have advanced in Canada to the place of an obligatory ritual. Some time ago, when a Canadian play opened in Paris, a reviewer, himself a Canadian, remarked sardonically, "Comme c'est canadien! Comme c'est pur!"6 I should add that this comment was incorporated by the Canadian publisher as a part of his blurb. Analogies between the actual growth of an individual and the supposed growth of a society may be illuminating, but they must always be, like all analogies, open to fresh examination. The analogy is a particularly tricky form of rhetoric when it becomes the basis of an argument rather than merely a figure of speech. Certainly every society produces a type of culture which is roughly characteristic of itself. A provincial society has a provincial culture; a metropolitan society has a metropolitan culture. A provincial society will produce a phenomenon like the tea party described in F.R. Scott's well-known satire, The Canadian Authors Meet. A metropolitan society would turn the tea party into a cocktail party,7 and the conversation would be louder, faster, more knowing, and cleverer at rationalizing its pretentiousness and egotism. But its poets would not necessarily be of any more lasting value than Mr. Scott's Miss Crotchet, though they might be less naive. It is true that relatively few if any of the world's greatest geniuses have been born in Canada, although a remarkable British painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis,8 went so far as to get himself born on a ship off Canadian shores, and developed an appropriately sea-sick view of Canada in later life. But we do not know enough about what social conditions produce great or even good writers to connect a lack of celebrated birthplaces with the moral quality of Canadian civilization. Another aspect of the same assumption is more subtle and pervasive. It is widely believed, or assumed, that Canada's destiny, culturally and historically, finds its fulfilment in being a nation, and that nationality is essential to identity. It seems to me, on the other hand, quite clear that we are moving towards a postnational world, and that Canada has moved further in that direction than most of the smaller nations. What is

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important about the last century, in this country, is not that we have been a nation for a hundred years, but that we have had a hundred years in which to make the transition from a prenational to a postnational consciousness. The so-called emergent nations, such countries as Nigeria or Indonesia,9 have not been so fortunate: for them, the tensions of federalism and separatism, of middle-class and working-class interests, of xenophobia and adjustment to the larger world, have all come in one great rush. Canada has—so far—been able to avoid both this kind of chaos and the violence that goes with the development of a vast imperial complex like the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. The Canadian sense of proportion that I mentioned is especially valuable now, as helping us to adopt an attitude consistent with the world it is actually in. My present task, I think, is neither to eulogize nor to elegize Canadian nationality, neither to celebrate its survival nor to lament its passage,10 but to consider what kinds of social context are appropriate for a world in which the nation is rapidly ceasing to be the real defining unit of society. We begin, then, with the conception of a "modern" world, which began to take shape a century ago and now provides the context for Canadian existence, and consequently for our Centennial. A century ago Canada was a nation in the world, but not wholly of it: the major cultural and political developments of Western Europe, still the main centre of the historical stage, were little known or understood in Canada, and the Canadian reaction even to such closer events as the American Civil War was largely negative. Today, Canada is too much a part of the world to be thought of as a nation in it. We have our undefended border with the United States, so celebrated in Canadian oratory, only because it is not a real boundary line at all: the real boundary line, one of the most heavily defended in the world, runs through the north of the country, separating a bourgeois sphere of control from a Marxist one. Culturally, the primary fact about the modern world, or at least about our "Western" and "democratic" part of it, is that it is probably the first civilization in history that has attempted to study itself objectively, to become aware of the presuppositions underlying its behaviour, to understand its relation to previous history, and to see whether its future could in some measure be controlled by its own will. This self-consciousness has created a sharp cultural dialectic in society, an intellectual antagonism between two mental attitudes. On one side are those who struggle for an active and conscious relation to their time, who study what is happening in the world, survey the conditions of life that

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seem most likely to occur, and try to acquire some sense of what can be done to build up from those conditions a way of life that is at least self-respecting. On the other side are those who adopt a passive and negative attitude, responding to the daily news and similar stimuli, aware of what is going on but making no effort to understand either the underlying causes or the future possibilities. The theatre of this conflict in attitudes is formed by the creative and the communicating arts. The creative arts are almost entirely on the active side: they mean nothing, or infinitely less, to a passive response. The subject matter of contemporary literature being its own time, the passive and uncritical attitude is seen as its most dangerous enemy. Many aspects of contemporary literature—its ironic tone, its emphasis on anxiety and absurdity, its queasy apocalyptic forebodings—derive from this situation. The communicating arts, including the so-called mass media, are a mixture of things. Some of them are arts in their own right, like the film. Some are or include different techniques of presenting the arts we already have, like television. Some are not arts, but present analogies to techniques in the arts which the arts may enrich themselves by employing, as the newspaper may influence collage in painting or the field theory of composition in poetry. Some are applied arts, where the appeal is no longer disinterested, as it normally is in the creative arts proper. Thus propaganda is an interested use of the literary techniques of rhetoric. As usual, there are deficiencies in vocabulary: there are no words that really convey the intellectual and moral contrast of the active and passive attitudes to culture. The phrase "mass culture"11 conveys emotional overtones of passivity: it suggests someone eating peanuts at a baseball game, and thereby contrasting himself to someone eating canapes at the opening of a sculpture exhibition. The trouble with this picture is that the former is probably part of a better educated audience, in the sense that he is likely to know more about baseball than his counterpart knows about sculpture. Hence his attitude to his chosen area of culture may well be the more active of the two. And just as there can be an active response to mass culture, so there can be passive responses to the highbrow arts. These range from, Why can't the artist make his work mean something to the ordinary man? to the significant syntax of the student's question, Why is this considered a good poem? The words "advertising" and "propaganda" come closest to suggesting a communication deliberately imposed and passively received. They represent respectively the communicating interests of the two major areas of soci-

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ety, the economic and the political. Recently these two conceptions have begun to merge into the single category of "public relations."12 One very obvious feature of our age is the speeding up of process: it is an age of revolution and metamorphosis, where one lives through changes that formerly took centuries in a matter of a few years. In a world where dynasties rise and fall at much the same rate as women's hemlines, the dynasty and the hemline look much alike in importance, and get much the same amount of featuring in the news. Thus the progression of events is two-dimensional, a child's drawing reflecting an eye that observes without seeing depth, and even the effort to see depth has still to deal with the whole surface. Some new groupings result: for example, what used to be called the trivial or ephemeral takes on a function of symbolizing the significant. A new art of divination or augury has developed, in which the underlying trends of the contemporary world are interpreted by vogues and fashions in dress, speech, or entertainment. Thus if there appears a vogue for white lipstick among certain groups of young women, that may represent a new impersonality in sexual relationship, a parody of white supremacy, the dramatization of a death-wish, or the social projection of the clown archetype. Any number may play, but the game is a somewhat self-defeating one, without much power of sustaining its own interest. For even the effort to identify something in the passing show has the effect of dating it, as whatever is sufficiently formed to be recognized has already receded into the past. It is not surprising if some people should be frustrated by the effort to keep riding up and down the manic-depressive roller-coaster of fashion, of what's in and what's out, what is u and what non-u, what is hip and what is square, what is corny and what is camp.13 There are perhaps not as many of these unhappy people as our newspapers and magazines suggest there are: in any case, what is important is not this group, if it exists, but the general sense, in our society, of the panic of change. The variety of things that occur in the world, combined with the relentless continuity of their appearance day after day, impress us with the sense of a process going by a little too fast for our minds to focus on anything in it. Some time ago, the department of English in a Canadian university decided to offer a course in twentieth-century poetry. It was discovered that there were two attitudes in the department towards that subject: there were those who felt that twentieth-century poetry had begun with Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922, and those who felt that most of the best of

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it had already been written by that time. There also appeared to be some correlation between these two views and the age groups of those who held them. Finally a compromise was reached: two courses were offered, one called Modern Poetry and the other Contemporary Poetry. But even the contemporary course would need now to be supplemented by a third course in the postcontemporary, and perhaps a fourth in current happenings.14 In the pictorial arts the fashion parade of "isms" is much faster: I hear of painters, even in Canada, who have frantically changed their styles completely three or four times in a few years, as collectors demanded first abstract expressionism, then pop art, then pornography, then hard-edge, selling off their previous purchases as soon as the new vogue took hold. There is a medieval legend of the Wild Hunt, in which souls of the dead had to keep marching to nowhere all day and all night at top speed. Anyone who dropped out of line from exhaustion instantly crumbled to dust. This seems a parable of a type of consciousness frequent in the modern world, obsessed by a compulsion to keep up, reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of the total movement. It is a type of consciousness which I shall call the alienation of progress. Alienation and progress are two central elements in the mythology of our day, and both words have been extensively used and misused. The conception of alienation15 was originally a religious one, and perhaps that is still the context in which it makes most sense. In religion, the person aware of sin feels alienated, not necessarily from society, but from the presence of God, and it is in this feeling of alienation that the religious life begins. The conception is clearest in evangelical thinkers in the Lutheran tradition like Bunyan, who see alienation of this kind as the beginning of a psychological revolution.16 Once one becomes aware of being in sin and under the wrath of God, one realizes that one's master is the devil, the prince of this world, and that treason and rebellion against this master is the first requirement of the new life. A secularized use of the idea appears in the early work of Marx, where alienation describes the feeling of the worker who is cheated out of most of the fruit of his labour by exploitation. He is unable to participate in society to the extent that, as a worker, he should, because his status in society has been artificially degraded. In this context the alienated are those who have been dispossessed by their masters, and who therefore recognize their masters as their enemies, as Christian did Apollyon.17 In our day those who are alienated in Marx's sense are, for

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The Modern Century

example, the Negro, whose status is also arbitrarily degraded, or those who are in actual want and misery. The Negro, looking at the selfishness and panic in white eyes, realizes that while what he has to fight is ultimately a state of mind, still his enemies also include people who have got themselves identified with this state of mind. Thus his enemies, again, are those who believe themselves his masters or natural superiors. Apart from such special situations, not many in the Western democracies today believe that a specific social act, such as expropriating a propertied class, would end alienation in the modern world. The reason is that in a society like ours, a society of the accepted and adequately fed, the conception of alienation becomes psychological. In other words it becomes the devil again, for the devil normally comes to those who have everything and are bored with it, like Faust. The root of this aspect of alienation is the sense that man has lost control, if he ever had it, over his own destiny. The master or tyrant is still an enemy, but not an enemy that anyone can fight. Theoretically, the world is divided into democracies and peoples' republics: actually, there has never been a time when man felt less sense of participation in the really fateful decisions that affect his life and his death. The central symbol of this is of course the overkill bomb, as presented in such works as Dr. Strangelove,18 the fact that the survival of humanity itself may depend on a freak accident. In a world where the tyrant-enemy can be recognized, even defined, and yet cannot be projected on anything or anybody, he remains part of ourselves, or more precisely of our own death wish, a cancer that gradually disintegrates the sense of community. We may try to persuade ourselves that the complete destruction of Communism (or, on their side, of capitalist imperialism) would also destroy alienation. But an instant of genuine reflection would soon tell us that all such external enemies could disappear from the earth tomorrow and leave us exactly where we were before. In this situation there is a steady pressure in the direction of making one's habitual responses passive. The first to succumb to this pressure are those whose attitude to the world is deliberately frivolous, who have only an instinct for avoiding any kind of stimulus that might provoke a genuine concern. Such an attitude tries to ignore the issues of the day and responds mainly to the "human interest" stories in the tabloids19 provided for it, gathering its experience of life much as one might pick up a number of oddly shaped stones on a beach. But even here the effort to shut out anxiety is itself an anxiety, and a very intense one, which

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keeps the conscious and critical part of the mind very near to the breaking point of hysteria. The mind on the verge of breakdown is infinitely suggestible, as Pavlov demonstrated,20 and the forces of advertising and propaganda move in without any real opposition from the critical intelligence. These agencies act in much the same way that, in Paradise Lost, Milton depicts Satan acting on Eve. All that poor Eve was consciously aware of was the fact that a hitherto silent snake was talking to her. Her consciousness being fascinated by something outrageous, everything that Satan had to suggest got through its guard and fell into what we should call her subconscious. Later, when faced with a necessity of making a free choice, she found nothing inside her to direct the choice except Satan's arguments, which she perforce had to take as her own, the more readily in that she did not realize how they had got there. Similarly, the technique of advertising and propaganda is to stun and demoralize the critical consciousness with statements too absurd or extreme to be dealt with seriously by it. In the mind that is too frightened or credulous or childish to want to deal with the world at all, they move in past the consciousness and set up their structures unopposed. What they create in such a mind is not necessarily acceptance, but dependence on their versions of reality. Advertising implies an economy which has some independence from the political structure, and as long as this independence exists, advertising can be taken as a kind of ironic game. Like other forms of irony, it says what it does not wholly mean, but nobody is obliged to believe its statements literally. Hence it creates an illusion of detachment and mental superiority even when one is obeying its exhortations. When doing Christmas shopping, there is hardly one of us who would not, if stopped by an interviewer, say that of course he didn't hold with all this commercializing of Christmas. The same is to some extent true of propaganda as long as the issues are not deeply serious. The curiously divided reaction to the Centennial—a mixture of the sentimental, the apprehensive, and the sardonic—is an example. But in more serious matters, such as the Vietnam war, the effects of passivity are more subtly demoralizing. The tendency is to accept the propaganda bromide rather than the human truths involved, not merely because it is more comfortable, but because it gives the illusion of taking a practical and activist attitude as opposed to mere hand-wringing. When propaganda cuts off all other sources of information, rejecting it, for a concerned and responsible citizen, would not only

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The Modern Century

isolate him from his social world, but isolate him so completely as to destroy his self-respect. Hence even propaganda based on the big lie, as when an American or Chinese politician tries to get rid of a rival by calling him a Communist or a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, can establish itself and command assent if it makes more noise than the denial of the charge. The epigram that it is impossible to fool all the people all the time may be consoling, but is not much more. What eventually happens I may describe in a figure borrowed from those interminable railway journeys that are so familiar to Canadians, at least of my generation. As one's eyes are passively pulled along a rapidly moving landscape, it turns darker and one begins to realize that many of the objects that appear to be outside are actually reflections of what is in the carriage. As it becomes entirely dark one enters a narcissistic world, where, except for a few lights here and there, we can see only the reflection of where we are. A little study of the working of advertising and propaganda in the modern world, with their magic-lantern techniques of projected images, will show us how successful they are in creating a world of pure illusion. The illusion of the world itself is reinforced by the more explicit illusions of movies and television, and the imitation world of sports. It is significant that a breakdown in illusion, as when a baseball game or a television program is proved to have been "fixed," is more emotionally disturbing than proof of crime or corruption in the actual world. It is true that not all illusion is a bad thing: elections, for example, would hardly arouse enough interest to keep a democracy functioning unless they were assimilated to sporting events, and unless the pseudo-issues were taken as real issues. Similarly the advantages of winning the game of space ships and moon landings may be illusory, but the illusion is better than spending the money involved on preparations for war. Then again, when illusion has been skilfully built up, as it is for instance by such agencies as the Reader's Digest, it includes the illusion of keeping abreast of contemporary thought and events, and can only be recognized as illusion by its effects, or rather by the absence of any effects, in social action. Democracy is a mixture of majority rule and minority right, and the minority which most clearly has a right is the minority of those who try to resist a passive response, and thereby risk the resentment of those who regard them as trying to be undemocratically superior. I am speaking however not so much of two groups of people as of two mental attitudes, both of which may exist in the same mind. The prison of illusion

City of the End of Things

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holds all of us: the first important step is to be aware of it as illusion, and as a prison. The right of free criticism is immensely important, and the habitually worried and anxious attitude of the more responsible citizen has a significance out of proportion to its frequency. But the alienation of progress operates on him too, in a different way. He finds, in the first place, his response of concern becoming a stock response.21 Many of us have had the experience of beginning to read a journal of critical comment, tuning ourselves in to the appropriate state of anxiety, and then noticing that we have in error picked up an issue of several months back. In the split second of adjustment we become aware of a conventionalized or voluntarily assumed response. I am not deprecating the response: I am trying to describe a cultural condition. But any conventionalized or habitual response is subject in the course of time to the pressure of becoming automatic. As I write this, an official communique about education arrives in the mail, and I read: "If we are to keep pace with the swiftly moving developments of our time, we must strive for ever higher standards in every field of endeavour.... No informed person is unaware of the tremendous effort that [it] will take to meet the demands that the years ahead will produce. Yet we are also aware that the general well-being of our nation is dependent on our ability to meet the challenge." One would say that it was impossible to write flatter cliches and platitudes, and the effect of cliche and platitude ought to be soothing. So it is, and yet every word is soaked in the metaphors of a gasping panic, as though the author had placed a large bet on a contender in a race who was, like Hamlet, fat and scant of breath [5.2.287]. The conscious appeal is to the concerned and intelligent citizen who ought to take an interest in what his public servants are trying to do. A less conscious motive is to prepare him for an increase in taxes. But the combination of urgency in the rhetoric and of dullness in the expression of it is, or would be if we were not so familiar with it, very strange. Something has happened to atrophy one's responses when the most soporific words one can use are such words as "challenge," "crisis," "demand," and "endeavour."22 Even the most genuinely concerned and critical mind finds itself becoming drowsy in its darkening carriage. And not only so, but the very ability to recognize the cliche works against one's sense of full participation. Self-awareness thus operates like a drug, stimulating one's sense of responsibility while weakening the will to express it. The conception of progress grew up in the nineteenth century around

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The Modern Century

a number of images and ideas.23 The basis of the conception is the fact that science, in contrast to the arts, develops and advances, with the work of each generation adding to that of its predecessor. Science bears the practical fruit of technology, and technology has created, in the modern world, a new consciousness of time. Man has doubtless always experienced time in the same way, dragged backwards from a receding past into an unknown future. But the quickening of the pace of news, with telegraph and submarine cable, helped to dramatize a sense of a world in visible motion, with every day bringing new scenes and episodes of a passing show. It was as though the ticking of a clock had become not merely audible but obsessive, like the telltale heart in Poe. The first reactions to the new sensation—for it was more of a sensation than a conception—were exhilarating, as all swift movement is for a time. The prestige of the myth of progress developed a number of value-assumptions: the dynamic is better than the static, process better than product, the organic and vital better than the mechanical and fixed, and so on. We still have these value-assumptions, and no doubt they are useful, though like other assumptions we should be aware that we have them. And yet there was an underlying tendency to alienation in the conception of progress itself. In swift movement we are dependent on a vehicle and not on ourselves, and the proportion of exhilaration to apprehensiveness depends on whether we are driving it or merely riding in it. All progressive machines turn out to be things ridden in, with an unknown driver. Whatever is progressive develops a certain autonomy, and the reactions to it consequently divide: some feel that it will bring about vast improvements in life by itself, others are more concerned with the loss of human control over it. An example of such a progressive machine was the self-regulating market of laissez-faire. The late Karl Polanyi has described, in The Great Transformation, how this market dominated the political and economic structure of Western Europe, breaking down the sense of national identity and replacing it with a uniform contractual relationship of management and labour. The autonomous market took out a ninety-nine year lease on the world from 1815 to 1914, and kept "peace" for the whole of that time. By peace I mean the kind of peace that we have had ourselves since 1945: practically continuous warfare somewhere or other, but with no single war becoming large enough to destroy the overall economic structure, or the major political structures dependent on it. And yet what the autonomous market created in modern consciousness was, even when optimistic, the feeling that Polanyi

City of the End of Things

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has finely described as "an uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth."24 That is, the belief in social progress was transferred from the human will to the autonomous social force. Similar conceptions of autonomous mass movement and historical process dominate much of our social thinking today. In Communist theology the historical process occupies much the same position that the Holy Spirit does in Christianity: an omnipotent power that cooperates with the human will but is not dependent on it. Even earlier than the rise of the market, the feeling that man could achieve a better society than the one he was in by a sufficiently resolute act had done much to inspire the American and more particularly the French Revolutions, as well as a number of optimistic progressive visions of history like that of Condorcet.25 Here the ideal society is associated with a not too remote future. Here too there are underlying paradoxes. If we ask what we are progressing to, the only conceivable goal is greater stability, something more orderly and predictable than what we have now. After all, the only thing we can imagine which is better than what we have now is an ensured and constant supply of the best that we do have: economic security, peace, equal status in the protection of law, the appeal of the will to reason, and the like. Progress thus assumes that the dynamic is better than the stable and unchanging, yet it moves toward a greater stability. One famous progressive thinker, John Stuart Mill, had a nervous breakdown when he realized that he did not want to see his goals achieved, but merely wished to act as though he did.26 What was progress yesterday may seem today like heading straight for a prison of arrested development, like the societies of insects. In the year 1888 Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, a vision of a collectivized future which profoundly inspired the progressive thinkers of that day, and had a social effect such as few works of literature have ever had. Today it impresses us in exactly the opposite way, as a most sinister blueprint for a totalitarian state. A more serious consequence is that under a theory of progress present means have constantly to be sacrificed to future ends, and we do not know the future well enough to know whether those ends will be achieved or not. All we actually know is that we are damaging the present. Thus the assumption that progress is necessarily headed in a good or benevolent direction becomes more and more clearly an unjustified assumption. As early as Malthus27 the conception of sinister progress had made its appearance, the vision of a world moving

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The Modern Century

onward to a goal of too many people without enough to eat. When it is proposed to deface a city by, say, turning park lots into parking lots, the rationalization given is usually the cliche "you can't stop progress." Here it is not even pretended that progress is anything beneficent: it is simply a Juggernaut, or symbol of alienation. And in history the continued sacrificing of a visible present to an invisible future becomes with increasing clarity a kind of Moloch-worship [i Kings 11:7; Acts 7:43]. Some of the most horrible notions that have ever entered the human mind have been "progressive" notions: massacring farmers to get a more efficient agricultural system, exterminating Jews to achieve a "solution" of the "Jewish question," letting a calculated number of people starve to regulate food prices. The element of continuity in progress suggests that the only practicable action is continuous with what we are already doing: if, for instance, we are engaged in a war, it is practicable to go on with the war, and only visionary to stop it. Hence for most thoughtful people progress has lost most of its original sense of a favourable value judgment and has become simply progression, towards a goal more likely to be a disaster than an improvement. Taking thought for the morrow, we are told on good authority, is a dangerous practice [Matthew 6:34]. In proportion as the confidence in progress has declined, its relation to individual experience has become clearer. That is, progress is a social projection of the individual's sense of the passing of time. But the individual, as such, is not progressing to anything except his own death. Hence the collapse of belief in progress reinforces the sense of anxiety which is rooted in the consciousness of death. Alienation and anxiety become the same thing, caused by a new intensity in the awareness of the movement of time, as it ticks our lives away day after day. This intensifying of the sense of time also, as we have just seen, dislocates it: the centre of attention becomes the future, and the emotional relation to the future becomes one of dread and uncertainty. The future is the point at which "it is later than you think" becomes "too late." Modern fiction has constantly dealt, during the last century, with characters struggling toward some act of consciousness or self-awareness that would be a gateway to real life. But the great majority of treatments of this theme are ironic: the act is not made, or is made too late, or is a paralysing awareness with no result except self-contempt, or is perverted into illusion. We notice that when the tone is less ironic and more hopeful about the nature and capacities of man, as it is for instance in Camus's La Peste, it is usually in

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a context of physical emergency where there is a definite enemy to fight. Even in theory progress is as likely to lead to the uniform and the monotonous as to the individual and varied. If we look at the civilization around us, the evidence for uniformity is as obvious and oppressive as the evidence for the rapid change toward it. The basis of this uniformity is technological, but the rooted social institutions of the past— home, school, church—can also only be adapted to a nomadic society by an expanding uniform pattern. Whatever the advantages of this situation, we have also to consider the consequences of the world's becoming increasingly what in geology is called a peneplain, a monotonous surface worn down to a dead level by continued erosion. We are not far into the nineteenth century before we become aware of a different element both in consciousness and in the physical appearance of society. This is a new geometrical perspective, already beginning in the eighteenth century, which is scaled, not to the human body, but increasingly to the mechanical extensions of the body.28 It is particularly in America, of course, that this perspective is most noticeable: Washington, laid out by L'Enfant in 1800, is already in the age of the automobile. This mechanical perspective is mainly the result of the spreading of the city and its technology over more and more of its natural environment. The railway is the earliest and still one of the most dramatic examples of the creation of a new kind of landscape, one which imposes geometrical shapes on the countryside. The prophet Isaiah sees the coming of the Messiah as symbolized by a highway which exalts valleys and depresses mountains, making the crooked straight and the rough places plain [Isaiah 40:3-5]. But, as so often happens, the prophecy appears to have been fulfilled in the wrong context. The traditional city is centripetal, focused on market squares, a pattern still visible in some Ontario towns. Its primary idea is that of community, and it is this idea that has made so many visions of human fulfilment, from Plato and the Bible onward, take the form of a city. To the modern imagination the city becomes increasingly something hideous and nightmarish, the fourmillante cite of Baudelaire, the "unreal city" of Eliot's Waste Land, the ville tentaculaire of Verhaeren.29 No longer a community, it seems more like a community turned inside out, with its expressways taking its thousands of self-enclosed nomadic units in a headlong flight into greater solitude, ants in the body of a dying dragon, breathing its polluted air and passing its polluted water. The map still

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The Modern Century

shows us self-contained cities like Hamilton and Toronto, but experience presents us with an urban sprawl which ignores national boundaries and buries a vast area of beautiful and fertile land in a tomb of concrete. I have had occasion to read Dickens a good deal lately,30 and Dickens was, I suppose, the first metropolitan novelist in English literature, the first to see the life of his time as essentially a gigantic pulsation toward and away from the great industrial centres, specifically London. And one notices in his later novels an increasing sense of the metropolis as a kind of cancer, as something that not only destroys the countryside, but the city itself as it had developed up to that time. The Victorian critics of the new industrialism contemporary with Dickens, such as Ruskin and Morris, concentrated much of their attack on its physical ugliness, which they saw as a symbol of the spiritual ugliness of materialism and exploitation. Critics of our time are more impressed by the physical uniformity which they similarly interpret as a symbol of spiritual conformity. If certain tendencies within our civilization were to proceed unchecked, they would rapidly take us towards a society which, like that of a prison, would be both completely introverted and completely without privacy. The last stand of privacy has always been, traditionally, the inner mind. It is quite possible however for communications media, especially the newer electronic ones, to break down the associative structures of the inner mind and replace them by the prefabricated structures of the media. A society entirely controlled by their slogans and exhortations would be introverted, because nobody would be saying anything: there would only be echo, and Echo was the mistress of Narcissus. It would also be without privacy, because it would frustrate the effort of the healthy mind to develop a view of the world which is private but not introverted, accommodating itself to opposing views. The triumph of communication is the death of communication: where communication forms a total environment, there is nothing to be communicated. The role of communications media in the modern world is a subject that Professor Marshall McLuhan has made so much his own that it would be almost a discourtesy not to refer to him in a lecture which covers many of his themes. The McLuhan cult, or more accurately the McLuhan rumour, is the latest of the illusions of progress: it tells us that a number of new media are about to bring in a new form of civilization all by themselves, merely by existing. Because of this we should not, in staring at a television set, wonder if we are wasting our time and

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develop guilt feelings accordingly: we should feel that we are evolving a new mode of apprehension. What is important about the television set is not the quality of what it exudes, which is only content, but the fact that it is there, the end of a tube with a vortical suction which "involves" the viewer. This is not all of what a serious and most original writer is trying to say, yet Professor McLuhan lends himself partly to this interpretation by throwing so many of his insights into a deterministic form.31 He would connect the alienation of progress with the habit of forcing a hypnotized eye to travel over thousands of miles of type, in what is so accurately called the pursuit of knowledge. But apparently he would see the Gutenberg syndrome as a cause of the alienation of progress, and not simply as one of its effects. Determinism of this kind, like the determinism which derives Confederation from the railway, is a plausible but oversimplified form of rhetoric.32 Similarly with the principle of the identity of medium and message, which means one thing when the response is active, and quite another when the response is passive. On the active level it is an ideal formulation which strictly applies only to the arts, and to a fully active response to the arts. It would be true to say that painting, for example, had no "message" except the medium of painting itself. On the passive level it is an ironic formulation in which the differences among the media flatten out. The "coolness" of television is much more obvious in the privacy of a middle-class home than it is when turned on full blast in the next room of a jerry-built hotel. All forms of communication, from transistors to atom bombs, are equally hot when someone else's finger is on the button. Thus the primary determining quality of the medium comes from the social motive for using it and not from the medium itself. Media can only follow the direction of the human will that created them, and a study of the social direction of that will, or what Innis called the bias of communication,33 is a major, prior, and separate problem. Technology cannot of itself bring about an increase in human freedom, for technological developments threaten the structure of society, and society develops a proportionate number of restrictions to contain them. The automobile increases the speed and freedom of individual movement, and thereby brings a proportionate increase in police authority, with its complication of laws and penalties. In proportion as the production of retail goods becomes more efficient, the quality of craftsmanship and design decreases. The aeroplane facilitates travel, and therefore regiments travel: a modern traveller, processed through

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an immigration shed, might think ruefully of the contrast with Sterne, travelling to France in the eighteenth century, suddenly remembering that Britain was at war with France, and that consequently he would need his passport [A Sentimental Journey, vol. 2, "The Passport, Paris"]. The same principle affects science itself. The notion that science, left to itself, is bound to evolve more and more of the truth about the world is another illusion, for science can never exist outside a society, and that society, whether deliberately or unconsciously, directs its course. Still, the importance of keeping science "free," i.e., unconsciously rather than deliberately directed, is immense. In the Soviet Union, and increasingly in America as well, science is allowed to develop "freely" so that the political power can hijack its technological by-products. But this means a steady pressure on science to develop in the direction useful to that power: target-knowledge, as the Nazis called it.34 I am not saying that there are no answers to these questions: I am saying that no improvement in the human situation can take place independently of the human will to improve, and that confidence in automatic or impersonal improvement is always misplaced. In earlier times the sense of alienation and anxiety was normally projected as the fear of hell, the "too late" existence awaiting those who, as Dante's Virgil says, had never come alive [Inferno, canto 3,1. 64]. In our day this fear is attached, not to another world following this one, but to the future of our own world. The first half of the modern century was still full of progressive optimism: an unparalleled number of Utopias, or visions of a stabilized future, were written, and universal prosperity was widely predicted, partly because most of the people being exploited in the main centres of culture were well out of sight in Asia or Africa. After the midway point of 1917 there came an abrupt change. Spengler's Decline of the West appeared in Germany the next year. Here it is said that history consists of cultural developments which rise, mature, and decline like organisms. After they have exhausted their creative possibilities, they turn into "civilizations." The arts give place to technology and engineering; vast cities spread over the landscape, inhabited by uprooted masses of people, and dictatorships and annihilation wars become the course of history. A Classical "culture" entered this stage with Alexander, and, later, the rise of Rome. The Western world entered it with Napoleon, and is now in the stage corresponding to that of the Punic Wars, with the great world states fighting it out for supremacy. Spengler is often dismissed as "fatalistic" today, but his paralleling of

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our historical situation with earlier periods, especially that of the Roman Empire, and his point that our technology could be part of a decline as easily as it could be part of an advance, are conceptions that we all accept now, whether we realize it or not, as something which is inseparably part of our perspective. The progressive belief suffered a rude set-back in America in the crash of 1929; it was adopted by the Soviet Union as part of its revolutionary world view, but is gradually fading out even there, much as the expectation of the end of the world faded out of early Christian thought. In our day the Utopia has been succeeded by what is being called, by analogy, the "dystopia," the nightmare of the future. H.G. Wells is a good example of a writer who built all his hopes around the myth of progress, in which the role of saviour was played by a self-evolving science. His last publication, however, Mind at the End of its Tether (1940), carried all the furious bitterness of an outraged idealism. Orwell's 1984 is a better-known dystopia, and perhaps comes as close as any book to being the definitive Inferno of our time. It is a particularly searching study because of the way in which it illustrates how so many aspects of culture, including science, technology, history, and language, would operate in their demonic or perverted forms. The conception of progress took off originally from eighteenth-century discussions about the natural society, where the progressive view was urged by Bolingbroke and Rousseau and the opposite one by Swift and Burke. According to Rousseau, the natural and reasonable society of the future was buried underneath the accumulated injustices and absurdities of civilization, and all man had to do was to release it by revolution. Writers of our day have mostly reverted to the view of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, that slavery is to man at least as natural a state as freedom: this is the central insight of one of the most penetrating stories of our time, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and is certainly implied, if not expressed, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and many similar works. It is natural that many people should turn from the vision of such a world to some illusion or distracting fiction that seems to afford a more intelligible environment. Nationalism is or can be a distracting fiction of this kind. The nation, economically considered, is a form of private enterprise, a competing business in the world's market; hence, for most people, nationality comes to their attention chiefly through inconvenience—customs duties, income taxes, and the like. But it also may provide some sense of a protected place. It can't happen here,35 we may say,

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The Modern Century

deliberately forgetting that the distinction between here and there has ceased to exist. It is significant that intense nationalism or regionalism today is a product either of resistance to or of disillusionment with progress. Progress, when optimistic, always promises some form of exodus from history as we know it, some emergence onto a new plateau of life. Thus the Marxist revolution promised deliverance from history as history had previously been, a series of class struggles. But just as there are neurotic individuals who cannot get beyond some blocking point in their emotional past, so there are neurotic social groups who feel a compulsion to return to a previous point in history, as Mississippi keeps fighting the Civil War over again, and some separatists in Quebec the British Conquest. However, one wonders whether, in an emergency, this compulsion to return to the same point, the compulsion of Quixote to fight over again the battles he found in his books, is not universal in our world. In ordinary life, the democratic and Communist societies see each other as dystopias, their inhabitants hysterical and brainwashed by propaganda, identifying their future with what is really their destruction. Perhaps both sides, as Blake would say, become what they behold [Jerusalem, pi. 44,1. 32]: in any case seeing tendencies to tyranny only on the other side is mere hypocrisy. The Nuremberg trials laid down the principle that man remains a free agent even in the worst of tyrannies, and is not only morally but legally responsible for resisting orders that outrage the conscience of mankind. The Americans took an active part in prosecuting these trials, but when America itself stumbled into the lemming-march horror of Vietnam the principle was forgotten and the same excuses and defiances reappeared. All the social nightmares of our day seem to focus on some unending and inescapable form of mob rule. The most permanent kind of mob rule is not anarchy, nor is it the dictatorship that regularizes anarchy, nor even the imposed police state depicted by Orwell. It is rather the self-policing state, the society incapable of formulating an articulate criticism of itself and of developing a will to act in its light. This is a condition that we are closer to, on this continent, than we are to dictatorship. In such a society the conception of progress would reappear as a donkey's carrot, as the new freedom we shall have as soon as some regrettable temporary necessity is out of the way. No one would notice that the necessities never come to an end, because the communications media would have destroyed the memory.

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The idea of progress, we said, is not really that of man progressing, but of man releasing forces that will progress by themselves. The root of the idea is the fact that science progressively develops its conception of the world. Science is a vision of nature which perceives the elements in nature that correspond to the reason and the sense of structure in the scientist's mind. If we look at our natural environment with different eyes, with emotion or desire or trying to see in it things that answer other needs than those of the reason, nature seems a vast unthinking indifference, with no evidence of meaning or purpose. In proportion as we have lost confidence in progress, the scientific vision of nature has tended to separate from a more imaginative and emotional one which regards nature or the human environment as absurd or meaningless. The absurd is now one of the central elements in the contemporary myth, along with alienation and anxiety, and has extended from man's feeling about nature to his feeling about his own society. For society, like nature, has the power of life and death over us, yet has no real claim on our deeper loyalties. The absurdity of power is clearer in a democratic society, where we are deprived of the comforting illusions that surround royalty. In a democracy no one pretends to identify the real form of society either with the machinery of business or with the machinery of government. But in that case where is the society to be found to which we do owe loyalty? There are two contemporary plays which seem to sum up with peculiar vividness and forcefulness the malaise that I have described as the alienation of progress. One is Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The main theme of this play is the paralysis of activity that is brought about by the dislocation of life in time, where there is no present, only a faint memory of a past, and an expectation of a future with no power to move towards it. Of the two characters whose dialogue forms most of the play, one calls himself Adam; at another time they identify themselves with Cain and Abel; at other times, vaguely and helplessly, with the thieves crucified with Christ. "Have we no rights?" one asks. "We got rid of them" the other says—distinctly, according to the stage direction. And even more explicitly: "at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us." They spend the whole action of the play waiting for a certain Godot to arrive: he never comes; they deny that they are "tied" to him, but they have no will to break away. All that turns up is a Satanic figure called Pozzo, with a clown tied to him in a parody of their own state. On his second appearance Pozzo is blind, a condition

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which detaches him even further from time, for, he says, "the blind have no notion of time."36 The other play is Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woo//? The title of this play is echoed from the Depression song, "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" where the "wolf" was a specific fear of unemployment. I began this talk by saying that the modern century was the first to study itself objectively, and that this has created an opposition between the active mind that struggles for reality and the passive mind that prefers to remain in an illusion. Art, culture, the imagination, are on the side of reality and activity: Virginia Woolf, chosen because of the sound of her last name, represents this side, and the characters are "afraid" of her because they cannot live without illusion. The two men in the play are a historian and a scientist, facing the past and the future, both impotent in the present. "When people can't abide things as they are," says the historian George, "when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things .. . either they turn to a contemplation of the past, as I have done, or they set about to ... alter the future."37 But nobody in the play does either. George can murder his imaginary child, but the destruction of illusion does not bring him reality, for the only reality in his life was contained in the illusion which he denied. I have tried to indicate the outlines of the picture that contemporary imagination has drawn of its world, a jigsaw-puzzle picture in which the Canada of 1967 is one of the pieces. It is a picture mainly of disillusionment and fear, and helps to explain why our feelings about our Centennial are more uneasy than they are jubilant. In the twentieth century most anniversaries, including the annual disseminating neurosis of Christmas, are touched with foreboding. I noticed this early in life, for my twenty-first birthday was spent at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933, entitled "A Century of Progress," where the crowds were much more preoccupied with worrying about the Depression than with celebrating what had led to it. And yet this picture, as I have tried also to explain, is the picture that the contemporary imagination draws of itself in a mirror. Looking into the mirror is the active mind which struggles for consistency and continuity of outlook, which preserves its memory of its past and clarifies its view of the present. Staring back at it is the frozen reflection of that mind, which has lost its sense of continuity by projecting it on some mechanical social process, and has found that it has also lost its dignity, its freedom, its creative power, and its sense of the present, with nothing left except a fearful apprehension of the future.

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The mind in the mirror, like the characters in Beckett, cannot move on its own initiative. But the more repugnant we find this reflection, the less likely we are to make the error of Narcissus, and identify ourselves with it. I want now to discuss the active role that the arts, more particularly literature, have taken in forming the contemporary imagination, which has given us this picture. The picture itself reflects anxiety, and as long as man is capable of anxiety he is capable of passing through it to a genuine human destiny. II Improved Binoculars Let us begin by looking at some of the characteristics that we generally associate with the word "modern," especially in the arts. "Modern," in itself, means simply recent: in Shakespeare's day it meant mediocre, and it still sometimes carries that meaning as an emotional overtone. In its ordinary colloquial sense it implies an advanced state of technology and the social attitudes of a highly urbanized life. In some Western Canadian towns, for example, houses with outdoor privies are advertised as "unmodern." But "modern" has also become a historical term like "Romantic," "Baroque," or "Renaissance." It would be convenient if, like "Romantic," the colloquial uses of the word were spelled in lower case and the cultural term with a capital, but this is not established. Like "Romantic" again, "modern" as a cultural term refers partly to a historical period, roughly the last century, but it is also partly a descriptive term, not a purely historical term like "medieval." Just as we feel that Keats or Byron are Romantic and that some of their contemporaries, Jane Austen for example, are either not Romantic at all or are less Romantic, so we feel that "modern" is in part a style or attitude in recent culture, and that some of the artists and writers of the last century have been "more modern" than others. "Modern," so used, describes certain aspects of an international style in the arts which began, mainly in Paris, about a hundred years ago. Out of compliment to our centenary, I shall date it from 1867, the year of the death of Baudelaire. The larger context of this "modern" is the series of vast changes that began to take place, not around 1867, but a century earlier. These earlier changes included the American and French Revolutions, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, new and more analytical schools of thought, such as the French Encyclopedists and the British Utilitarians, and the cultural development we call Romantic. By

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1867 this movement had entered on a second phase, continuous with but distinguishable from its predecessor, and this begins the modern century properly speaking. The thinkers Darwin and Marx, and later Freud and Frazer, the writers Rimbaud, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, the Impressionist painters and their successors, belong to it. During the whole of the last century, there has naturally been the most frantic resistance to "modern" culture, for both the highbrow arts and the popular ones, though for different reasons, have a powerful capacity to stir up guilt feelings, personal insecurities, and class resentments. The Nazis called the modern style a Jewish conspiracy, the Jews being for them the symbols of a racism without a national boundary. The Communist hierarchy calls it an imperialistic conspiracy, and particularly attacks the "formalism" which it asserts symbolizes the ideology of a decadent class. One may suspect from such things as the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial38 that the periodic "thaws" in the Soviet Union are mainly a device to determine where the really dangerous threats to the bureaucracy are coming from, but even so they show something of the tremendous pressure building up against the barriers of official stupidity and panic, which may eventually break through them. Chinese resistance is still militant, though of course the cultural traditions there are different. Hysterical people in the democracies, in their turn, call the modern style a Communist conspiracy; in Canada it is often called Americanization. It is true that many aspects of modern culture, especially popular culture, are of American origin, like jazz, but America is a province conquered by the international modern much more than it is a source of it. In literature, the international character of the modern style has been partly disguised by difference in language. Just as we seem to be moving into a world in which we meet the same kind of things everywhere, from hydro installations to Beatle haircuts, so we seem to be moving into a world in which English will become either the first or the second language of practically everybody. But of course it does not follow that English or any other language will become a world literary language. The last hundred years have also been a period in which many minority languages have been maintained, revived, or in some cases practically invented, by an intense regional patriotism. Hebrew, Norwegian, Flemish, Irish, and French in Canada are examples. The prestige of such movements is one of several elements that have helped to shape a common view which is the opposite of the one I am advancing here. Culture,

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it is often said, in contrast to economic and political developments, is local, regional, and decentralized, as dependent on an immediate environment as a fine wine or a delicate and traditional handicraft like peasant costumes. The first step in the creation of an indigenous culture, therefore, is a firm boundary line, and the next step is the cultural equivalent of high tariffs against foreign influences. This theory of culture probably originated in Romantic theories about a creative "folk," and has been confusing the Canadian scene for even longer than the past hundred years. I held a version of it myself, or thought I did, when I was beginning to write in Canadian periodicals a generation ago. According to Shelley in his preface to Prometheus Unbound, the decentralizing of Great Britain into a dozen or more districts, each with its own cultural centre, would help to awaken the country to the kind of cultural vitality enjoyed earlier by such small towns as Periclean Athens or Medicean Florence. It sounds unlikely, but it is a roughly consistent extension of Shelley's association of human freedom with the self-determining of national cultures, particularly Greece and Italy. William Morris, again, thought of culture as essentially "manufacture" in the strict sense, as the work of brain and hand which has a totally different function from that of mechanized industry. Hence his ideal world is one of small and relatively isolated communities, governing themselves by local councils and keeping themselves busy making things. In his view the so-called minor or useful arts are the index of a culture; the major arts are assimilated to them, and both are produced by a domestic economy.39 In T.S. Eliot, again, we find "culture" associated with an intense decentralization. Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture and similar essays are much preoccupied with Welsh and Scottish nationalisms and with the desirability of having most people not move from the place where they were born.40 The attempts to "purify" a language are also part of the resistance to the international modern. It is consistent with William Morris's attitude that he should deplore the mongrel nature of modern English which has helped to make it a world language, its grafting of so many Latin conceptual and Greek technical terms on a Teutonic stock. Morris was one of those who wanted English to throw out its load of loan words and return to more Teutonic methods of making up a vocabulary, such as calling a market a cheaping place or a baby carriage a pushwainling.41 Such efforts got nowhere in English, but some other languages, such as Persian, or German in the Nazi period, were more successful in driving

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out foreign influences on vocabulary and syntax, at least for a time. Even in Australia, I understand, there has been a group of poets devoted to putting as many native Australian words into their poems as possible.42 A late echo of this tendency is the anti-/ow0/43 campaign in French Canada, the effort to set up European French as a standard of correctness against the normal linguistic developments which tend to Anglicize and Americanize French-Canadian speech. Outside literature, resistance to the modern style has very little if anything to put in its place. Approved Nazi painting and approved Communist fiction can only fall back on idioms derived from the art before 1867, on worn-out Romantic and Victorian formulas which can no longer be used with their original energy and conviction. If we compare T.S. Eliot's theories about decentralized culture with his own poetry and the quality of his influence, both of which are completely international, it is clear that the theories are merely something dreamed up, and have no relation to any cultural facts. It is of course true that a coherent environment is a cultural necessity. And many of the world's great cultural developments do seem to have been assisted by some kind of local resistance to imperial expansion. The catalyser of ancient Greek culture was clearly the successful battle for independence by a province on the fringes of what was essentially, in its civilization, a Persian world. Hebrew culture drew a similar strength from its resistance to Egyptian and Mesopotamian imperialism. Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century Holland were provincial rebels against the centralizing forces of the Papacy and the Hapsburg Empire; Germany in the Napoleonic period and, on a smaller scale, Ireland at the turn of this century joined a cultural efflorescence to a political resistance. In our day similar movements are going on, though more confined to the cultural area. The liberalizing of Communist culture is much more likely to start in Poland44 or Hungary than in the Soviet Union, and Mexico has maintained a remarkable cultural independence of its northern neighbour. The feeling that Canada in this respect has left undone what it ought to have done45 amounts to a national neurosis. But what I have described is not a social law: it is merely something that often happens, and just as often fails to happen. And even if it were a social law, there are many elements in Canada's situation that would make the applying of it to Canada a false analogy. Even apart from this, however, there is still the question, Where does the seed come from that grows up in these localities of provincial resis-

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tance? Spontaneous generation is no more credible in culture than it is in biology. Seeds of culture can only come from the centres of civilization which are already established, often those centres against which the local culture is revolting. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the forms of art are autonomous: poems and pictures are born out of earlier poems and pictures,46 not out of new localities, and novelty of content or experience in such localities cannot produce originality of form. We notice that the more popular an aspect of culture is, such as jazz music, films, or the kind of poetry associated with beatnik and similar groups, the more quickly it becomes international in its idiom. To try to found a serious culture in Canada on a middle-class intellectual resistance to popular culture of this kind would be the last word in futility. All this may seem too obvious now to insist on, but many intellectuals, in both English and French parts of the country, have in the past been engaged in an inglorious rearguard action of trying to encourage a regional or tourist's-souvenir literature, and it is perhaps still worth repeating that the practice is useless and the theory mistaken. Complete immersion in the international style is a primary cultural requirement, especially for countries whose cultural traditions have been formed since 1867, like ours. Anything distinctive that develops within the Canadian environment can only grow out of participation in this style. The distinctively "modern" element in the culture of the last century has played, and continues to play, a revolutionary role in society. It may be easiest to illustrate this from the pictorial arts. In medieval painting the prevailing conventions were religious, and for that and many other reasons the technique of representation was highly stylized. As the centuries went on, we can see a growing realism in the painting which, in its historical context, was an emancipating force. The Byzantine type of stylizing comes to be thought stiff and angular; lighter and springier lines succeed in later Gothic; more human touches appear in the divine faces; landscapes sprout and blossom in the background; an occasional nude appears if the iconography makes it possible, as in pictures of St. Sebastian or Mary Magdalene. The growth of realism, in other words, is also a growth in the humanizing of the projected myths, man recovering for himself the forms he had created. As we pass into the Renaissance, and painting becomes more secularized, it begins to reflect something of the spirit that is also in Renaissance science, the feeling of man as a subject confronting an objective world. With the development of perspective the pictorial vision settled

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on a fixed point in space. As a result there grew up some curiously pedantic critical theories of painting, which assumed that it was primarily a representational art, and that the function of painting was not to create a vision but to record one. The Elizabethan critic Puttenham,47 writing in the age of Michelangelo and Titian, even asserted that the painter had no creative power at all, but merely imitated nature in the same way that an ape imitates a man. This dreary doctrine found its way into Shakespeare's Winter's Tale [4.4.89-93] somewhat disguised. I mention it only to emphasize the fact it misunderstands, which is the tremendous projecting force in Renaissance and Baroque painting. In Rubens, the great spiralling and twisting rhythms, usually starting from a diagonal, that, so to speak, pick up the eye and hurl it into the furthest point of the picture, express a kind of will to objectify. The same kind of will is also in Rembrandt, in a quieter and more contemplative form, as the eye is led to the points of light that emerge from the graduated shadows. Rembrandt carried this objectified form of painting about as far as human skill could carry it, and imposed his way of seeing on successors for generations. When we look at the later work of Turner, contemporary with the great English Romantic poets, there is a different feeling which, in the particular context we are speaking of now, might be called a colossal emancipation of vision. It is not the titles of such pictures as Rain, Steam and Speed that make us feel that we are in a new world, but the sense of a new way of seeing. We are not looking at nature here, but are identified with the processes and powers of nature, the creative forces symbolized by the swirling colours, the dissolving shapes, and the expanding perspective where we seem to see everything at once, as though the eye were surrounding the picture. This is imitating nature as the Romantic age conceived imitation, where man and nature are thought of as connected, not by the subject-object relation of consciousness, but by an identity of process, man being a product of the organic power of nature. As Coleridge says, it is this latter, the natura naturans, that the painter imitates, not the structure of natura naturata in front of him.48 With the great Impressionists who followed Turner the realistic tendency achieves a second culmination. Impressionism portrays, not a separated objective world that man contemplates, but a world of power and force and movement which is in man also, and emerges in the consciousness of the painter. Monet painting Rouen cathedral in every aspect of light and shade, Renoir making the shapes in nature explode into vibrations

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of colour, Degas recording the poses of a ballet, are working in a world where objects have become events, and where time is a dimension of sense experience. We can, of course, look back on earlier painters and see the same things in Rubens or Tintoretto, but we see them there with the hindsight that Impressionism has given us. In all these centuries the representational aspect of painting is the organically growing aspect, the liberalizing force, the avant-garde movement. It is a realism of form, and as it develops it tends to become something of a conservative social force. Thus Dutch realism often reflects a quiet satisfaction in middle-class Dutch life, and in some modern painters—I think particularly of Vuillard49—the visual aspect of our social experience is similarly bathed in a benevolent glow of beauty and charm. There is nothing wrong with this, but it was inevitable that there should also develop, as part of the expanding horizon of pictorial experience, a revolutionary or prophetic realism, of the sort that runs through Brueghel, Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier. This kind of realism is often not realistic in form: it may be presented as fantasy, as in Brueghel's Mad Margaret or Goya's Caprichos. But it tears apart the fagade of society and shows us the forces working behind that facade, and is realistic in the sense of sharpening our vision of society as a mode of existence rather than simply as an environment. By 1867 Impressionism was reaching its climax of development, and the "modern" world was taking shape. But there are very different elements in the modern world which are also making pictorial impressions. In advertising, propaganda, and a great deal of mass culture, of the type I referred to in my previous lecture, and which is usually intended to be received passively, the prevailing idiom is one that may be called stupid realism. By stupid realism I mean what is actually a kind of sentimental idealism, an attempt to present a conventionally attractive or impressive appearance as an actual or attainable reality. Thus it is a kind of parody or direct counter-presentation to prophetic realism. We see it in the vacuous pretty-girl faces of advertising, in the clean-limbed athletes of propaganda magazines, in the haughty narcissism of shop-window mannequins, in the heroically transcended woes of soap-opera heroines, in eulogistic accounts of the lives of celebrities, usually those in entertainment, in the creation by Madison Avenue of a wise and kindly father-figure out of some political stooge, and so on. The "socialist realism" of Communism, though much better in theory than this, has in practice much in common with it.50 It seems clear that

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an officially approved realism cannot carry on the revolutionary tradition of Goya and Daumier. It is not anti-Communism that makes us feel that the disapproved writers, Daniel and Babel and Pasternak, have most to say to us: on the contrary, it is precisely such writers who best convey the sense of Russians as fellow human beings, caught in the same dilemmas that we are. Revolutionary realism is a questioning, exploring, searching, disturbing force: it cannot go over to established authority and defend the fictions which may be essential to authority, but are never real. We may compare in American painting the lively development of the so-called ashcan school51 with the WPA murals52 in post offices which glumly rehearsed the progress of transportation from camel to jeep, and which are now mostly covered up. In this context we can see that realism of form has changed sides: it is no longer a liberalizing and emancipating force, incorporating the hopes and fears of humanity into the icons demanded by churches, public buildings, and well-to-do patrons. The projected image is now the weapon of the enemy, and consequently it is the power to project the image that becomes liberalizing. A new kind of energy is released in the painting that followed the impressionists, an energy which concentrates on the sheer imaginative act of painting in itself, on painting as the revolt of the brain behind the eye against passive sensation. Cezanne is the hinge on which this more specifically "modern" movement turns, but it has of course taken a great variety of forms since. One is the abstraction, or Abstract Expressionism later, which portrays the combination of form and colour without reference to representation. Another is the action-painting which tries to communicate the sense of process and growth in the act of painting. Still another is the "pop art" which presents the projected images of stupid realism itself, in a context where the critical consciousness is compelled to make an active response to them.53 Stupid realism depends for its effect on evoking the ghost of a dead tradition: it is a parody of the realism which was organic a century or two ago. The active and revolutionary element in painting today is the element of formalism. (I know that I am using "formalism" in a looser sense than it is used in Marxist criticism, but I am trying to suggest some of the wider implications of the contrasting views.) I said that to the painters of the age of Giotto the old Byzantine conventions were beginning to seem unnecessarily constricting. But in the stupid realism of commercial late Roman sculpture, with its stodgy busts and sarcophagi, the sharp angu-

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lar patterns of Byzantine leap out with a clean and vital flame. The cycle of culture has turned once more, and once again it is the stylized that is the emancipating force. Of course there is always a central place for a realism which is not stupid, which continues to sharpen our vision of the world and the society that are actually there. But the exhilarating sense of energy in great formalism is so strong that modern realism tends to express itself in formalist conventions. In Brueghel's Slaughter of the Innocents a conventional religious subject is located in a realistic landscape that recalls the terror and misery of sixteenth-century Flanders; in Picasso's Guernica54 the terror and misery of twentieth-century Spain is expressed with the stylizing intensity of a religious primitivism. In literature there is a change from Romantic to modern around 1867 that is in some respects even sharper and more dramatic than the shift from Impressionism to Cezanne. At the beginning of the Romantic period around 1800, an increased energy of propulsion had begun to make itself felt, an energy that often suggests something mechanical. When the eighteenth-century American composer Billings developed contrapuntal hymn settings which he called "fuguing-tunes," he remarked that they would be "more than twenty times as powerful as the old slow tunes."55 The quantitative comparison, the engineering metaphor, the emphasis on speed and power, indicate a new kind of sensibility already present in pre-Revolutionary and pre-industrial America. Much greater music than his is touched by the same feeling: the finale of Mozart's Linz Symphony in C is based on the bodily rhythm of the dance, but the finale of the Beethoven Rasoumovsky Quartet in the same key foreshadows the world of the express train. Bernard Shaw compares the finale of Beethoven's Opus 106 to the dance of atoms in the molecule, whatever that sounds like.56 A similar propulsive movement makes itself felt in those greatly misunderstood poems of Wordsworth, The Idiot Boy, Peter Bell, The Waggoner, where we also have references to "flying boats" and the like, and in many poems of Shelley, where again some of the characters seem to be operating private hydroplanes, like the Witch of Atlas. This sense of the exhilaration of mechanical movement continues into the modern period, especially in the Italian Futurist movement around the time of the First World War. In fact the modern is often popularly supposed to be primarily a matter of "streamlining,"57 of suggesting in furniture and building, as well as in the formal arts themselves, the clean, spare, economical, functional lines of a swiftly moving vehicle.

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But in modern literature at least, especially poetry, we have to take account of other tendencies. The decline of admiration for continuity is one of the most striking differences between the Romantic and the modern feeling. It perhaps corresponds to the decline of confidence in progress that we discussed earlier. The Swinburne whose linear energy carries his reader through hundreds of pages of poetic dramas and lyrics is felt, by Eliot, to be a poet "who does not think,"58 as less modern in both feeling and technique than the Hopkins who prefers the techniques of "sprung" to those of "running" rhythm. (Swinburne is more correctly estimated now, but as part of a critical development which has outgrown the anti-Romantic phase of modernism, and has got its sense of tradition in better focus.) In France, one modern poet even maintained that the function of poetry was to wring the neck of rhetoric.59 Such a poet would be bound to accept the dictum of Poe, a most influential one in the modern period, that a long poem is really a contradiction in terms,60 for it is rhetoric, in the sense of a conventional form of expression that supplies a continuous verbal texture, which makes a poem long. In French literature this rhetorical continuity is associated particularly with Victor Hugo, who is thought of as a premodern Romantic. Modern poetry tends to be discontinuous, to break the hypnotic continuity of a settled metre, an organizing narrative, or a line of thought, all of which, it is felt, are apt to move too far in the direction of passive response. In Eliot's The Waste Land the scenes, episodes, and quoted lines are stuck into the reader's mind somewhat as the slogans and illustrations of advertising are—tachistoscopically, as the educators say.61 But, once there, the reader is compelled to a creative act of putting the fragments together. The continuity of the poem, in short, has been handed over to him. One may see here a tendency parallel to the formalism of modern painting. What corresponds for the ear to stupid realism in the visual arts is partly rhetoric, in the sense used above, the surrounding of an advertised object with emotional and imaginative intensity, the earnest, persuasive voice of the radio commercial, the torrent of prefabricated phrases and cliches in political oratory. Nineteenth-century social critics who could not always distinguish the paranoid from the prophetic, such as Carlyle and Ruskin, often work themselves up emotionally by means of rhetoric into states of mind where they are possessed by the rhetoric and are no longer controlling it, so that a certain automatism comes into the writing. We see this also in a debased form in propaganda harangues.

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In general, uncontrolled rhetorical babble is an expression of a sadomasochist cycle, where the thing that is uncontrolled is a desire either to hurt someone else or to humiliate oneself. The definitive presentation of the "anti-hero" in modern literature, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, emphasizes this feature of uncontrolled mechanical talk, and traces it to an excess of conscious awareness over the power of action. The narrator despises himself, and yet admires himself for being honest enough to despise himself, and hence is continually possessed by rhetorical rages directed either at himself or at some projection of himself. Similar tendencies exist in Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is the chief reason why Hamlet, with his melancholy and his broken power of decision, his self-accusations and his uncontrolled brutality to others, becomes so central a Romantic and modern image of consciousness. The antirhetorical tendency in modern literature is part of a general tendency in modern culture to plant a series of antitank traps, so to speak, in the way of the rumbling and creaking invaders of our minds. In the creation of poetry there seems to be an oddly paradoxical element. Something oracular, something that holds and charms and spellbinds, is involved in it, and the oracular permits no distraction or criticism: nothing must dispel its mood. Yet what the oracle expresses is frequently an epigram, a pun, an ambiguous statement, or a conundrum that sounds like a bad joke, like the witches' elliptical prophecies to Macbeth [1.3.48-69; 4.1.48-132!. Wit is addressed to the awakened critical intelligence and to a perception of the incongruous. Poetry has often veered between these two aspects of the poetic process: in the age of Pope, wit was the preferred element; with the Romantics a more solemnly oracular tone dominated, or alternated with wit, as in Byron. In the modern period the prevailing tone tended to shift again to wit. The degree of abstraction in painting that we see in Leger or Modigliani,62 or perhaps even in Cubism, where a representational picture has been assimilated to geometrical outlines, is witty, in somewhat the same way that poetry stepping along in antithetical rhyming couplets is witty. In both it is the discordia concors of artistic discipline and natural untidiness that evokes the sense of wit, as when a woman's breast becomes a sphere or an epigram falls neatly into ten iambic syllables. T.E. Hulme,63 Wyndham Lewis,64 and others, in the early anti-Romantic phase of modernism, were much struck by this analogy between abstraction and satirical wit, and set it up as a standard against the continuous rhetoric and oracular solemnity that they found in the Romantics, from Words-

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worth to Gertrude Stein. Of poets, perhaps Auden in English has given us most clearly the sense of creation as play, an expression of man as homo ludens.65 The contrived and artificial patterns of his verse are consistent with this, just as the light verse they resemble is more contrived than heavy verse, and play-novels like detective stories more contrived than "serious" fiction. Valery's view of poetry as a game bound by arbitrary rules like chess is similar, and Valery remarks that "inspiration" is a state of mind in the reader, not in the writer66—another example of the modern tendency to turn as much activity as possible over to the reader. There are many complaints about the obscurity of the arts in the modern world, and about the indifference that the modern artist seems to have for his public. But we can see by now that modern art is directly involved in a militant situation peculiar to our time. It does not simply come into being as an expression of human creative power: it is born on a battlefield, where the enemies are the anti-arts of passive impression. In this context the arts demand an active response with an intensity that hardly existed before. Hence the modern artist is actually in an immediate personal relation with his reader or viewer: he throws the ball to him, so to speak, and his art depends on its being caught at the other end. We have already noticed how in The Waste Land (and much other modern poetry) the poet hands the continuity of his poem over to the reader, and one could make out a very good case for saying that the reader of Finnegans Wake is the hero of that book, the person who laboriously spells out the message of the dream. Finnegans Wake belongs of course to the stream-of-consciousness technique in modern fiction. This technique, which is still going strong in the novels of Samuel Beckett, is continuous, but not rhetorically continuous: that is, the links are associative and not merely ready-made as they are in a propagandist speech, hence they require an active reader to see the sequential logic in them. One would expect to find in the modern, then, some decline in the prestige of the particular quality in art represented by the term "craftsmanship," or, perhaps more accurately, by the highly significant epithet "finished." The work of art is traditionally something set up to be admired: it is placed in a hierarchy where the "classic" or "masterpiece" of perfect form is at the top. Modern art, especially in such developments as action-painting, is concerned to give the impression of process rather than product, of something emerging out of the heat of struggle and still showing the strain of its passing from conception to birth. Balzac tells a celebrated story about a painter whose masterpiece broke

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down into a tangle of meaningless lines. But the modern century has to take this parable of the chef d'oeuvre inconnu [unknown masterpiece] seriously, for the lines are not meaningless if they record the painter's involvement with his subject and also demand ours. Malraux67 has remarked how much the sketch, the sense of something rapidly blocked out and left incomplete, seems to us the index of an artist's vitality. The same principles hold for poetry, even to the extent that a poet today can get more money out of selling his manuscript excreta to libraries than he can out of royalties on the published volume. Dramatists try to break up the hypnotic illusion of the play by various devices that suggest a dramatic process in formation, such as introducing stagehands or prompters, or breaking down the distinction between actor and role. Such devices are regarded by Brecht as a creative form of alienation, giving the audience a closer view of imaginative reality by chopping holes in the rhetorical facade.68 Novelists adopt similar devices to break the story-teller's spell on the reader: thus Gide's The Counterfeiters is a story about a novelist writing a novel called The Counterfeiters. Readers of Canadian literature may see similar tendencies in Reaney's Listen to the Wind or Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.69 The tendency to prefer the imperfect work engaged in history to the perfected masterpiece that pulls away from time is closely related to another tendency which also originates in the opposition to passive anti-art. Advertising and propaganda are interested arts, arts with ulterior motives. Behind them is a course of action which they end by exhorting one to follow. A good deal of literature has followed the same pattern (e.g., The Pilgrim's Progress, Self-Help by Samuel Smiles) and still does. But as a rule the work of art as such is disinterested: there is nothing beyond itself to which it points as the fulfilment of itself. In modern painting and poetry, especially in the last two decades, there has been a good deal of emphasis not only on this disinterested and self-containing aspect of the arts, but of attack on those tendencies within the arts themselves that seem to lead us passively on from one thing to another. A detective story is a good example of this donkey's-carrot writing: we begin it to find out what we are told on the last page. Writing with this structure is teleological: it contains a hidden purpose, and we read on to discover what that purpose is. Many modern poets, with William Carlos Williams70 at their head, regard such concealing of a hidden design as gimmick-writing: for them, the image, the scene, the thing presented, the immediate experience, is

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the reality that the arts are concerned with, and to go beyond this is to risk dishonesty. The theory of the modern style in poetry is set out in the letters of Rimbaud known as the lettres du voyant, with their insistence that the genuine poet sees directly, in contrast to the rhetorician who talks about what he sees. The same kind of emphasis has been common in painting for a long time: music has been affected by it more recently, but perhaps more radically than any other art. Classical music, up to quite recent times, has been intensely teleological: in symphonies from Haydn to Brahms we feel strongly how the end of a movement is implied in the beginning, and how we are led towards it step by step. In much contemporary music, both electronic and conventional, the emphasis is on the immediate sense impression of sound: the music is not going anywhere; it may even be proceeding by chance, as in some of the experiments of John Cage.71 The ear is not thrown forward into the future, to hear a theme being worked out or a discord resolved: it is kept sternly in the present moment. This conception of the unit of experience as a thing in itself is of course an intensely impersonal attitude to art: the writer (and similarly with the other arts) is doing all he can to avoid the sense of impressing himself on his reader by suggesting meaning or form or purpose beyond what is presented. In this conception of chosisme,72 as it is sometimes called, it is not simply continuity, but significance or meaning itself, which has been handed over to the reader. One may see in most of these modern tendencies a good deal of distrust in the rational consciousness as the main area of communication in the arts. Modern art is irrational in many respects, but it is important to see why and in what ways it is. We spoke of advertising and propaganda as stunning or demoralizing the critical consciousness in order to move past it and set up their structures in the rest of the mind. There is clearly no point in setting the artists to defend a Maginot line73 that has already been outflanked: the artist has to move directly back into the attacked area, and set up his own structures there instead. Hence the various Freud-inspired movements, like surrealism, which communicate on a normally repressed level; hence too the great variety of modern developments of fantasy and articulated dream, where there is no identity, and where the world is like that of Milton's chaos, with things forming and disappearing by chance and melting into other things. In Kafka, for example, the event, the ordinary unit of a story, is replaced by the psychological event, and the social and other significances of what is happening are allegories of these psychological events. The primary

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emphasis is on the mental attitude that makes the events possible. Thus The Castle is presented as a kind of anxiety nightmare, yet a theological allegory of God's dealings with man and a political allegory of the police state run in counterpoint with it. I am not trying to suggest that all these modern tendencies form part of a single consistent pattern: far from it. All that they have in common is an imaginative opposition to the anti-arts of persuasion and exhortation. The obvious question to ask is, of course: granted that the arts in the modern world are full of antagonism to the anti-arts, granted that they parody them in all sorts of clever ways, granted that they encourage an active instead of a passive response, does this really make them socially effective? In a world resounding every day with the triumphs of slanted news and brainwashed politics, what can poetry and painting do, tortoises in a race with hares? This question is one of the most powerful arguments of our enemy the accuser. We are constantly learning from the alienation of progress that merely trying to clarify one's mind is useless and selfish, because the individual counts for so little in society. Marxism, with its carefully planned agenda of revolution, provides the most complete answer to the question, "What then must we do?"74 The democracies provide more limited and piecemeal forms of social activism, demonstrations, sit-ins, teach-ins, protest marches, petitions, and the like, partly (if one may say so with all due sympathy and respect) as gestures of homage to the superior effectiveness to be found in the world of public relations and controversies. Similarly, the artist often feels an impulse to guarantee his vision by his life, and hence we find the pattern of antagonism of art to anti-art repeated in an antagonism of artist to society. In political thought there is a useful fiction known as the social contract, the sense that man enters into a certain social context by the act of getting born. In earlier contract theories, like that of Hobbes, the contract was thought of as universal, binding everyone without exception. From Rousseau on there is more of a tendency to divide people into those who accept and defend the existing social contract because they benefit from it, and the people who are excluded from most of its benefits, and so feel no obligation, or much less, to it. As everyone knows, Marx defined the excluded body as the proletariat or workers, and saw it as the means to a reconstituted society. Those who accept and are loyal to the social contract are known consistently, throughout the whole period, as the bourgeoisie or middle class, otherwise known, in

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different contexts, as Philistines or squares. Whenever artists think of themselves as a social group, they seem inclined to define themselves in terms of their opposition to the bourgeois society of the contract, with its materialistic and conformist standards. Some of them have followed the Marxist form of this opposition, though very few in the English-speaking countries, and very few even of those, have been of a type that under a proletarian dictatorship would survive the first purge. Radical sympathies in American fiction have tended rather to take the form of a sentimental populism, of a thepeople-keep-marching-on type. During the Depression, the contest of labour and management began to assume something of the dimensions of a revolution, and the labour movement still had, like the Negroes today, the dignity of an oppressed group. As a result there was a considerable infiltration of working-class sympathies into the drama, films, and musical comedies of that period. But today few areas of American life are less inspiring to the Muse than the trade unions. The collapse of Communist sympathies in American culture was not the result of McCarthyism and other witch-hunts, which were not a cause but an effect of that collapse. The object of the witch-hunt is the witch, that is, a helpless old woman whose dangerousness is assumed to rationalize quite different interests and pleasures. Similarly the Communist issue in McCarthyism was a red herring for a democratic development of the big lie as a normal political weapon: if internal Communism had been a genuine danger the struggle against it would have taken a genuine form. Sympathy with Communism collapsed under the feeling that, even at its best, and ignoring its atrocities, the bureaucracy of Communism was enforcing much the same kind of social contract as the managerial and authoritarian elements in the democracies. Hence American liberals, even radicals, soon lost all faith in the moral superiority of Communism. Losing the faith75 was undoubtedly right: the immense relief with which they lost it may have been less so. But if the Marxist form of radicalism, of the kind that helps to shape the dramas of Brecht and Gorky, is rare in American literature, there is a type of anarchism in it which is far more common. The figure of the individual who will not play the silly games of society, who seems utterly insignificant but represents an unbreakable human force, runs through its literature from Rip van Winkle and the romances of Cooper to the present day. The patron saint of this tendency is Thoreau, retreating to Walden to build his own cabin and assert that the only genuine America

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is the society of those who will not throw all their energies into the endless vacuum suction of imperialist hysteria and of consuming consumer goods ["Conclusion"]. Huck Finn, drifting down the great river with Jim and preferring hell with Jim to the white slave-owner's heaven [The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chap. 31], is a similar figure, one of the bums, hoboes, and social outcasts who reach a deeper level of community than the rest of us. This outcast or hobo figure is the hero of most of the Chaplin films; he also finds a congenial haven in comic strips. The juvenile delinquent or emotionally disturbed adolescent may in some contexts be one of his contemporary equivalents, like the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye. Sympathy for the youth who sees no moral difference between delinquency and conformity still inspires such Utopian works as Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd.76 An earlier and very remarkable Canadian work of this anarchist kind is Frederick Philip Grove's A Search for America, where the America that the narrator searches for is again the submerged community that only the outcast experiences. This form of proletariat has recently combined with another tradition of very different origin. One distinctively modern element in our culture, introduced in the main by the Romantic movement, is the conception of the serious writer, who is in a prophetic relation to society, and consequently in opposition to it. It is no longer sufficient to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that they who live to please must please to live:77 the serious writer is committed to saying what may not and probably will not please, even if he hopes to please enough, on a different level of pleasure, to be able to live also. With Baudelaire and his successors this antagonism to society becomes a way of life, usually called Bohemian, the antagonism being expressed partly in the oversimplifying phrase, epater le bourgeois [getting the middle class's back up]. More accurately, the artist explores forbidden or disapproved modes of life in both imagination and experience. The square, the man who lives by the social contract, takes the public appearance of society to be, for him, its reality. Hence his obsessive tendency to appear in public clean, clothed, sober, and accompanied by his wife. The artist may symbolize a more intensely imaginative community through dirt or slovenliness, lousifying himself as much as possible, as Rimbaud remarked, or through more openly acknowledged forms of sexual relationship outside marriage. Drugs and narcotics have been associated with the arts for a long time, but took on a new intensity and relevance to the creative process with the Romantic movement. The bourgeois view that the appearance of

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society is its reality is of course based on illusion, and we have seen how a breakdown in illusion is often more disturbing than genuine dangers. Similarly, long hair in young men or pictures portraying a consenting sex act may stir up deeper social anxieties than actual delinquency or rape. The combination of Bohemian and hobo traditions in the beat, hip, and other disaffected movements of our time seems to be part of an unconscious effort to define a social proletariat in Freudian instead of Marxist terms. Such groups find, or say they find, that a withdrawal from the social establishment is a necessary step in freeing them from repression and in releasing their creative energies. Creation is close to the sexual instinct, and it is in their attitude to sex that the two groups collide most violently, as each regards the other's views of sex as obscene. The Freudian proletarian sees established society as a repressive anxiety structure/8 the basis of which is the effort to control the sexual impulse and restrict it to predictable forms of expression. His emphasis on the sexual aspect of life, his intense awareness of the role of the thwarted sexual drive in the cruelties and fears of organized society, make him quite as much a moralist as his opponent, though his moral aim is of course to weaken the anxiety structure by the shock tactics of "bad" words, pornography, or the publicizing of sexual perversions and deviations. The collision of youth and age is more openly involved in this kind of movement than elsewhere. In a society dominated by the alienation of progress, the young, whose lives are thrown forward to the future, achieve a curious kind of moral advantage, as though the continued survival of anyone whose life is mainly in the past required some form of justification. Certain other elements in this social movement, such as the growth of confessional and self-analysing groups, show some parallels with Marxist techniques. The picaresque heroes of Kerouac are "Dharma bums," social outcasts with serious social and even religious ideals.79 Their environment is the squalid and seedy urban one, the city that is steadily devouring the countryside, yet in their repudiation of everything structured and organized in it they struggle for an innocence that is almost pastoral. They seek a kinship with the nature which, like them, has been repressed, almost obliterated, by organized society. In two writers who have strongly influenced this Freudian proletariat movement, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, pastoralism is a central theme. In the nineteenth century the relation of country to city was often thought of, in writers

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who had begun to hate and fear the rise of a metropolitan civilization, as a relation of innocence to experience, of the healthy natural virtues of the country corrupted by the feverish excitements of the town. This myth produced a good deal of nineteenth-century literature and social propaganda, ranging in value from Wordsworth's Michael to temperance melodramas. The pronouncements on drinking and sexual mores made by those in our society who are most spectacularly not with it, like many members of the lower clergy and the higher judiciary, are still often inspired by such visions of a virtuous rustic daring to be a Daniel in a wicked Babylon [Daniel 7-12]. A number of other writers who continued the tradition of eighteenth-century primitivism also nurtured a tangled garden of metaphors about the need for being "rooted in the soil," as part of a similar opposition to the metropolitan development of society. This form of nostalgic de la boue80 was a strong influence on nineteenth-century fiction (Jean Giono, Knut Hamsun),81 though the ponderous prose lyrics it tended to specialize in are largely forgotten now. It is an attitude with a naturally strong bias toward racism, and in this form it entered into the volkisch developments in Germany which lay behind much of Nazism. Nineteenth-century French Canada also had its propagandists for the motto emparons-nous du sol,82 idealizing the simple peasant bound to his land and his ancestral faith, a picture with a strong resemblance to Millet's Angelus, of which the most famous expression is Maria Chapdelaine.83 There were similar movements elsewhere in America, like the Southern agrarian movement of a generation ago.84 In Miller and Lawrence this pastoral theme is less sentimentalized and more closely connected with the more deeply traditional elements of the pastoral: spontaneity in human relations, especially sexual relations; the stimulus to creative power that is gained from a simpler society, less obsessed by satisfying imaginary wants; and, at least in Lawrence, a sense of identity with nature of great delicacy and precision. The pastoral withdrawal from bourgeois values merges insensibly into another, the sense of the artist as belonging to an elite or neo-aristocracy. The origin of this attitude is the feeling that in a world full of the panic of change, the artist's role is to make himself a symbol of tradition, a sentinel or witness to the genuine continuity in human life, like the London churches in The Waste Land. In religion this attitude expresses itself, as a rule, in adherence or conversion to the Catholic Church. Here it is often the Church as a symbol of authority or tradition that is the

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attraction: Charles Maurras expressed this most bluntly by saying that he was interested in Catholicism but not in Christianity.85 Political preferences are right-wing, with emphasis on the traditional functions of aristocracy and royalty, especially among those who actually were of aristocratic origin, like Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam. Eliot's characterizing of himself as "royalist in politics"86 is a late and not very resonant British echo of what was mainly a French and nineteenth-century tendency. Economic preferences vary, but are always strongly against the conspiracies of international finance. In the 19205 and '305 many of this group were attracted to Fascism, which they saw as leading to a new recognition of heroic energy in life, including the creative energy of the arts. Both this group and the pastoralists are haunted by the sense of an invisible serenity which has disappeared from contemporary life but can be re-experienced through tradition. Often this feeling takes the form of a sense of vanished gods, like the "dignified, invisible"87 presences of Eliot's rose garden. Yeats tried to identify these presences with his pantheon of Irish gods and heroes; Lawrence with his darker gods and his historical myths like that of the Etruscans; George and other German Romantics with the Classical gods; Jung with unconscious archetypes. Christian writers tend to think more conceptually of the organizing ideas of religion—original sin, Incarnation, a personal power of evil, and the like—as giving a new richness and depth of significance to life, whether of joy or terror. "I do wish those people who deny the reality of eternal punishment," said the Catholic poet Lionel Johnson, "would understand their own dreadful vulgarity."88 One type who most obviously withdraws from the social contract and sets up a way of life in opposition to it is the criminal. There are two kinds of criminals, professional and amateur: those for whom crime is money and those for whom crime is fun. We are concerned with the latter group. It is obvious that the criminal or conspirator is a ready symbol for the artist who breaks with the social contract; one thinks of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and his conspiratorial motto of silence, exile, and cunning, or Rimbaud's identification of himself as a child of Satan, linked to criminals, slaves, and outcasts of all kinds. The symbol of the artist as criminal, however, goes much deeper. I spoke of the way in which optimistic theories of progress and revolution had grown out of Rousseau's conception of a society of nature and reason buried under the injustices of civilization and awaiting release. But, around the same time, the Marquis de Sade was expounding a very different view of the natural soci-

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ety. According to this, nature teaches us that pleasure is the highest good in life, and the keenest form of pleasure consists in inflicting or suffering pain. Hence the real natural society would not be the reign of equality and reason prophesied by Rousseau: it would be a society in which those who liked tormenting others were set free to do so. So far as evidence is relevant, there is more evidence for de Sade's theory of natural society than there is for Rousseau's. In any case there is an unpleasantly large degree of truth in the sadist vision, and a good many literary conceptions have taken off from it, or near it. One is the cult of the holy sinner,89 the person who achieves an exceptional awareness, whether religious or aesthetic in character, from acts of cruelty, or, at least, brings about such an awareness in us. Dostoevsky's Stavrogin, Gide's Lafcadio, with his acte gratuit or unmotivated crime, the hero of Camus's L'Etranger and of Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, are examples.90 A good deal of contemporary American writing links not merely picaresque law-breaking, smoking marijuana and the like, but outright violence and terror, with serious social attitudes. There is something of this in Mailer, and a good deal more in LeRoi Jones and other "black power" adherents.91 In D.H. Lawrence, too, a curious hysterical cruelty occasionally gets out of hand, most continuously, perhaps, in The Plumed Serpent. Jean Genet is the most remarkable example of the contemporary artist as criminal: his sentence of life imprisonment was appealed against by Sartre, Claudel, Cocteau, and Gide, and even before his best-known works had appeared, Sartre had written a seven-hundred-page biography of him called Saint Genet. Genet's most famous play, in this country, is Le Balcon. Here the main setting is a brothel in which the patrons dress up as bishops, generals, or judges and engage in sadistic ritual games with the whores, who are flogged and abused in the roles of penitents or thieves. The point is that society as a whole is one vast sadistic ritual of this sort. As the mock-bishop says, very rudely, he does not care about the function of bishop: all he wants is the metaphor, the idea or sexual core of the office. The madam of the brothel remarks, "They all want everything to be as true as possible . . . minus something indefinable, so that it won't be true"92—a most accurate description of what I have been calling stupid realism. A revolution is going on outside: it is put down by the chief of police, and the patrons of the brothel are pulled out of it to enact the "real" social forms of the games they have been playing. Nobody notices the difference, because generals and judges and bishops

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are traditional metaphors, and new patrons come to the brothel and continue the games. The chief of police, the only one with any real social power, is worried because he is not a traditional metaphor, and nobody comes to the brothel to imitate him. Finally, however, one such patron does turn up: the leader of the revolution. There is a good deal more in the play, but this account will perhaps indicate how penetrating it is as a sadist vision of society. All these antisocial attitudes in modern culture are, broadly speaking, reactionary. That is, their sense of antagonism to existing society is what is primary, and it is much clearer and more definite than any alternative social ideal. Hugh MacDiarmid, supporting both Communism and Scottish nationalism, and Dos Passes, moving from a simple radicalism to a simple conservatism, are random examples among writers of what sometimes seems a dissent for its own sake. Wherever we turn, we are made aware of the fact that society is a repressive anxiety structure, and that creative power comes from a part of the mind that resists repression but is not in itself moral or rational. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Pale Fire, a gentle, wistful, rather touching pastoral poem falls into the hands of a lunatic who proceeds to "annotate" it with a wild paranoid fantasy about his own adventures as a prince in some European state during a revolution. Poem and commentary have nothing to do with each other, and perhaps that is the only point the book makes. But the title, taken from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens [4.3.438], suggests a certain allegory of the relation of art to the wish-fulfilment fantasies that keep bucking and plunging underneath it. Such forces are in all of us, and are strong enough to destroy the world if they are not controlled through release instead of repression. In my last lecture I want to talk about the way in which the creative arts are absorbed into society through education. Meanwhile we may notice that the real basis for the opposition of artist and society is the fact that not merely communications media and public relations, but the whole structure of society itself, is an anti-art, an old and worn-out creation that needs to be created anew. Ill Clair de lune intellectuel The modern world began with the Industrial Revolution and the Industrial Revolution set up an economic structure beside the political one which was really a rival form of society. Industry had often enough taken the form of an organization distinct from the state, but never

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before in history did man have so strong a feeling of living under two social orders as he did in the period of laissez-faire. The separation could not, of course, last indefinitely, because the economic social order had so revolutionary an effect on the political one. Explicitly in Marxism, and more tentatively in the democracies, all society eventually comes to be thought of as consisting functionally only of workers or producers. Marxism moves in the direction of a final or once-for-all revolution in which the productive society becomes the only society; in the democracies the nonproductive groups, or leisure classes, gradually become socially unfunctional. In both types of society, however, there are, in addition to the workers and their directors, a large group who exist to explain, manifest, encourage, rationalize, and promote the various forms of production. In Marxist societies, those in this second group are known as party workers; in the democracies, especially in North America, they are thought of as advertisers and educators. It seems clear that even with the heavy handicap of defence budgets, even with the assistance given to those parts of the world which are committed to the West but are otherwise unfortunate, the productive power of American and other advanced democracies has become so overefficient that it can continue to function only by various featherbedding93 devices. One device, of the type satirized in Parkinson's Law,94 is the subsidizing of employment; another, of the type lamented in The Feminine Mystique,95 is the effort to encourage as many as possible of the female half of the population to devote themselves to becoming full-time consumers. But these devices do not conceal the fact that leisure is growing so rapidly, both in the amount of time and the number of people it affects, as to be a social complex equal in importance to employment itself. Thus the technological revolution is becoming more and more an educational rather than an industrial phenomenon. For education is the positive aspect of leisure. As long as we think of society, in nineteenth-century terms, as essentially productive, leisure is only spare time, usually filled up with various forms of distraction, and a "leisure class," which has nothing but spare time, is only a class of parasites. But as soon as we realize that leisure is as genuine and important an aspect of everyone's life as remunerative work, leisure becomes something that also demands discipline and responsibility. Distraction, of the kind one sees on highways and beaches at holiday weekends, is not leisure but a running away from leisure, a refusal to face the test of one's inner

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resources that spare time poses. It is to genuine leisure what the feather-bedding devices I have just referred to are to genuine industry and business. Our problem today is not that of a leisure class, but of leisure itself, as an increasingly growing factor in the lives of all classes. In relation to the economy, man is essentially functional, deriving his individuality from his job and his social context. In relation to leisure he is essentially a performer or actor, judged, not by his specific role, but by his skill in performance. That is, any leisure activity which is not sheer idleness or distraction depends on some acquired skill, and the acquiring and practice of that skill is a mode of education. Education involves, first of all, the network of educational institutions: schools and universities, which occupy most of the time and attention of a large part of the population, and many other types of organization— churches, museums, art galleries, theatres, just to start with. To look at our society realistically today, we have to think of its economic or productive aspect as a part of it: let us say, by a rhetorical statistic, half of it. The other half consists of the educational activities which are growing much faster, proportionately, than industry, and which I shall call the leisure structure of society. The industrial and the leisure structures make up, between them, the program of needs and activities which, in their degenerate form in the ancient Roman world, were described as bread and circuses.96 In the democracies, as well as in the Communist states, social development has been mainly a matter of relating the economic structure to the political one. In Canada, as in Britain and America, the left wing tends to favour closer relations, usually stopping short of complete socialization, and the right wing tends to favour economic autonomy, usually stopping considerably short of pure laissez-faire. Views on the relation of the political to the leisure structure seem to be the reverse of this. Liberal sympathies are more disposed to keep the leisure structure autonomous, and to feel that the political influence on the leisure structure is normally a bad influence. The right wing are more disposed to mutter about the injustice being done to the anti-intellectual majority of taxpayers, and to call for tighter cultural budgets. In any event the question of what the government does in relation to the leisure structure is taking on an increasingly revolutionary importance. The word "revolution," which originally suggested conspiracy and barricades in the street, can now, in our society, only be associated with some kind of centralized action, usually by the government, in

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whatever areas can develop enough freedom of movement to revolutionize anything. At present the so-called mass media are sponsored mainly by advertising, which means that they are related primarily to the economy: these include television, newspapers, and the dwindling body of fiction and picture magazines which function as retail advertising journals. The turning of sponsorship into direct control, as when an editor is dismissed or a program cancelled for offending an advertiser, is felt to be pernicious by those who are not completely cynical in such matters. Every effort of a government, however timid, to set up national film and broadcasting companies, and thus to turn over at least some of the mass media to the leisure structure, is part of a fateful revolutionary process. So is every effort to subsidize creative talent; so, even more obviously, is every effort to plan a city more intelligently than leaving it to speculative blight. We are taking the first cautious steps on this revolutionary road now, and it is highly typical of Canada that it is the administration of the leisure structure, questions of dividing responsibility and authority, that should be most eagerly discussed. The complete control of the leisure structure by the political or economic power is a logical development of Marxism, at least in its twentieth-century form, but to us the Marxist attitude to the leisure structure seems a purely reactionary one. If the growth of the leisure structure is as important and central a development as I think it is, some of the major possibilities of further social development remain with the more industrially advanced democracies. Schools and universities are mainly for young people, and, under the influence of the view of society as consisting primarily of wage-earners, they have traditionally been thought of as places in which the young are prepared for real life. This view is congenial to the normal tendency of the adult to think of the adolescent as a rudimentary and primitive form of himself. In my own student days during the Depression, when so many students came to college because of the difficulty of finding jobs, it was felt that the four years spent in study required some justification. What creates a man's self-respect, it was thought, is the holding of a job as the head of a family, and university appeared merely to postpone this function. Young people in working-class homes felt this even more strongly, and, in my experience, did not much care that most of them were unofficially but effectively excluded from the universities. The greatly increased number attending today reflects of course an increase in both population and economic buoyancy; but when it is said that stu-

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dents go to college because industry and business now require more education, I suspect a hangover of the old self-justifying arguments. I think students come to college because they realize, more clearly than many of their elders, that by doing so they are fully participating in their society, and can no longer be thought of as getting ready for something else more important. It inevitably follows from the same principle, however, that the university, or at least the kind of thing the university does, can hardly remain indefinitely the exclusive preserve of the young. The question of adult education is still too large and shapeless for us to be able to look squarely at it along with all our other problems of expansion, but, apart from the very large amount of education within industry itself, the adult population will also need institutions of teaching and discussion as the organized form of their leisure time: I think particularly of married women with grown-up families. It is difficult for a government not to think of education in terms of training, and to regard the university as a public service institution concerned with training. Such a conception naturally puts a heavy emphasis on youth, who are allegedly being trained for society, the human resources of the future, as we say. Adult education will no doubt enter the picture first in the context of retraining, as it does now in industry, but before long we shall have to face a growing demand for an education which has no immediate reference to training at all. We have next to consider the relation of the leisure structure to the arts. Down to the nineteenth century, painters, poets, composers tended to follow the traditions set by their predecessors, imitating them and carrying on their conventions in a more elaborate way. Thus there was a steady increase in self-awareness and complexity, and a process resembling that of aging, with each generation building on what had been done up to that point. With the nineteenth century there came, along with the continuing of this process, a prodigious lateral expansion in influence. It was mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century that the great museums came into being, at least in their present form, and the museums brought together an immense assemblage, not merely of works of art, but of objects that presented analogies to and suggestions for the arts. The result was to provide the artist with an encyclopedic range of influences; it made the artist an academician instead of an apprentice learning from masters. What the museums did for the visual arts modern recordings have done for music.

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The increase of historical knowledge, of which archaeology formed a central part, was so vast as to make it seem as though the cemeteries were on the march, the entire past awakening to an aesthetic apocalypse. Painters and sculptors in particular were presented with a worldwide panorama of creative skills, very largely in the applied or so-called "minor" arts. This was naturally an important influence on the trend to formalism that I spoke of in my last lecture, for what this panorama revealed was primarily a universal language of design. Design in its turn has provided a basis for the unifying of the "major" and "minor" arts. Anyone today comparing an exhibition of modern painting or sculpture with one of textiles or pottery gets the impression that in the modern period there is really only an art of design, which is applied equally to all the visual arts, major and minor. I have referred to the view of William Morris,97 at the threshold of the modern period, that the minor or useful arts were a key area in social revolution because they represent, more clearly than the major arts, the imagination as a way of life, as providing the visible forms of a free society. Although social developments have not followed Morris's antimechanistic anarchism, it is still no doubt true that the principles which link such a painter as Mondrian98 to textile or ceramic design are a part of a considerable democratizing of aesthetic experience. If so, Morris was right in seeing a significant social, even a political dimension in modern cultural developments. Along with archaeology and its "museum without walls,"99 as it has been called, came anthropology and its study of "primitive" cultures, which brought primitive art, with its weird stylizing of form, its openly phallic and sexual themes, its deliberate distortion of perspective, squarely in front of the artist's eye. Of all elements in the modern tradition, perhaps that of primitive art, of whatever age or continent, has had the most pervasive influence. The primitive, with its immediate connection with magic, expresses a directness of imaginative impact which is naive and yet conventionalized, spontaneous and yet precise. It indicates most clearly the way in which a long and tired tradition of Western art, which has been refining and sophisticating itself for centuries, can be revived, or even reborn. Perhaps the kinship between the primitive and ourselves goes even deeper: it has frequently been remarked that we may be, if we survive, the primitives of an unknown culture, the cave men of a new mental era.100 It is not always realized how closely analogous the developments of modern literature are to those in the visual arts. The worldwide pan-

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orama of the museums is not attainable in literature with the same immediacy, because of the barriers of language. Linguistics sometimes gives an illusion of having surmounted these barriers, but the illusion of literature in translation is even less convincing. However, the trend to formalism, stylizing, and abstraction is quite as marked in poetry as in painting. The elements of verbal design are myth and metaphor, both of which are modes of identification. That is, they are primitive and naive associations of things, a sun and a god, a hero and a lion, which turn their backs on realism or accurate descriptive statement. In literature, as in painting, realism was an emancipating force down to the nineteenth century, when it reached its culmination in the great novelists of that period. The modern period begins with Baudelaire and the symbolisme that followed him, and literature ever since has been increasingly organized by symbolism, dense and often difficult metaphor, myth, especially in drama, and folk tale. This development was anticipated in the great mythopoeic poetry of the Romantics, especially Blake, Shelley, and Keats, who correspond in poetry to the revolution of Turner in painting. Like the parallel developments in visual art, the increase of consciously employed myth and metaphor is also an increase in erudition and the conscious awareness of tradition. When the Romantic movement began, there was one important primitive influence on it, that of the oral ballads, which began to be collected and classified at that time. The oral ballad makes a functional use of refrains and other strongly marked patterns of repetition, which correspond to the emphasis on design in the primitive pictorial arts. The fact that it depended for survival on an oral tradition meant that whatever personal turns of phrase there may originally have been in it were smoothed out, the poem thus acquiring a kind of stripped poetic surface quite unlike that of written poetry. The literary ballads which imitate these characteristics—the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake's Mental Traveller, Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci—come about as close as poetry can come to reproducing directly the voice of the creative powers of the mind below consciousness, a voice which is uninhibited and yet curiously impersonal as well. This was also the "democratic" voice that Whitman attempted to reproduce, and Whitman is the godfather of all the folk singing and other oral developments of our time which cover so large an area of contemporary popular culture. A different but related Canadian tradition is that of the chansonniers, as represented today by Gilles Vigneault.101

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Fifty years ago it could be said that the university and the creative artist were at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. The university, on its humanistic side, ran a critical and scholarly establishment concerned with the past, and related itself to the present by translating the values of the past into contemporary middle-class values. Anyone interested in painting or writing was likely to drop out of school as soon as it had wasted the legal amount of his time and devote himself to living precariously by his wits. I spent a dinner talking to such a (Canadian) writer recently: he told me of how he had left school at grade ten and eventually established himself as a writer, of how his life since had been financially difficult, even despairing at times, but redeemed by the excitement of an unexpected sale, or, more genuinely, by occasional gleams of satisfaction over a creative job well done. A century ago this would have been a familiar type of story, but while I listened with interest and respect, because I knew his work and admired it, I felt that I was hearing one of the last legends of a vanishing species, of a way of life that was going and would not return. For in the last few decades the leisure structure has become much more integrated. The university's interest in contemporary culture is now practically obsessive, nor is its relation to it confined to mere interest. More and more of the established artists are on its teaching staff, and more and more of the younger rebels are their undergraduate students. While serving on a committee for awarding fellowships to Canadian writers, I noticed that practically all the serious English candidates were employed by universities and practically all the French ones by the National Film Board or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. What cultural differences this implied I do not know, but for both groups some professional connection with the leisure structure was so regular as to amount practically to a closed shop. When the beatnik movement began about ten years ago, it seemed as though an anti-academic, even anti-intellectual tendency was consolidating around a new kind of cultural experience. It attracted certain types of expression, such as the improvising swing ensembles and their derivatives, which had traditionally been well outside the orbit of higher education. But the academics got interested in them too, and vice versa. The nineteenth-century artist was typically a loner: even in the twentieth he was often the last stand of laissez-faire, resisting every kind of social mediation between himself and his public. It is still often asserted that he ought to continue to be so, and should avoid the seductions of

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university posts and foundation grants. The social facts of yesterday are the cliches of today. But he is now in a world where such agencies as the Canada Council102 represent a growing concern on the part of society with the leisure structure. This has affected all aspects of the arts: we may note particularly the changes in genre. Some arts, like music and drama, are ensemble performances for audience; others, like the novel and the easel painting, are individualized. In an intensely individualized era like the Victorian age, the novel goes up and the drama goes down. Up until quite recently, the creative person, say in literature, was typically one who "wanted to write," and what he wanted to write was usually poetry or fiction. He might dream of rivalling Shakespeare, but he would be unlikely to want Shakespeare's job of a busy actor-manager in a profit-sharing corporation. It looks as though creative interests were shifting again to the dramatic: it is Pinter and Albee and Beckett on the stage, Bergman and Fellini and others in film, who seem to be making cultural history today, as the novelists were making it a century ago. The creative undergraduate tends less to bring his sheaf of poems to his instructor, and tends more to ask his advice about where he can get financial assistance, private or foundational, as a result of having gone broke with a film-making or dramatic venture. This may be a temporary vogue, but I think not, and of course it is obvious how this kind of creative interest immediately involves the artist in the social aspects of the leisure structure. (Psychotherapy, so profoundly connected with the contemporary imagination, has recently changed its emphasis from narrative and confessional techniques to dramatic ones,103 which is perhaps another aspect of the same cultural trend.) In my earlier talks I spoke of the modern imagination as resisting the pressure of advertising and propaganda, which assume and try to bring about a passive response. Advertising and propaganda come respectively from the economic and the political structures, and I touched on the neurosis in modern life which springs from the feeling that these structures are not worth loyalty. For all our dislike of the word "totalitarian,"104 we have to recognize that there is a profound and genuine, if ultimately specious, appeal in any form of social activity which promises to expand into a complete way of life, engaging all aspects of one's interests and providing fulfilment for one's cultural, spiritual, and intellectual as well as social needs. A generation ago many people plunged into radical politics in the hope of finding a total program of this kind, but all forms of politics, including the radical form, seem sooner or later

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to dwindle into a specialized chess game. Many others at various times have sought the same total activity in religion, a more promising place, but often a disappointing one, with rather second-rate cultural rewards. It would simplify my argument considerably at this point if I could say that the leisure structure was the missing piece of society, that it is what we can give an unqualified loyalty to, and that it does fulfil the entire range of nonmaterial human needs. There is however no reason to suppose that the leisure structure, as it grows in social importance, will produce a social institution any better (if no worse) than business or politics do: the most we can hope for is a system of checks and balances which will prevent any one of our new three estates from becoming too powerful. Even Plato hardly went so far as to believe in the perfectibility of intellectuals, and the history of the Christian Church, which started out with a much higher ideal of loyalty, does not encourage us to feel that any social institution can be a genuine embodiment of a social ideal. It is mainly those in the departments concerned with the arts, humanities, and general education who show a clear difference of social attitude, not because their virtue is superior, but because their budgets are low. The rich grants that scientists and administrators can obtain as employees of government and industry will always be attractive, whatever their relation to academic freedom, a relation which in itself will become much hazier as universities become more dependent financially on government. I should describe the ideal or Utopian features of the leisure structure, along with the political and economic ones, rather differently. The evolution of political democracy, as it fought against entrenched privilege at first, and then against dictatorial tendencies, has to some extent been a genuine evolution of an idea of liberty, however often betrayed and perverted, and however much threatened still. The evolution of industry into a society of producers, as labour continued to fight against a managerial oligarchy, has been to a correspondingly modified extent an evolution of an idea of equality. Matthew Arnold warned the dominant bourgeoisie of Victorian England that a society could pursue liberty to the point of forgetting about equality.105 Today, with capitalism in a counter-reformation period and with totalitarianism thought of as something foreign, we prefer to be reminded that society—that is, other societies—can pursue equality to the point of forgetting about liberty. But neither political democracy nor trade unions have developed much sense of the third revolutionary ideal of fraternity—the word "com-

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rade" has for most of us a rather sinister and frigid sound. Fraternity is perhaps the ideal that the leisure structure has to contribute to society. A society of students, scholars, and artists is a society of neighbours, in the genuinely religious sense of that word. That is, our neighbour is not, or not necessarily, the person in the same national or ethnical or class group with ourselves, but may be a "good Samaritan" or person to whom we are linked by deeper bonds than nationality or racism or class solidarity can any longer provide. These are bonds of intellect and imagination as well as of love and good will. The neighbour of a scientist is another scientist working on similar lines, perhaps in a different continent; the neighbour of a novelist writing about Mississippi is (as Faulkner indicated in his Nobel Prize speech)106 anybody anywhere who can respond to his work. The fact that feuds among scholars and artists are about as bitter as feuds ever get will doubtless make for some distinction between theory and practice. It is a peculiarity of North America today that culture is absorbed into society mainly through the university classroom. Such a dependence of contemporary culture on the educational system, rather than on a selfacquired social education supplementing the academic one, is much less true of Europe. This seems to imply, perhaps correctly, a higher degree of maturity in European society, in this respect at least. When I speak of the North American university's interest in contemporary culture as obsessive I am speaking of a degree of interest that I somewhat regret: it might be better if the university confined itself to supplying the historical dimension of its culture. But the students dictate a great deal of the teaching program of the university, though they seldom realize it, and students of the humanities appear to regard the study of the contemporary or near-contemporary as the most liberalizing element of a liberal education. My notion is that the trend is for the European pattern to fall in with the North American one rather than the other way round, but my observations do not depend on such a prediction. Whatever the eventual relation of teaching and culture, the academic and the creative aspects of contemporary society have certainly come together within the last generation or so, and their future destinies, so far as one can see into the future, appear to be closely linked. This accounts for a feature of our cultural life which seems more paradoxical than it is. The university classroom is concerned with "liberal" education, and liberal education is liberal in every sense of the word: it emancipates, it is tolerant, it assimilates the learning process to a social idea.

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Yet so far as it is concerned with contemporary culture, its material includes all the reactionary and antisocial attitudes I glanced at earlier, some of which are, in detail, quite obviously silly, perverse, or wrong-headed. But when contemporary authors are assigned for compulsory reading, and when they are taught in a way that relates them to their cultural heritage, a certain detachment comes into the attitude toward them. Not all the detachment is good, but one thing about it is: the social attitude of the writer is taken over by the social attitude of education itself, and loses its crankiness by being placed in a social context. Study, as distinct from direct response, is a cool medium, and even the most blatant advocacy of violence and terror may be, like Satan in the Bible, transformed into an angel of light by being regarded as a contribution to modern thought. Where shall wisdom be found? [Job 28:12]. Chiefly, for our age, in the imaginative and technical skills of the more or less unwise. The leisure structure, then, is essentially a structure of education, which means that it is vitally concerned with teaching. One can teach only what is teachable, and what the university must teach is the only thing it can teach: the specific disciplines into which genuine knowledge is divided. What results from this in the mind of the student? Facts, perhaps; ideas; information; the techniques of the present; the traditions of the past. But all these things are quickly acquired by the good student, and, unless used for some definite purpose, quickly forgotten. What emerges from university teaching, as its final result in the student's mind, is something the university cannot, or should not, explicitly teach. As most great theorists of education, from Castiglione to Newman, have recognized, the form of liberal education is social, in the broadest sense, rather than simply intellectual. I should call the social form of liberal education, provisionally, a vision of society, or, more technically, a mythology. In every age there is a structure of ideas, images, beliefs, assumptions, anxieties, and hopes which express the view of man's situation and destiny generally held at that time. I call this structure a mythology, and its units myths. A myth, in this sense, is an expression of man's concern about himself, about his place in the scheme of things, about his relation to society and God, about the ultimate origin and ultimate fate, either of himself or of the human species generally. A mythology is thus a product of human concern, of our involvement with ourselves, and it always looks at the world from a man-centred point of view. The early and

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primitive myths were stories, mainly stories about gods, and their units were physical images. In more highly structured societies they develop in two different but related directions. In the first place, they develop into literature as we know it, first into folk tales and legends of heroes, thence into the conventional plots of fiction and metaphors of poetry. In the second place, they become conceptualized, and become the informing principles of historical and philosophical thought, as the myth of fall becomes the informing idea of Gibbon's history of Rome, or the myth of the sleeping beauty Rousseau's buried society of nature and reason. My first lecture dealt primarily with mythology in this sense, particularly with the so-called existential myths. It seems to me that there have been two primary mythological constructions in Western culture. One was the vast synthesis that institutional Christianity made of its Biblical and Aristotelian sources. This myth is at its clearest in the Middle Ages, but it persisted for centuries later, and much of its structure, though greatly weakened by the advance of science, was still standing in the eighteenth century itself. The other is the modern mythology that began when the modern world did, in the later eighteenth century, but reached its more specifically modern shape a century later, and a century before now. The older mythology was one that stressed two things in particular: the subject-object relation and the use of reason. Man was a subject confronting a nature set over against him. Both man and nature were creatures of God, and were united by that fact. There were no gods in nature: if man looked into the powers of nature to find such gods they would soon turn into devils. What he should look at nature for is the evidence of purpose and design which it shows as a complementary creation of God, and the reason can grasp this sense of design. The rational approach to nature was thus superior to the empirical and experimental approach to it, and the sciences that were most deductive and closest to mathematics were those that were first developed. Of all sciences, astronomy is the most dependent on the subject-object relationship, and in the Middle Ages particularly, astronomy was the science par excellence, the one science that a learned medieval poet, such as Dante or Chaucer, would be assumed to know. In the premodern myth man's ultimate origin was of God, and his chief end was to draw closer to God. Even more important, the social discipline which raised him above the rest of creation was a divine ordinance. Law was of God; the forms of human civilization, the city and the

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garden, were imitations of divine models, for God planted the garden of Eden and had established his city before man was created; the ultimate human community was not in this world, but in a heaven closer to the divine presence. Philosophers recognized that the ordinary categories of the mind, such as our perception of time and space, might not be adequate at a purely spiritual level. It was possible, for example, that a spiritual body, such as an angel, did not occupy space or travel in space at all. The unfortunate wretch who attempted to put this question into a lively and memorable form by asking how many angels could stand on the point of a pin has become a byword for pedantic stupidity, a terrible warning to all instructors who try to make a technical subject interesting. But as far as popular belief and poetic imagery were concerned, the spiritual world was thought of as essentially another objective environment, to be described in symbols—city, temple, garden, streets— derived from human life, though the myth taught that human life had been derived from them. This mythology, relating as it did both man and nature to God, was a total one, so complete and far-reaching that an alternative world picture was practically unthinkable. This is the real significance of Voltaire's familiar epigram, that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, which was, in his day, a much more serious remark than it sounds.107 One could, theoretically, be an atheist; but even an atheist would find God blocking his way on all sides: he would meet the hypothesis of God in history, in philosophy, in psychology, in astronomy. As for morality, its standards were so completely assimilated to religious sanctions that even a century ago it was impossible for many people to believe that nonreligious man could have any moral integrity at all. In the eighteenth century there began to grow, slowly but irresistibly, the conviction that man had created his own civilization. This meant not merely that he was responsible for it—he had always been that—but that its forms of city and garden and design, of law and social discipline and education, even, ultimately, of morals and religion, were of human origin and human creation. This new feeling crystallized around Rousseau in the eighteenth century, and the assumptions underlying the American and French Revolutions were relatively new assumptions. Liberty was no longer, as it had been for Milton, something that God gives and that man resists: it was something that most men want and that those who have a stake in slavery invoke their gods to prevent them from getting. Law was no longer, as it had been for Hooker, the reflec-

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tion of divine order in human life, but in large part the reflection of class privilege in property rights. Art and culture were no longer, as they had been for the age of Shakespeare, the ornaments of social discipline: they took on a prophetic importance as portraying the forms of civilization that man had created. The Romantic movement brought in the conception of the "serious" artist, setting his face against society to follow his art, from which the modern antagonism of the artist to society that I discussed earlier has descended. A major principle of the older mythology was the correspondence of human reason with the design and purpose in nature which it perceives. This correspondence was still accepted even after God had dwindled into a deistic first cause, a necessary hypothesis and nothing more. The modern movement, properly speaking, began when Darwin finally shattered the old teleological conception of nature as reflecting an intelligent purpose. From then on design in nature has been increasingly interpreted by science as a product of a self-developing nature. The older view of design survives vestigially, as when religion tells us that some acts are "contrary to nature." But contemporary science, which is professionally concerned with nature, does not see in the ancient mother-goddess the Wisdom which was the bride of a superhuman creator. What it sees rather is a confused old beldame who has got where she has through a remarkable obstinacy in adhering to trial and error— mostly error—procedures. The rational design that nature reflects is in the human mind only. An example of the kind of thinking that Darwin has made impossible for the modern mind is, "If the Lord had intended us to fly, he'd have given us wings." The conception of natural functions as related to a personal and creative intention is no longer in our purview. Modern mythology, at least with us, is naturally not as well unified as the earlier one, but it does possess some unity nonetheless. It reaches us on two main levels. There is a social mythology, which we learn through conversation and the contacts of family, teachers, and neighbours, which is reinforced by the mass media, newspapers, television, and movies, and which is based fundamentally on cliche and stock response. In the United States, elementary education, at least before the Sputnik revolution of 1957,108 consisted very largely of acquiring a stockresponse mythology known as the American way of life. Canadian elementary teaching has been less obsessed by social mythology, as its children do not require the indoctrination that citizens of a great world

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power do, but it has its own kind, as in fact do all societies in all ages. Social mythology in our day is a faint parody of the Christian mythology which preceded it. "Things were simpler in the old days; the world has unaccountably lost its innocence since we were children. I just live to get out of this rat race for a bit and go somewhere where I can get away from it all. Yet there is a bracing atmosphere in competition and we may hope to see consumer goods enjoyed by all members of our society after we abolish poverty. The world is threatened with grave dangers from foreigners, perhaps with total destruction; yet if we dedicate ourselves anew to the tasks which lie before us we may preserve our way of life for generations yet unborn." One recognizes the familiar outlines of paradise myths, fall myths, exodus-from-Egypt myths, pastoral myths, apocalypse myths. The first great modern novelist is usually taken to be Flaubert, whose last and unfinished work, Bouvard et Pecuchet, included, as part of its scheme, a "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas." In recent years there has been a phenomenal growth of books which are written from within one of the social sciences, but are actually read as social satires. Anyone can think of a dozen titles: The Lonely Crowd, The Affluent Society, The Organization Man, The Academic Market-Place, The Status Seekers, The Insolent Chariots, The Hidden Persuaders, Games People Play. This last one breaks the rhythm of the conventional titles: a stock phrase preceded by the inside-knowledge suggestion of the definite article. Not all of these are good books, but they all deal with subjects about which good books ought to be written. The importance of this form of literary fiction, for that is what it is, is that it studies society from the point of view of its popular or cliche mythology, its accepted ideas. It is bound to have a revolutionary impact on other fiction by making novelists and dramatists more aware of the symbolic and ritual basis of social behaviour. A more complicated mythology emerges in general education and liberal arts courses, where we become aware of the immense importance of the thinkers who have helped to shape our mythology: Rousseau, Marx, Freud, the existentialists, and others whose importance depends on what versions of it we take most seriously. In addition to the art and scholarship which is specialized and works with limited objectives, there is a wide variety of "idea books," books that survey the intellectual world, or a large section of it, from a certain comprehensive point of view. On the bookshelves of my study in front of me as I write I see works of history: Spengler's Decline of the West, Toynbee's A Study of His-

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tory, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. Works of philosophy: Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Works of science: Eddington's Nature of the Physical World, Sherrington's Man on his Nature. Works of criticism: McLuhan's Understanding Media, Fiedler's An End to Innocence, Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New, Irving Howe's Steady Work. Works of psychology: Norman Brown's Life against Death, Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Works of religion: Buber's / and Thou, Tillich's The Courage to Be, Cox's The Secular City. This is a purely random list, but it should give an idea of the kind of book that helps to shape our contemporary mythology, and to give coherence and coordination to our views of the human situation. All these books deal with ideas, but occasional words in the titles, "Decline," "City," "Eros," "Innocence," indicate their origin in myth. In a sense they are all philosophical, even though most of them are clearly something other than actual philosophy. What I am here calling mythology has in fact often been regarded as the rightful function of philosophy, and we note that philosophers, especially of the existentialist school, have been particularly fertile in naming our central myths, such as the alienation, absurdity, anxiety, and nausea dealt with in my first lecture. Our mythology, I said, is a structure built by human concern: it is existential in the broad sense, and deals with the human situation in terms of human hopes and fears. Thus, though some of the books I have listed are written from the point of view of a scientific discipline, it does not really include the physical sciences. In our day, ever since Darwin, there have been two world pictures: the picture of the world we see, which is simply there, and is not man-centred, and the picture of the world we make, which is necessarily man-centred. The arts, the humanities, and in part the social sciences, all contribute to the contemporary myth of concern, but the physical sciences have their own structure, perhaps their own mythology. The earlier mythology was developed out of the idea of God; God has today no status, even as a hypothesis, in physical science,109 but the myth of concern neither excludes nor necessitates God, who comes into some versions of it and not into others. Of course scientific conceptions are continually being annexed by mythographers: the conception of evolution, for instance, has been applied in dozens of ways. But when the term evolution is used in Bernard Shaw's theory of a divine creative will, in Herbert Spencer's philosophy of ethics, in a Biblical scholar's account of the growth of the idea of God, or in a history of

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painting, the conception used is not identical with the biological theory: it is only a mythological analogy of that theory. How significant the analogy is has still to be determined, as a separate problem. Naturally science has immense relevance to the myth of concern, especially when it manifests an ability to destroy or to improve human existence—in some areas, such as genetics, it is not always easy to distinguish the two things. But it is a primary function of the myth of concern to judge the effects of science on human life in its own terms. This is what good mythological works written by scientists, such as the books of Eddington and Jeans110 and Sherrington, help us to do. When a mythologist attempts to show that the conceptions of science support or prove his vision, he weakens his power of resistance to science. What I am describing is a liberal or "open" mythology, of the sort appropriate to a democracy. I call it a structure, but it is often so fluid that the solid metaphor of structure hardly applies to it at all. Each man has his own version of it, conditioned by what he knows best, and in fact he will probably adopt several differing versions in the course of his life. Myths are seldom if ever actual hypotheses that can be verified or refuted;111 that is not their function: they are coordinating or integrating ideas. Hence, though good mythological books are usually written by competent scholars, the mythology of concern is something different from actual scholarship, and is subordinate to it. Any verified fact or definitely refuted theory may alter the whole mythological structure at any time, and must be allowed to do so. Yet there are certain assumptions which give mythology some social unity and make discussion, argument, and communication possible. It is not addressed directly to belief: it is rather a reservoir of possibilities of belief. It is the area of free discussion which Mill, in his essay On Liberty, felt to be the genuine parliament of man and the safeguard of social freedom as a whole. It is the "culture" that Matthew Arnold opposed to the anarchy of doing as one likes,112 the check on social and political activism. For activism, however well motivated, is always based on rationalized stock response. Beliefs and convictions and courses of action come out of an open mythology, but when such courses are decided on, the area of discussion is not closed off. No idea is anything more than a half-truth unless it contains its own opposite, and is expanded by its own denial or qualification. An open mythology of this kind is very different from a closed one, which is a structure of belief. There are two aspects of belief, theoretical and practical. Theoretical belief is a creed, a statement of what a man

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says he believes, thinks he believes, believes he believes. A creed is essentially an assertion that one belongs to a certain social body: even if one is trying to define an individual belief not exactly like anyone else's, one is still defining one's social and intellectual context. One's profession of faith is a part of one's social contract. Practical belief is what a man's actions and attitudes show that he believes. Pascal's conception of the "wager,"113 the assumptions underlying one's conduct, is a conception of practical belief. Similar conceptions are in Newman's Grammar of Assent, and, more generally, in Vaihinger's theory of assumed fictions."4 A closed mythology, like Christianity in the Middle Ages, requires the statement of theoretical belief from everyone, and imposes a discipline that will make practice consistent with it. Thus the closed mythology is a statement both of what is believed to be true and of what is going to be made true by a certain course of action. This latter more particularly is the sense in which Marxism is a closed mythology, and the sense in which another revolutionary thinker, Sorel, generally conceives of myth.115 A closed mythology forms a body of major premises which is superior in authority to scholarship and art. A closed myth already contains all the answers, at least potentially: whatever scholarship or art produce has to be treated deductively, as reconcilable with the mythology, or, if irreconcilable, suppressed. In Marxist countries the physical sciences are allowed to function more or less independently of the myth, because, as remarked earlier, society picks up too many of its golden eggs to want to kill the goose, but as the physical sciences do not form an integral part of the myth of concern, their autonomy, up to a point, would not be fatal to it. A closed myth creates a general elite. In the Middle Ages this elite consisted of clerics; in Marxist countries it consists of those who understand both the principles of Marxism and the way that the existing power structure wants Marxism rationalized. In the democracies there are many who would like to see a closed myth take over. Some are hysterical, like the John Birch Society,116 who want a myth of the American way of life, as they understand it, imposed on everything, or like the maudlin Teutonism which a generation ago welcomed the formulating of the Nazi closed myth in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century. It may be significant that the book which actually bears that title should be one of the most foolish and mischievous books of our time. Some are nostalgic intellectuals, usually with a strong religious bias, who are bemused by the "unity" of medi-

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eval culture and would like to see some kind of "return" to it. Some are people who can readily imagine themselves as belonging to the kind of elite that a closed myth would produce. Some are sincere believers in democracy who feel that democracy is at a disadvantage in not having a clear and unquestioned program of its beliefs. But democracy can hardly function with a closed myth, and books of the type I have mentioned as contributions to our mythology, however illuminating and helpful, cannot, in a free society, be given any authority beyond what they earn by their own merits. That is, an open mythology has no canon. Similarly, there can be no general elite in a democratic society: in a democracy everybody belongs to some kind of elite, which derives from its social function a particular knowledge or skill that no other group has. The earlier closed mythology of the Western world was a religion, and the emergence of an open mythology has brought about a cultural crisis which is at bottom a religious crisis. Traditionally, there are two elements in religion, considered as such apart from a definite faith. One is the primitive element of religio, the collection of duties, rituals, and observances which are binding on all members of a community. In this sense Marxism and the American way of life are religions. The other is the sense of a transcendence of the ordinary categories of human experience, a transcendence normally expressed by the words "infinite" and "eternal." As a structure of belief, religion is greatly weakened; it has no secular power to back it up, and its mandates affect far fewer people, and those far less completely, than a century ago. What is significant is not so much the losing of faith as the losing of guilt feelings about losing it. Religion tends increasingly to make its primary impact, not as a system of taught and learned belief, but as an imaginative structure which, whether "true" or not, has imaginative consistency and imaginative informing power. In other words, it makes its essential appeal as myth or possible truth, and whatever belief it attracts follows from that. This means that the arts, which address the imagination, have, ever since the Romantic movement, acquired increasingly the role of the agents through which religion is understood and appreciated. The arts have taken on a prophetic function in society, never more of one than when the artist pretends to deprecate such a role, as, for instance, T.S. Eliot did. It is sometimes said that the arts, especially poetry, have become a "substitute" for religion,"7 but this makes no sense. The arts contain no objects of worship or belief, nor do they constitute (except

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professionally for a few people) a way of life. If a man is brought up to believe, say, in the immortality of the soul, loses that belief, and then reconciles himself to death by saying that he will continue to live in the memories of his friends, he really does have a substitute for religion— that is, an accommodation of a transcendent religious conception to the categories of ordinary experience. Many "philosophies of life," like that of Sartre in our day, are substitutes for religion in this sense, but the arts are not and never can be. The alliance of religion and art is based on the fact that religion deals with transcendent conceptions and that the arts, being imaginative, are confined, not by the limits of the possible, but by the limits of the conceivable. Thus poetry speaks the mythical language of religion. And perhaps, if we think of the reality of religion as mythical rather than doctrinal, religion would turn out to be what is really open about an open mythology: the sense that there are no limits to what the human imagination may conceive or be concerned with. I developed my own view of such questions by studying the poetry of William Blake. Most of Blake's lyrical poems are either songs of innocence or songs of experience. One of the songs of innocence is a poem called The Lamb, where a child asks a lamb the first question of the catechism, "Who made you?" The child has a confident answer: Christ made the lamb because he is both a lamb and child himself, and unites the human and subhuman worlds in a divine personality. The contrasting poem is the song of experience called The Tyger, where the poet asks, "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Some students of Blake, I regret to say, have tried to answer the question. The vision of the world as created by a benevolent and intelligent power is the innocent vision, the vision of the child who assumes that the world around him must have parents too. Further, it is a world in which only lambs can live: lions and tigers can enter it only on condition that they lie down with the lamb, and thereby cease to be lions and tigers. But the child's vision is far behind us. The world we are in is the world of the tiger, and that world was never created or seen to be good. It is the subhuman world of nature, a world of law and of power but not of intelligence or design. Things "evolve" in it, whatever that means, but there is no creative power in it that we can see except that of man himself. And man is not very good at the creating business: he is much better at destroying, for most of him, like an iceberg, is submerged in a destructive element.118 Hence the fragility of all human creations and ideals, including the ideal that we are paying tribute to this year. The world we see and live

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in, and most of the world we have made, belongs to the alienated and absurd world of the tiger. But in all our efforts to imagine or realize a better society, some shadow falls across it of the child's innocent vision of the impossible created world that makes human sense. If we can no longer feel that this world was once created for us by a divine parent, we still must feel, more intensely than ever, that it is the world we ought to be creating, and that whatever may be divine in our destiny or nature is connected with its creation. The loss of faith in such a world is centrally a religious problem, but it has a political dimension as well, and one which includes the question we have been revolving around all through: What is it, in society, to which we really owe loyalty? The question is not easy to answer in Canada. We are alienated from our economy in Marx's sense, as we own relatively little of it ourselves; our governments are democratic: that is, they are what Nietzsche calls "all too human." We have few ready-made symbols of loyalty: a flag perfunctorily designed by a committee, a national anthem with its patent pending, an imported Queen.119 But we may be looking in the wrong direction. I referred earlier to Grove's A Search for America, where the narrator keeps looking for the genuine America buried underneath the America of hustling capitalism which occupies the same place. This buried America is an ideal that emerges in Thoreau, Whitman, and the personality of Lincoln. All nations have such a buried or uncreated ideal, the lost world of the lamb and the child, and no nation has been more preoccupied with it than Canada. The painting of Tom Thomson and Emily Carr, and later of Riopelle and Borduas,120 is an exploring, probing painting, tearing apart the physical world to see what lies beyond or through it. Canadian literature even at its most articulate, in the poetry of Pratt, with its sense of the corruption at the heart of achievement, or of Nelligan with its sense of unfulfilled clarity, a reach exceeding the grasp,121 or in the puzzled and indignant novels of Grove,122 seems constantly to be trying to understand something that eludes it, frustrated by a sense that there is something to be found that has not been found, something to be heard that the world is too noisy to let us hear. One of the derivations proposed for the word "Canada" is a Portuguese phrase meaning "nobody here." The etymology of the word "Utopia" is very similar, and perhaps the real Canada is an ideal with nobody in it. The Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create. In a year bound to be full of discussions of our identity, I

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should like to suggest that our identity, like the real identity of all nations, is the one that we have failed to achieve. It is expressed in our culture, but not attained in our life, just as Blake's new Jerusalem to be built in England's green and pleasant land [Milton, Preface, 1. 16] is no less a genuine ideal for not having been built there. What there is left of the Canadian nation may well be destroyed by the kind of sectarian bickering which is so much more interesting to many people than genuine human life. But, as we enter a second century contemplating a world where power and success express themselves so much in stentorian lying, hypnotized leadership, and panic-stricken suppression of freedom and criticism, the uncreated identity of Canada may be after all not so bad a heritage to take with us.

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Current Opera: A Housecleaning October 1935

From Acta Victoriana, 60 (October 1935): 12-14. Reprinted in RW, 1-4. Noteworthy here is Frye's interest in the comic potential of opera.

This is not a criticism of the performances of the opera company that visited Toronto recently, as the present critic succeeded in seeing only Madame Butterfly. If this was typical, they were adequate enough, if somewhat perfunctory. Of course Madame Butterfly is unfortunate in having a modern and quasi-realistic setting, which throws an onus of stage "business" on the singers. The result in this case was a good deal of spasmodic cigarette-lighting and nose-blowing and uneasy and rather aimless puttering about the stage in an effort to make some gesture in the direction of drama. But the response to a melodrama of stock pathos is one thing, and the response to Puccini's extraordinarily competent and fluent journalistic style of composition is quite another, and a general impression remained of an hermaphroditic and ill-conceived mingling of outlines. This suggests the obvious reflection that the opera would be all the better for being completely conventionalized; surely a drama that depended on automatic movements making no pretence of holding a mirror to any kind of nature1 would be better suited to the declamation and rhetoric which singing involves. If Madame Butterfly depended at all on chorus work the demands of the drama would of course be less obtrusive, but when it proceeds almost entirely by aria and recitative the stage effect is bound to be stiff and awkward. The opera began as a method of incorporating Greek drama in Western art forms: two or three leading characters, a chorus, a mythological setting; all this was de

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rigeur throughout the seventeenth century, and in fact provides the basic form for Handel and Gliick. If Handel was dissatisfied with the opera, it was not because he rebelled against the operatic convention, but simply because it was not concentrated enough for him to impose his massive designs on it. His genius expanded into the oratorio, which is not less conventionalized than the opera but far more so. After his time a century-long duel was fought between the traditions of German counterpoint and of Italian melody, a conflict resolved only by Mozart, which had for its chief incidents the row between Handel and Bononcini, the Gliick-Piccini opera fight in Paris, the triumph of Rossini in Vienna, the establishment of the Italian comedie larmoyante in the nineteenth century, its destruction by Wagner, and the belated attempts of Puccini and his colleagues to cling to Wagner's coat-tails.2 All the energy which the great Germans expended on incorporating the opera into the tradition of systematic music did not, however, succeed in affecting the Italian model to any extent, and attempts to revitalize it now can have only an eccentric interest. The Italian operatic tradition has lived long, but it is not the less dead for having died hard. The impact of the Russian ballet annihilated what was left of it at once; a single touch of the immense strength and discipline of conventionalized art was enough to sweep the facile virtuosity of the Pattis and Carusos into limbo.3 We have said that it is necessary to conventionalize the opera to avoid the absurdity and incongruity which the sensitive listener is bound to feel: every work of art asks a suspension of judgment from us, but the serious opera asks too much. But of course where the appeal is comic, where the incongruous becomes artistically valuable, this objection disappears. For if we conventionalize the opera in any direction, we immediately get something that is not an opera, however excellent an oratorio or ballet it may be. Therefore when Mozart's unerring instinct brought the opera to its highest pitch of perfection and established it as an art form in its own right, it appeared as comedy. For high tragedy in musical drama seems difficult to reconcile with the loose and florid construction of opera: it needs massed choruses undisturbed by the broken lights of the stage. Tragedy, in short, belongs to the oratorio; the opera is comic, seldom succeeding with anything more serious than pathos. Madame Butterfly is typical of a large number of entirely unconvincing melodramas. Owing to the difficulty of getting a genuinely sympathetic audience, there is no form more easily parodied than the opera: the whole English tradition, from Gay to Dame Ethyl Smyth, has run not

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only to light opera but to mock opera.4 It will probably be impossible to convince the antiquarians of future centuries that Gounod's Faust5 is not a parody of Goethe: they would simply point to Ave Maria as an instance of Gounod's skill in parody. The association of the opera with high society and its support by wealthy women pretending to culture has also helped to make it entertainment closer in spirit to the circus than to creative art. Whether Wagner ever succeeded in nullifying these objections is a question at present beyond our scope. His framework is mythological, of course, but not conventionalized; his gods are Dionysiac rather than Olympian,6 and the general effect is one of assertive antinomianism and self-apotheosis carried to its fullest extent. As a master of display Wagner probably has no rival in history, but that very fact makes him anarchic and disruptive as an artist; even if he did succeed, no one else can follow him in his field. Wagner stands with Nietzsche as the joint godfather of Nazism, and until we have found out whether the swaggering and posturing of pompous heroes who do not have to pay their own way is more lasting and worthwhile, in art or in life, than a unity founded on rationality and humour, we shall be unable to put Wagner in his proper perspective. But we can hardly deny that he did his work with sufficient thoroughness; so completely did he shatter the opera that it is now in a state of decadence from which it can never be rescued. It is possible, in fact it is highly probable, that the opera, in a changing social order, is undergoing a catacomb period of which Wozzeck7 may furnish an example. But "grand opera" is no longer synonymous with culture, even with ermine and diamond pseudo-culture; the contemporary turn to symphonies and chamber music is a healthy and hopeful sign.

3

Ballet Russe December 1935

From Acta Victoriana, 60 (December 1935): 4-6. Reprinted in RW, 4-7. Sergei Diaghilev launched the emigre Ballet Russe in Paris in 1909. In its earliest phase the company owed much of its reputation for innovation to the close connection to Russian composer Igor Stravinsky that Frye describes here, and to an outstanding company whose members included Vladimir Nijinsky and Leonide Massine. Diaghilev's sudden death in 1929 led to the creation of a variety of Ballets Russes companies, who often, as in the performance Frye witnessed in Toronto, performed the work of more traditional national composers alongside their more innovative successors. The ballet, like all forms of drama, demands the divided attention of sight and hearing, which sometimes makes for mixed feelings on the part of its audience. In my own case there was a marked contrast between the effect of the stage performance on the one hand, and the succession of unpleasant noises made by a rather scarecrow orchestra on the other, which seemed to have tuned its kettledrum to the music of another sphere altogether. The night I went—Thursday—two of the ballets were Tschaikowsky and one Rimsky-Korsakov, which provided another contrast between the suave, jog-trot waltz rhythms of nineteenth-century dance music and the whirling spirals, piercing lines, and sharp colours of the stage settings, a contrast which the intermediate dancing did not fully resolve. My obstinate refusal to see in Tschaikowsky's Fifth Symphony a musical representation of the conflict of man and Destiny is perhaps an irrelevant point. And perhaps not. Tschaikowsky provided worse programs than that for other works, in order to cover up his deficiencies in command of musical form: one can always see the easy-going slapdash

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amateur under the most solemn passages in his music, just as one can always see the incredibly skilful technician under the most delicate and spontaneous passages of Mozart. Music such as Tschaikowsky's, however pleasant it may be in itself, does not meet the demands of the art form of the ballet. Let me explain. If a tired businessman is dragged, first to an opera, then to a ballet, his reaction will probably be in favour of the latter. If he tried to rationalize his preference, he would no doubt say that, in the first place, it was more pleasant to look at human bodies, specifically female bodies, that were organisms of grace and suppleness and rhythm than to contemplate the masses of soggy porridge the average prima donna packs around her vocal chords; that, in the second place, there was something moving and happening all the time, instead of having a lot of people standing around with their mouths open; that, in the third place, while in both art forms people perform a number of complicated actions for largely unintelligible reasons, in the ballet they are more obviously following the music, so that the tired businessman, without a foreign language, does not feel so much that he is being cheated out of half the show. What these impressions boil down to is this. In a ballet it is the rhythm of the music that is projected across the footlights; in an opera it is the melody. Now rhythm is the fundamental organizing force of music; music is an art that moves in time, and while it is possible to examine it in terms of pattern, such an examination entails abstraction from performance. Melody in music exists solely in a contrapuntal and rhythmic context, and has a completely relative function. All music has melody, doubtless, but to think of music in terms of it is to reduce music to pattern. Consequently it is no mean technical feat to organize an opera rhythmically and prevent it from breaking up into a disjointed series of elaborate harmonized tunes. Wagner's development of recitative and his theory of "endless melody"1 result from his recognition of this difficulty, but his approach is rather a negative one, owing largely to the fact that when the Romantics destroyed the strict forms of the great contrapuntal traditions the inner rhythmic vitality that held the operas of Gliick and Mozart together was greatly weakened. But the ballet, being a projection of the rhythm in music, while it demands a higher standard from the composer, will respond far more readily to one who can meet that standard. Because of its immense energy and its concentration and economy of form, it meets, as no other art form in drama has yet done,

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the aesthetic demands of a mechanical civilization which seeks the greatest power and strength in the most clean-cut outlines; and because of its shorthand way of communicating ideas it can appeal to an intellectual and sophisticated audience which can respond to symbolism and convention, but becomes impatient of explanation. The performance I attended of the Ballet Russe, while it supplied all the fun and excitement one could reasonably ask, also showed how young the ballet is, how little composers have kept pace with its technique, and how quickly any one aspect of it becomes outmoded. The music had an unusual lightness and virility—unusual at any rate for Tschaikowsky—but it was still a rather thin support for the amazing dexterity and energy of the dancing. Not only was the music old-fashioned, however, but the intellectual conceptions portrayed seemed at times somewhat incongruous as well—I am thinking, of course, of the Fifth Symphony. The interpretation, which was all about Temptation and Passion and Fate and Frivolity, was as frankly allegorical as a miracle play, and allegory is not symbol.2 In an allegory two related outlines are kept separate and parallel; the result, in this case, was to let the dancing represent the program of the music, in other words, to keep translating the music into a synthesis of intellectual concepts belonging to philosophy or religion. This is pernicious: music is music, not a warbling system of ethics. On the other hand, music is a part of life, and if the choreographer can give us human actions, or actions connected with humanity, which take on meaning through a musical rhythm and which in turn bring that rhythm more closely into experience, so much the better. This can be done by the symbolism of such a ballet as Petroushka, where drama and music become rhythmically one thing instead of two; and this work in particular owes much of its power to the concreteness and clarity of its view of life. The ballet cannot remain permanently in fairyland—the satiric attitude is too important and essential to contemporary art for that. And, despite a regrettable tendency to flood the stage with a sulphurous glow of blue or yellow light, the Ballet Russe gave us little idea of the emotional range or intensity of its chosen form, or of the maturity it has already assumed. The ballet is in the hands of the twentieth century, which starts, as far as it is concerned, with Stravinsky. It also seems to be in the hands of Russia, and it is difficult to judge the art form by the particular aspects of it treated by emigres. What those last two sentences imply about the connection of Russia with the twentieth century is a question I postpone.

4

The Jooss Ballet April 1936

From Canadian Forum, 16 (April 1936): 18-19. Reprinted in RW, 7-10. Kurt Jooss was a German choreographer, teacher, and director. In 1933, after the rise of the Nazis forced Jooss and his company out of Germany, the group moved to Darlington, England. From this base, the Jooss Ballet toured the world. Frye's critical estimation of Romanticism as "subjective art" in these early pieces may perhaps prove an unexpected feature for many readers.

It is a stock commonplace to say that a healthy society produces a healthy art, and sick society decadent art. Art flourishes when the artist is regarded, not as a long-haired wild-eyed shaman, but as a skilled labourer who gets properly paid for his work—whether he is famous or anonymous does not matter. It flourishes when it can depend on a set of symbols or conventions the public recognizes and is ready to accept; for that means, on the one hand, that the artist can take something at least for granted, without having to surround his works with a palisade of apologetic, and on the other that the public is settled enough to prefer the original to the novel. It flourishes when it appeals to a large and vulgar audience as well as to a discriminating coterie, when it makes room for bright colours and a loud noise. It flourishes when it can be pressed into the service of religion, for a religion provides both the large audience and the required body of understood conventions and symbols. Setting the plastic and graphic arts aside, we should infer from the above that it is a healthy sign when a society is able to produce dynamic arts appealing definitely to a group consciousness. That is, arts depending on group production and group response, an ensemble performance and an audience, such as music and drama. Music and drama have

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always been associated; they both developed out of the dance, both were originally ritual arts and have frequently been allied with religion.1 They go up when society feels itself secure and cooperative; they go down in an era of individualism. Sixteenth-century England, for instance, produced an amazing development in music and drama: in nineteenthcentury England both arts practically disappeared. To pass to the more specific form of musical drama, we find that the pre-industrial eighteenth century gave us the oratorios of Bach and Handel and the operas of Gliick and Mozart; but in the long century and a half of subjective art which followed the one important contribution, that of Wagner, was the most highly individualized achievement, and therefore more a destruction than a development of musical drama. Consequently if we are passing from anarchic individualism to a more strongly unified society, we shall assuredly get more music, more drama, and consequently more musical drama. Today the oratorio is dead and the opera apparently moribund, but we seem to be getting an extremely lively and genuinely new art form in the ballet. And the ballet possesses all the symptoms of healthy art postulated above. For its production it demands, not a charlatan chewing his nails in a garret, but a group of workmen in music, drama, and choreography who have graduated from apprenticeship, a school of dancers, and an integrated tradition of performance. It is definitely a conventionalized and symbolic art form, depending on a stylizing of gesture and pantomime, and aided rather than rendered meaningless by the use of masks and traditional costume. By its use of gesticulation it leaves room for farce, satire, melodrama, propaganda—everything that goes home to a large unselected audience. It unites music and drama on the common basis out of which, we have said, they both developed—the dance. Its rise, therefore, adumbrates future social developments in a way that no political prophecy could do. Its ramifications, connecting up, via Russia, with Oriental drama, indicate that the Eurasian tendencies which have become so prominent in painting and music will find a focus in the ballet as well. So far the ballet has gone through a period of transition. It has used incidental music not originally intended for it, and the greatest of the composers treating it seriously as an art form—Stravinsky—has been temperamentally unsuited to it, for though he clearly recognizes, and has explicitly stated, the necessity of impersonality and convention, his own style tends toward the vehement spluttering of Wagner or Tschaikowsky rather than the more objective balance required. Behind

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Stravinsky there is the "emigre" Russian ballet, associated with the names of Diaghilev, Massine, and Nijinsky. A typical product of this school visited Toronto last fall, and the laboured virtuosity of its dancing, the eternal jiggling monotony of its nineteenth-century music, its set poses, rococo pictorial backgrounds, and vaguely allegorical programs amply showed how far the ballet had yet to go. On the other hand, the Jooss Ballet, which came more recently, definitely showed where the ballet is going. One almost dares to hope that neither Wagner nor his godson Hitler have yet bludgeoned all the music out of the German soul. Out of the four ballets they performed, two were developments of the rather anaemic delicacy of the older ballet, which specialized in fairyland and period pieces. But all four had an artistic integrity and unity about them, a genuinely dramatic outline and development, a thoroughgoing rhythmical organization. Each was built around a central conception into which every feature of the music, drama, and dancing was closely welded. Their last and biggest ballet, called The Green Table, opened with a scene of gesticulating politicians getting ready for war, which admirably showed how powerful a vehicle for satire the ballet really is.2 For caricature, the most direct form of satire, gets its effect by suggesting past movements, and in the pantomime of the ballet the movements are worked out. The following scenes, presenting the war itself in its various aspects of battles, starvations of refugees, rapes in brothels, and so on, were presented with an amazing concentration and power. There was no "incidental" music; the music organized every motion of the dancing; there was no "story" tacked on as a program for the music; the lines of the drama blended at every point with the other elements. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this type of ballet is musical drama, and has nothing whatever to do with program music.3 One of the most extraordinary touches of the performance was the instrumental accompaniment, which dispensed with the orchestra and was played on two pianos. It can easily be seen how immensely the conventionalizing of the dramatic action was reinforced by this conventionalizing of the music; the clipped, incisive, penetrating rhythm of the piano, never changing in timbre, knit together the whole performance in a way no other instrumental arrangement could have done. The Jooss Ballet gave us a completely new idea, not only of what the ballet is capable of doing, but of what the piano is capable of doing. Since Stravinsky, there has been an increasing tendency to regard the piano, not as an ille-

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gitimate descendant of the clavichord, not as an epitomized orchestra, not as a mechanized harp, but as an instrument of percussion, having a uniquely rhythmic power, as the violin has a uniquely melodic expressiveness. If we seem to have been talking all around the Jooss Ballet, rather than definitely about the performance, that is partly because the writer's critical faculties were to some extent paralysed by its novelty, and partly because he believes it to possess an unparalleled historical importance for our time. After all, if one sees growing up under one's nose a new art form showing every sign of becoming as expressive for the twentieth century as Elizabethan drama and Mozartian opera were for their respective times, it is something to get very much excited about, is it not?

5

Frederick Delius August 1936

From Canadian Forum, 16 (August 1936): 19-20. Reprinted in RW, 10-14. Frye had anticipated writing this review for some time: in remarks on the state of music in Toronto made in a letter postmarked 25 January 1935, he told Helen Kemp that "Toronto is going into a spasm of mourning for dead British musicians, which means that I shall have to listen to a lot of Elgar and this blasted Pre-Raphaelite Delius" (NFHK, 1:401).

Frederick Delius was born in England of naturalized Dutch parents, spent his early days in America, studied in Germany, and lived nearly all the rest of his life in France. Yet no one, we are told, has more successfully expressed the very spirit of England and the English than Delius has done in Brigg Fair and the Cuckoo in Spring. By virtue of this, it is claimed, Delius is essentially an English composer, although he has written with equal success in American, Celtic, French, and Norwegian idioms, and was acclaimed by Germany long before he was known in England. The moral of which is, that the language of music is so concrete and exacting that it must necessarily, like that of science, be universal, nationalism being on the other hand only an arid abstraction. Thus national music is probably written best by those who, being divorced from national ties, can look at a nation objectively. So if Delius has done what a more explicit patriot like Elgar could not do, it may be partly because he has that advantage, just as Bach would have the advantage of a peasant when it came to writing a peasant's cantata. Nationalism in so academic an art as music can never get very far away from a sentimental primitivism consisting largely of fine writing around a folk tune, which is by now a thoroughly sterile and irritating formula.

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I should myself be inclined to trace Delius's musical ancestry, by virtue of his Leipzig training, through Grieg to Mendelssohn. Further back it is hardly necessary to go. It has been said that his treatment of the variation form1 recalls the great Elizabethans, but this is an unconscious and by no means isolated influence. Certainly he is one of the small group of composers who, being accepted as English, have helped to deliver English music from an obsession with a tom-tom marching rhythm which has disfigured it from Handel's imitators to Elgar. But this is rather a negative achievement. A musician should be approached in terms of culture, not of race or nationality, and in Delius's case the appropriate cultural term is "Romantic." The essential fact about Romanticism in music is that it overthrew the classical conception of music as rhythmically organized counterpoint— that is, as a time art working out a rhythmic impulse in a traditional form—and replaced it with a conception that looked at music vertically, as a succession of harmonies supporting a leading melody. This made room for the increase of subjectivity which the Romantics brought to music by destroying objective forms like the Bach fugue and the Mozart sonata. But this static approach to music resulted in new forms which were necessarily plastic and pictorial rather than strictly musical. Delius is almost a complete Romantic in this sense. All through his work runs a chordal rather than a contrapuntal conception of music. He is far more interested in tone "colour" (a pictorial metaphor) and timbre than in the long buoyant outlines of polyphonic construction, and his music seems never very far removed from some pictorial program. The best instrument for bringing out leading melodies is, of course, the violin, and the violin is obviously Delius's favourite instrument, the more so as he himself was trained as a violinist. In the violin sonatas the Romantic conception of melody against a harmonic background is carried to almost excessive lengths; the piano parts consist of page after page of subordinate chords and echoes of the violin melodies. It is true that Delius is an expert harmonist, and that he has all the faculty of a Franck or a Debussy2 in getting the right chord for any context. But a chord so placed is an epigram, and hundreds of epigrams in succession become wearisome. He is usually, as we should expect, at his best in slow movements, to which the aria form is well adapted. It is this static, pictorial approach to music, this lack of pervading rhythmic vitality and horizontal development, that accounts for the languor, the sensuousness, the cloying sweetness, so frequently complained of in his work. The string quartet, which demands a continuous contrapuntal tex-

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ture, is a poor medium for him, and his one essay in the form disintegrates in performance, while his writing for the piano, an unmistakably rhythmical instrument, is sonorously arid. The same Romantic qualities are evident in his treatment of the sonata form. The classical sonata is inherently dramatic, dependent on strong contrast in movements and themes. Delius's more lyrical approach usually gets rid of the movement contrast by welding the sonata into one movement, while his thematic development presents a uniformly flowing movement of successive ideas which are neither new themes nor variations of old ones. When this pattern is combined with the repetition and restatement of themes which the sonata form itself demands, the result—especially evident in the violincello sonata and the string quartet—is apt to be monotonous, reminding one of a late Beethoven quartet without the struggling propulsion, or, more frequently, of a sort of jellied Schubert. With Delius this harmonic approach is merely a convention justified by the music: he does not vociferate it as a dogma, like Schonberg or Scriabin.3 His deficiencies in chamber music result from the choice of an unfavourable medium, not from incompetence. The chorus and the orchestra give him an additional variety of ''colour" in timbre, and a fuller emancipation from a hampering classical tradition. The massive serenity and balance of his best choral and orchestral work is a striking contrast with the restless moodiness of his chamber music. The expansion of the medium allows his creative will freer play. For Delius is a true Romantic in his subjectivity. Debussy has a pictorial interest in music as well, but he does not lack rhythmic vitality; in consequence, his pictorial tone poems are far more objective. His clouds, gardens, raindrops, and so on are, like Blake's, "men seen afar";4 they seem to express their own natures in sound. Delius takes the point of view rather of the contemplating spectator, and so powerful is the domination of a single mood that an impression of unity is retained in spite of all the vagaries of unrepeated themes. This is why his music is so frequently described as rhapsodic. All of which is thoroughly consistent with Delius's own character: he has always been known as an individualist, taking no part in the rough-and-tumble world of professional music, owing allegiance to no school. But even here he is profoundly typical of culture. For the Romantic assertion of will that followed the Industrial Revolution developed a spiritual loneliness in the artists of the nineteenth century which drove many to eccentricity and a few to insanity. A pervading attitude of isolation in a hostile universe brought about a kind of revised pagan

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religion, which shows itself in three easily recognized aspects. The arrogant will-to-power doctrine of Nietzsche caricatured in Fascism today is an example of one aspect; Whitman's ecstatic absorption in nature illustrates another; and the languor and sensuousness of the Swinburnian school of English poetry is a good instance of the third. Delius, as thoroughgoing a pagan as one could wish to find, has touched all three points. In his great Mass of Life he sets Nietzsche to music; in his Sea Drift he sets Whitman; in his Songs of Sunset he even condescends to Dowson's revoltingly sticky Cynara.5 One hardly needs a not too successful Pagan Requiem to summarize the evidence. Delius's paganism is honest enough, with none of the hankering for a cloudily catholic religion which inspires the theosophies of Hoist and Cyril Scott,6 and, like most paganism, it is centred on an ideal of physical dignity. In the stately chord progressions of the choral and orchestral works which culminate in such tremendous climaxes, we get the will-to-power side of this; in the dreamy relaxation of the symphonic poems, we get the more purely sensuous side; in his consistently pictorial approach, we get the "nature mysticism" of it. He cannot be said to be free from the spiritual elephantiasis which is also in Elgar, Hoist, and Vaughan Williams, but his expression of it is less portentous. One has to set him beside someone like Cesar Franck to understand the limitations of his attitude. In Delius, whether he repeats his themes or not, the ultimate unity is one of mood; the organizing force of his music is the expression of an emotional impulse. In Franck, as we are carried along the constant evolution and transformation of ideas, we are conscious of entering into an objective structural unity. If one likes antithetical jingles, one might say that Delius's music is the mental expression of physical energy, and Franck's the physical expression of mental energy. Most of those who have written on Delius have known him personally, and Delius seems to have been well worth knowing. In consequence, his undoubted sincerity and nobility of character have tended to make criticism of his music rather partial. When this passes, his importance will, I am forced to think, become increasingly historical. Composers are now impatient with the long harmonic lethargy of Romantic music, and the twinges of contrapuntal conscience which have so sorely afflicted Stravinsky, Schonberg, and even Antheil7 in recent years may indicate that contemporary music is doing a certain amount of noisy yawning and stretching preparatory to getting up and going somewhere.

6

Three-Cornered Revival at Headington 28 October 1936

From Isis, 28 October 1936,14. Signed JR (by Canadian Rhodes Scholar Joseph Reid), but written by Frye (see NFHK, 2:614). Based on a story by Faith Baldwin, Wife vs. Secretary was a Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer production directed by Clarence Brown.

Wife versus Secretary is constructed on the well-worn pattern of the isosceles triangle whose three high-spots are Clark Gable, magnificent business man and suspected husband; Myrna Loy, sweet andt?]1 suspicious wife; and Jean Harlow, super efficient, suspected, but innocent secretary. Apart from the fact that one feels all along that a little honest heart-to-heart talk would put everything straight—in fact that the whole substance of the story is based on a rather stupid and far-fetched misunderstanding, which simply doesn't tally with the sophistication of Gable and Loy—this is first-rate cinema. The producer has exercised admirable restraint in appealing hardly at all to wild passions, and at the same time has delighted his public with a display of manly affection rarely seen on the screen, and never seen off it. The dialogue is fast and clever, without any of the distressing sort of thing we remember having heard in Blond Bombshell.2

7

Music and the Savage Breast April 1938

From Canadian Forum, 18 (April 1938): 451-3. Reprinted in RW, 14-18. The occasion for this review, as Frye belatedly reveals in his last paragraph, is the Canadian release of Walt Disney's first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in December 1937.

Music and drama are the two great group art forms; that is, they are ensemble performances before audiences. They have a common origin in religious ritual.1 All primitive tribes, emerging from a stage of human sacrifice and cannibal communion, develop a number of dances and songs which to them are the expression of worship. The two principles on which these dances and songs are based are rhythm and mimicry, the sources of music and drama respectively. As music and drama evolve into art forms, they retain for a long time something of their sacerdotal, other-world associations. Greek music and Greek drama were both closely connected with Greek religion. In the Middle Ages music was composed by monks and regulated by theologians; and from the special choir music at Christmas and Easter services comes the whole medieval drama, which was essentially an acting out of Christian mythology. Music and drama, then, come down to us haunted by primitive fears of an uncanny and hostile world, by a primitive shuddering delight in seeing murder and torture, by primitive lusts and emotional hysteria. In proportion as they develop into art forms, music and drama work this off and turn it into more civilized sublimations. Drama did this in nearly all the great civilizations, ancient and modern: Aristotle called the sublimating effects of tragic drama pity and terror [Poetics, i449b]. But music

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remained rudimentary and abortive in every civilization except our own, and consequently it bears a far heavier weight of hocus-pocus. For centuries people thought of it as a kind of hypnotic magic, good for charming men as well as snakes, possessed of a mysteriously compelling power of attraction. The Bible tells us of David's use of it to cure the manic-depressive attacks of King Saul [i Samuel 16:14-23]. Greek legends speak of an Orpheus who drew trees and stones after him [Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.1-105, 11.1-84], and of Sirens whose singing pulled sailors to their rocks [Homer, Odyssey, 12.39-54, 158-200]. Then the myth becomes rationalized. Greek religious philosophy had to account for music in some way, and was full of the most abysmal puns on the word "harmony": the principle of order which held the universe together was a "harmony" and therefore it was musical, although this cosmological music could not be heard. In spite of which, the idea lasted for two thousand years. Shakespeare proved by means of it that a man who was tone-deaf would be out of tune with universal harmony and would therefore be the very lowest kind of criminal.2 He was checkmated by Milton, however, who realized that as the music we know is not harmony, but a series of discords ending in a harmony, earthly music ought not to exist at all.3 Angels and regenerate men, on this theory, spend eternity yelling one note. When men ceased to believe that the sun went around the earth, they gave up the music of the spheres. By that time music was a flourishing art form, and its development did a great deal to clear up the superstitions connected with it, which were based on ignorance like all superstitions. But while the superstitions have gone, the terrific emotional impact of music has not. Cultivated music refines and canalizes this impact; popular music gives it to us straight in the midriff. And popular music, it should be noticed, is musical drama; that is, it is associated with dancing and marching, which are forms of dramatic action. It is directly descended from the war dance and the fertility rite. Every highschool girl knows what a powerful erotic stimulant music is, and everyone interested in promoting wars knows that music can turn a decent man or woman into a murderous maniac. It is nothing against popular music to say that it has a savage ancestry; so has everything else. But the second example I have given shows that an emotional orgy, if carefully exploited by unscrupulous people, can be a very powerful social evil. Bread and circuses4 were what the Roman tyrants kept their people in order with, and of the two circuses

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are by far the more important. For the circus, the big show of flags and salutes and marching men with a thumping, sandbagging musical rhythm organizing it, is absolutely essential to tyranny and social reaction today. As long as one exists the other will. As long as people can get lumps in their throats and go shivery all over when they see uniforms and hear a brass band, so long will mass wars and totalitarian states last, whatever they call the causes they appeal to. And yet musical drama has had a glorious record in the arts. All great ages of drama have been aided by music: Greek drama had its chorus, Elizabethan drama its songs, the Chinese drama of the Sung dynasty,5 which is still acted in Toronto, has its orchestra. Similarly, the great age of music has been aided by drama. When the art of music reaches its culmination in the eighteenth century with Bach and Mozart, Bach brings the tragic form of the oratorio to its highest development in the St. Matthew Passion (a form strikingly similar to Greek tragedy), and Mozart does the same for the comic form of the opera. The only other musician equal in genius to these two, setting Beethoven aside as an instrumental composer, is Wagner. For Wagner's bitterest enemies, among whom I include myself, cannot deny that in sheer ability to write music he gets top ranking. But in Wagner's musical dramas we begin to see where the reactionary circus of today comes from. Wagner's art form represents a tremendous individual conquest over both music and drama, and in consequence (it is a consequence) he makes a religion of megalomania. It is a point of honour with that religion, not only to be anti-Christian, but to go straight back to the primeval elements of the German soul, or, in less technical language, to re-establish in modern Germany the war dance and fertility rites the Germans indulged in before they became civilized. Hitler is an avowed disciple of Wagner, and that fact is not accidental. He could find nothing to his taste in a Christian such as Bach, or a peaceful Austrian sceptic such as Mozart. In proportion as society becomes more cooperative, musical drama, the central group art form, will become more popular. We have seen that if the growth of social cooperation leads only to the brutal and degrading tyranny of the totaltarian state, popular musical drama will lead only to the incessant flogging of the higher feelings by the lower, induced by military bands and erotic jazz orchestras. But there are other forces at work, trying to make this growth of cooperation lead to a more efficient, sane, and peaceful civilization. Can they make any use of musi-

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cal drama? Can the art form of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Bach, and Mozart be made popular, and help them to fight their battle for sanity? I think so. There are two media through which it could be done. One is the ballet. I have expressed my ideas about the ballet before in this magazine [nos. 3-4], and need not repeat them, other than to say that, as the ballet unites music and drama on the basis of the dance out of which they both evolved, as it demands an immense cooperative organization and the long apprenticeship so essential to sane and normal art, as it integrates gesture with the drama and needs a background of vivid and pungent painting, it could easily be the most highly developed and intellectually concentrated art form of the twentieth century. This would not make it immediately popular, in spite of its power to convey farce and caricature, but would make it politically very significant. The other is, of course, the cinema. There is no better index to the general level of civilization in a country today than the quality of its cinemas. Hollywood has given a free hand to two authentic geniuses, Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney, and it is obvious in their pictures how close we are to ballet and pantomime techniques, and how nearly the music comes to organizing every movement of the dramatic action. Yes, I've seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Yes, I told you all that stuff about Wagner and Greek philosophy just to lead up to it. I'm sorry, but—you remember that it started to rain when Snow White dropped dead, and that she remained in her glass coffin through autumn and winter, and came back to life in the spring when her lover kissed her? Well, that's what most of those primitive rituals were about—the spirit of life and growth that died when the year died, and rose again at the year's rebirth. They meant more than just rape and murder. They were cursed with that, and we are born under that curse, but we and our children don't have to keep on applauding gangsters and allowing them to tear us to pieces with bombshells to the end of time. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?6

8

Men As Trees Walking1 October 1938

From Canadian Forum, 18 (October 1938): 208-10. Reprinted in RW, 35-9. The original was accompanied by four reproductions—of Dawson's Blue Mouth of Paradise, Picasso's Woman Weeping, Penrose's The Human Frame, and Doll's Autumnal Cannibalism. The art exhibition at the CNE, an unusually good one all round, included the first Canadian showing of representative surrealist pictures.2 Apparently the idea was that the show would be a refresher for the jaded throats of our fashionable artistic nonentities and professional screamers, hoarse with the lunacy of the Group of Seven3 and the hideous obscenity of a picture of a naked wench. But, as that kind of stunt, the show was a pleasant failure. People came in crowds: some, it is true, to make the automatic comments and objections which perhaps even a surrealist painter could have anticipated, but most because they were genuinely curious and amused. Those who knew something about pictures saw in front of them, in painting after painting, a technical precision which leaves many very clever Canadians, untrained in the millennium-old European tradition of accurate drawing and colouring, miles down the road. The surrealists can hardly be charlatans if they can paint like that, they felt. Those who knew nothing about pictures and cared less spluttered or giggled hysterically, but practically every picture held them with its glittering eye and had its will.4 Something was happening to them inside which made them giggle and splutter. Most of the rest simply asked, quite intelligently and honestly, What's it all about? This article is less an answer to the question than an attempt to restate

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it. After the Great War the disintegration of European culture impressed artists so much that a number of them made an artistic creed of chaos. Art is form and synthesis, but art in so incoherent a world as ours can only be an art stuck together out of odds and ends. So arose the movement called Dadaism, an art of putting things together at random to "evoke oracular responses,"5 as one devotee put it, from the unusual patterns afforded by their combination. An artist would go for a walk and come back littered with rubbish which he would patiently glue together—this kind of assembling is called montage or collage. Very soon the Dadaist movement was hit by Freud's earlier and cruder theory of the soul as a libido struggling for self-expression but censored and distorted by the respectable ego or conscious mind. The libido creates dreams, and the Dadaists turned to it as the sole source of creative energy remaining to man in the modern world. They laboured to summon the authentic dream image from their midriffs and smite it straight into the midriffs of their public, if they had a public in mind at all. Dreams, they felt, had an immediate, vivid communication denied to the censored consciousness. And as dreams are the unrepressed fears, lusts, and hates of the essential man, the Dadaists, who of course inherited the whole tradition of sadism and the "romantic agony"6 of the nineteenth century, set forth in their pictures an All Hallows Eve of demoniac horror and obscenity. Not that it was all deadly serious—the odd or unexpected is always funny, and the public is quite justified in laughing at it. Max Ernst's Burning Woman7 is not far from the comicstrip Olive Oyl. All of which was very healthy for both art and culture. But psychology passed from the demons to the gods. Freud shared the limelight with both Jung and the new researches into the primitive mind carried on by anthropology. Painters began to realize that the subconscious speaks a universal and intelligible language, a language of symbols no doubt, but a language from which all existing languages, all myths of all religions, and all the effective imagery of art, are derived. So the destructive anarchism of the Dadaists passes into the synthetic movement of surrealism. Its central idea remains in Tanguy's The Questioning,8 in which a litter of half-formed objects is set against a blank background. At first, then, surrealism reflected the Freudian theory of the split in human consciousness, the antagonism of libido and ego. One can see a rather feeble example of this in Dawson's Blue Mouth of Paradise,9 in

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which the heads representing the routine slickness of conscious activity have been pasted on, while the painted ones have the haunting quality of the subconscious. In the earlier Dali10 (the Dali of the famous limp watches and the half-open drawers), objects are painted with meticulous care, and it is in the paradoxical combining of these objects that we recognize the bizarre emotional intensity of the dream image. This, in Dali and in his imitators, is generally considered surrealism proper, distinguished sharply from two other art movements: cubism, the geometrical analysis of the space world, and abstract painting, the purely lyrical arrangement of pattern which attempts to bring painting to the imaginative concentration of music. Of late, however, abstract and surrealist painting have begun to merge, as in this show we could see most clearly in the pictures of Chirico, Miro, Klee, and Paul Nash,11 and even so cubist a picture as Picasso's Weeping Woman was included as surrealist. This is partly owing, no doubt, to the fact that cubism, abstraction, and now surrealism (to which he seems finally committed) have all been experimental stages in the development of Picasso, one of the greatest revolutionary geniuses in Western culture. But even more important, the dropping of "isms" in modern art is one sign that serious artists have begun to realize that if they want to maintain their ideals they must get a clearer idea of what they are. Cafe intellectualism, pseudocultured giggles at bourgeois stupidity, arty remoteness from life, the painting of critical cliches rather than pictures—all these defects of modern art must join the dodo before the ferocious brutality now given carte blanche over most of the world. In the coming fight between creators and destroyers, the artists must present a united front on the creative side. A few surrealists, such as the young English poet David Gascoyne,12 find the universal symbolic language spoken by surrealism in the proletarian mind, the analytic, differentiating side of the soul having gained the upper hand among the bourgeoisie. But the high command of the left wing has decided that "socialist realism" is the orthodox offering to the working class, and as a matter of fact surrealism has developed from the "mental revolution," apparently a sort of extreme unction to prepare the bourgeois mind for dissolution, proposed by the Dadaists. Idealism obstinately clings to these pictures, the belief that the world exists as it is perceived, and that a renewed imagination would create a better world. Tyranny may be explained as the result of economic conditions, but fundamentally it is a condition of the human mind; clear up the mind and the tyrants can be hooted off the stage. Some of these pictures are like lit-

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tie lectures in the idealist dogma that the mind creates the world, like Penrose's Human Frame,13 in which the figure holds a bit of blue sky in her hand (this is of course impossible to see in our illustration), or Dali's Great Dreamer, in which a human face is superimposed on a procession that looks like an allegory of history. Surrealism is perhaps more congenial to Spaniards and Germans, whose traditions are more favourable to synthetic and symbolic thinking, than to Frenchmen or Americans. The Germans, who have given us Klee and Kandinsky/4 will probably make the most important contributions to its future development as soon as they lynch their gangster parasites. Yet surely, in a balanced mind, the critical consciousness is the interpreter of the symbols produced by the creative imagination, and symbolic art in consequence has to strike a medium between the unintelligible chaos of private associative patterns and the dead conventions imposed by a Philistine religion. For this reason, surrealist art is certain to develop in the direction of more explicit and fundamental symbolism, from which consistent commentaries can be more easily inferred; one thinks of the development of the highbrow classical allegories of the Renaissance, now forgotten, into the art of Botticelli and Mantegna.15 Revolutionary painting today, at any rate in the hands of such a master as Orozco/6 depends upon this communal symbolism, and in such a picture as Dali's Autumnal Cannibalism, deeply felt and universally shared feelings about the autumn as a time both of the maturity and of the dying of the world and its connection with the approaching butchery of the human race, perhaps as a necessary prelude to its rebirth, are what appear on canvas. How far the surrealists can go in their apocalyptic attempt to make the human mind create a new heaven and a new earth [Revelation 21:1], no one can say. But it's worth trying.

9

K.R. Srinavasa lyengar's Lytton Strachey December 1940

Review of Lytton Strachey, by K.R. Srinivasa lyengar (London: Chatto and Windus, 1939). From Canadian Forum, 20 (December 1940): 292-3. Lytton Strachey, biographer, satirist, pacifist, man of letters, and debunker, is most famous as the author of the iconoclastic Eminent Victorians (1918). Other works include Landmarks in French Literature (1912), Queen Victoria (1921), Elizabeth and Essex (1928), and Portraits in Miniature (1931). This book has obvious defects: its ideas are commonplace, its style indifferent (though it improves greatly after its rather Babu opening),1 and it hardly supersedes Boas.2 But it does bring back the memory of that "peculiar age," the first decade of the twenty-year truce. In 1919 E.T. Raymond said that, the old men having bungled the young into a war, the young would run things for the future.3 But the young men were dead, and the foolish old men doddered on, and culture was taken over by a group of highly talented dons. What they produced, naturally, was brilliant, ephemeral and parasitic, orchidaceous and fungoid; fine poets wrote in allusion and epigraph, good novelists dealt in allegory or with a cadaverous and crepuscular "higlif." They loved the eighteenth century and they cursed their ghostly father, Matthew Arnold, but towards their own time they were quizzical, pragmatic, and very annoyed with the obscenity laws. Such a soil could, like the mud of the Nile, only produce something equivocal, something not-quite. Strachey is one of the best of these dons. His "Portraits in Miniature" display the irony of a Chekhov, who, through some defect in creative power, has turned to memory instead of imagination, to history instead of drama. The studies of Victoria and Elizabeth have a documentary

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gestation and stylistic parturition as laborious as that of a Flaubert novel, but their navel-strings are not cut: they never become independent works of art. Oh, well. Strachey is dead, and eke his patience, and both at once are buried under a hail of Nazi bombs.4

10

The Great Charlie August 1941

From Canadian Forum, 21 (August 194.1): 14.8-50. Reprinted in RW, 18-24. London-born Charles Spencer Chaplin joined Mack Sennett's Hollywood Keystone film company in 1913. The films Frye describes here are of a later period, when Chaplin's fame, opportunities, ambitions, and talents had all expanded: they include The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (194.0), In this review essay, Frye speaks of the "impartial destructiveness" of Chaplin's humour and notes the recurrent religious imagery that underprops his political critique. It is also one of the first occasions in this collection when he recognizes and speculates about the enormous imaginative power an artist can mobilize through the fusion of comedy and allegory. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 3. Serious discussion of the importance of movies in modern art has long ago passed the condescending phase. When the culture of the industrial age really hits its stride, the mainsprings of its creative power will be in its one cultural industry. What the church was to the Middle Ages and the prince to the Renaissance, the movie is to modern artists, and it will continue to be their chief patron however many other outlets are provided in PWA1 work, social planning and housing, the radio, or industrial design. And just as the drama is appropriate for an organic society and the novel for a laissez-faire one, so the movie, where the audience is docilely regimented by ushering officialdom and yet sits in dark spiritual isolation from one another, is appropriate for us. Of course, the central and dominating influence of the movie is not yet fully obvious in America, perhaps not in any country except Russia, where Lenin emphasized it.2 This is due largely to the paralysis of finan-

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cial monopoly in Hollywood, which has hurt both the movie and the arts outside it. At present writers are brought up and forgotten about just as inventions are, and for the same reasons; the supercolossal complex inherited from the 19205 has pandered to a waning hope that the Age of Tinsel will sometime return. The audience often lags behind the movie: it never occurs to anybody, for instance, to listen to the incidental music, and it is cheaper to use chunks of the Unfinished Symphony than to pay a good musician to write an intelligent sound track, as the French and sometimes the Russians do. Outside the movies, the analysis of emotion in poetry, of society in the novel, of the subconscious in surrealism, becomes increasingly clinical and antiseptic as more popular forms of nostalgia and grousing and morbidity are reeled off in the theatres. The preoccupation with the means rather than the ends of expression, with words, cadences, geometrical patterns, and mental processes rather than with ideas and subject matter, is an infallible sign of decadence, and points to a lack of integration between modern art and modern life. The cinema should take the lead in any such integration. The thought of the salary paid to Madeleine Carroll3 has encouraged many a pretty girl to look prettier; and a poet might find his Muse a much less pimpled and constipated lady if he thought the movies could make an intelligent use of a good poet. The movies suffer, of course, from a corresponding decadence: they, too, put the emphasis on the means, on beautiful actors and showy sets. But the director is growing in box-office prestige and a surprisingly large number of films do attain to a considerable unity and relevance of detail. This is partly because the movie is capable of the greatest concentration of any art form in human history. The possibilities of combining photographic, musical, and dramatic rhythms leave all preceding arts behind in their infinity. Music accompanying silent business can turn it into a scene de ballet: a camera travelling around a dialogue can give it a weird fourth-dimensional symbolism: the crudest slapstick can use a repeating pattern of scene or gesture as essential to it as blood and sleeplessness to Macbeth or the Siegfried motif to The Ring. When a real genius controls the production of a movie, things should happen. Back in the old silent days, when the average commercial film had the artistic appeal of a streetcar ad, Charlie Chaplin was turning out a series of grotesque little ballets, with every movement and gesture as eloquent as the lines of a sculptor's drawing. The public did not laugh because it was amused: it thought it was being amused because it laughed, with the

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panicky suffocation of hysteria. True, there were scenes of unbearable pathos, like the unattended banquet in The Gold Rush, but that was all right: Charlie made them laugh, so he must be a funny man. Like Mark Twain. Mark Twain had written The Prince and the Pauper and The Connecticut Yankee, two of the loudest screams of fury against society ever uttered in America: he had lanced the putrescence of Hadleyburg; he had shown us Huckleberry Finn deliberately choosing to go to hell with outcasts rather than to heaven with decent people (chap. 31); he had left notebooks full of epigrams burning through social hypocrisies like nitric acid. But everybody knew Mark Twain was funny, because they laughed at him. Dryden says that audiences in his time always laughed at lunatics, which would include Ophelia and Lear.4 Just before the Age of Tinsel dropped dead, Chaplin planted a terrific kick in its posterior with City Lights, in which the rags-to-riches philosophy of that period, its fawning on athletes and tycoons and its callous disregard of subtler heroes, got its definitive take-off. But that was a jeu d'esprit: not until Modern Times did the importance of Chaplin in American culture (I know he was born in England) become fully obvious. Major American art seems always to have been the product of an individualism which has no constructive theory of society and regards it as essentially a product of hypocrisy, tyranny, and cowardice. Its motto is Whitman's, "Resist much; obey little."5 Never mind why: just buck. This idea of the original sin of the state, this reckless and instinctive anarchism, is in Jefferson's theory of decentralized democracy, in Thoreau's program of civil disobedience, in Emerson's idea of self-reliance as trust in God, in Whitman's myselfishness, in Hawthorne's and Melville's pagan and diabolic allegories, in Mark Twain's intellectual nihilism. We are now told that this attitude is extinct beyond the coasts of Maine, but it has only shifted its perspective. In exhorting America to buck Hitler off their necks because he has ideas about organizing society, Dorothy Thompson and MacLeish6 are appealing to the same instincts Franklin and Paine appealed to to buck England off. Since Mark Twain, no anarchist of the full nineteenth-century size has emerged except Charlie Chaplin. But the hero of the Chaplin films, with his quixotic gallantry and courtesy, his pity for the weak, his apologetic and ridiculous isolation from society, and the amount of damage he does against his own very good will to that society, makes this Yankee cussedness an ideal worthy of respect. For all its plethora of revolutionary symbols, Modern Times is not a socialist picture but an anarchist one:

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an allegory of the impartial destructiveness of humour. Put into the perfectly synchronizing machinery of a factory, a jail, a restaurant, this forlorn and willing Charlie wrecks all three, not by trying to but by trying not to. He very nearly accepts the highbrow's compromise with society by singing a song no one understands and dares not admit ignorance of, but even this does not work. He gets, however, an insight into love, courage, and sacrifice which the foremen who bully him and the cops who beat him up no more understand the nature of than a bedbug understands the nature of a bed. We are left with a feeling that the man who is really part of his social group is only half a man, and we are taken back to the primitive belief, far older than Isaiah or Plato but accepted by both, that the lunatic is especially favoured by God.7 This, of course, is not fully intelligible without some reference to religion, and it is in this that The Great Dictator shows its chief advance on Modern Times. To the Nazi the Jew sums up everything he hates: he is of a different race, he is urban, he is intellectual, he is often undersized, he has a sense of humour and tolerance. For these reasons he is also the perfect Chaplin hero: besides, a contempt for this big-happy-family racialism is the first principle of American anarchism. Imagine Huckleberry Finn without Jim or Moby-Dick without Queequeg, and you can soon see why Chaplin had to be a Jew. But the picture itself is not Jewish, but Christian to a startling degree. The parallel between the dictator who gains the world but loses his soul and the Jewish barber on the one hand, and Caesar and a Jewish carpenter on the other, is very unobtrusive but it is there. Chaplin knows well enough what the Jew Freud and the Christian Pope Pius agree on, that anti-Semitism is a preparation for, and a disguised form of, anti-Christianity. But his conception of Christianity is one conditioned by his American anarchism. What attracts him about Christianity is that something in it that seems eternally unable to get along with the world, the uneasy recurrence, through centuries of compromise and corruption, of the feeling that the world and the devil are the same thing. Hence the complement to his Jewish barber is a dictator who is also an antichrist. The picture opens with a huge cannon pointing at Notre Dame. "Oh Schultz, why have you forsaken me?" [cf. Mark 15:34] Hinkel blubbers at one point, and when his counsellor whispers the word "god" to him he screams and climbs a curtain. At probably the same moment Hannah says that if there were no God her life would be no different, which recalls Thoreau's remark that atheism is probably the form of religion least boring to God.8 The horrible isolation of the will to

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power makes its victim not superhuman but subhuman: "a brunet ruling a blond world." When Hinkel explains that he is shaved in a room under the ballroom with a glass ceiling, it sounds like a very corny gag, but it is quite consistent with his scurrying up curtains, mangling nuts and bananas, and dashing about in the futile restlessness of a monkey. Hinkel may not be the historical Hitler, but he is, perhaps, the great modern Satan Hugo and Gide and Baudelaire longed to see, though he would have disappointed them, as Satan always does. Opposite Hinkel is the inarticulate, anonymous, spluttering Jewish barber, who hardly speaks until a voice speaks through him, and with that voice the picture ends. How anyone can imagine that it could have any other end is beyond me. One of the minor triumphs of the picture is Commander Schultz, the perfect Quixote type of our age, the man who tries to fight Hitler with a complete set of Hitler's ideas in his head. With his schoolboyish attempt to pit melodrama and adventure and secret societies and "Lombard sacrifices" against the Hinkel machine, with his maudlin Teutonic reveries about apple blossoms and bright-eyed maidens in a garden when he is flying upside-down in his plane (one of the most brilliant touches in the picture) Chaplin shows, without wasting a syllable, both why Nazism began with Germans and why mere patriotism, in Germany or outside it, will never ruffle a hair of Hitler's forelock. Apart from the expression on the great white tank that follows Charlie into Austria and the superb shaving ballet to Brahms's dance, there is little made of the mechanical mass hypnotism of the Nazi state. This is rather a pity, considering what the cinema can do along this line, but Chaplin's choice was deliberate: in the "review" of armed forces before Hinkel and Napaloni we never see a machine, but only the grimacing figures in the box. He lets the singsong howls of Hinkel's wonderful speeches do the rest, along with that curious rhythmic beat that holds every Chaplin film together but is difficult to define, except for obvious repetitions like the circulating of dishes in the ordeal scene and of chairs just before the final speech. How long does celluloid last? Other pictures go: Reynolds's are fading, Apelles' destroyed.9 Giotto's, it is true, look as though they had been painted yesterday, but then they probably have been. If films can survive indefinitely our grandchildren will probably ask some very awkward questions if we didn't see the great Chaplin masterpieces when they were new, or did see them and missed the point. They won't care about the Russian campaign.

11 Reflections at a Movie October 1942

From Canadian Forum, 22 (October 1942): 212-13. Reprinted in RW, 28791. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 4.

Was it not that quaint old forgotten author, Karl Marx, who said that new instruments of production are the causes of cultural changes? At any rate the movie and its ally, the radio, have made a very considerable one. Fifteen years ago, when movies were silent and the radio a squalling infant, Calvin Coolidge was in the White House.1 This gentleman, never having anything to say, seldom opened his mouth, and when he did open it a noise like the cry of the great bronzed grackle in the mating season emerged. This inability to talk was one of his chief political assets, for he lived at a time when a president was merely an idol carried in the processions of big business. In those days fluent and ready speech was associated with high-pressure salesmen, and rhetoric in consequence distrusted: even patriots did not take the Fourth of July orator very seriously. Today the uvula is mightier than the tank: Churchill's and Roosevelt's speeches have been major military operations, and in former years an alleged cancer on Hitler's throat gleamed like the Star of Bethlehem to exasperated democrats. Rhetoric and oratory are back again to stay, and the radio and the movie have brought them back. All over Canada, and America, of course, the old regime still lingers. Children are taught to read and write, but the manner of speech is left to original sin. To the average Canadian or American, cultivating an accent means cultivating an English accent, and anyone who does that is a sissy, a snob, and a hypocrite. The fact that it is far better to cultivate an English accent than not to cultivate an accent at all is quite lost on him.

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The result is painful but ubiquitous. Untold millions of Americans tawk through their nowses and hawnk like fahghorrns; some whine like flying shells; some splutter and gargle like cement mixers. The average American pronunciation of "yes" or "now" is hardly a human sound at all. Bad speakers, however, are not yet outcasts; they are not yet in the position of the stinking innocents of the soap ads, whose friends can smell them but can't tell them. We are all in the same boat. I have a grating and monotonous voice myself, and am unusual only in being aware of it. Education simply leaves the voice alone: there are "rhetoric" courses in American universities, but the university is both too late and too exclusive. But the day of judgment on the corncrake and the hyena is at hand. It is no longer true that every American boy has a chance to become president: he has a chance only if he can attain mastery of the air, and he can do that only by learning to talk. If he is to persuade the voters that he is a reincarnation of Lincoln, he must forget about jokes and split rails and log cabins2 and concentrate on Lincoln's magnificent oratorical style. Much of the now obsolete distrust of oratory was well founded, and it is only now emerging from its Neanderthal stage of Fascist rabble-rousing. Even Hitler is far less of a screaming ham than he used to be, however, and we are now able to see more clearly what the radio and movie are doing for literature. A respect for rhetoric implies a close affinity between the spoken and the written language, and through the two chief mediums of it we are gradually becoming more aware of the sounds and rhythms of our own speech. One of the main reasons for the immense ascendancy of Huckleberry Finn in American literature is that it is the only book of its time written throughout in authentically American language. Not until Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and their better contemporaries is there a systematic attempt to get away from a conventional literary English for narration and description—and these writers reached maturity with the talking picture and the radio. It is the same in poetry. Poetry has for a long time been afraid of rhetoric, and in consequence has got badly bogged down in the book. Minor poets have largely lost even the ambition, let alone the ability, to imitate the roll and sweep of major poetry.3 For the poetry of Homer, Shakespeare, and Co. is not a lot of lines on the page: it is something to walk down street keeping time to, something to bellow when you're drunk. If you try to walk down the street marching to Amy Lowell or get drunk and try to bellow the Spoon River Anthology, you will see what I mean by the decline of rhetoric.4 Yet

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this state of things cannot survive the era of the sound track and the radio play, and our more interesting poets are slowly abandoning the subtle shuffle of Rozinante for the bucking of Bucephalus.5 The moral for Canadians is quite simple. Fifteen years is not a long time, geologically speaking, and with increased practice in listening to the sounds and rhythms of speech, we may in another fifteen years begin to find out what our language is. Canadians speak American. There is no Canadian accent or idiom, at least none common to all nine provinces, and British English, apart from a few cloistral schools, is as foreign to Canadians as Erse.6 Official documents still require "our" spellings and schoolteachers still insist that whenever there is a difference of usage the English form is the right one, if we can only remember which it is. (Check your guess on "schedule" with the dictionary.) But none of this has the slightest effect on the spoken language. A schoolteacher is often not aware that she makes no attempt to speak the language she teaches, and would be quite capable of saying, "Now tomorrow we will go on to the lesson on shall and will, as I would like to finish it by Friday." The various people who sound off about the danger of Americanizing our speech always make their protests in the purest American, and a Daughter of the Empire7 would have arrived at a fantastic pitch of imperialism before she would say petrol for gas or wireless for radio. Now this simple fact, instantly obvious to any Canadian, has not yet, with a few honourable exceptions, been digested by Canadian writers. Most of our poets give up the problem of language entirely and retreat into the lyric, where they can write in poetic diction to their heart's content. I open Marjorie Pickthall at random and my eye falls on the word "byre."8 No Canadian farmer calls his cowshed a byre; why should a Canadian poet avoid the usage of her own country? And if a Canadian novel or short story happens to be dull or commonplace, it is often so not from a lack of imagination, but from a lack of courage and confidence in taking hold of the language. The radio and the movie are dramatic forms, and the drama is simply integrated rhetoric: one of its chief functions is to bring together the spoken and written language in some sort of unity. There will always be a certain looseness in speech and a certain convention in writing, but the wide gap between standard American and what Mencken calls the "vulgate"9 is decadent, and partly the result of a dead theatre. Movie actors and radio speakers from Roosevelt down will have to take the lead in establishing a normal speech which is free and colloquial and at the

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same time good enough to be a basis for writing. This involves the larger problem, one of the most important of our postwar reconstruction jobs, of establishing cultural standards which are not based either on class distinctions, as in Britain, or on an intellectual minority, which is our problem. This latter is the cause of the unnatural union of slovenly speech and free education. The American vulgate speaker does not say "throwed" because no one has told him that "threw" is the accepted form. He says "throwed" because he knows damn well that "threw" is the accepted form. Nine-tenths of "bad" grammar is a deliberate and conscious (or half-conscious or subconscious or unconscious, whatever your private psychological myth may be) variation of a known standard. The variation does not always originate directly, of course, with the user of it, but it is in his background. He feels that a consistent use of standard speech, while it would certainly be "talking good grammar," would also be stilted and formal; it would sound stuck-up and make his friends nervous. The standard of correctness, then, is established by a small group, written down in grammars, taught at school and university, and evaded by a working majority of speakers. This is an impossible situation: rights and wrongs in speech should be established by general usage. But general usage at present seems to have little ambition beyond altering a tacitly accepted standard. The use of "throwed" for "threw" does not mean that ordinary speech tends to change strong verbs into weak ones: if standard speech requires "dived" the vulgate will have "dove." Toronto streetcar conductors almost always announce Elm Street as "ellum," but I heard one, directly after doing so, pronounce "borrowed" as "bor'd," showing phonetically the reverse tendency. If standard speech calls for "I began" and "I've begun," the vulgate will have "I begun" and "I've began." Wherever there is a feeling of cultural inferiority there will be this parody of accepted forms: Huckleberry Finn says "skiff" and "raft"; Jim says "skift" and "raff." A grocery clerk once said to me, "it doesn't make any difference," and then at once corrected himself to, "it don't make no difference." He felt that the latter form was more pungent and direct, and he may well have been right. But this antithesis of "correct" speech and effective speech evidently should be overcome as far as possible. The movies, and even to some extent the radio, are doing this in their own way. The boys and girls who want to model their lives on their movie heroes will at any rate have to listen to them talk. Their voices, if not actually pleasant, are at least intelligible, which is a good

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deal; and movie dialogue, while seldom interesting in itself, is at least recognizable as the spoken language. The more dignified movie characters, of course, speak infinitely better than the average American, and the speech of the latter is generally represented by the comic characters. There is, therefore, a slight but significant pressure of ridicule on the gum-choked whinnies of the American adolescent. And on such bases a new sense of the importance of the sound of the voice, the choice of the words, and the rhythm of the speech, is bound to grow, and bound to wake up literature. Where should we be today if we had been offered blood, toil, tears, and perspiration?10

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Music in the Movies December 1942

From Canadian Forum, 22 (December 1942): 275-6. Reprinted in RW, 24-8. Now that I have got it down there, that title seems a rather derisive challenge, like an ostrich egg in a henhouse. In the first place, there is a discouraging text for all music critics from the Book of Ecclesiasticus [32:4]: "Pour not out talk where there is a performance of music, and display not thy wisdom out of season." In the second place, a casual layman, who cannot even follow movie reviews which talk about pan shots and fade-ins, and who never worked up the courage to see Gone with the Wind or Fantasia or Mrs. Miniver, is hardly the person to spot Significant Trends. But the subject of music in the movies has been so little treated (the only good book on the subject I have seen is Oscar Levant's A Smattering of Ignorance) that perhaps even vague and ill-documented remarks about it may have some point. Music has been used as a background for movies ever since the latter were first made; since then, the movie proper has developed amazingly, but the incidental music has kept pace with it only just enough not to be completely incongruous. In early days a scarecrow orchestra sat in the pit and sawed off popular songs, keeping a wary eye on the screen so that the traps man could tonk something when the clown hit his head, or the bass fiddler slither the strings when a woman tore her dress or got kissed. Gradually attempts were made at more appropriate commentaries. I can remember when I was about fourteen seeing a book called Motion Picture Moods, assembled by one Rapee,1 in which the various emotions and scenes depicted in movies were listed alphabetically and given appropriate music from some standard composer. There were

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Chopin Nocturnes and Grieg Idylls for Love and Romance, and various allegro agitatos for Excitement and Fire. The first entry, Aeroplane, had a slice of Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccioso, then my stock piece. I could never understand why, possibly because as I played it it sounded more like a tank charge. With talking pictures, of course, Hollywood took over the performance of the music itself, which, pace the Musicians' Union, was a good thing. But Hollywood still thinks of music as "sound effects," and music is about the only Hollywood Cinderella still without a success story. There is a considerable gap in intelligence and interest between, say, Frankenstein and Citizen Kane, and the music in the latter case ought to show a corresponding superiority in the shivering of timbres. But the music for both sounds much alike—the same endless drum rolls, the same tired trombones sliding from solemn burp to gloomy blop. That curious feeling of reincarnation, of Having Been Through All This Before, that assails one so frequently at movies, owes a great deal to the stereotyped music. Two reasons have been assigned for the neglect of music: one, that nobody, from producer to ultimate consumer, ever by any chance listens to it; and the other, that the movie is a realistic art which the use of music disorganizes. The first point, though true, is an effect rather than a cause; the second, though obsolescent, deserves a brief comment. Still photography, apart from portraiture, is a more epigrammatic art than painting, and is more dependent than painting on the picturesque. No matter how carefully composed, it usually retains some suggestion of a found subject, a random impression which happens to be typical of a large number of others. This is doubtless the reason why photographers display so marked a tendency to corny allegory, of the kind that labels a picture of a little girl "Springtime" or "Age of Innocence." And what is true of still photography is even more true of the movie. The camera's business is not to trace the action indiscriminately, but to pick out the salient and representative details. Thus, to illustrate the fact that a man has just died, you may show a telephone ringing without being answered, or a hand relaxing, or a dog barking, without showing the man at all. This is not realism; it is symbolism. A stage play may be, up to a point, realistic: but once you photograph it you have conventionalized it as much as if you had put the dialogue into blank verse. In the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet there is a continuously ascending series of Montagues and Capulets: first the servants, then Tybalt and Benvolio, then the heads of the houses, and finally the Prince. In the

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movie version2 the camera darts all over the market place, giving one quick shot after another, in an associative but not a logical order. The play presents the brawl as a single visual pattern: the movie gives a series of symbols of it. Years ago, in a very indifferent Harold Lloyd3 picture, the hero undertook to bounce a spoon into a glass with another spoon. As long as he was unsuccessful in the story he failed to do this trick: when his enterprises worked out to a happy ending he did it with a flourish. That was, of course, a pure if somewhat crude piece of symbolism, and it would have been impossible without a camera. The more intelligent the moviegoer, the more he appreciates this kind of thing, and the more he will be attracted, not by the name of the star, but by that of a witty and resourceful director. Therefore, a continuous use of musical symbolism is in complete accord with the whole structure of the movie. The movie demands a running musical commentary, like the Chinese drama: it is not so well adapted, like the Elizabethan, for the incidental dance or song. The camera gets restless during a song and acquires a nervous habit of peering into the singer's molar cavities which is painful and embarrassing to watch. The talents of Romberg, Gershwin, Kern, and Berlin4 are very considerable ones, but they are stage and not screen talents. In fact, the whole of dance-based contemporary music, whether jazz, swing, or popular song, is ill-suited to the movie and has had little influence on it. Practically all of it is bound to a remorseless slogging treadmill rhythm, from the wittiest Duke Ellington or the subtlest blues down to the silliest stop-the-wop war song. Syncopation, incidentally, does not vary this beat; it accentuates it. This is not saying that the popular song or dance has no place in a movie, but that it should have a subordinate place in a unified musical pattern. This pattern should be symbolically related to the movie without being program music. That is, it should be based on certain recurring themes which, like the leitmotifs of a Wagner opera, are associated with certain characters or symbols in the picture. That is what Chaplin does, or at any rate did in Modern Times, and what Chaplin is doing today other directors will be overdoing tomorrow. Quotations from standard music would be a minor feature of this. I did not, as I have indicated, see Fantasia, but I gather that the treatment of the Pastoral Symphony was a bit heavy-handed compared to the delicate reference to it at the opening of the superb Farmyard Symphony, just before all the animals got to work on the Verdi Miserere. Often a director will develop

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a plot through a long sequence of symbolic shots known as "montage/' which nearly always has a musical accompaniment. This technique is capable of almost indefinite expansion: one thinks of documentaries, like O'Flaherty's Man ofAran, in which there are long descriptive scenes without a word of dialogue. These point the way to a mixed musical and pictorial art of a kind heretofore impossible. When human beings are used in such scenes, the emphasis thrown on pantomime is so strong that the picture becomes a kind of ballet: a beautiful example is a Rene Clair called Sous les Toils de Paris.5 Hollywood directors still have a horror of all music that calls attention to itself: their insistence on its subordination is too marked to be anything less than a dogma. That is why it is so noisy: if it were quieter it would be more impressive and noticeable. Levant says that the average producer, like the parvenu who refused to have any second violins in his orchestra, feels gypped if he gets anything less than tuttis. And that is why it is written in an invariable idiom made up from the mannerisms of well-known composers. And that is why it is so pompous and rhetorical: an audience will nearly always get the point of the smallest touch of musical humour, a cavorting bassoon or cuckoo noises from the piccolo. And that is why it still sticks to a conventional orchestral background, the train and boat sequence in The Reluctant Dragon6 being the sort of exception that proves the rule. However, all these lags will get adjusted in time. Unfavourable critics of movies usually blame their deficiencies either on the Tycoon at one end or the Goon at the other, depending on whether they are left or right critics. But there is a kind of inner evolution in art which neither cigar-chewer nor gum-chewer can obstruct forever, and what is now a sprawling and amorphous "show" may in a surprisingly short time become a clean-cut musical drama.

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Max Grafs Modern Music November 1946

Review of Modern Music: The Story of Music in Our Time, by Max Graf (New York: Philosophical Library, ca. 1946). From the "Briefly Noted" section of Canadian Forum, 26 (November 1946): 190. Not much use to anyone with a serious interest in the subject, as the author seems almost incapable of referring to music except in terms of metaphors and similes from other arts; but it mentions a good many names and contains a number of cultural pep-talks which might provide some frame of reference to a beginner in music "appreciation," whatever that is. The general line of approach is Bruckner-Mahler Viennese.1

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Abner Dean's It's a Long Way to Heaven November 1946

Review of It's a Long Way to Heaven, by Abner Dean (New York and Toronto: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945). From the "Briefly Noted" section of Canadian Forum, 26 (November 1946): 190. This brief review maintains Frye's momentum in the investigation of popular, antirealist art forms.

About sixty eerie drawings, with mysterious titles, of naked, gnome-like figures, ranging in treatment from allegory to surrealism. The best have a disturbingly haunting quality that one rarely finds in the more realistic captioned cartoons of the New Yorker school, and in fact are "funny" only to the extent of making one giggle hysterically. Most are psychoanalytic in reference, but a few can be called social comment and a few are theological. One of the latter shows a figure squatting on top of a pillar in a desert, completely swathed in a ball of yarn. Title: "Accumulated Virtue."

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Russian Art December 1946

Review of The Art of Russia, edited with a preface by Helen Rubissow (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946). From Canadian Forum, 26 (December 1946): 213.

A very useful collection of black and white reproductions illustrating Russian painting from medieval icons on. It appears from it that after the seventeenth century, Russia became the Eastern colony of European art as America became the Western one, and Russia like America lost the ability to resist cultural invasions at the same time that she gained the ability to resist military ones. All the European fashions in painting seem to have rolled over Russia in waves, most of them dyed with a strong Germanic tinge by the time they arrived. The Revolution helped release a tremendous burst of creative energy, and the art of Lissitsky, Malevich, Chagall, and Kandinsky1 was the result; but, following a directive from Lenin, this energy was soon gleichgestaltet [forced into conformity] and a rather corny "socialist realism," supposed to be directed more directly to the masses, took its place.2 The same development occurred in America under the WPA,3 where however, a more relaxed policy permitted the growth of more variety.

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Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye August 1947

Review of The Innocent Eye, by Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1946). From Canadian Forum, 27 (August 1947): 119. Sir Herbert Read, born in Yorkshire to a dairy-farming family, was an infantry officer in World War I, and subsequently one of the most indefatigable promoters of avant-garde art in the English-speaking world. His many works include Naked Warriors (1919), The Green Child (1945), and Contemporary British Art (1951). Autobiography is, like blank verse, very easy to write and very hard to write well. Mr. Read writes well, especially in the early part of his reminiscence, which reads at times like a prose version of Wordsworth's Prelude. This is natural for a critic who strives to be, in contrast to T.S. Eliot, anarchist in politics, Romantic in literature, and agnostic in religion.1 He is perhaps an anarchist only in the sense in which we are all anarchists, wanting the society that interferes least with individual freedom. Romanticism he defines as belief "in the immediacy of expression, in the automatism of inspiration, in the creative nature of even poetic evolution" [78-9], which has made him among other things a spokesman of surrealism.2 His religious position is cloudier, and I think confused by Kierkegaard's statement of the religious and aesthetic positions as an "either/or" dilemma. I should say at a venture that further examination of the Taoism he refers to would reveal something more interesting than agnosticism. But any autobiography is apt to sound pretty tentative unless its author is much nearer to being dead than Mr. Read is.

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The Eternal Tramp December 1947

From Here and Now, i, no. 2 (December 1947): 8-11. Reprinted in RW, 2834. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 3.

With Monsieur Verdoux Chaplin enters a "problem comedy" phase of his development which has lost him a good deal of his popular following. Shakespeare must have suffered a similar loss when he abandoned Falstaff and Pistol for Angelo and Parolles, and orthodox comedy constructed "as you like it" for dubious dramatic hermaphrodites too bitter to be amusing and too sardonic to be tragic. At the same time those who consider Chaplin to be one of the world's greatest dramatists are reassured by the explicitly didactic quality of Monsieur Verdoux, for it indicates that Chaplin is fully aware of his genius and has accepted the authority that genius confers. So those who have recognized this authority for some time need no longer feel condescendingly highbrow, as people so often are when they find real humour in a comic strip or real merit in a bestseller. In any case Monsieur Verdoux seems, like Measure for Measure before it, to be talking insistently about religion, so we must examine it as religious drama, whatever our previous impressions of Chaplin may be. Comedy is intensely conservative in its formulae: The Great Dictator could have been entered with Aristophanes in an Athenian festival with very little essential change. And the character of the tramp, the pathetic clown whom Chaplin has spent his life creating, has affinities not only with the great comic types, the pantaloon, the vice, the harlequin, the fool, and so on, but with the great characters who evolve out of the types, with Quixote and Falstaff, Micawber and Huck Finn. Laughter,

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the criticism of comedy, expresses a sudden release from something frustrating, and hence may be the laugh of society delivered from a menacing or eccentric individual, or the laugh of an individual delivered from some entangling social machinery. Hence the clown who draws both the laugh of sympathy and the laugh of ridicule becomes a focus of comic genius. Here pathos enters, for the root idea of pathos is the failure of an individual, through weakness or ignorance or disastrous luck, to enter his natural community. This attacks a fear in us so deep that real pathos (false pathos appeals to self-pity) is a kind of artistic rape, a physical assault of unbearable intensity. The death of Quixote, the rejection of Falstaff, the unattended banquet in The Gold Rush, the laughter of the blind girl in City Lights when she first opens her eyes on the forlorn jailbird who has made such efforts to get the money for her operation—these things make us wince and look away and feel that our entertainer has betrayed our confidence. But such an incident is a sign that comedy is developing into something that is not comedy, and yet not tragedy either, for it includes comedy. Chaplin's tramp is an American dramatic type, and Rip Van Winkle and Huck Finn are among his ancestors. The tramp is a social misfit, not only because he is too small and awkward to engage in a muscular extroverted scramble, but because he does not see the point of what society is doing or to what purpose it is expending all that energy. He is not a parasite, for he possesses some occult secret of inner freedom, and he is not a bum, for he will work hard enough, and still harder if a suitable motive turns up. Such a motive occurs when he discovers someone still weaker than himself, an abandoned baby or a blind girl (students of Jung will recognize the "anima" in Chaplin), and then his tenderness drives him to extraordinary spasms of breadwinning. But even his normal operations are grotesque enough, for in the very earnestness with which he tries so hard to play society's game it is clear that he has got it all wrong, and when he is spurred to further efforts the grotesqueness reaches a kind of perverse inspiration. The political overtones of this are purely anarchist—I have never understood the connecting of Communism with Chaplin1—the anarchism of Jefferson and Thoreau which sees society as a community of personal relationships and not as a mechanical abstraction called a "state." But even so the tramp is isolated by his own capacity for freedom, and he has nothing to do with the typical "little guy" that every fool in the country has been slobbering over since Pearl Harbor.2

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City Lights marks the end of a phase in the tramp's development. Up to this time he has been very much like Huck Finn: Huck Finn with his ingenious dodges to protect his hunted friend, his gentle but fierce loyalty which makes him choose hell with Jim rather than the slave-owner's heaven [chap. 31], and his open-mouthed admiration for the bustling know-it-all Tom Sawyer, who, realizing that Jim is free anyway and that he can't lose, muscles in at the end and takes all the credit for setting him free while making the silliest possible shambles of Huck's simple plan [chaps. 32-42]. In Modern Times a new theme appears: the relation of the tramp to society is no longer personal, for society has become mechanized, and the central symbol of the film is that of the man caught in the machine, the machine itself representing not other human beings but an anonymous impersonal fate. Here the latent anarchism of the tramp becomes an unconscious direct-action sabotage, wrecking the apparatus he is trying so hard to control. Here too, however, the machine provides an insistent rhythmical beat driving the story along and keeping the characters in step with a glazed hypnotic stare. In the great nut-twisting scene this reaches the concentration of a ballet, and there is one breathless moment when even the tramp himself is caught by the rhythm, and rushes out into the street twisting nuts on everything he sees. This moment, expanded, is the theme of The Great Dictator. When the tramp turned his attention to Hitler he attacked, like Napoleon, at the strongest point. The only mark of real greatness in Hitler was the seriousness with which he accepted his Antichrist role, his pedantic insistence that even a child saying grace at meals should thank his Fiihrer for his bread.3 The Antichrist symbolism in The Great Dictator, in which a dictator who is blacked out by a Jewish barber recalls the Caesar who was annihilated by a Jewish carpenter, is too complicated to work out here, but is connected with a personal relation between Hitler and Chaplin's tramp. Every normal person thinks of Hitler as a ham, and a great clown would therefore see in him only a pretty poor imitation of himself. The Great Dictator is built on the resemblance of Hitler to the tramp, Mussolini representing the bully of the earlier films. And because this resemblance is merely a special application of every normal person's reaction, the real tramp, throughout the picture, is also the normal human being, who speaks in the name of all decent people at the end. This means that Hitler is not only the counterfeit tramp, but that Chaplin has found the Antichrist where in a sense Nietzsche found it, in something subhuman that imitates the normally human, something to be

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symbolized by an ape or monkey. That is why Chaplin's Antichrist Hitler is also a repulsive anthropoid who climbs curtains, gobbles bananas, and peers up women's skirts. But at the same time he is quite clearly the tramp himself gone mad, possessed by the pounding beat of a machine age. We understand now why the real tramp's efforts to act "normally" are so absurd: he is normal, and he can only behave like others by becoming obsessed as they are. In Monsieur Verdoux the tramp appears again, with the same jaunty air, the same extravagant clothes, the same exuberant courtesy. As in City Lights, he is poor and has a helpless girl to look after, and as in Modern Times, he is thrown out of work by a "Depression," a mysterious twist of a social machine. And so, the tramp decides, he will learn to operate that machine, and do things the way society does. Society is evidently playing a ruthless law-of-the-jungle sort of game, the strong trampling on the weak, the cunning making fortunes out of the helpless, and a few at the top building up vast social engines for the sole purpose of destroying life. So, with the same reasonable and conscientious earnestness with which the tramp in City Lights entered a boxing ring to earn money for his blind girl, Verdoux sets about murdering and robbing rich widows in order to protect his crippled wife and child. Not moral, perhaps; but morality doesn't seem to be the point of society's game. And about his fourteen murders there is (one thinks of Arsenic and Old Lace)4 a kind of crazy innocence. He does not rationalize, or pose as an artist in crime; he merely accepts an "existential situation" absurd enough for Camus (whose L'Etranger remotely resembles Verdoux). The touch of the sentimental about him (he can incinerate women but not step on a caterpillar) suggests the Nazi's maudlin brutality, and he makes the quick financial decisions of a capitalist tycoon. But unlike them, he shows no defensive self-righteousness, either of the romantic or the realistic kind. And so while his behaviour is a shrewd and logical parody of the tycoon and the Nazi, still his lack of self-righteousness makes it naive and what we already see with intolerable clarity slowly begins to dawn on him: that somehow or other he has got it all wrong again. His success however is remarkably well sustained, and it is clear that he could only have played society's game by catching, as Hitler does, the maddening beat of the social machine. His actions are a beautiful and intricate juggle of timing and two-timing, punctuated by a rhythmical sequence of phone calls, train schedules, and riffled bills. He

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goes through his routine with Hitler's glazed eyes, glancing at his watch as Hitler would consult an astrologer, rising to a crisis of action as Hitler would seize the historic hour. And his downfall is not due to the cleverness of society so much as to the fact that he wakes out of his hypnotic trance, reverts to normal, and becomes again the real tramp, the sane social misfit, unable to act because deprived of motives for doing so. Nobody really catches him. From society's point of view the story of Verdoux is a detective thriller, and the detective does get on his trail. But the whole smug banal convention of the detective story, with its criminal murder at one end balanced by a judicial murder at the other, its glorification of the man-hunter, and its elaborate pretence that the social order develops logical machinery to catch every rebel against it, explodes at the moment that the detective accepts Verdoux's poisoned drink. Again, the film opens on a hideous squabbling family that supplies Verdoux with one of his victims, and this family, a symbol of social claustrophobia, does close in at the end. Nevertheless the social vengeance that traps Verdoux comes from Verdoux himself. He deliberately walks into the prison because he has finally realized that he has never escaped from what it represents. We are told that another turn of the social machine, a financial crash that wiped him out, was what brought him to his senses. But the real awakener is his realization that the machine does not operate as a machine, much less as a social order, because it is out of control, and therefore it operates as blind chance. Luck is no respecter of persons, and even a vulgar and selfish fool like the Martha Raye5 character (her name of course is Bonheur, but a pun on bonne heure, underlining the subtle timing element, occurs in the dialogue), simply because she is born lucky, has more of the predestined accuracy of the sleepwalker than he, with all his agility. Her shattering mindless laugh, which regularly recurs through a wedding party, is certainly a voice of doom, yet it is a laugh with no pleasure (which is, like Blake's tear, an intellectual thing) [Jerusalem, pi. 52,1. 25], no triumph and no cry for vengeance, but is more like the noise the iceberg made when the Titanic hit it. Again, the girl-tramp whom Verdoux was going to poison as an experiment is dismissed with a theatrical remark about her corrupting him into goodness, transforming Satan into an angel of light. He turns the girl's luck; he waves his hand and makes her rich—for she goes to the arms of a munitions manufacturer.

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In the dock something of the dazed bewilderment of the trance still hangs about Verdoux, because he is not cynical enough to understand why the pretence of moral virtue is so important to society. Of course his life is immoral, but why is society talking about morality? He does not argue that he should be released because his judges are no better. He merely refuses to accept what is in front of him as an adequate symbol of his condemnation. He feels, in other words, not only that he does not understand what society is driving at with its mass murders, but that there can be no sense in anything at all, including his trial, unless everyone present is in the dock of a bigger court under the eye of a wiser judge. "I shall see you all very soon—very soon," he says. In The Great Dictator Hitler was portrayed both as Antichrist and as a counterfeit tramp, which implies an association between the sane tramp and Christ. That is, the tramp, the mouthpiece of all decent people in the final scene, represents whatever it is in man that is redeemable. Verdoux is both the mad and the sane tramp, and hence Antichrist, the monkey that looks like a man, is the mad tramp acting as society does: in short, Antichrist is human nature, which mocks the image of God in man. At that moment Verdoux becomes Everyman, possessed by a new security inspired by his great discovery. All men are condemned to death because all men are involved in crime. From one point of view at least, and the one that now he must hold to, there can be no difference between moral good and moral evil, the two aspects of degraded knowledge, between the criminal who kills and the society that wages war, between the criminal who robs and the society that exploits labour. The futility of all human efforts to judge other humans is what marks all victims of human justice, however much they "deserve" their punishment, with a more than human dignity. Verdoux sustains that dignity to the end. He resists the very subtle temptation of the reporter to give his side of the story, to presume to be a prophet on the strength of his experience of evil. Then a priest comes in. "What would you do if there were no sin?" asks Verdoux. "What I am doing now," says the priest: "trying to save a lost soul." There can be lost souls without sin apparently: the priest cannot conceive a paradise without a church militant: he is, therefore, like the reporter, merely a projecting claw of the social machine. Then the police offer Verdoux a drink of rum, and for the third time in the picture a drink is refused and then accepted. Perhaps Verdoux accepts because refusal is the gesture of

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the really innocent victim, like Christ refusing the vinegar sponge [Mark 15:36!. "I've never tasted rum," he says, and Everyman, with his foul life and his immortal soul, drains the communion cup with its new drink, and goes out to be caught in a machine once more, full of hope because this time the machine will overreach itself and set him free.

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On Book Reviewing June 1949

From Here and Now, 2 (June 1949): 19-20. Frye's remarks, along with those of Malcolm Ross and F.R. Scott, were introduced by a note from the editor explaining that "the following three articles constitute the result of a questionnaire which we sent to Mr. Frye, Mr. Ross, and Mr. Scott. We do not doubt that all our readers' questions will not be answered here and for this we are solely to blame. However, insofar as the subject is inexhaustible, we hope that our authors have provided sufficient impetus for further discussion." Readers of this volume will note Frye's reference to criticism as "the science of literature" and his controversial views on the precritical nature of the value judgment. QUESTION: Is there, in your opinion, a real difference between reviewing as such and literary criticism? ANSWER: Oh, yes. Criticism is the science of literature: a systematic and progressive comprehension of it. Being a science, it begins in induction and the collecting of instances. Book reviewing thus belongs to the preparatory empirical stage of criticism; but there are many aspects of criticism itself that deal with general laws, principles, and axioms, and have nothing directly to do with the preliminary survey of available data which the reviewer helps to make. Aristotle was a great critic, but I should guess that he would have been a rather poor book reviewer. QUESTION: If so, what is a) the function of the book reviewer? ANSWER: Book reviewers are among the shock troops of culture. They are the first victims of the fact that far too many people can read and write. Countless swarms of books pour off the presses and make their noisy and jostling way to the citadel of criticism and scholarship. Each

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has to be stopped and challenged by a group of critical sentries, asked for his papers, and, if they are found to be in good order, passed on, otherwise turned back to be ground up into pulp again and put to more useful purpose. Abandoning metaphors, the reviewer has to determine, first, what category the book belongs to, second, how good it is of its kind. The value judgment is based on two things. A good book must delight and it must instruct.1 Anyone who desires to quarrel with or qualify that statement should take up some other occupation. QUESTION: b) the audience he addresses? That depends first on the category of the book. Books on fishing should delight and instruct fishermen, whether or not the reviewer can tell a salmon from a trout. It depends secondly on the audience of the magazine he writes for. It is his editor's business to limit the objectives of his circulation. If the reviewer writes for the popular press, he should adopt standards of delight and instruction as unselected as possible; if he writes for a learned journal, he is already directly concerned with critical problems. QUESTION: c) the end he wishes to achieve? The end of the book review is to determine other readers dialectically either to accept the book (which means buying or at least reading it), or to let it go. If the reviewer moves for the book's rejection, that is still a dialectic choice. If he recommends it, the end of book reviewing is the beginning of criticism proper. The first reviews of a successful book are followed by the slower rhythms of secondary criticism, where the author as a whole is considered, and eventually becomes a classic, or at least part of the permanent data of literature on which criticism is based. QUESTION: d) the means by which he attains his end? I don't understand this altogether: surely the means is the review itself. The value of the review depends on the reviewer's intelligence and responsibility. The reviewer has no business to be a satirist of new literature: he has no right even to exult in his power of making bad books look as bad as possible. It is too easy to be what Jacob prophesied of the tribe of Dan: a serpent in the way that biteth the horse's heels so that his rider falleth backward [Genesis 49:16-20]. Still, book reviewers are perhaps too much maligned. Kierkegaard, I seem to remember, speaks of them as a scrofulous eruption—or was it a green slime?—on the surface

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of literature.2 Even bad reviewers, however, have their uses for the author, if none for the reader: they correct his perspective. The author knows not only what he means, but what he intended to mean, what he thought of on the way toward saying it, and what overtones of meaning he wants to be picked up. Thus he unconsciously creates in his mind an ideal reader who is really a double of himself. The reviewer always turns out to be someone else, and so his perceptions will seem unexpectedly gross and dull. But even if he is stupid or malicious, the author must learn that a regrettably large proportion of his public is also stupid and malicious. Yet I think it possible to be too quick in assuming that the reviewer has sold his soul to Satan the accuser. So vain an animal is man,3 that if he writes a book he regards anything said in his favour as the least the fool could have said, whereas any animadversion is apt to make him feel like a Hamlet watching the dumb show of a damned smiling villain dropping poison into a sleeping public's ear [3.2.260, stage direction]. If I may speak both as a reviewer and as one who has been reviewed, I think that usually a reviewer's failures are only occasional breakdowns in the exacting discipline of his craft.

19

Academy without Walls1 May 1961

Address delivered to the Canadian Conference of the Arts, O'Keefe Centre, Toronto, 4 May 1961. From Canadian Art, 18 (September-October 1961): 296-8. Reprinted in Varsity Weekend Review, i December 1961, i, 4; OE, 38-45; and RW, 45-54. Frye's speech was one of "Two Canadian Points of View." A variety of typescripts, prepared before and subsequent to the delivery of the address, and for republication in RW can be found in NFF, 1988, box i, files n and o, NFF, 1988, box 47, file i, and NFF, 1991, box 38, file 2. These largely record Frye's obvious corrections of typographical and spelling errors, e.g., "neoclassical" for "new-classical," "manifestos" for "manifestoes." In an article adjacent to Frye's in Canadian Art, "That Museum without Walls," Frank Underhill disputed whether the absorption of the arts into the educational system was as benign a process as Frye had argued, and wondered whether the university was a sufficient shield for the unprotected, misunderstood condition of the arts in Canada. Contributors to the symposium varied widely in style and subject matter, although the tight connections many of them—particularly Jean-Charles Falardeau and Jane Drew—forged between the arts and the life of the city would have resonated with Frye's own concerns, and he may well have recalled them when he began writing MC.

I suppose everyone here has been asked by someone, at some time or other, to explain contemporary art to him. I cannot explain contemporary art, but I can point out two of its characteristics without moving very far away. In the first place, this is a conference of contemporary arts. Artists have always formed cliques, schools, groups, and "isms"; they have formed societies and guilds; they have organized manifestos, little magazines, cooperative housing, and insurance schemes. But the confer-

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ring artist, the artist who goes to a conference of artists, is a product of this age alone. In the second place, I am the third university man in a row to address you this afternoon, which means, whatever else it may mean, that we are well into the twentieth century. At no other period of history would academics be so willing to talk to artists or artists be so willing to listen to academics. At no other period of history has the university's devotion to the liberal arts been so closely associated with the actual arts. One obvious fact about the culture of our time is the enormously increased awareness of its past, and the variety and range of tolerance in its sense of tradition. The greenest student in a conservatory may learn more about pre-Mozartian music than Mozart himself ever knew; and even if, say, Watteau or Goya had known anything about Bushman painting or Haida masks,2 they could hardly have seen much connection between them and the traditions of art that they accepted. But the artist of today cannot think of himself as being pushed along at the end of a thin line of historical development through Greece, Rome, and Western Europe. He is now a citizen of all time and space: Javanese puppet plays, Chinese calligraphy, Benin bronzes, Peruvian textiles— anything that has ever been produced as art or is now realized to be art may take its place in his tradition. Immense erudition is needed to understand the variety of influences on contemporary artists, and the work of Picasso, of Stravinsky, of T.S. Eliot, might from one point of view be studied as a mass of quotations and allusions. An artist may serve his apprenticeship in many ways: he may start at the age of eleven in a master's studio grinding colours and laying in backgrounds; or he may attend slide lectures in a university scribbling indecipherable notes in the dark about Carolingian manuscripts in the Ottoman Renaissance. What he is doing in either case is learning about the conventions of his art. For no artist ever faces his world directly: he enters into the conventions provided by the art of his time. One does not learn to paint landscapes by studying landscapes, any more than one learns to compose fugues by listening to street noises. After a little study of Italian painting, one may learn to distinguish at a glance across a room what century a particular picture was painted in. This would be impossible if any artist really had the power to face nature directly, outside the prism of convention. The novelist may gather his material from the life around him, but his ability to make anything of it will depend on his knowledge of novel-writing, which begins in his knowledge of how

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other people have written novels. An artist's technical ability, in short, comes out of his craftsmanship, and his craftsmanship comes out of his scholarship. Consequently, an increase in the sense of the variety of tradition, of the number of legitimate influences it is possible to have, becomes part of an increase in the technical resources of the arts. Art is, Aristotle tells us [Poetics, 14473], an imitative activity, and what it imitates, according to the critics, is nature. Other authorities have assured us that art is also a creative activity, and that what it creates is an aspect of human society. But in the twentieth century "nature" is no longer so firmly rooted a world of familiar physical objects, nor is "society" a group of familiar personalities growing out of it. You heard that a conference was being held in Toronto and came here by plane or train or car: in other words your "society" or environment is a coordinated series of points in space. Twentieth-century life does not radiate from a centre but rotates in an orbit, moving from point to point at will. Nature has become similarly abstract and conceptualized. The ease of moving around has become central in our imaginations, and our sense of objectivity is no longer identified with fixed objects. The objective world appears as a swirling mass of electrons even to those who do not know what an electron is; the view of the world from an airplane window, as an abstract pattern of crop and fallow fields or a geometrical network of city lights, is the world view even of those who have never been in a plane. Vision is relative to the choice of a point of view: this has always been true, of course, but never before so obviously true. Consciousness itself is a chosen point of view; there is no reason why the world of dream and fantasy should not be an equally valid choice. This vast expansion in the possibilities of form has given the artist unprecedented resources in technique. Representationalism in painting, diatonic harmony in music, strict metre and rhyme in poetry, are as legitimate techniques as they ever were, but each is now regarded as one among a great many possibilities. Like man in existentialist philosophy, art is in a state of unqualified freedom. To begin with, anything goes: difficulties may come later, but they come as consequences of a free choice. At times one feels that the artist is rather in the position of Adam in paradise, who had so much freedom that all he could do was sin. And yet much of this sense of unlimited freedom is an illusion, or rather, it exists for the art as a whole, but not for the individual artist. The artist is in theory free to commit himself to any one of a dozen conventions, but

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all that he can choose is a convention. Tachism,3 abstraction, twelve-tone harmony, free verse: these are loose terms for groups of conventions each of which is as rigid as the conventions of plain chant,4 Russian icons, or a beatnik's vocabulary. Contemporary art is neither popular nor esoteric. It is academic and scholarly, newly possessed of tremendous technical resources and still experimenting with their use. It is therefore an integral part of the educational system of our time, which is why the artist and the scholar can be so naturally associated as they are in this conference. It has always been said that the artist's function was to delight and instruct,5 and in an age like ours his importance as an instructor cannot be ignored. There will always be artists for every variety of creative expression, but a large part of the creative energy of our time is bound to be directed toward the exploring of technique. It is natural that poetry should turn to myth and metaphor, painting to the abstract relations of pattern and colour, music to a neoclassical absorption in form. How long this academic phase of art will last I do not know, not having a clouded crystal ball handy, but other things being equal it should outlast the century. There will be reactions against it every year or so, eddies churning in the stream, and each will be hailed in turn as the beginning of something totally new. But, as Samuel Butler remarked in Erewhon a century ago, "There is no way of making an aged art young again; it must work out its salvation anew, and in all fear and trembling."6 I am not making a value judgment on contemporary art: I am merely trying to characterize it. Being an academic myself, I feel that if art is academic there is nothing better for it to be, and that there is no reason why our age should be culturally inferior to any other. When the ideals of modern democracy were formed, there was some hope that patronage in the arts would be replaced by popularity; that art would cease to be a status symbol for connoisseurs and would take a central functional place in society. It has done this to some extent, but in a way that has disappointed many. Some of you may recall a tedious and foolish harangue that covered an inordinate amount of a Toronto newspaper a few weeks ago under the title of "Cult or Culture."7 There is, of course, no "or" about it: culture has always been a cult, in the sense of being a group of specialized and exacting disciplines. It is natural that some people should resent this, just as it is natural that some people should resent the fact that years of hard work in education are necessary for the best life. It is natural that some people should feel a strong urge

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to tell the artist that whatever he is doing he is doing it all wrong, and ought to "return" to something they regard as more satisfactory. The trouble is that the artist does not have all that freedom of choice, once his initial choice (and even that may not be a choice)8 has been made. He can paint or write or compose only what takes shape in his mind: he cannot will to become a different kind of artist. It is possible in a totalitarian society, and it might be possible in this one, to lay down certain approved norms that all artists must conform to, and to ensure that no one who does not have the specific talents required will ever get to be an artist. But that would not make realists out of artists; it would merely mean that a very different and much less genuinely creative group of people were taking over the arts. The contemporary artist is dependent neither on patronage nor on popularity, but on something in between. Because his work is increasingly regarded as an academic and scholarly activity, he depends on recognition by critics, reviewers, directors of museums and art galleries, members of the advisory boards of councils and wealthy foundations, university administrators who employ him as a summer teacher or resident artist—almost entirely a community of scholars. The artist may dislike this situation, or pretend to do so. He may dream of appealing to the general public over the heads of such scholars: he may attack them as unimaginative, culturally sterile, parasitic, prissy, and hidebound: he may fall into cliches of nineteenth-century Romanticism about the creator's virility and the critic's lack of it. We find this in the work of the writer who produces, for middlebrow magazines, the kind of highly conventionalized essay about his view of the modern world that is designed to give the impression of a writer writing like a writer. Or the artist may have been brought up to think of the academic as the opposite of the creative, and be genuinely bewildered by a world in which they have become the same thing. Nevertheless, scholars are the public on whom the artist must make his first impression, and from his point of view he could hardly do better. Advisory committees and the like are as a rule liberal to a fault: they know how many mistakes have been made in the past, and are not anxious to repeat them; they do not require conventional morality or subservient behaviour; they expect the artist to take the odd nervous bite out of the hand that feeds him. There are exceptions, but they are far fewer than when Samuel Johnson could list the hazards of the mental life as: "Toil, Envy, Want, the Patron, and the Jail" [The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1.160]. For many a modern artist, sup-

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ported by benevolent foundations until he can be handed over to the women's committees of symphonies and art galleries, the course would be better described as: "Prize, study, grant, the matron, and the kale." The patronage of the arts by various semi-official bodies, and the employment of artists by universities, do not mean that the country is trying to buy itself a culture, or that foundations are seeking for more virtuous and better publicized ways of paying income tax. Such things mean that in the twentieth century the creative arts have become absorbed into the educational process. The artist is recognized as a teacher and educator, and society is exposed, however reluctantly, to the contemporary arts because they are a necessary part of education. The "difficulty" of contemporary art is precisely the same as that of any other subject of education, which means that most of the difficulty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Algebra is neither difficult nor easy to the keen student, but to, say, the girl who has already decided on a life of bridge and Saturday shopping it is impenetrably obscure. She "can't do" algebra because it has no place in her vision of life. Nevertheless the educational system mildly compels her at least to try a little algebra, because this is a democracy, and it is her right to be exposed to quadratic equations however little she wants them. The arts are much less like algebra than, for example, a well-planned football game, but still they do demand some concentrating of attention. It is the right of people to be kept in contact with the contemporary arts because the public is partly paying for them, and the public ought to get what it ought to get. It is entirely impossible to know nothing of art and yet to know what one likes: what one likes is always a measure of what one knows. Those who deny that society is responsible for guiding and developing its own taste are people who cannot distinguish a democratic society from a mob. The result is that there is now an unprecedented tolerance for experiment and originality of all kinds in the arts. It is difficult even to imagine what sort of pictures would go today into a Salon des Refuses.9 Gone are the days when radicalism in the arts could be regarded as a sign of atheism, Communism, and moral turpitude. I remember passing behind two gentle old ladies in the Art Gallery of Toronto as they were contemplating some rather strident pictures by a young painter, and hearing one of them say, "And when I knew him he was a nice clean boy." But such comments are now rare. T.S. Eliot, with his Order of Merit and his odour of sanctity, must look back with some nostalgia to the days when The

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Waste Land was a new poem and he could be described as a "drunken helot" and a "cultural Bolshevist."10 On the contrary, even the Museum of Modern Art in New York is old hat now, and crowds line up before the elevators in the Guggenheim Museum waiting to be sucked down into the vortex of that preposterous building. As art becomes increasingly fashionable, anything new in art becomes a new fashion. To encourage it is ever so revolutionary, and yet completely safe. The Canada Council has no qualms about supporting the magazine Canadian Art, however radical the art may be that it illustrates.11 The Canadian Forum is a magazine that the Canada Council, according to its own statement, will not support, on the ground that it expresses opinions. Some things, apparently, can still be disturbing; but the arts, like the religions, seem to have become immunized. Pseudo-tolerance has an insecure basis, and carries its own disadvantages. Hazlitt, a tough Romantic radical who was both painter and critic, once spoke of music as a thing without an opinion,12 and though I do not share the view of music implied, I can understand his attitude. In their younger days artists may form in groups issuing manifestos and endeavouring to impress the public with the importance of their work by making defiant gestures at it. But as the artist grows more successful he becomes less fond of other artists and more fond of the people who buy his work and advance his reputation, and so tends to fall into the social attitudes prescribed for him by them. And academic art, like any other kind, has the defects of its virtues. For the arts reflect the world that produces them, and everything the detractors of modern art say about it is true, except that what they are objecting to is not so much something in our art as something in our lives. Painting, music, and architecture, no less than literature, reflect an anonymous and cold-blooded society, a society without much respect for personality and without much tolerance for difference in opinion, a society full of slickness, smugness, and spiritual inanity. But as long as the arts are thought of as educational they can teach as well as reflect. It would be an appalling disaster if the arts became merely decorative, identified with the qualities they do, to some extent, illustrate. It is a great mistake to imagine that the end of education in the arts is simply to admire the works of art themselves. Education in the arts makes one more critical and detached, not more impressionable. Of course one does appreciate what one has learned to understand; but the arts have something to teach beyond themselves, a way of seeing and

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hearing that nothing else can give, a way of living in society in which the imagination takes its proper central place. Just as the sciences show us the physical world of nature, so the arts show us the human world that man is trying to build out of nature. And, without moralizing, the arts gradually lead us to separate the vision of the world we want to live in from the world that we hate and reject, the ideals of beauty from the horrors portrayed by art when it is in the mood that we call ironic. All genuine art leads up to this separation, and that is why it is an educating force. Our present society is not predestined to go onward and upward, whether with the arts or without them. We are trying to marshal all the resources of culture and intellect we have in order to struggle with the problems that our civilization has created. We have outside us nations with different political philosophies, and we think of them as dangers, or even as enemies. But our more dangerous enemies, so far, are within. I spoke a moment ago of the difference between a mob and a democratic society. Our effective enemies are not foreign propagandists, but the hucksters and hidden persuaders and segregators and censors and hysterical witch-hunters and all the rest of the black guard who can only live as parasites on a gullible and misinformed mob. Yet the only really permanent way to turn society into a mob is to debase the arts: to turn literature into slanted news, painting into billboard advertising, music into caterwauling transistor sets, architecture into mean streets. As an educator, the artist today has a revolutionary role to play of an importance of which no nineteenth-century Bohemian in a Paris garret ever dreamed. He has powerful friends as well as enemies, for in his commitment to his art he has the fundamental good will of society on his side.

20

Communications 9 July 1970

From the Listener, #4 (9 July 1970): 33-5. Reprinted in Mass Communications: Selected Readings for Librarians, ed. KJ. McGarry (Hamden, Conn.: Linnet Books, 1972; n.p.: Clive Bingley, 1972), 119-24; Mass Media: Forces in Our Society, 2nd ed., ed. Francis H. Voelker and Ludmila A. Voelker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 402-6; and The Little, Brown Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Marcia Stubbs and Sylvan Barnet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 420-5. On Saturday, 20 June 1970, Frye recorded his talk for transmission on BBC Radio Three. Two typed transcripts exist in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 2, and NFF, 1999, box 38, file 4. Where they seem significant, the changes Frye made from the broadcast to the published essay have been recorded. I am on an advisory committee concerned with Canadian radio and television, and so I have been trying to do some reading in communication theory. I find it an exciting subject to read about, because so much of the writing is in the future tense, with so many sentences beginning, "We shall soon be able to ..." But I have also become aware of a more negative side to it, as to most technology. The future that is technically feasible may not be the future that society can absorb. There is a great gap now between what we are doing and what we have the means to do, and many writers regard this as a disease peculiar to our time that we shall get over when we feel less threatened by novelty. But I doubt that the gap can be so soon or so easily closed. When I read symposia by technical experts telling me what the world could be like one hundred years from now, I feel a dissolving of identity, with all the familiar social landmarks disappearing, as though I were in Noah's flood climbing a tree [Genesis 7:11-24]. As I imagine that this is what most people feel, I

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suspect that the world one hundred years from now will be much more like the world today than the experts suggest. Plato was much concerned with the revolution brought about by writing in his day. He felt that the oral tradition was done for, and that the poets, the great rememberers, were on their way out as teachers, and would have to give place to the writing philosophers. But Plato's Socrates, of all people, was unlikely to overlook the ironic side of this. In the Phaedrus we are told that the Egyptian god Thoth invented writing, and explained to all the other gods how greatly his invention would transform the memory [2740-2753]. The other gods looked down their noses and said that on the contrary it would only destroy the memory. Thoth and his critics were talking about different kinds of memory, so they couldn't get any further. The deadlock between the enthusiasm of a technological expert and a public digging in its heels to resist him has never been more clearly stated. All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social authority, and reflect their anxieties. In socialist countries they reflect the anxiety of the political Establishment to retain power; in the United States they reflect the anxiety of the economic Establishment to keep production running. In either case communication is a one-way street. Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, culture, contemporary issues, and remedies against the migraine we get from listening to it. It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming our habits of speech, our processes of thought. If people did not resent this they would not be human, and all the nightmares about society turning into an insect state would come true. My hair prickles when I hear advertisers talk of a television set simply as a means of reaching their market. It so seldom occurs to them that a television set might be their market's way of looking at them, and that the market might conceivably not like what it sees. If the viewer is black and sees a white society gorging itself on luxuries and privileges, the results can be explosive. But this is only a special case of a general social resentment against being always treated as an object to be stimulated. As with erotic stimulation, or should I say as with other forms of erotic stimulation, there is a large element of mechanical and involuntary response, for all the resentment. The harder it is to escape, the more quickly the resentment turns to panic, and it seems clear that a great

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deal of the shouting and smashing and looting and burning of our time comes from this panic. Many other things are best understood as forms of resentment, or at least resistance, to mass communication, such as the rock music which wraps up its listeners in an impermeable cloak of noise. I often wonder, too, how far the users of drugs have been affected by a feeling that they have been cheated out of genuinely new sensory impressions by the mass media. More important is the political resistance. When I read articles on satellite broadcasting and the like I am often told, with a teacher's glassy smile, that the increase in the range of broadcasting will lead to far greater international understanding, because very soon now we can have all the problems of Tanzania or Paraguay brought to us by touching a button, and won't that be nice? One answer from the public which is remarkably loud and clear is that they don't want all those people in their living room. If the world is becoming a global village, it will also take on the features of real village life, including cliques, lifelong feuds, and impassable social barriers. In spirit I agree with the optimists: it is the destiny of man to unite rather than divide, and as a Canadian I have little sympathy with separatism,1 which seems to me a mean and squalid philosophy. But I can hardly ignore the fact that separatism is the strongest political force yet thrown up by the age of television. The direction of most of the technological developments of our time has been towards greater introversion. The automobile, the passenger aeroplane, the movie, the television set, the multistorey block, are all much more introverted than their predecessors. The result is increased alienation and a decline in the sense of festivity, the sense of pleasure in belonging to a community. Even our one technically festive season, Christmas, is an introverted German Romantic affair, based on a myth of retreat into the cave of a big Dickensian cuddly family of a type that hardly exists. The one advantage of an introverted situation is privacy; but for us the growing introversion goes along with a steady decrease in privacy. This means that the psychological conditions of life, whatever the physical conditions, become increasingly like those of life in a prison, where there is no privacy and yet no real community. In this situation the easy defences of introversion, such as apathy or cynicism, are no defences at all. We hear of meetings broken up and speakers howled down by organized gangs; we try to phone from a tube station and find the telephone torn out; we read of hijacked planes and of bombs in letter boxes; hood-

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lums go berserk in summer resorts and adolescents scream all the words they know that used to be called obscene. We realize that these acts are in too consistent a pattern to be mere destructiveness, and yet they are too irresponsible to be serious revolutionary tactics, though they may be rationalized as such. However silly or vicious they may be, they are acts of counter-communication, acts noisy enough or outrageous enough to shout down that voice and spit at that image, if only for a few moments. But hysterical violence is self-defeating, not merely because it is violence but because, as counter-communication, it can only provoke more of what it attacks. Every outbreak of violence releases more floods of alarm, understanding, deep reservations, comment in perspective, denunciation, concern, sympathy, analysis, and reasoned argument. Violence, however long it lasts, can only go around in the circles of lost direction. There is a vaguely Freudian notion that there is something therapeutic in releasing inhibitions; but it is clear that releasing inhibitions is just as compulsive, repetitive, and hysterical an operation as the repressing of them.2 To go back to Plato and the god Thoth's invention: an oral culture, before writing develops, is heavily dependent on individual memory. This means that the teachers are often poets, because verse is the easiest verbal pattern to remember. With writing, and eventually printing, continuous prose develops. With prose, philosophy changes from aphorism and proverb to a continuous argument organized by logic and dialectic, and history to a continuous narrative. Such metaphors as "the pursuit of knowledge" are based on the sense of the planned and systematic conquest of reality which writing makes possible. In our day the electronic media of film, radio, and television have brought about a revival of the oral culture that we had before writing, and many of the social characteristics of a preliterate society are reappearing in ours. The poet, for example, finds himself again before a listening audience, when he can use topical or even ephemeral themes: he does not have to retreat from society and write for posterity. One common interpretation of this fact, strongly influenced by Marshall McLuhan, is that print represents a "linear"3 and timebound approach to reality, and that the electronic media, by reviving the oral tradition, have brought in a new "simultaneous" or mosaic form of understanding. Contemporary unrest, in this view, is part of an attempt to adjust to a new situation and break away from the domination of print. This view is popular among American educators, because it makes for

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anti-intellectualism and the proliferating of gadgets, and I understand that for some of them the phrase "p.o.b," meaning print-oriented bastard, has replaced s.o.b. as a term of abuse. It seems to me that this view is not so much wrong as perverted, the exact opposite of what is true. The difference between the linear and the simultaneous is not a difference between two kinds of media, but a difference between two mental operations within all media. There is always a linear response followed by a simultaneous one, whatever the medium. For words there is the participating response of turning the pages of a book, following the trail of words from top left to bottom right, or listening in a theatre or before a radio. This response is precritical, and is followed by the real critical response. This latter is the "simultaneous" response which reacts to the whole of what has been presented. In looking at a picture there is a preliminary dance of the eye before we take in the whole picture; in reading a newspaper there are two preliminary operations: the glance over the headlines and the consecutive reading of a story. Pictures and written literature give us a spatial focus, a kind of projected total recall, to contain the experience. When the communication simply takes place in time and disappears, there has been a purely linear experience which can only be repeated or forgotten. In verbal communication the document, the written or printed record, is the technical device that makes the critical or simultaneous response possible. The document is the model of all real teaching, because it is infinitely patient: it repeats the same words however often one consults it. The spatial focus it provides makes it possible to return to the experience, a repetition of the kind that underlies all genuine education. The document is also the focus of a community, the community of readers, and while this community may be restricted to one group for centuries, its natural tendency is to expand over the community as a whole. Thus it is only writing that makes democracy technically possible. It is significant that our symbolic term for a tyrant is "dictator": that is, an uninterrupted speaker. The most vivid portrayal of an oral society I know is in the opening of Paradise Lost. Satan is a rhetorician, an orator, a dictator; for his use of words, everything depends on the immediate mood, where one can express agreement or disagreement only by shouting. The devils are being trained to become oracles, whispering or commanding voices telling man how to act and think. They are also being trained to forget, to cut their links with their past and face the present moment. Eventually

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they adjourn for a cabinet meeting, for a preliterate society cannot get politically past the stage of a closed council with its oral deliberations. It is true that when we come to heaven there is another harangue and another listening audience. But there is one important difference: God is thinking of writing a book, and is outlining the plot to the angels. The domination of print in Western society, then, has not simply made possible the technical and engineering efficiency of that society, as McLuhan emphasizes. It has also created all the conditions of freedom within that society: democratic government, universal education, tolerance of dissent, and (because the book individualizes its audience) the sense of the importance of privacy, leisure, and freedom of movement. What the oral media have brought in is, by itself, anarchist in its social affinities. It has often been pointed out that the electronic media revive many of the primitive and tribal conditions of a preliterate culture, but there is no fate in such matters, no necessity to go around the circle of history again. Democracy and book culture are interdependent, and the rise of oral and visual media represents, not a new order to adjust to, but a subordinate order to be contained.4

21

The Renaissance of Books 15 November 1973

From Visible Language, 8, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 225-40. Reprinted with two small omissions in SM, 49-65. A note in Visible Language explained that "This essay was originally prepared as an address to the Ferguson Seminar on Publishing, held on the campus of the College of William and Mary [in Williamsburg, Virginia], November 15 and 16,1973." It is in some respects a reply to George Steiner's article "After the Book?" in Visible Language (Summer 1972), which was also originally delivered as a Ferguson Seminar lecture. The Ferguson Seminars were conceived by William Cross Ferguson, former president of the World Book Company and director and treasurer of the American Textbook Publishers Institute, who before his death in 1967 set in motion the establishment of an endowment for "a seminar in publishing ... devoted to the writing, editing, designing, printing, and marketing of books." At this date, it is clear that Frye's article is at once a uniquely personal effort in "the history of the book" an important analysis of the cultural authority enjoyed by the print medium, and a retrospective episode in his own intellectual autobiography. A carbon copy of the article in NFF, 1988, box 4, file hh lists some pencilled corrections, and strikes out "or even Iris Murdoch" from the list of contemporary novelists who, like Vonnegut and Pynchon, have moved to antirealist modes. NFF, 1988, box 60, file 6 contains the abstract Frye composed for the article, a document that further clarifies his disagreement with McLuhan. In it, Frye emphasizes that his concern is with the unique position of the book "among the instruments of communication in modern society," a uniqueness he credits to its existence as "a stationary focus for the community." This file also contains Frye's response to Norman Fiering about suggested revisions to the article.

I suppose one may spend one's whole life with books, without thinking particularly about the different kinds of emotional impact that books

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may have, not only because of what they are, but because of what they symbolize or dramatize in society. I can trace in my own earlier life several kinds of such symbolic influence. There had been a clergyman in our family, and the bookcases in our house included several shelves of portly theological tomes in black bindings. These were professional books, of course, and their equivalents would have been, and still would be, found in other such homes. But on a child they gave an effect of immense and definitive authority, of summing up the learning and wisdom of the ages. They appealed to that primitive area of response before reading was a general skill in society, when "gramarye" meant magic, when there were few Prosperos and many Calibans to say of them: Remember First to possess his books; for without them He's but a sot, as I am; nor hath not One spirit to command.... Burn but his books. [The Tempest, 3.2.91-5]

And yet when I was old enough to begin to try to use these books myself, I became aware of another important principle connected with books: the principle of the mortality of knowledge. Apart from two which I am still using, a Cruden's Concordance to the Bible and a Josephus, there was hardly a statement in any of these volumes which had not become demonstrably false, meaningless, or obsolete. I remember opening a huge commentary on the first page, the introduction to Genesis, and reading there: "Nothing is more certain than that this book was written by Moses." Alas, I already knew that if there was one thing more uncertain than the authorship of Genesis, it was the existence of Moses. The black bindings were appropriate: the books were coffins of dead knowledge. Their impressiveness as physical objects was grotesquely inconsistent with the speed at which scholarship moves, and it was clear that books ought to have a very different sort of appearance if they are to symbolize the fact that genuine knowledge is always in a state of flux. In the same house there were sets of Scott and Dickens, and sets of lesser writers as well, for in those days even a bestselling novelist with a temporary vogue might achieve a collected edition in twenty volumes. There were also poets—Elizabeth Browning, Longfellow, Whittier— bound up in some repulsive substance that at the least hint of sustained use began to split, crack, and come off on the fingers. Sinclair Lewis in Main Street refers to the "unread-looking sets" of authors in the homes

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of Gopher Prairie,1 and doubtless many such sets were unread. But being read may not have been their only, perhaps not even their primary, social function. I still possess a set of The World's Best Essays, bound in red leather and illustrated by steel engraving portraits of the authors. I hesitate to give it away, because it really is an extraordinary collection: I could hardly have believed that so much of Baudelaire,2 for example, was so available to North American homes around 1910. But the physical conditions of the set make it difficult to read, and almost impossible to use. I am not trying to characterize the reading habits, or nonreading habits, of an earlier generation: I am trying to illustrate the symbolic impact of certain types of books in middle-class households up to about 1920. As physical objects, such books assumed the role of a cultural monument, representatives of the authority of tradition. They are well evoked in an early poem of T.S. Eliot: Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law. [Cousin Nancy, 11.11-13]

However, this poem is also about a girl who smoked and danced the modern dances, implying that even Matthew and Waldo may not have been altogether with it, at least not in that physical form. The word "glazen," meaning, of course, that they were in formally designed bookcases with glass covers, indicates that, whether they were read or not, being looked at when they were not being read was an integral part of their function and value. I went to Toronto for my university training, and Toronto, in the 19305, still had a good deal of the British midland town about it, including a number of second-hand bookshops. Here was a quite different kind of emotional appeal connected with books. I should put this statement in the plural, for many emotions clustered around the second-hand bookshop. One was the emotion of nostalgia, on finding the favourite books of one's earlier life. Alexander Woollcott has an essay about a woman who discovered on a Paris bookstall the identical copy of a book she had possessed as a child: he speaks of this experience as "catching nature in the act of rhyming."3 Then there was the reflection on the vanity of human wishes, in coming, say, upon a book by an unknown author with a sad little inscription on the flyleaf presenting it to a friend. More central, of

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course, was the excitement of the treasure hunt. This could be literal and commercial, the rare exhilaration of carrying out from under the bookseller's nose something that was more valuable than he realized. But that was for experts: as a rule, one was content with the feeling that the book itself might be a hidden treasure, an unlocked word-hoard. This feeling, however often disappointed, is quite as primitive and essential as the impression of magical authority, already mentioned. Such shops have now largely disappeared from Toronto, as from other cities: even the forlorn books that used to go the rounds of church rummage sales have been bought up by librarians of new universities, at least in enough quantity to remove them from the orbit of the book-searcher's interest. The second-hand bookshop however represents something irreplaceable in one's literary experience, and it is bound to revive sooner or later, if only as an aspect of the junk-antique business. I was in London, on my way to Oxford as a student, when Penguins began to appear. At that time they were sixpence apiece, and could be got out of slot machines. They were aggressively advertised, at least for British mores at that time: I remember an advertisement contrasting a new Penguin with a battered and dog-eared copy of a book from a public library, with the caption: "You don't know who had it last."4 I did realize that this reflection on public libraries had some social significance, the public libraries being so major an influence on the book market throughout the nineteenth century, able to exert collateral forms of pressure like censorship. But I did not realize that I was seeing the birth of something like a revolution. After all, why should it have been one? Why should putting out books in brightly coloured soft covers, with the pages glued instead of sewn, be an important cultural change? It is surely not comparable with other physical changes in the history of the verbal arts, such as the change from scroll to codex around the beginning of the Christian era, to say nothing of the invention of the printing press itself. The reason, I think, is once again the fact that books are significant not only for what they are but for what they dramatize or symbolize in society by their appearance. The paperback was partly a reaction to the book as cultural monument, and by being that it helped to dramatize the importance of the book as an intellectual tool. It suggested a higher degree of expendability, and so acknowledged the mutability of scholarship and literary taste. The psychological effect of studying such a work as Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind in paperback seems to me to be quite

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different from studying the same book in a hard cover. And by dramatizing the book as intellectual tool, the paperback also dramatized the extraordinary effectiveness of the book, the fact that, familiar and unobtrusive as it is, the book is one of the most efficient technological instruments ever developed in human history. There are signs, naturally enough, that the paperback vogue is waning and that it will come to dominate the book world less exclusively in the future. One has to see it in its proper context, as one of several revolutions in verbal media. Others are the development of photocopying and the immense growth of facsimile reprints: I should add to this also what seems to me to be an unprecedented increase in the volume and range of translation. All these are part of the same cultural expansion that has produced reproductions in paintings and recordings of music, and like them they have greatly expanded the range of possible influence on contemporary culture. Just as any freshman in a conservatory may learn from records more about pre-Mozartian music than Mozart himself ever knew, so any student in a small college may have access, potentially, to a range of materials formerly available only in the biggest libraries. Even when books are produced in the scale and size of the cultural monument, they show the effects of these revolutions. An example is the type of book usually called, rather deprecatingly, the coffee-table book. This is normally a collection of photographs of pictures or buildings, and is designed, not to stand on shelves with an army of unalterable law, but to lie down enticingly and alone, like a mistress. Paperbacks and photocopied materials reflect also a major change in the academic perspective. As an undergraduate I was taught philosophy by G.S. Brett, a scholar greatly admired by his students, and most deservedly so, for his vast learning. He was the author of a History of Psychology, still a standard work on the subject; he had no degree except an Oxford M.A., and was Dean of the Graduate School, a task he took with little seriousness because he thought graduate research was mostly a lot of nonsense. He represented a generation of scholars whose life work was expressed by a single major book, or a very restricted canon of such books.5 But even in his last teaching years, the cataract of papers, offprints, and other manifestations of the publish-or-perish fetish in academic life had begun, as a part of the cultural change of which the paperback and the reprint are other symbols. Philosophers like AJ. Ayer began mounting attacks on metaphysics,6 partly, I think, because metaphysics represented the structural aspect of philosophy,

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the aspect which made large books possible. In their wake came the "productive scholars" of a new school, who tended to be suspicious of all books that were not collections of brief papers. Robert Musil, in The Man without Qualities, surveys the situation with his usual doubleedged irony: Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by means of locking it up in a system. Probably that is also the reason why there have been great philosophic minds in times of tyranny, whereas times of advanced civilization and democracy do not succeed in producing a convincing philosophy, at least so far as one can judge from the lamentations one commonly hears on the subject. That is why nowadays there is a terrifying amount of philosophizing done in small slices. . . . There is, on the other hand, a definite mistrust of philosophy in large chunks, which is simply considered impossible.7

I have always been very touched by the preface to the third and last volume of Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology. This was a work on which Tillich had spent many years, because, he says, he had always wanted to write a systematic theology. I can think of no better reason for writing anything, but the ambition itself was typical of a certain period of culture. By the time he reached his last volume the fashion in theology had changed, the younger intellectuals had turned to much more simplistic versions of existentialism than the one that he held, and he was being told on all sides that the phrase "systematic theology" no longer made any sense, in fact was a contradiction in terms. Similar changes naturally affected literature itself, especially poetry, which up to about 1950 symbolized a good deal of cultural authority whether it was read or not. When we speak of such nineteenth-century poets as Longfellow as "popular," we are using the term in a somewhat retrospective sense: Longfellow was widely read, but he was also a scholarly poet, and most of those who read him felt that they were engaging in a fairly highbrow enterprise. Even writers of inspirational doggerel might be regarded, on a popular level, with the kind of awe implied in another phrase from Lewis's Main Street: "they say he writes real poetry."8 The great poets of the first half of this century—Eliot, Yeats, Pound—had the somewhat aloof authority conferred by their erudition, even though they often felt the pull of the desire to be genu-

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inely popular. We have the Eliot of Sanskrit quotations and the Eliot of practical cats; we have the Yeats of Rosicrucian symbolism and the Yeats of the luminously simple ballads in the Last Poems. Allen Ginsberg's Howl is usually taken as the turning point towards a neo-Romantic poetry which has been popular in a way hardly known to previous generations. Much of this poetry has turned back to the primitive oral tradition of folk song, with the formulaic units, topical allusions, musical accompaniment, and public presentation that go with that tradition. The changes in prose fiction are even more significant from our present point of view. In Canada, as in many other communities, there lingered for a long time the myth of "the great Canadian novel," the hope that somebody some day would produce a novel in Canada as monumental as War and Peace. The word "the" implies that whoever did it would do it only once, but, even so, the achievement would have a redemptive force for the whole Canadian community: the authority of such a work would confer authority on the society that produced it. This means, among other things, that a monumental novel reflects a relatively coherent social order, as the Victorian three-decker, the book one could live inside of, manifested the prestige of Victorian society. Even Tolstoy's Russia, despite our hindsight, afforded a good deal of stability to the novelist of this kind. Hence the most highly regarded novels, in the period up to say 1940, were predominantly realistic, for realism had the dignity and the moral force that goes with the ability to study and interpret a civilization. Such realism was central to what F.R. Lea vis calls "the great tradition," which he studies, in a book with that title, in George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. However, when empires start building walls around themselves it is a sign that their power is declining, and "the great tradition" is now not much more than a tradition. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings came out in the mid-1950s, to the accompaniment of a chorus of readers saying "of course I can't read fantasy," usually with an air of conscious virtue. The success of Tolkien's book, however, indicated a change of taste parallel to the post-Ginsberg change in poetry, towards the romantic, the fantastic, and the mythopoeic. Science fiction, which is really a form of philosophical romance, has taken on a new importance, and the mythical elements in Pynchon or Vonnegut do not revolve around a realistic centre, as they do in Ulysses. Romance, fantasy, and mythopoeia are the inescapable forms for a society which no longer believes in its own permanence or continuity. I know several writers who acquired early in life

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an intense desire to be novelists of the "great tradition" type: they are dedicated and highly intelligent people, but they find heart-breaking difficulties in getting published, and when they are published suffer from a feeling that the parade is now going down some other street. One curious feature of the realistic development of prose fiction, from Don Quixote down to the last generation, is that it so frequently took the form of a parody of romance formulas. This is explicit in Don Quixote itself, but many other novels, Joseph Andrews, Northanger Abbey, The Eustace Diamonds, even Waverley, began as parodies of well-known types of romance. In Jane Austen's other novels the realistic study of character and setting is related, somewhat quizzically, to a romantic story with a conventional happy ending, and in the later novels of Dickens a great pageant of vividly "lifelike" characters move within a melodramatic plot so incongruous with them as to be almost an anti-narrative. We notice that characters confused by romantic values—Emma Bovary, Lord Jim, Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer—often occupy the central place in a realistic narrative. There seems something inherently paradoxical about the structure of a genre of literature that avowedly imitates life. The reason is not really so hard to grasp. Life has no shape; literature has. A realistic story must get its shape from somewhere, and ultimately the only place it can get it from is romance, a form of fiction in which the story is told for its own sake. The change of taste in favour of the romantic and mythopoeic in fiction, therefore, is parallel to the movement away from representation in painting. Fantasy presents the reader with the kind of situations that occur only in stories: it belongs to a conception of literature as a selfcontained and autonomous art. But literature, as long as it uses words, can never be as purely abstract as painting or music, and a more farreaching principle still is involved. Modern criticism, as such, begins with Oscar Wilde's dialogue, The Decay of Lying, the main object of which is to point out the shortcomings of any kind of literature that accepts the obligation to imitate "nature," or "real life." The speakers in Wilde refer to Charles Reade, who wrote one outstanding romance, The Cloister and the Hearth, followed by a number of inferior realistic stories, as an example of the fact that the popular notion of the greater weight and dignity of realism can often mislead a writer. They also say that Romola is a better novel than Daniel Deronda, not a statement that many admirers of George Eliot would accept, but again expressing a preference for romance over realism. Again:

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M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.9

Literature, we are told, does not necessarily gain in seriousness or value when it imitates nature or real life, but nature and real life do gain in seriousness or value when they imitate literature, that is, when something like a literary shape can be discerned in their chaotic phenomena. Wilde's argument is presented as a good-humoured paradox, but for us to go on thinking of it as one is living in the past: it expresses a simple truth reflected in many aspects of our cultural situation, especially from the mid-1950s to our own day. The principle of life imitating literature explains why the growth of fantasy and mythopoeia in fiction is accompanied by such works as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night,10 which are not realistic fiction but are documentary reports on events that seem to have in themselves a narrative shape. In some films the boundary line between imaginative artefact and documentary is even more difficult to find, the former often being disguised as the latter. This development is important in the growth of the communication media that have the social function of stabilizing the nonreading public. The nonreading public includes, of course, the reading public whenever it is not reading. But it also includes the very large group of people who cannot get a sufficiently vivid stimulus from the printed word to rely much on it for their imaginative participation in society. This group has finally settled mainly on television, to which films, radio, and picture magazines have all become subordinated. All these media are concerned with news and commentary as well as entertainment, and the principle of life imitating literature is present in both aspects. Our waking existence is a continuum: sleep and dreams have beginnings and ends, but when we wake up again we rejoin the continuum. Our lives also begin and end with birth and death, but birth and death, both of which are often described in terms of sleep or dream, respectively attach us to and drop us off the unending continuum of the living, the dead, and the unborn, in Edmund Burke's phrase.11 The function of the news media is to present a verbal imitation of this continuum, and television is the most efficient of all the media at doing so. Ritual is one means of keeping the continuum punctuated: we dramatize the stages when we join it or leave it or make a major change in our relation to it. News, in the

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stricter sense, is whatever breaks into the continuum, which is why so much news consists of disaster, and why all disaster is news. But besides the images of breaking, air crashes and the like, there are images of confrontation. Intellectual news, or the discussion of "issues," consists very largely of a polarizing of attitudes, for and against, which is why news media are so fascinated by the conception of the "controversial." In the "issue" the continuum appears to stop for an instant and focus on a simultaneous vertical contrasting of opposed attitudes. Television is consequently most effective when it presents such rituals as public weddings and funerals, or the ritualized confrontations of football and hockey games, and it presents "issues" in the same polarized way. Such direct pro-and-con opposition, with all neutral or middle ground eliminated, is also what the revolutionary aims at: the revolutionary strives for situations in which everyone opposed to his group can be equally characterized as "counter-revolutionary." Hence the treatment of issues in democratic mass media consists very largely of a kind of unconscious and undirected revolutionary strategy. The time when the impact of television really hit American society, in the later 19605, produced exactly this kind of undirected revolutionary confrontation, in student demonstrations and the like, which achieved practically nothing of any real social importance and stopped as suddenly as it began. This combination of ritual, game, and polarized issue brings into television a quality of literary imitation, a "story line" with a beginning, a prescribed direction, and a conclusion. The three elements are most completely merged in the great public trial or investigation scenes, where ritual, game, and the polarizing dialectic of legal prosecution and defence are all most fully employed. The Watergate sequence belongs to the same quasi-literary genre as the Joseph McCarthy hearings of the 19508: evidently a modern society needs a continuous supply of such dramas if the imitation of literature by life is to be kept at its most effective pitch. And unless life takes on something of the shaped quality of a literary structure it will not be deeply interesting to watch. For, as indicated above, it is by our imaginations, the mental response we make to literature, that we primarily participate in society. By itself, of course, this imitation of literature by the news media could become a very sinister tendency. There is no difference between Watergate and the Stalin purge trials of the 19305 so far as the genre being employed is concerned.12 Besides, moral issues are not related to

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literature in the same way that they are related to actual life. We ask an actor to put on a good show, not to tell the truth, and when, say, a senator remarks approvingly that the president was very "believable" in his last interview, he reflects the confusion of standards. Such a confusion returns us to the Machiavellian principle of pure appearance, the basis of what we now call propaganda. It is not important that the prince should be virtuous; it is important only that he should seem so. Such an attitude is imaginative in a perverted sense. Literature is phenomenal: it presents reality entirely through appearance, but in "real life" what is "real" is normally hidden or disguised by the appearance. In trying to get out of the bind that this imitation of literature by life gets us into, we have to return to the book, or at least to the verbal documents of which books form a major part. Newspapers and the electronic media have carried much further a tendency which was begun by the book: the tendency to break down the distinction between private and social experience. It always was true that poetry, for example, could never become the exclusive possession of one person in the way that an easel painting could be. Wherever there is a literature, there is a community of shared imaginative experience; and yet, wherever there are books, there is the opposite tendency of individualizing the audience. When society still contained a number of illiterates, or habitual nonreaders, a village community, say, would form around a man who could read aloud to them the news, or what passed for news, and current literature. A certain amount of Richardson in the eighteenth century, even of Dickens in the nineteenth, was transmitted in this way. But of course in proportion as the ability to read increased, the audience of hearers decreased. In Elizabethan times there were several popular theatres, but the fateful action taken by Ben Jonson in 1616, of publishing his plays in a book, and so suggesting that one could stay home to read the play instead of risking catching the plague in an audience, began an erosion of the public theatre that by Victorian times had threatened to remove drama from serious literature altogether. Similarly with religion: although Protestants insisted on public attendance at church as strongly as Catholics, their simultaneous insistence on the supreme authority of a sacred book did much to advance the decay of church attendance which is still with us. The concert hall has met similar difficulties with the recording of music. In the age of television it is a common experience to attend a public function and then go home to get on television a more comprehensive and comprehensible view of what

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one has just been engaged in. So what is the comparative value of the two experiences? Traditionally, the individual is thought of as having a primary duty to support the institutions of society. The permanence and continuity of church, court, lawcourt, political party, classroom, even, in lesser degree, of theatre and concert hall and museum, give dignity and importance to the individual's life by representing something older and longer lasting than he is. Hence the feeling of obligation about many forms of public attendance. The kind of development we have been tracing, from the earliest books to television, reverses this tendency by increasing the range of private life. It is significant again that the impact of television in the late 19605 carried with it a cult of nearly anarchic individualism. Yet the individual, qua individual, can hardly get much beyond the spectacular perspective on public life which makes it potentially a series of theatrical events. There must be some other form of activity that enables us to get closer to what underlies these spectacular representations. The permanence of social institutions is often symbolized by public monuments, buildings, statues, and the like, built for the astonishment of posterity out of stone or metal. There is of course a lurking irony in such productions of the kind crystallized in Shelley's Ozymandias sonnet: anything that can be set up can be knocked down, and doubtless will be sooner or later. The history of verbal documents is rather different, even though they too can become monumental, as we saw. There is a dramatic episode in the Book of Jeremiah, in the Old Testament, where Jeremiah's secretary Jehudi is reading from the prophet's scroll, to the king, a prophecy consisting largely of denunciations of the royal policy. At the end of every paragraph or so the exasperated king cuts off the read portion of the scroll with a knife and throws it into the fire [Jeremiah 36:20-32]. This must have been a papyrus scroll: parchment or vellum, besides being probably beyond the prophet's financial means, would have been tough enough to spoil the king's gesture. The king's palace disappeared totally in a few years, but the Book of Jeremiah, entrusted to the most fragile and combustible substance produced in the ancient world, remains in reasonably good shape. The vitality of words written on papyrus, as compared with the hugest monuments of perennial brass, has perhaps some analogy to the fact that life, precarious and easily snuffed out as it is, is still at least as strong a force as death. In our own civilization, as explained earlier, information changes

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quickly and needs more fluid media, and paperbacks, talked and taped books, interview books, printouts, microfiche, and documents coded for feeding into computers are all parts of the result. So are the great mountains of photocopied papers, which among other things have thrown the copyright law into a complete chaos. But by doing so, photocopied materials have illustrated the importance of a moral issue connected with the verbal arts which is even more important than copyright. In a primitive society, where there is no general dissemination of the ability to read or write, the poet becomes the teacher of the community. The reason is that a society without writing depends a great deal on memory, and the poet is better able to remember than other men because he can hitch things into verse, and verse is easier to remember than any prose arrangement of words. In such a society there is of course no sense of the poet's having exclusive possession of his material, any more than any other teacher would have. Later, the conception of literature develops as a body of great traditional themes held in common. Chaucer, Shakespeare, the writers of Greek tragedy, all draw their materials from well-known sources, and their assumption is: this story may have often been told, but I'm telling it better, so you won't need to refer to any other versions except mine. Gradually literature became assimilated to the conditions of the capitalistic market: the individual author's work had to be sufficiently distinct for him to patent it and prevent others from appropriating it. The right of an individual author to benefit from the marketing of his work is of course an unquestioned moral principle, and is likely to remain one. Still, copyright, or the private possession of literary work for the purposes of making a living from it, is not the primary moral principle connected with literature, or the verbal arts generally. That primary principle is rather the principle of public access to the work. I think once more of the Old Testament. We are told that during the repairing of the Temple in Jerusalem, a "book of the law" was discovered and brought to King Josiah: And . .. when the king had heard the words of the book of the law,... he rent his clothes. And the king commanded . . . saying, Go ye, enquire of the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that is found; for great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book. [2 Kings 22:11-13]

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What is significant here is the king's conviction that it was a matter of the utmost importance for the community as a whole to know what was in a written document. Naturally the first categories of verbal documents that need to be publicly known are the laws, so it is not surprising that a book of the law should first be open to public inspection. Most scholars think that the book thus discovered was, or was closely connected with, the existing book of Deuteronomy, which in the present arrangement of books looks like a supplement to or repetition of the law, as its name indicates. But it seems more likely that Deuteronomy was the kernel of the conception of a sacred book, out of which the whole Bible eventually grew. What was new was the feeling that this sacred book should be known by the whole community instead of being locked away among temple records. We see history in the process of turning a corner here, making a decisive and permanent change in human conditions. In such an event as the Protestant Reformation, two thousand years later, we can see how important still for the future was the insistence on the general accessibility of the acknowledged sacred book. This leads to a much more far-ranging general principle, one that has been expounded by the Canadian scholar Harold A. Innis in such works as The Bias of Communication. Control of communications is one of the primary aims of an ascendant class: whatever tends toward democracy must have, as one of its primary aims, the openness and sharing of communications. This principle goes along with another one, that the more fully a communications medium is concentrated on the passing show, on recording events as they occur, the more it tends to become a one-way street of messages in which the ordinary consumer has a passive role. In our day radio and television tend naturally to become monologues of this kind, despite the efforts made through cable and open-line programs to give the consumer a chance to talk back to his set. The electronic media are in any case so set up that, given a revolutionary situation, it is relatively easy for the group in power to seize control of them. Wherever there are dictatorships, the radio is the main instrument of expression: it is, in fact, highly significant that everything we regard as antidemocratic should be summed up by the word "dictator," that is, an uninterrupted speaker, who can expatiate for five hours on the glories of his regime and have the same speech bellowing from every street corner. Television is sometimes thought to be a "cooler" medium, but it isn't: we may

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compare the role of the "telescreen" in Orwell's 1984. In the democracies, of course, radio and television reflect the economic anxieties of selling and making profits through consumer goods rather than the political anxieties of censorship and thought control, but the cultural consequences have many parallels. Newspapers also become one-way streets in proportion to their preoccupation with headlines and deadlines: however, the competition of television is now forcing them to become something more like journals of opinion. Even Time, the most dictatorial of all journals, was recently startled by Watergate into producing an editorial. In this situation it seems clear that, however important it may be to have a "free press" and extend the principle of that freedom to radio and television as well, the main battles of freedom are not fought on the news front. They are fought further back, in an area where issues have acquired some temporal dimension and some historical context. If it were really true, as McLuhan and others have urged, that print is a "linear" medium, carrying the eye forward and hypnotizing all responses except the purely visual one of reading, there would be no difference between print and any other medium. But this thesis confuses the reading process with the consulting process, and overlooks the fact that print has a unique power of staying around to be read again, presenting, with unparalleled patience, the same words again however often it is consulted. It is therefore public access to printed and written documents that is the primary safeguard of an open society. We notice how drastic the alteration of the degree of freedom in society is when we are at war and a large group of documents have to be treated as "top secret," thereby inculcating a facile habit of secrecy which carries on into peacetime. We said earlier that there is no difference between Watergate and the Stalin purge trials of the 19305 so far as the genre is concerned: open inspection of the relevant documents is one of the major moral distinctions between them, one quite as important as the physical treatment of the witnesses. The relevant documents are, of course, difficult to interpret, and in raw form are as esoteric to most people as though they were locked up. We are brought back to the book, more particularly the book which is an expository treatise, as the ordinary means of expressing and understanding the general conflict of opinion in society, so far as that opinion is not simply a snap response to current events but a sustained and supported argument. The written expository treatise looks at first sight like

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a dictatorial monologue, but this is a misunderstanding. Nothing of the hypnotic rhetoric of speech to a present audience is left in it: the author is forced, by the nature of his medium, to put all his cards on the table, to take his reader into his confidence, to appeal to nothing but the evidence of the argument itself. And so, however often it may fail in meeting the standards prescribed by its own physical shape, the expository or thesis-book remains the normal unit of impersonal social vision, and the normal medium by which communication draws us together into a community. Now that society, after some years of reeling from the impact of television, is beginning to bring it under control, we can see more clearly that the book is the chief technological device that makes democracy and the open society continuously possible.

22

Violence and Television 26 August 1975

The"Summation" from the book Symposium on Television Violence/Colloque sur la violence a la television (Ottawa: Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, 1976), 206-15; French translation, 215-26. Reprinted as "Violence and Television" in RW, 3*53-73. Partially reprinted in French as "La violence a la television est un phenomene actuel que nous ne pouvons eviter" in Le Devoir, 11 October 1975, 13. Frye's remarks were originally presented at the Symposium on Television Violence at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 24-26 August 1975. Frye was the president of this symposium, convened by the research department of the CRTC and attended by experts from all over North America. Its aim was to understand "the technical, economic, and creative logic of cultural production and diffusion in broadcasting," according to a document of conference objectives prepared by the CRTC and available in NFF, 1988, box 76, file 5. This file also contains a transcript of the summary of the presentation Frye made at the symposium and there are variations, of varying significance, between the text here and "the memorable talk" he delivered on the occasion. Memorable or not, Frye called for the organizers to send him all the materials relating to the symposium, and appears to have revised very carefully: the most interesting variations between the talk and the printed essay have been included in the endnotes. One of the chief differences is that, over and over, the typescript seems to hammer home the educational duties of the broadcaster, where the published summary works more indirectly to the same end. Citations in the notes to other papers delivered at the symposium will be in the form Symposium, followed by page numbers.

The problem of violence is a problem without boundaries, and it expands indefinitely into the human situation. Of other major problems

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confronting us, those of ecology, the energy crisis, the curtailing of natural resources, the exterminating of animal and plant species, are the result of inheriting several centuries of systematic violence against nature. As for human society, violence is built into that on various levels. Wherever there are great inequalities of wealth and privilege, there is at least indirect violence, and the tremendous productivity of the United States, the major part of the North American civilization to which we belong, has been built up by a social activity that has included slavery, lynchings, the bad men of the Wild West, free fights with eyes gouged out, beatings of union organizers, and the more carefully legalized violence of the "robber barons" who built up such immense fortunes, some of which have become charitable foundations subsidizing studies in violence. In an expanding society like nineteenth-century America, violence flourished on the social or economic frontier; as the continent became socially consolidated, much of this violence was forced underground and became increasingly antisocial. Apart from outright crime, which is now a business like any other, there are many activities which are still legal but are morally wrong. When a broadcaster and a sponsor conspire to produce a socially irresponsible program, that is in itself a violent situation, and has to be recognized as such. In Canada, where we began with a military conquest and held down the northwest by a police force, most of the violence has been repressive, or law-and-order, violence. That is one reason why Canadian-produced television is quieter than American television, and why we take regulatory bodies like the CRTC so much for granted. I am somewhat disturbed by the fact that the opposite of "violent" seems always to be "nonviolent," as though violence were a positive thing and we had nothing to put against it except a negation. Wherever there is one human being there is a very considerable output of mental and physical energy, and wherever there is more than one human being those energies are going to conflict. It seems to me that violence, as we have been using the word here, is misapplied energy:1 it is to energy what prostitution is to sexual love. As such, it really is a negative force, and controlling violence would be the way to set human energy free for its proper tasks. Controlling violence means, first of all, raising the level of society. The people who produce and sell socially irresponsible programs are thinking of their viewers as a mob rather than a community. The mob is the lowest form of community: it is a completely homogeneous society

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organized for hatred, and will not remain a mob long unless it can find someone to beat up, or, failing that, something to smash. When a television program depicts someone being slowly beaten to death, the primary appeal is, "Look at this: isn't it fun?" As soon as anyone begins to object that this may be a wrong kind of fun, the violence is immediately rationalized, and turns self-righteous. All rationalized violence has much the same argument, the argument behind all fights on school playgrounds: he started it. That is, whenever violence is rationalized it is asserted to be counter-violence. Somebody else did something first, and we have to resist it. That is true of the violence of capital punishment; it is true of the violence of Palestinian terrorists.2 Fictional violence, however, may be rationalized more simply as a refusal to take a positive attitude in a violent world, that is, this is what we're all involved in, whether we like it or not—and so on. But the real reason, as Mr. Kotcheff remarked, is simply lack of imagination:3 depicting violence is easy, quick, and profitable. It is easy partly because violence is a mechanical form of human energy: so mechanical that it can even be quantified or classified as "heavy" or "light." As a mechanical cause producing a mechanical response, violence never accomplishes anything: the pendulum of aggression and counter-aggression simply goes on swinging all through history. To discuss such a question seriously we have to get away from what I think of as the whodunit fallacy. Many people think they are being practical about social problems when they think they have located a cause. We wouldn't have inflation if it weren't for the profit motive in making munitions; and so on. But every such located cause turns out eventually to be one more symptom of the problem, and not a cause at all. Mr. Garth Jowett's paper outlined a history of disapproval of popular arts as causes of a great number of social evils.4 First there were dime novels and penny dreadfuls; then there were movies, then comic books, and now television. One can always find some evidence for such arguments, but the evidence is seldom conclusive because of the "predisposed" element so often mentioned at this conference. Some people are always looking for something to trigger them to violence, and such stimuli are not hard to come by in any society. This is not an argument for dismissing the seriousness of the social effects of violent television programs, as so many of their producers say; it is merely an argument against regarding television violence as the cause of social violence. For as soon as a cause is thought to be located, the next step is "take it away; censor it;

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ban it." This would be a logical inference if the cause diagnosis were sound, but it isn't; there are too many causes. Censorship is itself a violent, or counterviolent, solution: it assumes that you've caught the real villain and are justified in doing what you like to him, which is precisely the fallacy of violence itself. We should be careful, therefore, not to go the way of the past, when our forebears tried to cure alcoholism by the law of Prohibition, or sexual excesses by censoring books.5 One can see in such measures vestiges of middle-class prejudice, and nervousness about what people might do without supervision. Prohibition was partly an attempt to impose a middle-class work ethic on the whole of society; prudery was partly a middle-class reaction to the fact that sex was something available to ordinary people, who really shouldn't be allowed to have it. Such measures turn what could otherwise be quite genuine problems into empty anxiety or pseudo-problems; they always focus on token anxiety symbols, like four-letter words, and they generally end in overcompensation. That is, after a generation of Prohibition North American society has become as boozy a society as the world has ever seen, and after a century or so of the most frantic prudery about sex, it has become—well, you can finish that sentence for yourselves. When newspapermen say that a democracy must have a free press, what they mean is "we want to run this paper ourselves." But behind that there may be a quite genuine belief that running the paper themselves would make for a freer society than external control would do, and the belief may well be right. In any case I sympathize with the low threshold against censorship demonstrated here: some of the liveliest moments of discussion came when someone on a panel would say, "I am entirely opposed to censorship and repressive legislation," and three people would jump up and say, "what do you mean by talking about censorship and repressive legislation?" But not many people are really defending censorship here: Mr. Lawrence says that the CRTC has no power to censor programs, and I for one would not stay on the Commission for ten minutes if I thought it was seeking such powers. Regulations are easy to pass, but equally easy to evade; Mr. Les Brown6 has reminded us of the vast industrial inertia bound up with the status quo, which can make any amount of regulation impotent. The only real justification for violence is self-defence, and of course society has a right to self-defence as well as the individual. But censorship and attempt at regulation are circular, following the dreary round of "how do we prevent

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the growing disrespect for law? Well, pass a law against it." One difficulty here is that the law ultimately can never catch the right people. Even a professional hired killer is less dangerous to society than the man who hires him, and the drug addict who murders in quest of a fix is still less dangerous than the man who controls the heroin supply. There is really no way to circumvent the laborious, frustrating, illogical procedures of democracy. Producers of irresponsible programs, like producers of motor cars which are death traps, will not improve what they are doing, so long as it is profitable, until they are forced to do so by the general pressure of society. Society as a whole includes all the regulatory agencies in government, religious groups, minority groups, groups of concerned citizens, and the people of integrity in the business itself. Any one of these may represent a very partial interest, but out of the whole conflict we get some sense of society as a structure, a society as far as it can get from the homogeneous mob. Something of that was beginning to emerge from the Pastore hearings,7 and I am seeing it emerging from this symposium as well. At the same time, I think nearly everyone here feels that violence on television constitutes a genuine problem, and is not an anxiety or pseudo-problem. It may have some of the characteristics of anxiety problems: there is the same desire to protect the weakest members of the community, which means the children—fifty years ago it would have been women and children—and there is nervousness over the fact that we can't control access to a television set as we can to a public theatre. The authority of parents is all we have to depend on, and in many—perhaps most—North American households that is not good enough. But Mr. Liebert8 and others have, I think, convinced us that something much more tangible than anxiety is involved. It is always possible to say to a social scientist that there may be methodological errors in his research and that he should go back and do some more research, but that's only stalling: the problem exists and it's here. As such, it is primarily an educational problem. By education I mean the structuring of experience that goes on every moment of our waking lives, not merely schooling, which is a very small, though certainly very central, part of education.9 Much of it, further, falls into my own area of literary education. No medium of communication can convey anything directly except sounds, verbal or musical, and images, and the communication of words is as important here as it is anywhere. We have to start with the peculiar characteristics of television as a

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medium, and more particularly as a medium of education. In teaching children one element to be educated is the imagination, the creative and structuring part of the mind. In literature, the imagination is best taught and trained through oral instruction, that is, telling stories, through learning to read and through encouraging children to write and tell their own stories. The stories children themselves tell are often quite ferocious: the fairy tale that ends dispensing poetic justice on all sides is likely to be an adult concoction. But the ferocity doesn't matter so much when it's a part of imaginative development: it's something to watch, but not something to be unduly concerned about. Television, because it presents the visual image directly, is not the best medium for training the imagination: what it is best at is training sensory alertness. That is why it is so influential a medium, and why it so strongly suggests imitation, at least by children and sick or immature adults. Its power to inspire imitation is, of course, the main reason why we're all here. Again, partly because of the way it can enter our lives from within our own homes, the television image has an energy of impact beyond that of any other medium. One could say, and I think M. Basile10 did say, that television is inherently a violent medium, violent by the nature of its own form, apart altogether from its content. The experience of life is a continuity, and news is essentially what breaks into that continuity. That is why so much news consists of disaster, and why all disaster is news. When news breaks into the continuity of life, it sets up a polarity, of safety against danger, security against threat. When the issues of the day become news, the simplest way to deal with them is to polarize them, break them into a for-and-against opposition, create adversary situations of the "hot seat" type, or assimilate controversy to the pattern of an election issue, where the conclusion is to vote for A or for B. Television, at least in communities where there is a round-the-clock supply of programs, is the most continuous medium in history, and forms a counter-world to experience, a world continuously polarized between good and bad, safety and disaster, peace and violence. Hence it is almost irresistibly easy for television to create melodramatic situations, with the good guys arrayed against the bad guys, and so presenting the illusion of a world in a state of constant violence, even though actual life, as Mr. Mohr11 reminds us, sees violence only rarely. Such melodramas even enter the presentation of sports, whether the sporting event is phoney, like the wrestling matches described by Mr. Kotcheff, or genuine, like hockey games.12

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Television emphasizes particularly the "human interest" or dramatic side of events and issues—that is, it puts actual events into dramatic forms. Somebody remarked in the discussion that we depend on the news media to structure the news, and that word "structure" is immensely important in this context. Once we get past the talking head in television, we are instantly in a world of drama, whether we are watching a hockey game or a race riot. I am not competent to enter the controversy over whether there is or is not such a thing as staged film, nor whether Daniel Boorstin is right in speaking of "pseudo-events," or events deliberately created by the news media themselves.131 do not see in any case why such pseudo-events are not also real ones. What I do know is, first, that television illustrates, more vividly than any other medium, the fact that we participate in society dramatically more than we do conceptually; and, second, that on television the structuring of fact is very similar to the structuring of fiction, both falling into much the same dramatic conventions. The educational problem I mentioned earlier resolves itself into one of turning the passive viewer into an active one, and this process should begin as early as possible in childhood. It was Gandhi who discovered that the most effective form of political violence was nonviolence, because nonviolent resistance forces the other side to exhibit violence. But the principle that passivity engenders violence can be applied in ways that would have horrified Gandhi. The passive viewer has to be increasingly stimulated: he gets bored or desensitized quickly, and so there must be a continual escalation of ferocity. Yet even so nothing is really going on, for him: nobody dies, nobody comes alive.14 The television set is a curiously ghostly medium: in our day, if we see ghosts or hear ghostly voices in the air, it means that somebody has left the television on. But the passive viewer's whole world is equally spectral: he cannot distinguish fact from fiction either on the screen or off it. He may see the most terrible event take place on the street before his eyes, but he will not lift a finger even to call the police. Nothing is really happening. This represents a central and frightening problem of violence in itself: a zombie existence in which violence emerges as a desperate effort at identity. Marshall McLuhan's phrase "the medium is the message" has been quoted so often, even at this conference, that it has lost all its meaning, if it ever had any. But another phrase of McLuhan's is much more concrete: he speaks of the need for civil defence against media fallout, which exactly describes what I mean here.15

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In attempting to train children to become active viewers, of television as of the rest of life, our assumption has to be that there is no audience in modern society: we can't afford to have audiences any more. We're all on the stage: each of us has a role to learn and a part to play. One of the roots of this problem is the old gap between the highbrow and the lowbrow, the academic and the popular, the overdetached and the overinvolved, the hypercritical and the uncritical.16 This gap is a socially morbid condition, and everything positive we are trying to do, about violence or any other problem, depends on outgrowing it. The electronic media can help us to outgrow it, I think, but we need other changes. I wish teachers of literature, starting with kindergarten, would understand that what confronts them is the student's whole verbal experience, and that everything we think of as literature is, in that experience, only the visible tip of an iceberg. I was once talking to a grade eight teacher who had given his students the problem of studying the rhetorical devices in television advertising, examining the status symbols offered, distinguishing the flattery from the threats, and seeing what was being referred to in both. The effect on them was so shattering that he thought at first he was working with too young an age-group, but he soon realized that he had struck the level on which their verbal experience was really being affected. They were not too young: on the contrary, any child old enough to be affected by television advertising is also old enough to study its effect on himself. The next step is the study of convention. Literature is made up entirely of conventions. There are no unconventional writers; convention is something that we can never break with: we can only build on it. Mr. Kotcheff's description of the assembling of a "Mannix"17 show is an example of convention on the lowest level: the difference between that and King Lear is a vast difference in degree of subtlety and complexity, but it is not really a difference in kind. But, because fact and fiction are presented in much the same frameworks in television, we have also to study the conventions of news reporting and of the discussing of contemporary issues, along with advertising and the entertainment programs. I am not thinking of this as a debunking operation, designed to make the student feel hostile or superior to television: I simply want him to understand what is going on, as early in life as possible. But, of course, understanding what is going on would also liberate him from the sense of what one of the background papers issued by the Research Branch of the CRTC calls the "intrinsic authenticity" of the medium.18

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A small child knows that he can be hurt, mentally and physically; but it takes him much longer19 to understand that others can be hurt too, and that it matters whether they are or not. In all scenes of violence there is the choice of identifying either with the agent or with the victim of violence.20 The "natural" or easiest tendency is to identify with the agent: this is primarily what is wrong with the wrong kind of television program. The path of genuine education has to go through identification with the victim. In Christianity, as M. Cote remarked,21 the centre of violence is the Crucifixion, and Christians are directed to focus their attention on a victim of mob violence. This would be equally true of Judaism, with its long and terrible history of anti-Semitism; it is also true of Classical culture. Plato's Republic is written around the question of why it is better to suffer than to inflict injustice.22 The focusing of interest on the victim is a common civilizing element in all our major cultural traditions. In literature, the difference between identifying with the agent and with the victim provides a basis for distinguishing what are called melodrama and tragedy. In melodrama we are expected to take the "right" side, to applaud the hero and hiss the villain, it being much more clearly established in melodrama than it ever is in actual life which is which. Melodrama appeals to the element of mob violence in us, the selfrighteous sense that we know the good guys from the bad guys, the "law and order" rationalizations that are growing so rapidly in society today, as the panic engendered by so much crime develops a vigilante complex among us. But it is significant that melodrama is something we don't take very seriously. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a melodrama, and a very instructive one. In this play the villain kidnaps the hero's two sons, and says he will kill them unless the hero chops off his hand and sends it to him. The hero does so—on the stage, of course—but the villain doublecrosses him and kills the sons anyway. However, the hero gets his deposit back: the villain sends him his hand, along with his sons' two heads. Then there is the question of getting all this meat off the stage: the hero takes both heads in one hand by their hair, but finds he hasn't any other hand with which to carry his other hand, if you follow me, and so turns to the heroine, who carries it off in her mouth, because she has had both hands cut off and her tongue cut out in a previous caper. Finally the villain, who is black, is caught and sentenced to be buried alive up to his neck. His response is melodramatically most satisfactory: he wishes only that he had been able to do ten thousand more evil deeds.23

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If a member of Shakespeare's audience were to feel that all this was only a lot of masturbation, and wanted to see something that was for real, he could go over to Tyburn to watch the execution of the latest traitor. The traitor would be hanged, cut down while still conscious, disembowelled, castrated, and finally torn to pieces by horses. The audience would think: what a very bad man to have done such a thing, and how protected and secure we should feel that all this is being done to him. When I speak of concern for the victim of violence I do not mean sentimentality; the punishment of criminals is doubtless an inescapable element of social life. What is wrong is the pleasure in the punishment, or in any act of violence whatever. What we call tragedy in literature is usually an action in which an agent of violence becomes a victim of it. As a victim, we look at his fate with concern, though not always necessarily with sympathy: we may feel sorry for Romeo and Juliet, but our feelings about Macbeth are different. The audience of a tragedy accepts violence as a fact of life: we are not living in the garden of Eden, and violence is one of the things that are always happening. When we see it happen, our view of it is detached, but not indifferent; concerned, but not weakly sentimental. This attitude of detached concern is what is meant in literature by catharsis.24 Catharsis does not mean working off aggressive feelings by watching violent television programs: it means that when we see violence, violent emotions are aroused in us, and that a fully mature response passes through and beyond these violent emotions, reaching a point at which we accept the reality of what is presented to us, but accept it with neither approval nor panic. This is the attitude, surely, that the active viewer should take to all the violence reflected on his television set. At this point, perhaps, we may see what a profoundly civilizing force television could be, and potentially is. All new inventions are apt to come first as social headaches, and it takes a while before their real usefulness is understood. In my younger days, in the '305 of this century, I was often shocked and disgusted at the callousness with which intellectuals could rationalize or dismiss so many of the most horrifying events of our times, such as the great Stalin massacres and deportations, whenever such events did not happen to fit their political categories. Their infantilism was connected with their being entirely men of print: they never saw anything except lines of type on a page. But something of the real horror and evil of the Vietnam war did get on television, and

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the effect on public opinion was, on the whole, good in the sense that the American public came to hate the war, instead of becoming complacent about or inured to it. In a world like ours, horrifying things will happen practically every day from now into the foreseeable future. Newsmen in all media have a duty to report violence when it occurs; novelists and dramatists have a duty to present imaginative forms of it. For an audience of concerned, serious, active viewers, this is a part of reality, and we can fight violence in the street with better courage and hope if the violence on the screen is on our side.

23

Introduction to Art and Reality 1986

From Art and Reality: A Casebook of Concern, ed. Robin Blaser and Robert Dunham (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986), 1-5. Frye's words introduce a collection of papers given at the Art and Reality Conference at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, 28 April 1983.

The following collection of essays is not so much about art and reality as about art and society. It deals with the perennial question of how the arts, which are seldom if ever popular in their higher manifestations, may be incorporated into society and on what terms. Mr. Irwin, who leads off, says that discussions of reality always turn immediately into discussions of meaning.1 He is on solid philosophical ground here: "reality" is a question-begging word, perhaps not a legitimate philosophical term at all, and we have to find a context for it. Meaning is established by context, and for the arts that means primarily a social context. Nine-tenths of what we call reality is not some ineluctably existing group of objects or conditions "out there": it is rather the rubbish left over from previous human constructs. The modern artist's struggles with the elements of his own art are his private business and in some aspects the business of criticism, but his obvious and public struggles are with a civic environment laid out by developers and the motor car, with bureaucracies staffed by people with a strong tendency to give top priority to holding their own jobs, with a public indoctrinated by mass media gossip. It is not surprising that among the most "realistic" of the contributors to this volume (Fortier, Luft, Hull, Straight) are administrators who have had experience in probing our human environment for relatively soft spots. The main theme discussed, then, is the relation

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of the arts to what M. Germain's lively and witty paper calls "cultural charity."2 Every human society sets up a distinctive form of culture with distinctive assumptions about itself and its relation to the world. In early or primitive societies there is a strong sense of concern, of the importance that everyone should believe or act alike, and either accept the common assumptions of the society or say they do. This kind of concern dominated our own culture during the Middle Ages, and it has revived today in totalitarian states, where the arts are required to be an answering chorus to the political assumptions of those in power. The situation in the Soviet Union and China differs from that in Europe and North America in that the latter societies have a political ideal called "democracy," which is of infinitely greater importance than the economic system as far as cultural life is concerned. Artists in our own society think very little about living under capitalism, and seldom feel any loyalty to capitalism as such: the democratic ideal is what matters. Democracy in the Western world comes at the end of a long process of social maturing, complicating, and pluralizing. After a time a general undifferentiated social concern becomes aware of special bodies of thought and skill forming within it that set up different standards of truth and authority. In the seventeenth century, astronomy began to advance a heliocentric view of the solar system when society as a whole was still concerned to cling to a geocentric one. Such heliocentric supporters as Galileo and Bruno3 became aware of a conflict between two kinds of authority, the authority of society as a whole and the authority of their science, and consequently they also became aware of a conflict of loyalties. It is not so difficult to see this conflict in the sciences, because of the kind of verification that science appeals to. It is more difficult to realize that serious artists and writers also belong to bodies of culture with a distinctive discipline, a distinctive authority, and a distinctive claim on the loyalty of their members (see particularly Irwin and Mays).4 In our day, totalitarian societies simply deny, as a matter of dogma, that literature and the arts have any authority beyond what the concerns of those in power want. In Marxism (I am not speaking of what Marxist intellectuals working in democratic countries may say, but of what Marxism itself does when it comes to power), artists and writers have the social function of promoting socialist ideology; otherwise they become the kind of neurotic, self-indulgent, romantic, etc. artists and writers that infest bourgeois countries.

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Unfortunately we have no theory of the authority of literature and the arts in society either, although artists and writers in democracies clearly accept some assumption of such an authority instinctively, and obviously not purely from self-interest. I should imagine that the basis of any such theory would assume two levels of concern in society. One is a primary level where coherence and agreement is everything: this type of concern, left to itself, would produce a kind of lynching-mob mentality, where any fully-rounded individual, simply by being that, would immediately become a marked-out victim. The other is a secondary level where the society can be studied with some detachment, a detachment which does not mean withdrawal but the capacity to look at one's environment objectively. Social concern does have its own case: environmental pollution, the energy crisis, the atom bomb, all show that a purely laissez-faire attitude to the development of science is pernicious. And there must be some limits for artists and writers as well, though in the absence of a general theory it is hard to say what or where they are. Practically all movements of censorship are simply expressions of mob hysteria, and almost invariably focus on the very people whom genuine social concern should be regarding as allies instead of enemies. In any case the tension between a society and its culture can never be decisive, because the arts and literature have authority but no power, and their authority is clearly not infallible either. But any genuine political guidance in a democratic country has to remain aware of the two levels of social concern. Intellectuals often do not make good politicians, because they form their social visions themselves without waiting for the input of the people they represent. They are aware, in short, only of the upper level of concern, just as the demagogue is aware only of the lower one. It is futile to argue about the importance of the arts in society on grounds that accept the usual popular assumptions about that importance. The basis of all such assumptions is an unshakeable conviction that the arts are something we could do without: we may associate them with something pleasant—beauty, special insight, world peace, or whatever—but as soon as the social mood changes such pleas are gone with the wind.5 We need the solidity of what is here and already established. I regret particularly the small attention given in this book to the role of the university in providing a focus for the counter-environment of culture in a society. The university is specifically dedicated, especially in its liberal arts areas, to fostering the critical sense, the detachment without withdrawal from social concerns, that keeps a democracy functioning.

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Society will enforce compulsory education up to a point, because it needs a sufficiently large number of docile and obedient citizens. We must learn to read in order to read traffic signs, and to count to make out our income tax. But literacy on this level is a passive response and reflex, and all genuine education begins in trying to transform this passivity into an activity. When society demands a "back to basics"6 movement in education, it usually forgets that the "basics" are not bodies of knowledge but skills, and that skills require an immense amount of practice and repetition. Such practice has to come increasingly from the student's own initiative, if teachers can no longer find the time or energy for supervising the amount of practice that every student must produce if he is to learn to read and write actively, reading with comprehension and writing with articulateness. The very interesting papers on technology indicate, I think, that technology can help this situation only in very specialized ways. In music, the old system of composing a piece of music, then scoring it, then trying to get someone to publish it and some musical group to perform it, is intolerably cumbersome and discouraging under present conditions. Technology can do a great deal to simplify and shorten this process, but there is one feature in the development of technology that aggravates educational problems rather than lessening them. Technological development tends to make for increasing introversion in society: the plane is more introverted than the train, the television set more introverted than the theatre. The young people one sees on the streets with headsets clamped over their ears are acting out what was a science fiction nightmare a few years ago. And introversion, of course, increases the gap between social consciousness and the arts which is the real theme of this conference. It is pointed out by several contributors (Lozoya, Watmough, Gagne, and, taking a different approach, Hirsch)7 that while the natural tendency of political and economic developments is to centralize and build up increasingly larger units, the natural tendency of culture is rather to decentralize, as smaller and smaller units of society become more culturally articulate. It is easy to oversimplify this contrast, because the marketing of the arts is an economic activity, and "cultural charity" may assimilate them to a political perspective even if it tries not to do so. But the contrast is there: economic developments tend to turn smaller centres into distributing centres only, and produce among other things the uniform hideousness of ribbon development and the kind of thing we

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drive through on the outskirts of every town. Its cultural developments, especially in architecture, are in themselves apt to develop only a dead and pompous uniformity. Here again the role of the university, as a continuous community specifically set up to dramatize the kind of social life in which the intellect and imagination have a functional place, is hard to overestimate. Without the university and the counter-environment it fosters, art galleries and museums become mainly tourist attractions, with, in Mr. van der Marck's8 tart phrase, Sisyphus9 for their patron saint. Perhaps Third World countries, or some of them, may be more responsive to cultural developments than countries devoted so intensively to the demands of the ugly consumer. Dr. Kirpal's10 paper is one of several that are suggestive on this point, though even UNESCO sometimes gives ominous signs of becoming one more goodwill institution bypassed by history, like the League of Nations.11 In earlier centuries the authority of social concern could be centred in a set of assumptions acceptable to almost everyone in the upper middle classes, to every person of "quality" whose opinion counted. Whatever its failings, and they were obvious enough, such a social structure did to a considerable extent balance the two levels of culture, preventing the primary one from degenerating into a mob and the secondary one from splitting off into an esoteric cult. In the twentieth century hardly anything of this sense of a social norm as a reliable criterion of judgment is left. In the eighteenth century a serious writer could assume a consistently rational reader: both writer and reader could accept certain postulates, and an individual outside that contract—Blake, for example— could be dismissed as an eccentric. Now we feel that if sanity is a social judgment, society has no ability to make such judgments beyond a very limited point. Spokesmen on both American and Russian sides of the armaments race have said that there is no sense in an atomic war, nothing is to be gained by it, and that no rational person would start such a thing. Such statements do not reassure us (see Oglesby, Schafer and others):12 a century that has seen Hitler and Stalin, besides many similar phenomena, knows that too many of the people who seek power within society are insane, and that such insanity is contagious and not isolating. I have referred very briefly and more or less at random to some of the papers that follow, because the reader will soon be reading them for himself. They have much to say about the profound social unease of our time, its confused priorities and its muddled standards, the general incomprehension of the arts, the sense of claustrophobia resulting from

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the absence of any genuine authority. They do not, I think, get to the point of establishing a case for the arts in the contemporary world to present to someone not already alerted to their importance, but they do suggest that the anxiety bred by the lack of such a case may drive us harder in pursuit of one.

Politics, History, and Society

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Pro Patria Mori April 1933

From Acta Victoriana, 57 (April 1933): 31-2. When Frye wrote this article, he was the editor of Acta.

The number of letters received by the editor, including a few contributions, congratulatory and condemnatory, on the result of Victoria's discussion of the Oxford Debate on their relation to King and Country, have made it obvious that the university and its alumni look to Acta for a formulation of the undergraduate attitude.1 At the request of the associate editor, in whose hands this issue is, I shall as a contributor endeavour to bring out the leading indications of the resolution: "That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country." My own reaction to the attitude of our elders and alleged betters, as exemplified by the editorials of our downtown newspapers, one excepted, and the letters of those, including many Vic graduates, who have made such exhibitions of themselves in their columns, will find clearer and more fluent expression through that of a colleague of mine in the following issue. "Abeunt studia in morones," says Mr. Rowland, and I need not gloss the epigram.2 What the motion signified, as I conceive it, was that there is a substantial group at Victoria who are ready to push a desire for peace to its logical and inevitable conclusion of refusing to break peace, and who believe that anything short of direct action in this regard is hypocrisy or moral cowardice. That a concrete statement should meet with such a roar of outraged protest, both here and in England, when the mouthing of pious abstractions in generalized terms meaning, in so far as they meant anything, the same thing, would have been greeted by unctuous

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approval, strikes this group as absurd and vicious. But it should be noted that this group is not setting itself against another which acclaims war as a means for killing off surplus population, a healthy outlet for energy, a developer of the qualities of stern and heroic manhood, and so on. These pretensions it dismisses, and gets down to brass tacks with its real opponents, who admit that war is an unmitigated and purposeless horror, but that as long as the status quo in economics, which implies a periodicity in annihilation wars, is kept alive by Fascist or other forms of dictatorship, there is always danger, and a war of defence probable, for more peaceably-minded nations. Now on strictly defensive grounds the pacifist argument begins to lack conviction. Lytton Strachey may have been inspired, but in sober fact he really dodged the issue.3 There is, of course, no such thing as an enemy. Even in the frenzy of 1914 people were only able to persuade themselves that they really ought to be fighting Germans by inventing an imaginary abstraction of savagery called a "Hun" and saying that this was a typical German.4 But while there are no enemies, any man or group of men who is in our country with hostile intent is a criminal, and has to be treated as such. That is, he must be shot down in cold blood. That this shooting down of a human life is a hideous insensate butchery is quite true, and that fact must be faced with set teeth, both in wartime and in peace. The soldier of another country in our own domain must be as calmly and cynically killed as a noxious insect. That attitude of detached calmness and total lack either of sadism or of patriotic zeal which has been retained by all the invincible military conquerors— Cromwell, Marlborough, Wellington, Napoleon—if adopted by a general populace, would be similarly invincible. As no man of really high intelligence ever goes in for a military career, and as every army is wellknown to be a masterpiece of inefficiency, a military attack, whether Japanese, French, German, or Russian, could not stand up two weeks against a handful of people who were unhurried and unafraid and could keep their heads. The fact that England has always taken her wars so much more casually than France or Germany, due to her insular position, has been the reason for her easy supremacy. But what has the phrase "For King and Country" got to do with such an attitude? A defensive war is fought for the safety of society, and follows the maxim "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" [John 15:13]. King and Country, however, represents a propagandic and deliberately induced hysteria which leads

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people, mad with the last desperation of fear, to calm themselves suddenly and then hurl themselves in front of a Juggernaut with exactly the same fanaticism, in obedience to the high priests of the army and the state. Bright uniforms, a thumping rhythmic music, impassioned speeches from hundreds of recruiting sergeants, including the heads of educational and governmental institutions, blazing posters, a frothing press, all scream the ideal of "King and Country." To say that this is not an appeal to intelligence would be putting it mildly. No state would dare to attempt conscription on the perfectly reasonable excuse that the interests of the nation demanded a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf or some trade concessions in the West Indies. Still less would it appeal to the decency and humanity of individuals, as the maxim quoted above does. This frenzy of what used to be called religious enthusiasm, this courage of the berserk or the priests of Baal [i Kings 18:28-9], is all that King and Country stand for. Even this began to falter under the grim hideousness of the late war, and the expedient was taken of adopting the slogan of a "war to end war."5 Just how much this phrase meant President Wilson6 soon found. War appeals to young men, because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism. That is why the reaction of the press to the attitude of students has been concentrated on emphasizing their youth and immaturity. We will leave psychologists to examine just how much hatred and envy of youth is concentrated in that reaction. We merely point to the fact that the confidence they express in our responding to another war springs, not from an attitude of despairing horror, as it ought, but from one signified by a wide and toothsome grin. Our task just now is to show that "King and Country" represents the screaming of the professional patriot who is a criminal in peace time, and more of a nuisance than a Hindenburg Line7 in war, as any Englishman who had anything to do with the late war can tell you. No Christian objects to dying for his friends, or even for a great cause, as a martyr or witness. But to assume that the call to arms of "Your King and Country need you" is imperative upon the highest ideals of humanity is an insult to the King and a sneer at the Country. Duke et decorum est pro patria mori.8 The propaganda of the war was ample evidence that if the Horatian line as it stands is true, it would be equally true without the pro patria. The abridged form, perhaps, contains all the wisdom of the ages. But no Christian can believe that, and very few non-Christians are ready in cold blood to act upon its logical inference.

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Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian June 1936

From Canadian Forum, 16 (June 1936): 21-2. Reprinted in RW, 277-82. Robert Denham suggests that this essay may have originated in Frye's work for the graduate English course he took during his second year at Emmanuel College. Certainly, editors inflicted major cuts on the essay as it moved from Frye's writing desk to the printed pages of the Forum. Frye's own offprint carries a terse note in his own hand that the article was "badly cut and printed, and pretty unintelligible" in the form supplied below. For the original and uncut version of the essay see "The Diatribes of Wyndham Lewis: A Study in Prose Satire," in SE, 346-80. Page references to Time and Western Man have been keyed to the edition published in Boston in 1957 by Beacon Press. Lewis's other works as mentioned here include: Tarr (Egoist Press, 1914; rev. ed., Chatto and Windus, 1928), The Art of Being Ruled (1926), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (Grant Richards, 1927), Time and Western Man (1927), Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot (1929), The Apes of God (Arthur Press, 1930), The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (1931), Hitler (1931), Men Without Art (Cassell, 1934). The place of publication is always London and where no publisher is noted, the publisher is Chatto and Windus.

The recent death of Oswald Spengler [8 May 1936] raises the issue of how far the influence of that thinker has penetrated into the Englishspeaking world. The Decline of the West is a book often used and seldom referred to, frequently quoted and rarely acknowledged. Its theses have become inseparable from our present modes of thinking: the theory of the organic growth of cultures, the maturation of our own and its historical parallelism with the Roman Empire, the distinction between culture

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and civilization; all this is as much taken for granted today as the libido or the dinosaur. But few people who parrot these ideas have any notion of their source, and as of course no "pessimist" can possibly be left unanswered, many of those who have read Spengler have attacked him. Of these attacks, probably the most important in English is that in Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man, and an analysis of Wyndham Lewis's thought will provide an excellent opportunity for seeing how unwelcome and yet how irresistible the arguments of an original thinker can be. Wyndham Lewis was one of the group of experimental writers who appeared just before the war, his most notable ally being Ezra Pound.1 The war, in which he served, interrupted his career at the beginning, but by 1919 he had established himself as novelist, painter, and polemical writer. After several years of silence, he produced a treatise on political theory, The Art of Being Ruled, following it by its literary and philosophical complement, Time and Western Man. From these two books his other long treatises radiate as more specialized applications of his attitude. The Industrial Revolution, says Lewis, ushered in a new form of society. Industrial technique entails incredibly rapid movement and development, which produces a society accustomed to regard incessant metamorphosis as normal. This stereotype of thought Lewis calls "revolutionary," and its most direct symbol is the advertisement. The Art of Being Ruled is devoted to showing that the imminent collapse of this form of society will result in something more stable and permanent, probably an economic world order governed by dictatorships, as ruling is the work of a professional ruler, not of a population in general. In 1931 Lewis singled out Hitler as a symptom of this Caesarean birth. The democratic form of society depends for its stability on the creation of stereotypes of mass thinking, mass entertainment, mass action. It depends, in other words, on a wholesale vulgarizing of the creative activity of art, the speculative activity of philosophy, the exploring activity of science. Industry vulgarizes science: man believes himself to be living in a scientific age because he can play with toys like radios and automobiles, which he could not have acquired without science; and it is only in this "popular mechanics" form that science really reaches him. Politics vulgarizes philosophy: Darwin's thesis of the survival of the fit becomes the excuse for mass murder; Spengler presses philosophical concepts into a counsel of a reactionary fatalism. So the ordinary man gets hold of philosophy only in the forms of social stereotypes.

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Nietzsche, Sorel, Spengler, and Freud, Lewis regards as vulgarizers of philosophical and scientific ideas. A precisely similar process goes on in art. Instead of the genuinely creative work of the rare and isolated genius, we find his techniques imitated by shrewd and clever craftsmen who swarm together in schools, movements, tendencies, groups, and generally in what Lewis calls phalansteries. These cliques, who are naturally on their guard to see that no real genius is given a hearing, vulgarize art into movements which become, like vulgarized science and philosophy, essentially political phenomena. Lewis's two novels are satires on these herd artists. Tarr, its scene laid in the cultural underworld of Paris, is built around the antithetical figures of Tarr, the genuine artist, and Kreisler, the typical parasite and charlatan. The Apes of God shifts the scene to London. A Greek called Zagreus (the god of the Orphic initiation) leads a vacuous moron, Daniel Boylen, through a kind of katabasis in which he is exposed to all sides of this vast interlocking arty "public," of the "Bohemian" variety, of people with private incomes who make hobbies of art, music, literature, and revolutionary politics. Lewis's world is essentially that of Antic Hay and the biting London scenes of Women in Love. The larger pattern behind this many-sided attack emerges in Paleface. Lewis regards the cult of sensibility preceding the French Revolution, and a similar cult preceding the Russian Revolution, as respectively the beginning and end of a fairly homogeneous cultural development, usually called Romanticism in its earlier stages and Impressionism in its later, which was throughout the product of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Perhaps its most persistent characteristic is Primitivism, the sentimental admiration, by a sterile and senile society, of the untamed, the unexplored, the uncultivated, the amorphous. All this is breaking down, the Great War having hastened its collapse and provoked a reaction which in the plastic arts is generally called "Expressionism." In his latest book, Men without Art, Lewis outlines the essential theories of Expressionism in regard to literature. Music, the great time art, is breaking down with the time philosophy, and literature will be forced more and more toward a plastic ideal. It will approach its subjects from the outside; it will tend to abandon poetry, which depends on rhythm and movement, for prose, and will be satiric rather than lyrical. Painting under Impressionism has dissolved in a mist of "atmosphere," and rigorous formal outline, more like that of the Egyptian or the Chinese, will replace the naturalistic humanism characteristic of the Hellenic tradition, which we have inherited.

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When Lewis comes to deal with Spengler in Time and Western Man, it is noteworthy that, in spite of his abusive tirade, he is not primarily concerned with the objective truth or falsehood of Spengler's theory of the organic growth of cultures. He says: To say that I disagree with Spengler would be absurd. You cannot agree or disagree with such people as that: you can merely point out a few of the probable reasons for the most eccentric of their spasms, and if you have patience—as I have—classify them. That, I think, I have done enough. [297 (pt. 2, chap. 2)]

This is of considerable significance. How does one find out the reasons for other people's spasms, and on what principles does one classify them? Lewis attacks Spengler, not as an individual, but as a symptom of a cultural consciousness. The whole importance of Lewis as a thinker lies precisely in his perception of the unity of that cultural consciousness (or, as Pareto calls it, a "psychic state")-2 The underlying postulate of Lewis's argument, which he takes so completely for granted that he does not bother to formulate it, is that a given society produces the philosophy, art, literature, politics, and religion appropriate to it. Lewis apparently denies this as a general principle. But the whole first part of Time and Western Man assumes the interconnection of the time philosophies of Bergson and Spengler, the will-to-power attitudes of Sorel, Marinetti, and Nietzsche, the stream of consciousness technique of Proust, Joyce, and Stein, the political development of imperialism and nationalism leading to Fascism, and more superficial phenomena like Charlie Chaplin and Anita Loos. He says, of course: "This essay is among other things the assertion of a belief in the finest type of mind, which lifts the creative impulse into an absolute region free of Spenglerian 'history' or politics" [148 (Preface to bk. 2)]. But Lewis has never treated a single great literary figure in this absolute way; everyone he has ever dealt with has been examined from the cultural-consciousness point of view. And of course it is precisely the thesis of a cultural consciousness, to which everything contemporaneous in a given society is related, that forms the basic doctrine of Spengler. One might suppose Shakespeare to represent "the finest type of mind," but I have never seen a book on Shakespeare more concerned to represent him as a historical and political phenomenon than Lewis's study of him in The Lion and the Fox. Lewis might, of course, protest that

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his whole point is that the nineteenth century never produced any really great or "absolute" art; that it was because of the "vulgarization" engendered by democracy that art got mixed up with politics and so became a historical phenomenon. Tackled on the score of The Lion and the Fox, he might extend this principle to our "semi-barbaric" Western culture (he assumes, of course, the existence of a Western culture), which he regards as far less civilized than the Chinese. But as every one of Lewis's diatribes is in some way concerned with that very culture, what price the following syllogism: all Lewis's critical books are concerned with the analysis of the cultural consciousness of the Western world, mainly during its last hundred years or so, which is treated both as a unity and as an organic growth; Spengler's work is a general view of history based on the same postulates; therefore all of Lewis's critical work is a special application of the Spenglerian dialectic. What Epicurus was to Lucretius, what Aquinas was to Dante, what, perhaps, Montaigne was to Shakespeare, that Spengler is to Wyndham Lewis. Lewis's whole thinking is dominated by Spenglerian concepts. The introduction to his preposterous book, The Dithyrambic Spectator, is based on Spengler's theory of craft-art in late civilization. His references to the "adolescence" of the Elizabethans as compared with our senile child-cult and to the "Roman brutality" of contemporary sport echo Spengler. His denunciations of Bohemia are pure Spengler: that both novels are Spenglerian satires is immediately obvious to anyone who has read both authors. His theory of the emergence of the philosopher-ruler, worked out in The Art of Being Ruled, is Spengler's theory of the rise of Caesarism. His book on Hitler is in octave counterpoint to The Hour of Decision. His attack on Impressionistic painting as having deserted a plastic for a musical ideal is unintelligible without its context in Spengler. And so on. In The Lion and the Fox, Lewis speaks of Frederick the Great, who, himself the most perfect disciple of Machiavelli in history, composed a bitter philippic against him, which was exactly what Machiavelli would have advised him to do. Similarly, Lewis examines Spengler, in Time and Western Man, as a historical and political phenomenon evolved by the cultural consciousness that also produced Bergson in philosophy, Proust in literature, Einstein in science, Picasso in painting, which is precisely according to Spengler's own instructions. Thus, Lewis's foreshortened perspective and his parenthetic repudiations of the very thesis he is advancing give him an air of being more commonsense and practical than Spengler, and of course he makes easy

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game of Spengler's bombastic and truculent jingoism, his turgid apocalyptic writing, his irascible retired-colonel philistinism. But the fact remains, that the more completely Lewis is the Spenglerian satirist, in the same way that Shaw is a Fabian satirist and Auden a Marxist satirist, the better off he is as a writer. Lewis has achieved a considerable reputation as the man who "debunked" Spengler, his biographer Gawsworth3 claiming that he has utterly destroyed Spengler's pretensions to being a thinker of importance in the contemporary world. For those genuinely interested in distinguishing the first-rate from the second-rate thinker, the producer of ideas from the exploiter of them, it may be as well to expose such a claim whenever possible.

26

War on the Cultural Front August 1940

From Canadian Forum, 20 (August 1940): 144, 146. Reprinted in RW, 282-6. Three economic systems, Nazism, Communism, and capitalism, are engaged in destroying (a) each other and (b) what they originally stood for. Nazism, in origin a frantic nationalism, is now an international armed force attempting world conquest, its vanguard a rabble of reactionary big shots in each country ready to act as traitors to the latter. Communism, at one time completely international in outlook, has become a patriotic national movement wherever it has had any real power or influence: in Spain, in Czechoslovakia, in China, in India, and of course in Russia. The capitalist imperialisms of Britain and America are committed to the defence of small independent nations. In the meantime, the word "democracy" wanders through books, magazines, newspapers, and speeches undefined and untranslated. We think of democracy in various ways: as the safeguarding of civil liberties, tolerance of labour unions, permission to curse the government, a bulwark of eccentricity and relaxation from the herd, retention of nineteenth-century parliamentary machinery, sabotage of would-be dictators, supremacy of civil over military power, or as a loose aggregate of all these things. In gloomier moments we suspect that it is only a sentimental ersatz religion, or an excuse for yammering in enlightened magazines, or, worst of all, only a word, used as pretext by the traitorous rabble mentioned above to destroy everything we have just listed. The source of this confusion seems to be that we think of democracy as a political theory. But a political theory without an economic context

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is only newspaper blah, and if democracy implies the economic context of capitalism, the socialists engaged in its defence are rather muddled. It is easy to say that they are, but too simple. A better explanation is that democracy is not primarily a political theory at all, but something rooted in the broader and deeper concepts of culture and civilization. This something broader and deeper neither Nazism nor Communism possesses. Both of these systems are at once political and economic structures, each is based on a social dialectic, and each Weltanschauung (that word has to come in somewhere) is a series of inferences from certain basic premises. Both are essentially synthetic or religious modes of thought; both, that is, are efforts of an organized social will to compel human life and science to fit a certain pattern of ideas. That is not what I mean by a religion, but it is what I mean by a religious mode of thought. Both being state religions without gods, neither can accommodate ideas in philosophy, discoveries in science, or works of art inconsistent with their immediate political ambitions, whether they are, in the language of the Defence of Canada Regulations (based on identical postulates) "false or otherwise." All such work must meet the very narrow pragmatic test of its usefulness to the state at that moment: otherwise the social organisms of Germany and Russia can no more absorb it than a baby can absorb coal oil. Marxism, for instance, has made little if any attempt to incorporate Spengler's irrefutable proof of the existence of organic culture growths, or the researches of Freud and Jung into the subconscious, or the great strides made by anthropology and related studies since 1900. Its most striking failure, however, is its childish attitude to religion: it has not recognized itself as a religious movement complete with bible, church, heretics, apostles, saints, martyrs, and shrines; it failed to see that the bourgeois reaction to it would form the rival religion of Nazism, and it considers any religious phenomenon essentially explained when glibly transposed into economic terms. As for Nazism, the delirious absurdity of its race theory needs no italics. Of course, the Nazis know that Jewand Red-baiting arouse far more sneaking sympathy than contempt in a country like Canada, but their "Nordic" fantasies have no such propagandic value. Democracy is in essence a cultural laissez-faire, an encouragement of private enterprise in art, scholarship, and science. The list of people tortured or banished by Hitler includes Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Freemasons, homosexuals, and sponsors of rival brands of Nazism like

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Strasser.1 No one can be equally sympathetic with all these groups, but in the last century English culture has received contributions from Jews (Disraeli), Catholics (Newman), Protestants (Browning), Freemasons (Burns), homosexuals (Wilde), and spokesmen of potential English Nazism (Carlyle). Obviously there has been considerable anarchy in English culture, a hopelessly inconsistent inclusiveness about it, and that large inconsistency is the basis of democracy. For it implies the acceptance and practice of the scientific attitude on the part of the people as a whole: the inductive suspending of judgment until enough, not only of facts and discoveries and techniques, but of viewpoints and theories and gospels and quack panaceas, are in, before changing the direction of social development. Opposed to this is the crusading religious temperament of the dictatorships working with a partial and premature cultural synthesis. Out of this inclusiveness of outlook springs everything else we associate with democracy, and it is on that basis that democratic countries rest their claim to be more highly civilized. What is true of science and scholarship is of course true of the arts. The dictator is less dependent on popular opinion than the democratic leader and is therefore far more dependent on popular prejudice: it is not Churchill or Roosevelt but Mussolini who must pose for cameras and kiss the shuddering babies and generally advertise himself like a toothpaste to retain public favour. Similarly the art that emerges under the cultural anarchy of democracy may be subtle, obscure, highbrow, and experimental, and if a good deal of art at any time is not so, the cultural achievement of the country is on a Woolworth level. But art under dictatorship seldom dares to be anything but mediocre and obvious. This is least true of music, for music is difficult to censor, and may well be the entering wedge of civilization in the two leading dictatorships. But crude, gaudy realism of painting and pompous broken-down classicism of architecture in both countries has been foreshadowing the Soviet-Nazi pact for years. The notion that democracy depends on economic rather than cultural laissez-faire has made a good many people rather confused about it and inclined to believe that it is nothing but a rationalizing of oligarchy. This idea is sedulously fostered by Nazi propagandists. Another source of confusion lies in the division between national and international loyalties, which, as we said at the beginning, is the underlying paradox of this whole conflict. Common to all three systems is the tendency to worldwide expansion we generally call imperialism: common to all three also

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is an intense, if sometimes vicarious, patriotism. Whichever way we look, that conflict of sympathies confronts us. Everyone wants a worldwide Zollverein2—even a community of old ladies drinking tea needs a merchant navy to bring the tea—and everyone wants to see the farce of anarchic national sovereignty and desperate national self-sufficiency brought to an end. How can we do that by propping up Poland again? And yet the highest culture seems to require some kind of decentralizing. Music and science are international, but literature depends on language and painting on locality: we shall always want the flavour of the region in these arts, just as we shall always want it in wine or in cheese, in glass or in linen. But is this worth so much blood and misery? A worldwide economy will emerge, whoever wins or loses the war— the human race is trying to evolve a digestive system, and will doubtless succeed. But it should be an unobtrusive and automatic digestive system, like the individual's. Being developed by states, however, it is necessarily accompanied by the phenomenon of expanding world states. Now the state has been well named Leviathan, for it is a primitive and barbarous form of the community just as the dinosaur is a primitive and barbarous form of life. It cannot survive without a small group of exploiters and a mass of victims. The bigger it gets, the greater the mass of victims and the more force necessary to hold them down. A world state would be, therefore, a handful of dictators, backed up by huge armies of praetorian guards ready to supply more when they die, ruling over vast slave populations. After criticism has been clubbed, reform machine-gunned, art degraded to the poster and the circus, religion to Caesar-worship, science to engineering, the surviving slaves would be well fed and clothed, and nothing could overthrow such a state but an invasion from Mars. The analogy between insect states and those of slightly dazed human beings has often been noted. In the present war it is our business to disintegrate and disorganize this world state whatever else happens. Our most powerful allies are not America and Turkey, but the war itself and the famine, starvation, plague, and anarchy that accompany it. We should not look for a dynamic ethic to fight the dictators with: confronted with their entomological logic we stand for nothing but absolute nihilism, absolute denial. We dream of no reestablished status quo: we look for nothing further than destruction.

27

Two Italian Sketches, 1939 October 1942

From Ada Victoriana, 67 (October 1942): 12-14, 23. NFF, 1991, box 24, notebook 17 contains Frye's handwritten draft for this article. There are very few changes from handwritten draft to published article. The most significant of these have been indicated in the endnotes. San Gemignano We are on our way from Siena to Florence, and decide to stop at San Gemignano. That's a little town on top of a hill full of enormous skyscraping towers the nobles used to build and shoot at each other from. We say good-bye to a cheerful little clerk we've been talking to on the train: he took English as his second language at school, and fed us remarks like "I am happy to go without Italy," meaning he would like to get out of the country, while we exchanged Italian almost as bad. The place is called Poggibonsi, which we know only from a couplet I found once in Browning: You may at Pekin, or at Poggibonsi, Either a shifty priest, or a dodgy bonze see.1

We look around for a shifty priest, and find nothing less than a bishop, which we take as a good omen. Then we get the bus, crowded with chattering Italians, and wind slowly up and up an enormously long hill. We glance at the people around us, reflecting that the Italians are a very convenient people for the Nazis to deal with: as long as they are friendly they can remember about the Nordic Lombards, and if that friendship

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cools they can bring up the subject of Etruscans. Up and up we go, passing women washing clothes in a brook and drying them on hedges, passing vineyards and olive trees, passing dusty donkeys and the downhill bus. Some of our friends have objected to our taking a holiday in a Fascist country, feeling that we ought to spend our handful of vacation money in those noble, generous, brave-spirited, free republics, Great Britain and France. Well, perhaps. Certainly at Siena, where we had an air-raid practice and a blackout, we began to get restive at being in an officially hostile country with the papers all hermetically sealed against news. "La politica non e serena," as our landlady said. But surely away up on this mountain, breathing this free mountain air (one of the voices of liberty, according to Wordsworth, who ought to have known),2 we can forget about Mussolini for a few hours. When we get there we find, however, that the town has been made into a "national monument" and Mussolini's plug-ugly sourpuss is plastered all over it. His epigrams, too. For every conspicuous piece of white wall in Italy is covered with mottoes in black letters from his speeches and obiter dicta—the successor to the obsolete art of frescopainting. One of them says, with disarming simplicity, "Mussolini is always right." "The olive tree has gentle and soft leaves, but its wood is harsh and rough," says another more cryptically. "War is to man what maternity is to woman," says a third. "The best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war," says a fourth, and it looks just as silly in Italian as it does in English. Another one of the few not of Mussolini's authorship reads: "Duce! We await your orders." Up here they present us with "We shoot straight." One of these, "The nation should be as strong as the army and the army as strong as the nation," reminds us how Italy is taxed to the back teeth for her army and how oddly all this gathering of pearls from swine contrasts with the miserable poverty of the town, a poverty as patient and humble as that poor old donkey. But is it so odd? Peasant feeds soldier and soldier kicks peasant—that was the Roman arrangement, so why not now, when the grandeur of Rome is revived and the national emblem once more is a whip? Well, where shall we start? The cathedral, I suppose. The big attraction there is a chapel full of Ghirlandaio,3 one of the stuffier of the Florentine stuffed shirts. That can wait: the nave is full of Sienese frescoes, and as there's very little fresco at Siena itself, we'd better start with these.

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On the west wall is a Last Judgment by Taddeo di Bartolo,4 a grim, saturnine peasant of a man who goes through hell with relish, adding a few touches of his own. We see fiends holding back a fat friar from a luscious banquet, a fiend riding on a woman and cutting off her breasts, a fiend excreting into his victim's open mouth with a wide grin on his ugly face, fiends winding somebody's bowels out of his stomach over a windlass. One can see in every line of its precise and balanced painting, Chesterton says, that medieval culture was always seeking equilibrium.5 Yeah . . . Here's the north wall, scenes from the Old Testament by Bartolo di Fredi,6 a good-natured soul with a weakness for animals. He really goes to town on the ark, and Pharoah's army drowning in the Red Sea, though his camels and giraffes certainly look a lot like horses. On the south wall are scenes from the life of Christ by someone called Barna7—never heard of him. They couldn't read or write in the Middle Ages, you see, and these pictures were the Bible of the poor—all the poor that could get field glasses or stepladders to see them and then somebody to figure them out, that is. It's not easy to make much out of the upper ones except that this Barna obviously has something to say and isn't just filling space. So the lower row on the Passion, which we can see, has all the more terrific a punch when we get to it. There's nothing like it in Italy—The Triumph of Death at Pisa, perhaps, but certainly nothing else, not even the Sistine, has that feeling of effortless strength. The first hint of it is the picture of Judas taking money from the priests. The priests are in a solid mass, scowling heavily at Judas, who is uneasy and acts as though the money were burning his hand. Not a slimy Judas, like Giotto's, but an intelligent and sensitive Judas. Then the taking of Jesus in the garden. Here you see the soldiers first—well, not the soldiers so much as an enormous thick mass of iron: helmets, armour, spears, pikes, all in perfect order. Christ is motionless and alone, and crowded out of the picture are the disorganized and beaten disciples. Peter hits out, a desperate and hopeless blow at Malchus's ear. Then Christ before Pilate: Christ with a prophetic Sienese face, gentle and human, yet almost unconscious of the surrounding ring of disciplined steel. Then the Crucifixion. Everything is there, of course: the three crosses, the fainting Virgin, the casual soldiers, the watchful angels; but they're not what you see first. What you see first is a Roman officer on horseback with his arm bent back to strike a terrific blow with a thick club at the legs of one of the thieves, and it's the stupid brutal power of that arm that keeps pulling your eyes back however long

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you look at the picture. And that's all. The Crucifixion is the end: there's no hint of anything beyond the fainting virgin, the absent disciples, the tortured God, and that symmetrical design of animated iron. Ghirlandaio can go to hell: we've got to get that bus. "We shoot straight," bellows Mussolini after us. No—wait a minute—my Italian is pretty shaky—it's future: "We shall shoot straight." Venice Venice does exist, gondolas and palaces and canals and everything, and as we settle into the steamboat and hear an American crack the deathless joke about every house sitting on its piles, we like it. It's a brilliant day, though, and the sun is unkind to Venice: the palaces badly need repair, and the canals reek with a subtle but very unpleasant smell. A sinister mass of green slime clings to every building, and as the wash of the steamboat reaches it, lifts and waves gently. How long can these buildings stand that wash, asks the same tourist. No one knows. No, the best part of Venice is at night, floating through the little canals in a gondola, with the queer lighting and the bridges and the waterstairs. Venice in the days of its glory—where the devil is the man going? Oh, yes, somebody caterwauling in another gondola over there. "E molto interessante, la serenata," says the gondolier. One of their rackets. We don't want it, thanks, but it takes a lot of splutter to get him detoured. We spend money at Venice: everything is very much higher here. All buildings charge admission three to seven times what other towns charge. The food is bad, for the first time in Italy; later we find in Verona that Venetian food is a standing joke. I got royally gypped—not just shortchanged, but gypped—today, also for the first time in Italy. They charge admission to churches; they charge extra to show you anything starred in Baedeker, who unfortunately loves the town; and there's a Veronese show here carefully spread over five buildings with enormous (for Italy) admission prices for each. These are microscopic things, but you're sensitive to money when you're travelling, and after a few days they begin to generate movement, like steam molecules. What does it live on, this quiet World's Fair of a town? There are no industries here. "What does this town live on?" I ask Mike. "Suckers," answers Mike, drowning his cigarette. That's certainly the atmosphere: everybody pounces on you to sell you something, and a blond like me

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feels as self-conscious as Lady Godiva on St. Mark's Piazza. Now that its paint has worn off, old Venice sits and dreams and reaches out for money, like a hermit. But was it really different in the days of its glory? I read something about this town once that explained what I'm feeling about it, but I can't just place it. Wasn't it a sort of clearing house for the Orient, a banking centre? Did it ever produce anything? Wasn't it always built on pure money, without any commodity basis for the money? Something like that, I think, though my economics are not very expert. That would explain a lot of Venetian art. These fantastic buildings like the Doge's Palace with their unreal and abstract decoration: they have nothing functional about them, like cathedrals or grain elevators, nothing that takes root in a soil—there isn't any soil—or has any relation to living, somehow. The painting's the same. Veronese shows Venice as a huge blonde bawd getting rained on by a torrent of gold, and that would be all right to the Venetians. They knew that money creates and sustains and moves all things: money would therefore be worthy of perfectly sincere worship. It doesn't matter whether their painters are stupid louts like Veronese or not. Tintoretto with a ponderous St. Mark flying through the air like Superman, Carpaccio with his ten thousand virgins being martyred—they were real painters even if they were paid by the square yard, but there's something vulgar about them you can't get around.8 And as there was never anything but money in the town, there could be nobody but bourgeois in it: no sort of class opposition and no real aristocracy. If only these people had been Jews. What a source of comfort and consolation they'd be to anti-Semites! That reminds me, I read a poem of T.S. Eliot on Venice which tried feebly to blame it all on the Jews anyhow.9 Jews . . . Oh, The Merchant of Venice, of course. That's what I've read. Have you ever noticed how much money there is in that play? It's all about Antonio's merchandise and his bargain with Shylock and Shylock's bond and equitable judgment and the relative value of gold and silver and lead caskets and the worth of promises and rings and wives and revenges. Even the stars are beautiful because they look like guineas. That would explain Shylock, who is neither a villain Jew nor a persecuted hero, but a money-maker making money faster than Christians, who decide to gang up on him.10 . . . Hey, you, you can't go home yet. We're paying for an hour, and it's only forty-five minutes. We compared watches when we started, remember?

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No, I'm not giving you all that fifty-lire note and it's no good touching your cap. You owe us five lire change. Well, if you haven't any change you can bloody well get some. When we go to the railway station the next morning it's draped in swastikas, because Dr. Goebbels, who has an axis to grind, is arriving to open a movie theatre. In Padua we read that he was greeted by gondoliers on his arrival. "You wan' guide? You wan' pos' card? You wan' feelthy peecture?" Sure he wants them. He wants everything he can get.11 He may even want a book we saw on the station bookstall, L'Arte di Conquistar gli Amid, by Dale Carnegie.12

28

G.M. Young's Basic May 1944

Review of Basic, by G.M. Young (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1943). This was Tract 62 of the Society for Pure English. This society, founded in 1919 by Robert Bridges, recognized the expansion of English into a world language, but feared that this expansion would dissolve the links that tied contemporary usage to what Bridges called "the finest literary language in the world." As a solution to the responsibilities and perils presented by this expansion, Bridges urged the Society's members to lobby for scientific reform, to monitor journalistic usage closely, and to maintain close supervision of worldwide variations in the use of the English language. The Society's membership included art historian Kenneth Clark, medievalist Kenneth Sisam, and philologist Logan Pearsall Smith. From Canadian Forum, 24 (May 1944): 47. This sounds like an erudite and competent commentary on Basic English by a writer for the Society for Pure English who is opposed to it.1 His point is that Basic English is not real English, and that the only people who can make it sound like real English are the people who already know real English, whereas others will simply fall back on the idiom of their native tongue and thereby make Basic unintelligible even as a code. He attacks, too, the elimination of the verb and the emphasis on nouns as a devitalizing of speech. The present reviewer, though his prejudices are with Mr. Young and though he has read very little Basic English that did not sound like unimaginative pidgin, is incompetent to discuss the merits of the case beyond suggesting that the use of Basic has progressed so far that it has got rather beyond the hypothetical arguments of what it would or would not do and should now be examined on its actual record of accomplishment.

29

Revenge or Justice?1 November 1946

From Canadian Forum, 26 (November 1946): 171. Reprinted in RW, 377-8. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, established by Great Britain, France, the U.S.S.R. and the United States, took place between November 1945 and October 1946 and tried twenty-two high-ranking Nazi defendants. The transcripts of the trial were published in forty-two volumes in Nuremberg in 1947-

Morally, the defendants at Nuremberg represented perhaps the largest mass of guilt that the human race has ever seen at one place and time. But in the present state of international anarchy, in which the executives of a sovereign state are not answerable to a higher court for their actions, they were legally as innocent as lambs. The object of the trials was, we were told, to remedy this monstrous situation, so that the execution of a convicted Nazi would not be the revenge of victor on vanquished, but the result of embodying a moral code which all decent men accept in some legal form. That, so we understood, was why the judges were willing to sit for months listening to evidence in which murder, torture, conspiracy, and treason kept turning up like the figures in an interminably recurring decimal, and why they leaned so far backward (too far, the Russians said)2 to declare that three of the most sinister heels in Europe were, as far as they were concerned, "innocent." But the newspapers and movies have long ago decided that anything to do with the war is no longer news, and the best they could do was to play up the trials as a pallid and rather unsuccessful version of a torso murder case. The British press complains that the executions were arranged solely for the convenience of American correspondents who wanted to make the early morning editions. Nothing in the news

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expresses or appeals to any feeling but the satisfaction of revenge on enemies who deserved at least all they got. Well, of course they did: but did all that work prove nothing except that Julius Streicher deserved hanging?3 An example of the real meaning of the trials is: if it is now a crime to try to start a war, what is now the legal status of the people who are advocating a "preventive" war on Russia? Or: if the theory of the amoral sovereign state can no longer be used as an excuse for aggressive actions, what is now the legal status of the more blatant forms of American imperialism? Has the smallest inkling of this real meaning yet penetrated to the minds, if any, of the hog-callers who proclaim that the American navy will go where it damn pleases? It is certainly not the newspapers' fault if it has.

30

F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West March 1947

Review of The Meeting of East and West, by F.S.C. Northrop (New York: Macmillan, 1947). From the "Turning New Leaves" section in Canadian Forum, 26 (March 194.7): 281-2. Reprinted as "Total Identification" in NFCL, 107-10. F.S.C. Northrop was Master of Silliman College and Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law at Yale University.

Professor Northrop's ambitious attempt to provide a philosophical basis for the union of Eastern and Western thought has attracted a good deal of attention. It is the work of an average but active intelligence, well informed on its own subject, which is philosophy; and though his grasp of history and art is less sure, it would be a very unusual erudition indeed which could derive no profit from all the information he provides about causation in Aristotle, the person in St. Thomas, the metaphysical assumptions underlying Renaissance science and the way that nuclear physics has affected them, the relation between Oriental philosophy and art, and the place of Mexico in the contemporary scene. The real value of the book is, I think, as a quarry of such information, and the fact that I find its thesis inconclusive does not, for me, affect that value. The style is a lecturer's style, ranging from lucid exposition to a habit of wordy repetitiveness doubtless acquired from watching difficult ideas bounce off the faces of sleepy undergraduates. The author quotes a Mexican writer as saying that American civilization is Utopian in shape.1 The postulates of American democracy are, on a social and moral plane, both admirable in their idealism and practicable in their application; but above that plane certain limitations begin to appear. The principles of the American constitution do not provide a

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cultural synthesis comprehensive enough to make an integral place for, in particular, the arts, philosophy, and religion. There is unity in American civilization; there is not enough in its culture.2 In American education the various subjects of study are autonomous and separate, the central principles common to them being lost; American taste in the arts inclines either to the highbrow and insulated, or the lowbrow and barbarous; and the God in whom American coins trust is a vague haze of benignant morality. Hence, for many American thinkers today the gigantic synthesis of religion, philosophy, science, and politics achieved in the Middle Ages looms up in front of them like an intellectual Utopia which complements that of their own moral idealism. American magazines and books are thickly strewn with admiring references to Aristotle, St. Thomas, the seven liberal arts, and the medieval preservation of personal values; and of deprecatory ones to the cult of self-analysis, the dehumanizing of the individual, and the centrifugal movements in politics and science which came with the Renaissance and sent us all skittering down the butterslide of introversion into our present Iron Age. It is an idea which should be left to Catholics, who know what they want to do with it; writers who have got a phallic father or something identified with what they call the "Puritan tradition" are apt to develop a sloppy habit of comparing the theory of Catholicism with the practice of Protestantism. Professor Northrop takes over from there. He feels that the Thomist synthesis is too full of fictions to serve for what he feels is required today, in a world which contains Russian Communism and the cultural traditions of China and India in addition to the great variety nearer home. To provide a basis for global understanding, we need a supersynthesis in which the two major elements will be a Western-democratic-scientific complex on the one hand, and an Eastern-contemplative-aesthetic complex on the other. (Russia will not be meat in this sandwich: the author has written an article called "The Impossibility of a Theoretical Science of Economic Dynamics," and has the usual academic-liberal view of Marxism.)3 He says that there is a unity in Eastern thought, and in Western thought; that these differ from one another, but are reconcilable. The fundamental datum of Eastern thought is an immediate apprehension of experience as a totality; that of the West, a theoretical construction made from experience which represents and makes intelligible its reality. The author calls the former (I think inadvisedly) an "aesthetic" and the latter a "theoretic" approach [461-5]. He feels that

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we can reconcile them by realizing that both actually exist simultaneously in all experience, whether Western or Eastern, as a direct two-term relationship, as, for instance, "blue" exists both as a pretty colour and as a light wave with a certain rate of vibration. This gets rid of the common Western fallacy of regarding the pretty colour as a subjective illusion thrown up by the theoretic word, a "secondary quality" at one remove from reality. Philosophers will have to decide on the value of this suggestion; its social and political importance, which the author is very keen on, seems to me rather doubtful. I am not sure that mutual understanding makes for better relations. Ten years ago, the people who best understood Nazism were those who most wanted to fight it. Today, Russians can see the drift of American imperialism far more clearly than Americans themselves, and vice versa. Tomorrow, it may well be better for Christians to believe that Mohammedans worship an idol called Mahound than to send them educated missionaries to explain that their theism should be "softened down" and "take on more of the open-mindedness of Hinduism" [456], as our author urges. Besides, achieving "one world" involves first economic unity, secondly the pooling of scientific techniques, and thirdly political unity. When this is done it will be found that wars are no more caused by conflicts in cultural traditions than thunderstorms are caused by clouds bumping together. It is a false analogy to say that because we should surrender national sovereignty we should also give up our language and all its literary possibilities for some dismal, idiomless Esperanto; and I think that religion, philosophy, and the arts, which latter are as dependent on locale as a fine wine, are involved in that false analogy. There is no earthly reason why the world should be culturally federalized; in the U.S.S.R. economic and political federation is counterbalanced by regional developments of culture, which seems to me to make sense. Chinese painting, for example, will influence Western painting purely through its merits as painting, not through any Western attempt to understand Chinese cultural traditions for political reasons. An Easterner might say that reconciling an aesthetic with a theoretic component of thought is itself a theoretic project, so that to reconcile them on these terms is really to annihilate the Eastern direct apprehension by absorbing it into a Western theory about its "place" in a still larger apprehension. The author says: "the specific relation between the aesthetic and theoretic components must be determined, thereby per-

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mitting the newly formulated world philosophy to specify the theoretical criterion by means of which the two differing cultures . . . can be combined" [376]. The word "theoretical" in this sentence suggests Western. The author quotes Lao-tzu as saying "the sage embraces oneness" [336!, but surely Lao-tzu does not mean by "oneness" something to be "reconciled" to what by hypothesis is something else. He is not talking about a mode of apprehension but about total identification; he is not simply throwing an epigram on a philosophical ammunition dump, but hinting at a vision as far beyond the merely aesthetic or emotional (the author rather recklessly associates these words) as it is beyond the merely intellectual. I imagine that whenever an Oriental philosopher tries to tell us about his Tao, his Citta, his Nirvana, or his Brahman, he is also telling us, in Eastern language, that an intellectual and cultural synthesis which gets everything in and reconciles everyone with everyone else is an attempt to build the Tower of Babel, and will lead to confusion of utterance. He may be wrong, but Professor Northrop will never catch him in his made-in-U.S.A. net, however skilfully he throws it.

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Wallace Notestein's The Scot in History July 1947

Review of The Scot in History, by Wallace Notestein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 194.6). From Canadian Forum, 27 (July 1947): 96.

An attempt to convey, by means of an easy-going historical jog-trot, the distinctive characteristics of Scottish culture, and to discover what sort of reality underlies the ready-made stereotypes of thrift, dourness, humourlessness, ambition, respect for education, and nonconforming aggressiveness which are usually associated with the Scotch. Doubtless there are such things as national characteristics, but so many accidents and exceptions are involved in them that such generalizations as "the Scots are better at taking a joke against themselves than the English" [333! seem to me of very doubtful value. The purpose of this book would probably have been better served by a straightforward cultural history. For an uninstructed non-Scottish reviewer two things seem understressed: the distinctive features of Highland culture and the variety and richness of the civilization of medieval Scotland, culminating in something of a golden age in the fifteenth century. Duns Scotus, for instance, is not mentioned.1 The best parts of the book deal with the Reformation and the eighteenth century.

32

Toynbee and Spengler August 194.7

Review of the abridgement of the first six volumes of Toynbee's A Study of History, by D.C. Somervell (London and New York: Oxford, 1946). From Canadian Forum, 27 (August 1947): 111-13. Reprinted as "The Shapes of History" in NFCL, 76-83. All references to Spengler's The Decline of the West (cited as DW) are keyed to the two-volumes-in-one edition published by Knopf in 1939.

The synthesis of modern thought is the philosopher's stone of our age, and any such synthesis would have to contain, if it did not actually consist of, a philosophy of history.1 The two greatest modern achievements in this field are represented by Marx and Spengler, one a Communist and the other more or less a Nazi. What we want, clearly, is an equally impressive structure which will make room for humane values and established religion and not scare the pants off the middle-class reader. So when the first six volumes of Toynbee's A Study of History came out in a one-volume abridgement, it scored a smashing popular success. This success was due mainly to Time, which has a deep interest in all books that promise to draw a cultural cordon sanitaire around Marxism.2 A Study of History presents an enormous mass of historical material strung along a thin line of argument often represented only by a single word, generally Greek. In the original, one can snuggle down to read endlessly about hundreds of fascinating subjects, with a comfortable feeling that all the time all this is proving something, though we may have to look back at the table of contents to see just what it is. The abridgement, by exposing the lines of communication more clearly, indicates that Toynbee is not writing a philosophy of history so much as

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unrolling a vast historical panorama. His material does not really "prove" anything: it provides the detail of his vision, and he leads us toward an imaginative total apprehension which can skip over the logical, and sometimes even the factual, stage. I have read many critiques of Toynbee, ranging from eulogy to invective, and have been struck with the fact that if one is in broad sympathy with what he is trying to do, his errors, however numerous, appear as blemishes in a picture rather than as wrong turns in a chain of reasoning. But if one is not in sympathy with him, everything seems equally pointless, and the whole pattern dissolves in chaos. Toynbee worked out his plan independently of Spengler, and when Spengler's Decline of the West appeared after the last war he thought at first that his work had been done for him. Spengler says that the essential shape of history is neither a chaos of accidents nor a steady linear advance, but a series of social developments which he calls "cultures." These cultures behave exactly like organisms: they grow, mature, decline, and die; and they all last about the same length of time. Each begins in a "spring" of an agrarian economy, a feudal and aristocratic society, and a mystical iconic religion, and matures into a "summer" of city-states and individualized art, thence into an "autumn" of urbane sophistication in art and economic expansion. At that point the "culture" changes to a "civilization" and plunges into a "winter" of huge cities, impoverished agriculture, dictatorships, and annihilation wars. The possibilities of its arts are exhausted, and its great achievements are technical feats of engineering and civil and military administration. The culture to which we belong is a "Western" one, which had its spring in the Middle Ages, its summer in the Renaissance, its autumn in the eighteenth century, and began its winter with the French Revolution. Previously there had been a Classical culture which went through the same stages. The heroes of Homer correspond to those of our own age of chivalry, the era of Greek city-states to our Renaissance, and the last glories of Athens to our age of Bach and Mozart. With Alexander the "civilization" phase of world empires begins, for Alexander corresponds to our Napoleon. The "decline of the West" has thus reached about the stage of the Punic Wars in Classical times, and the Roman Empire and the reign of the Caesars indicate what is ahead of us. In addition to these two great cultures, Spengler deals with an Egyptian, a Chinese, and an Indian one, an Arabian or Syrian one (he calls it "Magian," [1:183-216]) which began around the time of Jesus and aged into Mohammedanism,

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and a new Russian one which is just beginning. Apart from these culture growths, human life presents a mere continuity of existence without shape or significance. Primitive societies and exhausted ones alike "have no history." When one culture follows another in time, Spengler says, it does not really learn from its predecessor, and thus there is no general progress in history. When two cultures conflict, the more aggressive one may stunt and dwarf the other, producing what Spengler calls a "pseudomorphosis" [DW, 2:243]. Classical civilization did this to Magian culture, and Western civilization is doing it now to Russia. But no Westerner can ever understand what goes on in a Classical or Indian mind: he can only guess at it by seeing how all the products of the other culture fit into a consistent mental pattern which is not his. This overall pattern can be grasped, not, of course, through abstract propositions, but through symbols. Classical culture lives in a "pure present": it has nothing of our sense of time and history: it thinks of architecture as a columnar mass, of tragedy as stylized attitude, of sculpture as bodily form, of mathematics as integral numbers and enclosed spaces, of music as a relation of single notes, of diplomacy as personal contact. Western culture is characterized by a feeling for the infinite: it thinks of architecture as a soaring structural energy, of tragedy as an analysis of character, of sculpture as a struggle with material, of mathematics as variable function, of music as counterpoint, of diplomacy as cabinet decisions used as long-range weapons. Magian culture is full of domes, caverns, sacred books, and esoteric traditions; Russian culture expresses a "denial of height" both in its squat architecture and in its social communism, and so on. A good deal even of this is German Romanticism at its corniest, and some more sinister features are involved. We should, Spengler thinks, accept the character of our age and not sigh for a vanished past or a Utopian future which (Toynbee agrees) is the shadow of a tired mind. We can think up new variations of the arts, but new organic developments are no longer possible, and we should leave them to misfits and get on with our big wars and dictatorships . . . . Was the Rome of the Caesars, the Rome of Virgil and Horace and Ovid and Catullus, really interested solely in aqueducts and brass hats? Don't interrupt the professor. The author of Spengler's next book, The Hour of Decision, is just another Nazi stumblebum. But his thesis has bitten deeply into us: we are all Spenglerians to some extent, and if the enemy has any ammunition that we can capture, we should fire it back at the enemy.

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Much of Toynbee's book, especially the first three volumes, reads like an improved version of Spengler backed up by a far greater knowledge of history. He also isolates the "civilization" or "society" as the unit of historical study. The first three volumes trace the "genesis" and "growth" of these societies, and the next three "decline" and "disintegration," though in volume 4 he avoids the "decline" (Untergang) of Spengler's title and adopts "breakdown" instead. Spengler's six or eight civilizations are all included in a much fuller survey of twenty-one. The main improvement on Spengler comes in the role assigned the proletariat in the last stage. To Spengler the proletariat is nothing but a rabble: Toynbee sees that an internal proletariat (the exploited members of the society) and an external one (the barbarian nomads outside) combine to form a "universal Church" which becomes at once the coffin of the old society and the womb of a new one, so that a real spiritual progress from one society to another can occur. For reasons too complicated to examine here, this gives Christianity a far more satisfactory historical explanation than Spengler gives it. At the beginning of volume 4 there comes a crisis in Toynbee's argument, the question of the cause of decline, which involves a direct examination of Spengler. But he fails to pass this crisis, and all the rest of his book has the air of a dodged issue. He fires off two very damp squibs at Spengler. First he calls him a "fatalist," which is irrelevant: to predict the death of every living organism may be tactlessness, but it is not fatalism. Then he complains that Spengler uses a metaphor as though it were a fact. But A Study of History, organized throughout on such figures as "nemesis of creativity," "withdrawal and return," "schism and palingenesia," is a rather glassy house from which to throw this stone. As we have seen, an intuitive response based on an imaginative grasp of the symbolic significance of certain data is demanded by Toynbee as well as Spengler. Toynbee's real answer is that civilization is not an organism. An organism has a lifespan predetermined from the start; a civilization is a way of social life initiated by an environmental challenge and dependent for its continuity on maintaining a social will and judgment sufficient to meet further challenges. If it collapses, there is always a definable and at one time avoidable cause. Spengler's evidence for the organic nature of culture is of a kind which Toynbee shows himself much less skilful in handling. If, says Spengler, we study the growth of painting from Giotto to Rembrandt, we can see, in its development of interest in landscape, realistic portrai-

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ture, and the handling of light, a steady advance in self-consciousness and in the exploring of a certain range of possibilities [DW, 1:257-95]. It is not getting better or worse: it is simply growing older. If we compare modern America with Classical Rome, we shall see parallels of a kind that do not appear when we compare it with the age of Charlemagne, and these parallels can be accounted for only by a conception of cultural age. Spengler does not say, any more than Toynbee does, that "breakdown" is inevitable: he says growing older is inevitable, and he is quite as insistent as Toynbee on the importance of "self-determination" to prevent breakdown at a late stage. And his powerful argument proving that Western culture is a relatively old one still stands completely unrefuted. It will not do to suggest, like a lazy book reviewer, that it may after all rest on nothing but a false analogy. It doesn't. Toynbee's conception of history is so closely related to Spengler's that when he throws out Spengler's thesis, most of his own would go with it if he did not continually accept in practice what he denies in theory. He is stuck with many organic metaphors which he does not know how to avoid using. The death-and-rebirth rhythm of The Golden Bough3 is an essential part of his structure: he is quite right, and Spengler quite wrong in ignoring it; but it happens to be an organic rhythm. Civilizations still "grow," even if they suddenly turn into machines and "break down," and then into inorganic substances and "disintegrate." He quarrels with Gibbon's ghost for regarding the Antonine age as a real summer instead of an Indian one. He has no class of things with which to associate his conception of civilization and has to define it in circular terms like "entity." Of his twenty-one civilizations, every one except ours has gone through what look suspiciously like organic stages of a "time of troubles," a universal state, and a universal church; and the constant assertions that ours is an exception are not very convincing even to Toynbee himself, as the troubled cadences of his sixth volume, with its many uneasy glances at the parallels to "disintegration" in our own time, abundantly show. One has the feeling that he is afraid that the logical consequence of his own argument will land him in Spengler's "pessimism." But whatever one thinks of Spengler's pessimism, the optimism of a man who can write in 1939 that it is too early yet to say whether we have come to our time of troubles seems rather woebegone.4 Unlike Spengler, primarily a philosopher who picked up his history as he went along, Toynbee is primarily a historian, and his philosophical basis consists largely of his own hunches, some of Bergsonian origin.

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There are many places where he does not even see that a prior philosophical problem is involved. Thus, his survey of the causes of breakdown itself breaks down through ignoring the question of what constitutes a historical cause. Pascal says that if Cleopatra's nose had been an inch longer it would have changed the world's history.5 Spengler says that different characters might have replaced Antony and Cleopatra, different battles might have been fought, and the course of historical events superficially quite different, but the fundamental relationship of a moribund Egyptian culture, an aging Classical one, and a nascent Syrian one would still have been there. This distinction between history and chronicle is one of the profoundest of Spengler's insights. The distinction disappears in Toynbee, and in consequence he takes us back to the old "practical" view of history as a chaotic sequence of lucky and unlucky accidents, a roulette game in which a gambler's luck may hold if he figures out a system to beat the laws of chance. Both Spengler and Toynbee talk about Marx as though he were a second-rate thinker: the Nazi calls him a Jew and the English liberal a German Jew. But I suspect that Marx is holding the nutcracker that the reader of both Toynbee and Spengler wants. New instruments of production change the whole character of a society; and the technique for producing new instruments of production at will brought in by the Industrial Revolution has changed the whole character of history. There is now a completely new factor in the situation which cannot be wholly absorbed into a dialectic of separate "civilizations," important as that is. The question whether Western civilization will survive or collapse is out of date, like the same question about the British Empire, for the world is trying to outgrow the whole conception of "a" civilization and has reached a different kind of problem altogether. Because the Industrial Revolution started in the West, its transformation of the world has looked like the expansion of Western society, and in fact has partly been that, but something else is also happening. The factors which are the same all over the world, such as the exploitation of labour, have always been, if not less important, at any rate less powerful in history than conflicts of civilizations. Now they are more important, and growing in power. Toynbee feels that world peace now is essentially a question of getting the five surviving civilizations to live together in spite of their traditional differences in outlook. But this is the old league of sovereign nations again, the balance-of-power fallacies revised to rationalize the new set-up of national "blocs." The conception of United Civilizations,

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like the conception of United Nations, is pretty, but it isn't the real thing.6 A Study of History is already something of a museum piece. Volumes 4 to 6 were the product of the 19305, that horrible period of impotent democracy and rampant Fascism, and their general tone of hoping against hope that as much as possible of the status quo will "survive" reflects what we all felt then. Now we have the atom bomb and Russo-American imperialism before us, but some years have elapsed in war work since the completion of volume 6, and perhaps a fresh start will bring a fresh energy. The great synthesis of Marx and Spengler has yet to be written, but so has half of Toynbee's book.

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Gandhi March 1948

From Canadian Forum, 27 (March 1948): 267. Reprinted in RW, 382-3. Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalist, pioneer of "passive resistance" to British imperial power, and spiritual leader, was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic, shortly after participating in the negotiations for an autonomous Indian state.

It is difficult to fathom the mind of the man who murdered Gandhi. What, from his point of view, could have made Gandhi so detestable a figure that he was capable of entering his presence, asking for his blessing, and then shooting him down in cold blood? It seems almost as though the Hitlers and Stalins of the world do not get shot because the people who hate them are the kind of people to whom murder, for however good a cause, is repugnant. But the Lincolns and Gandhis of the world are hated by the kind of people to whom murder comes naturally and agreeably. The assassin of Gandhi was an Eastern apostle of the cult of violence and of the easy and sensual pleasures of looting, massacre, and terror; and Gandhi had to die because he threatened to spoil the fun. Yet in the recent utterances of Gandhi there was a kind of foreboding melancholy, as though Gandhi himself felt that he had outlived his time. He never wanted to be a white dictator, and he was far too intelligent not to realize that much of the popular emotion on which his personal ascendancy was founded indicated a kind of spiritual poverty in his followers, as though he stood for a vicarious sanctity. His personal prestige was never higher than when his teachings were most disregarded, and he felt very keenly the irony of his situation. How, he asked plaintively,

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could he be so reverenced in an India that was working out all its problems with no reference whatever to the power of nonviolence? Some of his followers tried to make him into a god, and though he would have preferred assassination to that, it is hard to see how he could have avoided being pushed, along with Lenin and Sun Yat-sen,1 into the modern pantheon of legendary heroes, infallible and impotent, who can be invoked to endorse any kind of action, however at variance with their teachings. The combination of saintliness and political shrewdness is by no means rare in history, but as the former quality is childlike (in the best sense) and the latter adult, the political saint as a rule seems to create the sort of situation in which he himself becomes an anachronism. Smaller and tougher people succeed him, who persuade themselves that they are more mature because they have lost their innocence.

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Ernst Junger's On the Marble Cliffs March 1948

Review of On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Junger, trans. Stuart Hood (Guildford: John Lehmann, 1947). From the "Turning New Leaves" section in Canadian Forum, 27 (March 1948): 283. Reprinted in RW, 291-4.

Ernst Junger was one of the German intellectuals who shouted for years about the affirming power of blood and race as opposed to the critical negations of reason, about the sensuous ecstasy of war and the way that life is fulfilled by heroic death, and about the sacred duty of transforming nationalism into a religion and of having no gods but the state. However, after the Nazis had finally got the crusade started, even Junger decided he had had enough, and in 1939 published a dreamy and fantastic allegory which is at the same time a bitterly disillusioned anti-Nazi satire. That such a book could have appeared at all in Nazi Germany gives it, of course, a good deal of curiosity value, though I do not feel that it is a really significant example of what a totalitarian state does to literature. The allegory is intentionally vague and ambiguous, and many details of it are not clear to me yet, but I cannot think that the allegorical form was adopted merely to obscure the anti-Nazi aspect of the meaning, which in any case it hardly does. It is hopeless for a writer under a tyranny to try to devise a way of getting past a stupid censor to an intelligent public. Either his book is suppressed or its meaning fails to get across: the censor is never stupid enough and the public never intelligent enough to provide any escape from that dilemma. Jiinger's book appeared because from the Nazi point of view his record was good, and because the general context of its anti-Nazi sentiments

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was an attitude thoroughly acceptable to many powerful Germans, militarists, Junkers, old-school Prussian officers, and right-wing religious groups. The general thesis of the allegory appears to be that Hitler is the serpent in the paradise of German Romanticism. The paradise is the ideal life on top of the marble cliffs, a life at once monastic and military, in a fairyland outside time and space, where the women are beautiful and compliant, the animals (including a remarkable set of vipers) beautiful and tame, and the gardens and vineyards perennially fruitful. Religion is a genial paganism based on fertility rites in the spring and vintage festivals in the autumn; philosophy is a series of cozy and witty symposiums; science (largely botany) is an untroubled contemplation of the beauty of nature. This lush daydream is roughly intruded upon by the tyrant of the wooded plains beneath, a "Chief Ranger" who gathers around him a base-born rabble and proceeds to turn it into a hideous nightmare of brutality and terror. The cliff-dwellers ignore him as long as possible and go on with their botany: "While evil flourished like mushroom spawn in rotten wood, we plunged deeper into the mystery of flowers" [60]. But gradually and very reluctantly they realize they have to fight him: "Mingled with this there was something else that might be described as a sense of shame—that we did not regard the woodland breed as enemies" [66]. It might at that. The conflict that the cliff-dwellers win with the help of their tame vipers (I am not clear what they are, except that they are not Allied soldiers), forms the crisis of the narrative. At no time is this conflict clearly presented as a conflict of freedom against tyranny. It is presented rather as a conflict of true and perverted heroic virtue, of those who understand Nietzsche and Wagner as opposed to those who merely exploit them. It is because the Chief Ranger has the same assumptions and values as the cliff-dwellers that the latter are so slow in understanding he is evil. Some of their leaders, it is explicitly said, hardly differ at all in temperament and morality from their enemies. The cliff-dwellers and the woodsmen possess the same conceptions of discipline and authority, of the profound significance that a heroic death gives to life, of the value of the utter abandonment of the will to the demands of the blood. But somehow or other the cliffdwellers hold these ideas in a noble sense, and the woodsmen in a vulgar sense. "Between full-blown nihilism and unbridled anarchy there is

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a profound difference" [82] says our author plaintively; a difference which the present reader has failed to grasp. It may be instructive to compare this story with another allegory that resembles it in some respects: Rex Warner's The Aerodrome. There the conflict really is one of freedom and tyranny, represented by an English village and an air force commanded by a maniacal dictator. The villagers are disorganized, ignorant, sensual, and helpless, the air force ruthless, efficient, and fanatical; yet in the very disorganization of the village there is a free spirit that liberates and triumphs, and in the very efficiency of the air force there is a central vacuum of despair into which the whole structure collapses. The same pattern is to be found, I think, in Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky. But these are conceptions out of the reach of Jiinger, who, like the sorcerer's apprentice, stands bewildered and blinking before the apparition he deliberately tried to raise, hating it and yet fascinated by it, rejecting it and yet unable to escape from it. For if Nazism is not an alien thing but the reflection in reverse of one's own attitude, one can hardly help finding a curious reassurance in it. "Even the warrior caste begins to lose heart when they see the masklike faces rising up to the battlements from the depths. So it comes about that in this world soldier's courage takes second place, and only the noblest spirits in our midst penetrate into the dwelling-place of terror. They know that all these images in reality live only in our hearts, and pass through them into the portals of victory as if they were mere mirrored shadows. Thus the masked terrors confirm them in their own reality" [75]. That last sentence is worth pondering. Jiinger has been prevented from writing by the occupation authorities, which seems a pity, as he is now evidently prepared to explain that the values of the liberal, Christian, and humanist traditions were right all the time. But a prophet has had it if he says, "Follow me, and I will take you down to the still depths of the human soul, where you will be free from all the compulsions of waking life, free from God, from morals, from conscience, and from your duties to others; where you will have the heat of the blood instead of the dazzle of light, and where you will dwell in the nothingness at the heart of both nature and yourself instead of barking your shins over the outworks of reality." And one's sympathy for him is a bit limited if, when he gets to this dark and godless world of blood, he turns around and says, "Oops, sorry; we seem to be in hell: excuse it please." However, the book is very rewarding for

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those who are interested in the doublings and windings of the post-Nazi German conscience; unless, to be sure, you can get to a revival of Chaplin's The Great Dictator. If that is possible, go and study the role of Commander Schultz in that picture, and you will learn from it all you ever need to know about the psychology of anti-Nazi Nazis.

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Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor July 1948

From Canadian Forum, 28 (July 1948): 85-6. Reprinted in RW, 295-300. Alfred Kinsey was an American biologist, founder, and director of the University of Indiana's Institute for Sexual Research. Kinsey led the team whose report on male sexuality, based on more than 5,000 interviews, appeared in 1948 as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1948). Since the publication of this review, Kinsey's report has been subject to severe methodological critiques. On 27 January 1975, as Frye put together a "memorandum for a possible third collection of essays," he noted how "addresses and commentaries . . . date very quickly," adding that the Kinsey review is "now so out of date that it has gone through the full cycle and has acquired a sort of historical interest." See NFF, 1991, box 36, file 12.

The first volume of the Kinsey report is now in the hands of the American and Canadian public, and has been very well received: readers of this magazine will remember Professor Ketchum's brilliant review of it in a recent issue.1 Following close on this comes a caterwaul to have it banned in Canada, which, in view of our various hole-and-corner systems of censorship, could succeed. In any case, it reopens the whole question of censorship.2 The anvil chorus this time is said by the press to be supported by a doctor who is president of the National Health League of Canada, which must be an error, as anyone in such a position would appreciate the value of the book. To urge that the sale and distribution of the book be restricted is defensible, though in my opinion mistaken; but to call the book itself immoral, as is very freely done, is to show unconsciously how badly such a study is needed. Censorship and democracy don't mix, and there is no argument in

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favour of censorship that does not assume an antidemocratic social tendency. Being an adult citizen of a modern democracy implies certain responsibilities and certain privileges. A pretty fair proportion of adult citizens will surely try, as far as they can, to dodge their responsibilities and abuse their privileges. That doesn't matter. The principle of a democracy is the principle of a jury trial: the control of the expert by common sense. It is unlikely that a man would get to be a judge without knowing some law and having some claims to personal integrity; and it is very possible that a juror may possess no law and no integrity. That doesn't matter. When it comes to bringing in a verdict, the judge must defer to the jurors. Similarly in every election many people either don't vote at all or vote on prejudice and a profound ignorance of the real issues involved. That doesn't matter: a democracy must extend the franchise to as many people as possible. In the Kinsey report there is a mass of evidence about sexual behaviour suggesting that much of our legislation is out of date and that major changes in it may be called for. In a democracy the only people sufficiently responsible to be entrusted with major legislative changes are the general public, fools, morons, and perverts included. It is certainly possible that many people will read the Kinsey report, or try to read it, for more or less unworthy reasons. That doesn't matter. Two questions are involved in all censorship: from whom is the book to be kept, and to whom is it to be restricted? Most arguments for it say that books dealing with adult problems should be kept at least from adolescents. There may be something to be said for this: the ten-year interval, pointed out in the report, between the awakening of sexual desire and the possibility of a stable satisfaction of it constitutes a hard problem for the adolescent: he needs guidance, and censorship may conceivably be a legitimate form of guidance. But all effective guidance of the adolescent begins and ends in the individual home: it is difficult if not impossible to devise machinery outside the home that will be of any use to him. And, of course, it is even more difficult to protect from himself the adult who never outgrows his adolescence. A certain amount of censorship, however, which operates entirely in this field is unavoidable. There is such a thing as real pornography, addressed chiefly to perverts: its nature and methods of distribution are well known to the police, and the police are competent to handle it. There is also borderline pornography addressed to the infantile intelligence, some of which, in a necessarily haphazard way, does get banned. Canada bans a good deal

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of material such as comic books which no one would want to go to bat for, even if one had some doubts about the principle involved.3 I am speaking only of unmistakably adult books, of which the Kinsey report is one. With regard to the second question, there is a lurking fallacy in the notion that certain books should be restricted to professional people. In a democracy there is no body of knowledge which "should" be restricted to anybody. All professional people are in possession of technical knowledge which other people have not taken the time to learn, and which the more childish and simple-minded people never could learn. Such technical knowledge is restricted by its very nature, but whenever a profession claims the right to an exclusive knowledge of anything, as distinct from a license to apply it, it is conspiring against the public interest. In this it is abetted by the childish part of the public, who like to feel that they are being safely taken care of by someone who has grasped all the high mysteries of law, medicine, or religion, who knows all about their complaints and how to treat them. Soap operas and cheap movies are loaded to the gunwales with wise and indulgent doctors, clergymen, and judges who are what the psychologists call "father figures." Doctors especially are singled out for sages of exemplary devotion to the line of duty. The medical profession as a whole is considerably embarrassed by this fawning servility and wants no part of it, though of course a few will always be corrupted by it, and spread a "doctor knows best" attitude through society as far as they can. Here again, the argument that an outsider may make a wrong use of his knowledge is logically quite sound, but in a democracy, the most illogical of all forms of government, it is merely irrelevant. Democracy simply says that it is harder to make a right use of ignorance. Literary people, alas, have no professional organization, and are continually being deprived of such books as Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County and James Farrell's Bernard Clare (the case of both books has been taken up in this magazine)4 through a censorship that is started up at random, like a roulette wheel. Some amateur censor complains about a book, and the professional censor, an official whose main job is not censoring at all, has to try to make sense of a boozy and maundering law about "prejudicial to public morals," or some such phrase. In practice this means that if a book contains one or more of the half-dozen words generally considered unprintable, or an unusually detailed account of the sex act, it can be banned. If allowed to circulate, there

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might be a remote chance that someone of limited culture would find the word or the passage and chortle, "Cheese, right out in print!" I don't see what harm would befall the social order if he did, but the law says that this possibility is frightful enough to deprive you and me of the book. James Joyce's Ulysses got into the States through a judicial ruling that it was not obscene because its attitude to sex was more discouraging than appreciative. I daresay this is good law, but it is not good literary criticism. I doubt if Rabelais would have been admitted under this decision, yet Rabelais was an even greater writer than Joyce. There is, however, no point in trying to argue reasonably with anything so stupid and irrational as this: we have simply to recognize that we have touched on a kind of social neurosis which we should try to diagnose and understand, and as far as possible cure. Panic about sexual frankness seems to be endemic in our society. It is not like panic about Communism, which has a perfectly definite cause. As for the amateur or self-appointed censor, the fact that he probably needs psychiatric attention himself is gradually dawning on the public, and he is no longer taken very seriously as a spokesman of religion and morality. He now has to work mainly by stealth: Dr. Kinsey and his associates received many threatening letters in the course of their research. It is the social response to him that is the real problem, and perhaps a future volume of the report will deal with it. I can only offer a tentative suggestion. As soon as an American child stops playing with his toys and looks around for other forms of entertainment, a vast interlocking world of commercial amusement is opened to him, nearly all of it focused directly on his emerging sexual consciousness. He (or she: the girl really gets the brunt of it) is smothered in erotic novels and magazines, erotic popular music, erotic movies and radio programs. By erotic I mean having the relation of the sexes presented as the most important and desirable feature of life. This erotic material is beyond the reach of the censor, because most of it has already been censored in accordance with an almost frantic prudery. The general principle of such censorship is to leave in everything that is adolescent and titillating, and cut out everything that implies maturity and responsibility. The habitual moviegoer will see plenty of bare thighs, but never a pregnant woman. This combination of the erotic and the prudish can only be understood if we realize that the function of prudery is not to suppress the libidinous feeling, but to enable it to achieve a socially acceptable expression. The result is that "innocent" relationships in popular fiction often require a sultry and

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morbid passion that in my opinion really is "prejudicial to public morals." I remember a prattling gooey movie with a fifteen-year-old girl as heroine, and the way the film presented the relation of that girl to her father made my back hair prickle. But then the producer had aimed it at children who had not yet learned to disentangle their filial and sexual feelings, and at childish parents who had continued to slobber over their children and give them fixations of a type that is now being called "momism." The evil that such entertainment does is in throwing a sexual spell on the adolescent before he can defend himself against it, so that it takes a good deal of character and will power for him to fight his way out of it. It would do so even if he did not have, in addition, the subtle but pervasive resistance of all the entertainment media, who want to keep on selling him the same bill of goods. Considering the statistics of movie attendance, soap opera listening, and pulp and slick magazine reading, it is clear that many if not most people fail to outgrow this stage. America almost seems to present at times the appearance of being continually sunk in a maudlin erotic stupor. I say America, not because American sexual habits differ from those of any other country, but because the commercial exploitation of them is so highly organized. Anyone sunk in such a stupor is naturally irritated by the more dry and matter-of-fact tones in which adults discuss the workings of the sexual instinct. The listeners to soap operas acquire not only prudery, but vague smoldering resentment against the people who walk at large in the world they are trying to escape from. And while I have no idea what censors think they are doing, what they really are doing is defending the tinsel world of the soap opera and the low-grade movie against the adult competition that continually threatens to shatter it. Nearly all really erotic literature is untouchable by any censor. Even Forever Amber could not be banned, and Forever Amber, though lively and amusing enough, was certainly designed for the relief of concupiscence, as the parsons say of marriage.5 Too many people want erotic literature. It is the adult book that is vulnerable to censorship, the serious author with something true and therefore unwelcome to say, who has to fight to be read. But the advantage of a democracy is that the minority who lead and the majority who get led have a good deal of respect for one another, and I should like to feel that the popular reception of the Kinsey report was in part an example of that.

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Cardinal Mindszenty March 1949

From Canadian Forum, 28 (March 1949): 267. Reprinted in RW, 387-8. The case of Hungarian prelate Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty received international attention following his arrest by the Communist government on a charge of treason in 1948 and his conviction the following year.

It is quite possible that Cardinal Mindszenty was, as he admitted, at least technically guilty of most of the charges against him. One of them, treason, is the same as our charge against Communists here: "conspiring to overthrow the government by force." Western reaction and comment to the trial is an inconsistent mixture of several things. We are given to understand that he should not have been tried because he was an eminent clergyman, that he was innocent of all charges, and that if he was conspiring to overthrow the government, good for him. Our newspapers, without intending it, are thus raising the same sort of dust storm propaganda and confusion of moral issues as the Hungarian government. The reasons for condemning the Mindszenty trial are quite simple, and have nothing to do with his rank or even his guilt. First, there is the whole illegal procedure in which the accused is kidnapped by the police and held incommunicado. The same thing happened in our spy trials, but here all thoughtful citizens, of whatever political creed, saw the insult to democracy in it.1 Protests were made, questions asked in Parliament, and those responsible for the bungle considerably embarrassed. More important, when the accused were brought to court they got a fair trial and were acquitted if there was no evidence against them. Second, there is the dreadful possibility, and even probability, of torture. The

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Communists appear to know much more about torture than the Nazis ever did, and to understand how to handle a man so that no external signs of torture can be discovered, while the whole soul and body within have been so destroyed that there is no will power left to resist any suggestion. It is unnecessary to labour the point that torture and justice cannot exist side by side. Third, there is the whole conception of a trial as a publicity stunt, as propaganda for the government, which turns the procedure into a ritual of human sacrifice, based on the principle that, as Caiaphas said at the trial of Christ, "it is expedient. . . that one man should die for the people" [John 11:50]. This evil thing is coming over here, and while it has of course not touched the courts yet, it is present in the Thomas committee hearings and other forms of extralegal action.2

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The Two Camps April 1949

From Canadian Forum, 29 (April 1949): 3. Reprinted in RW, 391-2. From 12 March 1947, when U.S. President Harry S. Truman, pressed by a militantly anti-Communist Republican "class of '46" that included Senator Joseph McCarthy, had declared his "Truman Doctrine" of global commitment to the fight against Communism and urged the world to "choose between alternative ways of life," the controlling factor of postwar U.S. foreign policy became its crusade against Communism. As Frye's subsequent articles acknowledge, the effects of this policy spilled over into the domestic political arena and had unpleasant implications for America's neighbours. In an unusually heated atmosphere, Frye repeatedly attempted to put forward the position of principled detachment he thought most appropriate to a Canadian democracy.

The world situation from the Russian point of view is something like this. Wars are caused ultimately by economic rivalries among nations. All nations except Communist ones are class societies, which must either preserve their class system through exploitation, search for colonial markets, and eventually armed conflicts, or have their class system destroyed by a revolution leading to a classless society. Thus the only possible way to achieve world peace is first to achieve a worldwide revolution. There can be no hope for peace as long as a major capitalist power remains in the world. Fortunately the situation is developing beautifully along Marxist lines. The U.S.S.R. holds the centre of the largest land mass in the world; it holds all Eastern Europe, and can put Western Europe in its pocket whenever it likes. The most important political event just now is the revolt of Asia,1 and Communism is able to exploit that, whereas America is forced to try to prop up reactionary and

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corrupt governments that are done for anyway. China is already in the Communist camp. The revolt of Africa has not yet come, but it is certainly coming, and the Communists will similarly be in a position to exploit that. There is no use tackling America directly: she is far too strong, she has the atomic bomb, and a more effective way to wage war with her is to curtail her export markets until, faced with the impossible contradiction between a shrinking market and an expanding economy, she blows up. The American point of view, if the Americans can be said to have a consistent point of view, is that the world is now in the same position as America herself was in in 1861. We are faced with the idea of the Union, a Union which has in practice hardly any existence at all. Yet the idea is there, and must be preserved. The Union must essentially be a union of free peoples, and it cannot exist half slave and half free. It is thus primarily a union of good will, and may contain many economic systems. The one thing it cannot tolerate is the right of secession on the part of a group of confederate states pledged to maintain a slave economy such as Americans believe the Russian economy to be. And America will, if absolutely necessary, fight to preserve the idea of Union against the right of secession. Anyone who keeps on hoping that Russia can be brought to see the democratic point of view, or is maintaining a theoretical Marxism against her own essential convictions, or will somehow manage to do something else than try to achieve a worldwide Marxist revolution, is in precisely the same position as those who fifteen years ago refused to read Mein Kampf and insisted that sooner or later Hitler could be brought to see reason. And if the issue is now between democracy and Communism, it follows that every blow against democracy aids Communism, including those struck by Americans themselves in an effort to preserve democracy. Marxist dialectic says that everyone must ultimately be a Communist or an anti-Communist, and Marxists not only expect but want those who are not Communists to be anti-Communists. Every offence to civil liberties in America and Canada today which is carried out in the name of democracy is following in the wake of the two men who have done most to aid Communism since Lenin—Hitler and Chiang Kai-shek.2

38

Law and Disorder July 1949

From Canadian Forum, 29 (July 1949): 75. Reprinted in RW, 392-3. The present Communist witch-hunt in the United States has rather paralysed liberal criticism, because of the complexity of factors and uneven distribution of sympathies involved. On the one hand, the democratic tradition gives the widest possible freedom of action in politics; on the other hand, the American people feel that in the present state of affairs Communists are for all practical purposes agents of Russia and active enemy aliens. Thus Communism is legal, but discouraged by intimidation; it cannot be prosecuted, so it has to be persecuted. Unlike the witch-hunt of 19191 the present moves against Communism have a good deal of popular support, as Russia has thrown away all the vast good will which, a few years ago, she could have had for the asking from the American public. Liberals and intellectuals who find in Communism the enemy of everything they stand for hardly know what to say, as they disapprove of the means employed while recognizing a certain amount of sense in the anti-Communist drive. The trouble is that there is no substitute for a reign of law except a reign of terror. If steps are taken against Communism outside the regular legal channels, they cannot help being violent and arbitrary. Without a legal definition of Communism, which would protect the Communist as well as the non-Communist, there is nothing to stop some people from calling anyone a Communist whom they regard as sufficiently dangerous. Without definite legal procedures, there is nothing to stop the anti-Communist drive from being led by people with lynching mentalities, who regard the processes of law as too cumbersome and slip-

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pery to work properly in an emergency situation. Whatever good the Dies and Thomas committee hearings2 may have done, the evil of intimidation, character assassination, forcible suppression of evidence, and the spreading of terrorized insecurity among government employees far outweighs it. To try to outlaw something by outlawed means in the name of the law is a hopeless paradox, and every step in contempt of law taken by a democracy brings it so much nearer to the processes of police espionage, torture, and secret arrest which democrats hate so much in the totalitarian countries. There are great and perilous difficulties involved in declaring the Communist party illegal, but at least such a procedure would put all suspected people to some extent under the democratic guarantees of personal security and presumption of innocence prior to legally proved guilt.3 The law may be imperfect, and even more imperfectly administered, but still it does possess our inherited liberties. As it is, the real Communists are far less vulnerable than their innocent bystanders to the reckless mud-slinging, private feuds, and official spreading of slander which have resulted from the Thomas hearings.

39

Two Books on Christianity and History September 1949

Review of Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History, by Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Scribner's, 1949) and Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, by Karl Ldwith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). From Canadian Forum, 29 (September 1949): 138-9. Reprinted as "The Rhythm of Growth and Decay" in NFCL, 141-6. It is curious, and probably significant, that two books by well-known Protestant theologians,1 on practically the same subject, should appear at practically the same time. They are based on the same essential facts, take quite similar attitudes toward them, and quote much the same authorities, an interpretation of the Bible being of course fundamental to each. But in spite of this parallelism, which extends to an identical number of pages, they complement rather than overlap each other. Dr. Niebuhr presents an argued thesis of his own; Dr. Lowith offers a series of studies of philosophical historians, beginning with Spengler and Toynbee and going backward through Marx and Hegel, through Vico and Voltaire in the eighteenth century, to the great medieval prophet of historical progress, Joachim of Floris,2 thence to St. Augustine, and finally to the Bible. This crab-like movement is a little confusing to the reader until he gets used to it, in spite of the fascinating information to be picked up on the way. Dr. Lowith's book documents and supplies evidence for Dr. Niebuhr's thesis, and Dr. Niebuhr's thesis synthesizes and illuminates Dr. Lowith's erudition. Even their faults are complementary: Dr. Niebuhr's book has too many misprints, and Dr. Lowith's a bad index.

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Both writers agree that there are three major views of history, the Classical, the Christian, and the modern. The Classical view was that history is a series of cycles: the same things happen over and over (or at any rate the same kind of thing does), empires rise and decline and give place to other empires, and no one can look for anything in history but change and decay. The wise man, from the Classical point of view, would do well to cut loose from history altogether, and cultivate the life of reason, which is timeless and not subject to change. This pessimistic view of history is, Dr. Niebuhr argues, an oversimplified identification of history with nature, and tends increasingly to identify the salvation of the soul with a withdrawal from contemporary reality. It was overthrown by Christianity, because Christianity's central doctrine is the coming of God to the world at a certain time in history. It was partly because Christianity could give a religious meaning to history, while pagan philosophy could not, that Christianity conquered the intellectual world during the fall of the Roman Empire. (The evidence for this is set out in the late Charles Cochrane's book, Christianity and Classical Culture, one of the finest scholarly studies ever written by a Canadian.)3 The Christian sense that there is meaning in history beyond just an endless series of cycles gave birth to the modern theory of progress.4 This theory is at the opposite pole from the Classical one: it finds a redeeming force within history itself, and thinks that man should become wholly absorbed in it. Both writers agree that the doctrine of progress, like the cyclic view, is inconsistent with Christianity, but Dr. Niebuhr devotes more attention to it. He gives some very melancholy quotations from apologists of progress which indicate that nearly all nonreligious modern views of history, whether bourgeois or Communist, liberal or reactionary, are attempts to cheer ourselves up by saying that while most human problems are still unsolved, nevertheless man is going on and on and up and up to greater and better things. Just what these things are depends on the taste of the theorizer. Some people say that we're improving generally because we're getting more individual freedom; others say it's because we're getting more social order. Some say that the advance of science will fix everything, others that a change in our economy will do it. The discovery of evolution in biology gave a lot of people a vague idea that science had now proved that there is progress in history—a notion that Dr. Niebuhr correctly identifies as "social Darwinism."

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The views of the progressivists referred to by Dr. Niebuhr are a curious melange of half-baked liberal and half-baked revolutionary ideas, in which freedom and dictatorship are often treated as though they were interchangeable. Thus, says one writer, the management of human affairs requires a thorough knowledge of anatomy and physics, physiology and metaphysics, pathology, chemistry, psychology, medicine, genetics, nutrition, pedagogy, aesthetics, ethics, religion, sociology, and economics: that it would take about twenty-five years to learn all that, and that those who did learn it could start directing the "reconstruction of human beings" from the age of fifty on. This precious pearl of wisdom happens to come from Dr. Alexis Carrel's Man the Unknown, but Dr. Niebuhr quotes others equally depressing. His conclusion, which he feels is the only one possible to Christianity, is that man alone cannot arrive at a final judgment of value on human life, for all human judgments reflect some kind of class prejudice or special interest. That is, you can't assume that whatever you happen to be most interested in is the key to everything. If you're interested in science, it doesn't follow that the advance of science will bring man freedom. Even if it does, it doesn't follow that freedom is the best thing for man to have, particularly if you don't know what you mean by freedom anyway. Even if it is the best thing for man, it doesn't follow that all history is a movement toward getting it. If you assume that it is, your "progress" is the automatic plodding of a donkey with a carrot in front of his nose. The donkey would do much better to stop and turn around and see who is driving him on, and why that particular carrot is dangling there. All the evidence goes to show that the real driver of the progressive human donkey is the selfish, greedy, and tyrannical part of man himself. Once we realize that, we may get somewhere with a theory of progress. It seems rather ironic, if not silly, to be talking in terms of progress when the world we actually live in is a world of dictatorships, global wars, and political persecutions of unprecedented fury. When an American intellectual looks out on such a world and sees that it is fundamentally very good, he really means that the enormous wealth and power of the American middle-class culture he belongs to makes him feel, for the moment, very comfortable. When a Russian Communist talks the same way, he means really that production of steel in the Soviet Union is up and things look good for the advance of Communism. After the last war and the atomic bomb, a lot of people began to realize that the express train to Utopia might be derailed, but were unable to turn from a frivo-

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lous optimism to anything but an equally frivolous despair. Dr. Niebuhr refers to H.G. Wells, who began by writing books with such titles as A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods, who then began to talk in terms of scientific dictatorships, and whose last book was called Mind at the End of Its Tether. Neither writer, however, really brings out the moral horror of a progressive view of history, or points to the consequences of the reckless sacrificing of means to ends which it entails. It is progressive to say, If we murder a hundred thousand farmers now we may get a more efficient system of collectivized agriculture in a hundred years. The arguments of the inquisitors in Koestler's Darkness at Noon are progressive arguments. The point is important, because our use of words is easy-going, and all the well-meaning people in the country describe themselves as progressive, including the writer of this article and most of his readers. It should be clearly recognized that the real dynamic of democracy is empiric and experimental rather than progressive in any metaphysical sense. Democratic action involves foresight and long-term planning rather than merely muddling through, but that is something very different from a belief that the real end of what we are trying to do now lies in the future. Such an attitude leads to despising the present generation for not being a hypothetically ideal posterity, which is a completely vicious state of mind. Both writers are far better on negative than on positive criticism. Dr. Lowith is deliberately negative: he comes much closer than Dr. Niebuhr to Luther's complete separation of church and world, and the main thesis of Meaning in History is that there isn't much meaning in history. He agrees that the Classical view of history was cyclic and the modern one progressive, and that both are inconsistent with Christianity. But he also feels that every philosophy of history must be either cyclic or progressive and that, therefore, no Christian philosophy of history will work out. He feels that the Incarnation is something that cuts vertically across history, not a new historical principle. So for him a religious philosophy of history is possible only in Judaism, where the Messiah is believed to be still to come. A progressive view of history therefore strikes him as a kind of parody of Judaism. Of all the people he discusses, he is most interested in St. Augustine, precisely because St. Augustine was the least interested in secular history as such. Dr. Niebuhr attempts a more positive view in the second half of his book but his argument is still heavily overlaid by negative statements.

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The people he disagrees with make up quite a large company, and after reading that the Catholics are wrong because they absolutize the church, the Lutherans wrong because they believe in a rule of saints, the modern liberals wrong because they are infected with progressivism, one begins to reflect rather irritatedly that everybody seems to be out of step but our Reinhold. It is possible to attack human complacency to the verge of being complacent oneself in refuting it, and Dr. Niebuhr often does not do full justice to the intensity and power of some of the modern thinkers he refers to: Marx, for instance, or Nietzsche. It seems to me possible to say much more about a Christian philosophy of history than either writer does say. The modern cyclic theories of Vico and Spengler, and to a lesser extent Toynbee, are very different from the old Classical view of the cycle. And it is too simple to say that St. Augustine refuted all cyclic views of history merely because he ridiculed the Classical one. It is possible to look at St. Augustine in another way, and find in his City of God a conception of the recurrent rise and decline of civilizations as central to his whole idea of the thing which stands over against the City of God, the civitas terrena or earthly city. The fall of the Roman Empire was the immediate occasion for, and the most impressive proof of, St. Augustine's thesis that anything man can erect will fall down sooner or later. In all human institutions, then, there is a rotary movement of rise and fall which goes back to the original fall of man. The affinity of this rhythm of growth and decay to that of the natural world, with its yearly vegetable cycle of death and revival, is the basis for the Vico-Spengler conception of history as showing a series of "civilizations" or "cultures" which behave more or less like natural organisms and go through much the same phases of growth, maturation, and decline. It is also possible that behind this organic rhythm, which it seems to me certainly does exist in history, there may be an evolutionary one, and, without vulgarizing this into a theory of progress, we may perhaps see in the Industrial Revolution the beginning of something that makes us, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, the cavemen of a new mental era.5 However, as far as they go Drs. Niebuhr and Lowith are sound enough. The serpent in Eden told Adam that if he would take a few bites out of the apple of the tree of knowledge, he would become like the gods, and know clearly what good and evil were. When Adam listened to this, he got into trouble. Adam's descendants, we are told, once decided to get together and build a big tower that would reach heaven,

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but before they finished it they found that they were no longer speaking the same language [Genesis 11:9]. The preachers of progress have been handing out similar advice, and planning similar projects, for well over a century, and with much the same result. There are many today who, looking at the world before them, feel vaguely that this was where they came in, but don't know how to get out of the dark theatre and back to the sidewalks of a real city. All Drs. Niebuhr and Lowith have tried to do is to indicate a possible exit.

40

Nothing to Fear but Fear November 1949

From Canadian Forum, 29 (November 1949): 169-70. Reprinted in RW, 395-8. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 4.

For some months now the American immigration authorities have been busily defending our otherwise undefended border. A number of labour leaders, students, and unfrocked Communists have been held up, turned back, or refused visas, and on a principle of chance well known to duck-hunters, they have even managed to bag a few authentic members of the Labour-Progressive Party. The recent refusal of visas to Professor Shortliffe of Queen's and Professor Barker Fairley of Toronto,1 amounting in at least the latter case to permanent exclusion, has brought the matter more into the open. As practically every Canadian has friends or relatives in the States, Canadian protest has been somewhat muffled. When made, it has usually been carefully qualified by two points: first, that it is intelligible that the U.S.A. should want to exclude people with a vocation for overthrowing its government by force; and second, that as a sovereign nation it has a perfect right to exclude whom it likes. Well, so it has, but its officials need not be so contemptuous of the national sovereignty of Canada, which, even if smaller, is quite as highly civilized, and quite as interested in democracy. It is an insult to Canada to have American authorities in charge of Canadian immigration who do not know the elementary facts of Canadian political life, and who cannot distinguish a Communist from a social-democrat. Earlier in the summer a prominent CCF leader had some difficulty in getting a visa because he had been called a Communist in a Trestrail pamphlet.2 But

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no American official should be handling Canadian immigration at all unless he knows all about the trustworthiness of Trestrail pamphlets. A similar political astigmatism must have blurred the official view of Professor Shortliffe, who, though he has associated himself with the CCF, was otherwise merely a professor of French trying to proceed to an appointment in French at Washington University. Professor Fairley wanted a visa to fulfil an invitation to lecture on Goethe at Bryn Mawr. For any normally competent official, the only question of importance would be: is there anything in this man's record to indicate that he is going to do anything more subversive than lecture on Goethe? And the answer to that question was obviously no. Professor Fairley is a world-famous Goethe scholar, and has never made a political speech in his life. But the officials, in a frenzy of misapplied subtlety, looked up all the occasions on which he had lent his name to the support of a Soviet friendship organization, and gravely decided that he was not sufficiently at war with Russia to be admitted even for a month. After all, had not Mrs. Fairley been sent home from the Peace Conference some months before? True, that action was as high-handed and foolish as the exclusion of her husband. But perhaps the authorities reasoned that if they made two foolish decisions over the same family, they would save their faces by their consistency. It is the element of panic in these decisions that is disconcerting. The immigration service is really a part of the police force, and there is no surer index of the official attitude to democracy than the behaviour of the police. In a totalitarian state it is obviously necessary to keep the police as stupid and brutal as possible. In democracies a reactionary government, if secure and at peace, generally prefers to have its police slightly confused. It likes to feel that if it says to a policeman, "Go out and get some Reds," he will soon return dragging after him an assortment of labour leaders, clergymen, social workers, liberal intellectuals, the executive of the Housewives Protective Association, and a Jewish tailor named Marks. This level of police activity is well represented in the recent case of a Toronto student arriving from Europe, who, though only passing through to Canada, was detained at Ellis Island for questioning about an alleged "inflammatory speech" made on shipboard. She had made no such speech, and was eventually released with apologies. The news report added that there were seven secret agents on board her ship, and this idiotic bungle was apparently the only result of their combined efforts.

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But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to individuals, but dangerous to their own community. The caprice of immigration officials is only a small part of the widespread dither engendered by the loyalty purges and all the other processes of trial by slander and prosecution by hearsay. Insecurity, distrust, and a feeling that an emergency situation demands arbitrary measures are, as everyone must know who has not completely lost his head, the elements that make a dictatorship strong and a democracy weak. The worst enemy of the American people could wish for nothing better than this kind of hysteria. In so energetic a country as America a lot of steam bubbles off the surface, and those who do not look below the surface get some very curious notions about the American character. Those who know Americans well—and Canadians do know them well—know them to be a people of great courage and high morale, with a deep love of freedom, a solid sense of humour, and inexhaustible reserves of generosity and hospitality. These qualities are, at the moment, not being adequately represented by the quaking sentries on the world's least dangerous frontier.

41

The Ideal of Democracy 7 February 1950

Published in the Varsity, 7 (7 February 1950): 3. The subheadings that appeared in the original have been omitted here.

All governments whatever must be either the expression of the will of a minority holding autonomous power, which is able to impose that will on society as a whole, or the expression of the will of the people as a whole to govern themselves. In the former case there is an antithesis between a ruling class and the ruled classes; in the latter case there is no governing class, but only a group of executives and public servants responsible to society as a whole for what they do. The latter conception of government is the democratic one. Democracy is thus essentially the attempt to preserve law and order in society which has superseded the primitive and outmoded idea of "rule." A monarchy may be democratic, as in Great Britain, but only if the king is conceived as reigning rather than ruling. But the cardinal democratic principle of limiting autonomous power applies to the majority as well. Unanimity being unobtainable in human society, the deciding force of democratic political action is normally the will of the majority; but democracy is very far from being merely the expression of the will of the people. The unconditioned will even of a majority could bring about as great a tyranny as the unconditioned will of a single ruler. The energy and dynamic of a democracy derive from majority rule; its balancing and preserving principle is minority right. In other words, the expression of the popular will will bring freedom only insofar as it is an informed will directed toward a desirable end. The conception of what the desirable end is must be built up from a con-

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flicting body of minority opinions. A democracy must, therefore, adopt the principle of toleration of variety in opinion and an inductive and empiric attitude to opinion in general. All kinds of religious views, of political programs, of scientific and philosophical conceptions, must be given free play. The limiting principle of such toleration is that all opinions should as far as possible be publicized, that is, submitted to the people as a whole. The publicizing of various opinions is democratic education in the broadest sense, the informing of the popular will by the individuals or minorities who have something to contribute to it. To use Toynbee's language for a different purpose, in a democracy all minorities must be creative minorities, never dominant ones.1 Antidemocratic social action, of the kind intolerable to a democracy, must necessarily be in the direction of withdrawing information and action from the community as a whole. It is a contradiction in terms for a democracy to tolerate a conspiratorial coup d'etat aimed at the restoration of the old idea of a professional ruling class. Democracy being a political theory only, it needs an economic structure to complete itself. Originally, this economic structure was laissezfaire capitalism, which aided the growth of democracy by playing a revolutionary role against the old hereditary concretions of power and privilege which had come down from feudal times. By now laissez-faire is in considerable danger of developing into an oligarchic dictatorship or managerial system, and revolutionary democratic action now takes the form of using the democratic machinery of government, the Parliament, the civil service, and the cabinet, to control the productive industrial economy to the point of making its actions known to the people as a whole and responsible to them. Along with this has grown what is coming to be known as the "welfare state,"2 the attempt to integrate the economy of society more closely with its government. Democracy is thus compelled at present to wage war on two fronts, against the dangers of a revolutionary coup d'etat coming from either end of the economic structure. These two threats are generally known as Fascism and Communism respectively, and both have as their aim the total control of government by a small ruling class within the economic structure. Both, therefore, aim at managerial dictatorships, and both claim to be fighting, not democracy, but one another. Both claim that democracy is merely the propaganda facade of its real enemy. The problem of democracy at present is to oppose both threats to its existence without being frightened by either into becoming the cat's paw of the other.

42

The Church and Modern Culture 1950

In 1947, Frye was a member of a commission appointed by the United Church to study modern culture and its points of tension with Christian faith, and to assess "the role of the church in the redemption of culture." Although the published version of the commission's report, The Church and the Secular World (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1950), was a collective project, Frye told Robert D. Denham that he had written the extract on pp. 13-14 of the booklet, Tenets of Modern Culture, reprinted here. In a diary entry written on 4 May 1950, Frye says that he also wrote the section "Literature" for part 2 of the report (D, 339). In this contribution, written at the very peak of the "end of ideology" period (see Introduction, xxxvii), Frye devotes considerable pains to an analysis of the American ideology. Tenets of Modern Culture 1. The oldest civilization in the modern world is the American one, which was established in its present form in 1776. Modern France dates from the French Revolution; Great Britain began to assume its modern form with the Reform Bill of 1832; Germany and Italy entered the modern world in 1870; China in 1912; Russia in 1917, and so on. The party now in power in America is the oldest political party in the world, and the Stars and Stripes is one of the world's oldest flags. 2. The axioms of this culture are essentially those of eighteenthcentury Deism. There is no real world except the physical world and the order of nature, and our senses alone afford direct contact with it. Religion can provide no revelation of another; nature is red in tooth and claw;1 we must look for God only in man, and in nature to the extent

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that it is subdued by man. The essence of religion is morality, dogma and ritual 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 essential meaning of human life is the progressive removal of the obstacles presented by nature, including atavistic impulses in man himself. This is done chiefly through the advance of science, by which is meant the increase in the comfort of the body, of which the mind is a function. 3. The problems of American civilization are connected with the facts: (a) that these absurd notions, however inadequate to the modern world, form part of an unofficial established church in American society, are taught in schools, and are impressed on American children at their most impressionable age; (b) that the real churches have been too deeply contaminated with such ideas themselves to make much effective resistance against them; (c) that they form part of the ideology, not of democracy, but of laissez-faire, and yet have kidnapped and secularized the democratic spirit in American life, so that many Americans regard democracy as inseparable from laissez-faire. 4. The axioms and postulates of laissez-faire, as the above indicates, are anti-Christian, and lead in the direction, not of democracy, but of managerial dictatorship. Such a dictatorship may be established in either of two ways: (a) through the consolidation of the power of the oligarchy (Fascism); (b) through the seizure of power by a revolutionary leadership established within the trade unions (Communism). The preservation of democracy thus depends on a balance of power held by the state and its popularly elected representatives against the threat of a coup d'etat coming from either end of the economic machine. Both Fascism and Communism claim to be the logical forms of true democracy, and both claim to be fighting, not democracy, but one another, for each maintains that democracy is merely the propaganda facade of its rival. 5. The sense of imminent apocalypse in history is not new, but the present one has five main causes: (a) The Fascist cause. This rests on the belief, worked out most coherently by Spengler, that Western culture has reached, like the Roman Empire before it, a late era of imperialism, technical and engineering feats, annihilation wars, and dictatorships, and that now is the time for the advent of new Caesars whose will will release a divinely heroic power in their followers. (b) The Communist cause. This rests on the belief, worked out most

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coherently by Marx, that the Industrial Revolution, with its attendant power of introducing new instruments of production at will, has brought a dialectic struggle into history that will eventually end history as we know it (i.e., as a pattern of class exploitation). It may be noted that both Fascism and Communism are cul ts of a divinely inspired leader, but that the Fascist hero is a man of will who seizes "the hour of decision"2 and the Communist hero is the incarnation of a revolutionary dialectic. Fascism subordinates the natural reason to the natural will, and Communism reverses the process. The practical results do not greatly differ. (c) The laissez-faire cause. This rests on the belief that man is rapidly progressing towards a temporal Utopia, and is part of the heritage of American Deism. It has run a manic-depressive cycle from a manic point in 1928-29 to a depressive point now with the threat of the A- and H-bombs. (d) The technological cause. This is the simple fact that man has finally succeeded in learning how to do himself some irreparable damage, and the natural man's hatred of life is now checked in mid-course by his fear of death. (e) The religious cause. From the religious point of view, Fascism in its pure form of German Nazism looks very like an atheistic parody of Judaism, preserving its sense of ethnic purity and its expectancy of a temporal Messiah but throwing away its God. From the religious point of view, Communism looks very like an atheistic parody of Roman Catholicism, preserving its sense of an irrefutable and worldconquering dialectic and setting up at Moscow an imitation of its central infallible church, but, again, throwing away its God. It is possible that laissez-faire, the doctrine of the individual liberty of the natural man, is similarly a godless parody of Protestantism. If so, democracy and Protestantism are natural allies, for democracy has consistently played a revolutionary role against laissez-faire. Thus from the point of view of any one of the three great Biblical religions, our age seems to be an age of a consolidating anti-Christ. 6. Communism, the most immediate of the three enemies, is antireligious because it regards religion as the shadow thrown into another world by the class exploitation of this one, and believes that if men are deprived of the hope of immortality they will turn with renewed energy to transforming their own society. Christians know that when the eternal perspective is taken away from man, the resulting claustrophobia

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(angst) drives men mad. But unless Christians devote their energies to transforming society as though the Communists were otherwise right, the Source of Christian charity will remain unsatisfied. [Modern] Literature From the invention of the alphabet to our own day, the only major technological advance directly affecting literature has been the printing press. Now, however, the changes brought about by movies, radio, and television, to name only the more conspicuous agents, have made our own age one of unparalleled transmutation of cultural values. Even the conceptions of "book" and "author" are undergoing change. A modern bestseller has only a temporary incarnation as a book between its initial appearance as a magazine serial and its ultimate appearance as a movie. In the making of a movie the role of the author, or "word man," is a minor and often a negligible one. Many of the conventional categories of literature—novel, essay, poem, and the like—are becoming inorganic extensions of tradition. In studying, say, drama in Canada, we must take account of radio drama (which ranges from Lister Sinclair's "Socrates"3 to soap opera), revues (e.g., "Spring Thaw"),4 pantomime and monologue (Fridolin),5 and the influence of films and television, as well as the more conventional stage plays. Among the good effects of these technological changes we may reckon the new prestige which radio and movie alike have given to the spoken word. The revival of oratory, the change from the era of the silent Coolidge to the era of the eloquent Roosevelt, is the most striking example of this; but the beneficial effects of the new media on drama and even on poetry (which by 1900 had got so badly bogged down in the printed page that it had nearly lost its connection with vigorous rhythmical speech) cannot be questioned. The results, which range from the sporadic efforts to revive poetic drama down to the use of choral reading in primary education, are still tentative, but healthily experimental. The bad effects are more obvious, and one hopes that they are more temporary. The commercial sponsorship of radio programs (partly counteracted in Canada by a publicly owned broadcasting commission) and the complete commercialization of the Hollywood film industry are alike fatal to independent and original creative effort. The successful magazines, the so-called "slicks," which print popular fiction and sometimes a very little poetry, are, for all practical purposes, retail advertis-

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ing journals. The greater part of American book business is now in the hands of three or four vast publishing combines, each with its own reprint trade, its own book-of-the-month scheme for dumping ephemeral rubbish on a bewildered public, and its own advertising machinery for ballyhooing the latest purveyor of erotica into a rival of Balzac and Tolstoy. The Grip of Commerce

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that nearly all genuine culture of our day should be characterized by a revolutionary revolt, on principles of economy and simplicity, against the interlocking and strangling grip of commerce. The original novelist must find an independent publisher, content to make at most a small profit on the book, who will not refuse it if it does not seem likely to make a successful movie. The poet must seek fame (he need waste no time looking for financial support) in the "little magazine," run on a shoestring by a few enthusiasts until its mounting deficit finally kills it. The little magazine has for nearly a century been one of the main arteries of culture, especially in France. Trade unions are on the side of exploitation as far as culture is concerned, but the linotype may soon have its monopoly threatened by cheaper machines. The discriminating book-buyer must avoid the glossy bestseller counter and do his buying among second-hand books and paper-backed reprints. (There are signs that in America and Britain, as in France, the paperbound book will become the salvation of the impoverished intellectual.) Drama must confine itself to the energy and devotion of small groups with little money for elaborate staging, sometimes (one thinks for the third time of France) restricted to a front parlour. Among films it is almost a rule that the less money a film has cost, the better it is likely to be, the Italian films Shoe Shine and Open City being done under conditions which approach those of the commedia dell'arte.6 In the long run, of course, products of culture which depend on the human brain and hand will flourish long after commercial pseudo-culture has, like Frankenstein, been killed by the mechanism it has created. Even now it seems probable that the situation will be greatly clarified by the development of photographic magazines, comic books, and the like, to cater to the needs of those who find reading too great a mental strain, and whose demands for entertainment have long confused the literary scene. We have spoken only of the democracies: in totalitarian states, where

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advertising has become propaganda, and vested interests complete monopoly, all loopholes for the independent author are closed up. But even in the democracies the tendency of the author to regard himself as the prophet, priest, and king of a new era, which was so common in the previous century, has largely disappeared. Advertising and propaganda are ironic arts, in the sense that they say what they do not wholly mean, and in the face of this vast and ruthless irony the sincere author is only too glad to turn to anything that seems to guarantee the validity of his sincerity. The Importance of Religion In this situation religion seems to offer a new hope to the author, and an increase in the importance of religion is a very real fact in contemporary culture. In poetry, for instance, there has been nothing like the outburst of technical experiment that followed the previous war: it seems as though our poets were more interested in finding something to say than in finding new ways to say it. The stock secular themes of poetry—the beauty of nature, the power of sexual passion, even the cruelty and injustice of society—seem to be handled with an increasing detachment, as though the themes themselves were felt to be spiritually exhausted. On the other hand, we have the great popularity of religious themes, besides the Anglo-Catholic influence emanating from Eliot, the Barthian influence emanating from Auden, and the Roman Catholic influence emanating from Claudel and Peguy. All this seems to be due, not to accident or fashion, much less to any desire to escape to a better world, but to a growing sense that the whole point of poetry is that God and man meet in a Logos. In fiction the abrupt decline of the classical novel, the pure study of character, is hardly realized even yet, but the form that rose with the middle class in the eighteenth century is rapidly disappearing with that class. The author who writes a novel primarily because he has a story to tell is now a rare bird; our best "novelists," if the word is still applicable, have themes rather than stories, and their approach is allegorical rather than realistic. We have the explicitly religious allegory of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis,7 the socially significant allegory, including the melodramas which deal with the labour unrest and race prejudice, and the historical allegory, where the characters illustrate the author's philosophy of history. The great rise to popularity of the thriller (the French

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"existentialist" movement has largely founded its prose fiction on the thriller form) makes it look as though a stereotyped conflict of heroes and villains will provide the basic formula of fiction in the next age. Here again the role of religion in clarifying the nature of heroism and villainy (one thinks of the use of Catholicism in Graham Greene), is of increasing importance. The hero of a thriller is regularly an agent of freedom, as the villain is of tyranny, and the existentialists are much preoccupied with freedom as an end in itself—but what a man is to be free for they do not say. Perhaps religion can help them. The churches should make sure that they are always on the side of genuine and sincere creative effort, however new, different, or "shocking." Commercial art is not only monotonous but also prudish, ready to give way to any kind of pressure in order to please every kind of superstition and immaturity. The churches have acquired a bad but deserved reputation for supporting prudery, for continually demanding the enforcement of the most trumpery social and moral taboos, and for showing no other interest in culture: for being, in short, a mouthpiece for middle-class vulgarity and for the commercial interests that pander to it. The church should be a mouthpiece only for the truth that makes free [cf. John 8:32] and for the Word that has overcome the world, and if it is so, all the genuine culture in the world will bear witness to its power.

43

And There Is No Peace June 1950

An unsigned editorial from Canadian Forum, 30 (June 1950): 52. This and the next piece were identified as Frye's by Robert D. Denham in the course of his work on Frye's 1950 Diary (see D, 353).

The Canadian delegation to the Moscow Peace Congress1 has been active in various cities of Canada since its return. A "Ban the Bomb" petition and interviews with Messrs. Pearson and Coldwell2 in Ottawa backfired somewhat, but large public meetings in Toronto and Hamilton were more successful, and the movement is currently enjoying a good deal of publicity. The stock reactionary answer is that the movement led by Dr. Endicott and Hewlett Johnson3 is a one hundred per cent Communist front, and that anyone who imagines it to be anything else is a sucker. Because it is the stock reactionary answer, many people of tolerance and good will feel that it is too facile to be the right one. Actually, it is the right one. But if Communists talked complete nonsense they would not be dangerous. We cannot say that it's all Communist propaganda and therefore a pack of lies; if it's all Communist propaganda, it's about forty per cent true. It is true that the world is heading straight for a war of unimaginable destruction. It is true that no organized group of people in Canada are preaching peace with the same earnestness as the Communists. It is true that Soviet Russia does not want a shooting war. And it is very probably true that the inherent contradictions in the present structure of American capitalism make, if not a war, at any rate some kind of war economy, necessary to its functioning at the present

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time. A lot of other things are true too; but that does not prevent these things from being equally true. Hence the enormous propaganda value that Dr. Endicott, Dean Johnson, and Father Duffy4 have for the Communists. They suggest that their adherence to the party line is the result of a Christian longing for peace; they rouse nostalgic memories of the 19305 and the mirage of a "Popular Front"5 of all lovers of freedom against brutal tyrants; and they exploit the very natural distrust that many people have for antiCommunist smear campaigns. They can create a mass rally in a big auditorium where the Communists in their own name could not raise a dozen people beyond their own members. Hoodlums who break up their meetings add immeasurably to their prestige. And their influence can do nothing but expand and increase in the power vacuum created by the democratic apathy and sense of frustration about an approaching atom-bomb war. We shall have to find better arguments for peace than the facile demonstration that those who advocate the peace of a worldwide Communist dictatorship are Communists.

44

Caution or Dither? July 1950

An unsigned editorial from Canadian Forum, 30 (July 1950): 75, identified as Frye's in D, 384. The postwar Canadian Forum took a keen interest in the British experiment in Parliamentary socialism under Clement Attlee and this is Frye's own contribution to this ongoing concern.

The confusion resulting from the Labour Government's refusal, or nearrefusal, to enter into the Schuman Plan is due to the fact that it is impossible not to sympathize, to some extent, with all the points of view. The Schuman Plan is primarily an attempt to end the political schism in Western Europe between France and Germany by making the economic interests of both countries too closely akin for a major conflict between them ever again to occur.1 Nobody can oppose the possibility of ending all future Franco-German wars. Nobody can fail to agree that economic union, starting with coal and steel, is the only effective way to bring this about. It is, of course, a snap decision, brought about through fear of Russian aggression and infiltration, and through the encouragement of the Marshall Plan, of which the Schuman Plan is really a subsidiary part.2 But that could actually be a point in its favour: it certainly could be argued that the correct procedure is to express a will to agree first, and work out the details afterward. The trend toward unity and away from jealousy is good in itself, whatever its motivation; and surely the strength and importance of the labour unions in the negotiations will prevent the Schuman Plan from becoming just one more cartel. Against this, British public opinion is divided between what is often called "doctrinaire socialism" and what might well be called doctrinaire expediency. Mr. Attlee3 and the executive group hesitate to commit

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themselves to the unqualified principle of setting up a coal and steel Authority that will limit national sovereignty, not because they disapprove of limiting national sovereignty, but because so sudden a change in Britain's relations with the Continent would involve a complete reconsideration and realignment of Britain's present economic structure, as well as her political relations with other Commonwealth nations. The Conservative view is probably very similar, though they are not missing the opportunity to get an Opposition's free credit out of the situation. On the other hand, the Bevan-Dalton group,4 which appears to have issued the latest Labour Party statement more or less on its own, is raising all the old uncomfortable socialist questions. Isn't the Schuman Plan merely one more effort to "make capitalism work," and, by absorbing the present British Government within its structure, throw Socialism out of work? The least satisfactory aspect of the situation is the fact that the Labour Party seems to have a genius for bad public relations. It has given the public, with the help of a right-wing press, the impression of fumbling a fine opportunity for statesmanship and dithering away a chance to turn the whole course of history toward peace and unity. This impression is quite false, but it will not do to leave it at that.

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Trends in Modern Culture 1952

From the original publication as chapter 7 of The Heritage of Modern Culture: Essays on the Origin and Development of Modern Culture, ed. Randolph C. Chalmers (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952), 102-17. This was the book that grew out of the work of the Culture Commission of the United Church (see headnote to no. 42). Reprinted in RW, 300-15. The Modern Social Scene The modern world derives its form primarily from the vast social change which began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and which we may call the Industrial Revolution, from its most conspicuous feature. This change, like every other, was at once old and new: unique and yet in some degree a repetition of the pattern of previous events. The repetitive aspect of it is worked out most fully in Spengler's Decline of the West. Spengler sees history as a series of quasi-organic developments or "cultures," which are at first agricultural and feudal, then urban and oligarchic, and finally become industrial and totalitarian. The last stage is one of huge cities, nomadic population, profiteering and dictatorships, mass wars, the impoverishing of agriculture and the exhaustion of the arts, and the growth of technology. The only hope for such an epoch is in a nation strong enough to place it under martial law. Classical culture, according to Spengler, went into this phase in its Roman period, and Western culture reached the same stage at the time of Napoleon. We are now at the stage corresponding to the Classical Punic Wars, with the centres of growing world empires struggling for mastery, and the Rome of the future will be whatever nation has enough

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organization, discipline, leadership, ethnic integrity, and historical sense to impose its will on the rest of the world. Being a very right-wing German, Spengler had no doubt about which nation that would be, or how it would proceed to go about imposing its will. The uniqueness of the same event finds its most articulate exponent in Marx. According to Marx, the structure of society is dependent on the range of productive power represented by its "instruments of production," or technological potency. This productive power is used to maintain the class structure of society, in which the producing classes are the servants of a leisure class. The Industrial Revolution brought in, not simply new inventions, but a technique for producing new inventions at will. Hence its immediate effect is to accelerate exploitation at a terrific speed, making the group of dispossessed producers so large that it becomes practically the equivalent of society itself. Such a dispossessed society could, by seizing its own producing power, recover its balance in a revolutionary act that would not only destroy its class structure but put an end to history as we know it, history as we know it being essentially the mutation of class struggles. Here, then, are two logical and coherent interpretations of the Industrial Revolution which help to explain the two great totalitarian movements of our time. Both movements are revolutionary, leading up to an act of will in a crisis. In all critical acts, whether social or individual, there can be no division of attitude: the act implies that argument, objection, and doubt of the issue have ceased. Hence a revolutionary movement demands a heroic leadership that must be accepted by all its followers as inspired and infallible. The nature of the leadership differs slightly: both Nazism and Communism determine the future on the analogy of the past, but for Nazism analogy means likeness and for Communism it means inner structure (as in Paul's phrase "analogy of faith").1 Thus the Nazi hero catches the historical moment or "hour of decision" (the title of Spengler's second book)2 as it recurs in time, and the Communist hero incarnates the dialectic of history: he is the word of Marx made flesh, for all Communist leaders, whether Trotsky, Stalin, or Tito, must claim to be the true heirs of Marx and Lenin. However, for most of those living in the democracies, the essential identity of Fascism and Communism as cults of the divine leader or conquering Messiah is far more significant than these differences.3 The Industrial Revolution came to a world in which the most highly organized groups were relatively small nations, most of them in Western Europe. It increased pro-

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duction at such a rate, and engendered so competitive a scramble, that nations had to become either large enough to endure the contest, or small enough to drop out of it. The colonial expansion which resulted appears to have been a transitional phase. What is now taking shape is a new "geopolitical" configuration, in which the effective nations are huge land masses extending over most of a continent. The development of long-range destructive weapons such as the atomic bomb is designed to make warfare on a full continental scale a military possibility. The continental character of the modern political world is so new that it is difficult for many to stop thinking in the old terms. This is particularly true of Europe, where the nations obviously have no political future except in a continental federation. Again, at least one of the new continent-powers—a vast Negro republic in Africa—has not yet been born, but it assuredly will be born sooner or later, and if South Africa insists on sowing the wind of apartheid it may have to reap the whirlwind of a Communist Africa. We do not normally think of the United States of America as the world's oldest country. But, as the firstborn political child of the new age, there is a sense in which it is. The party now in power at Washington is the oldest political party in the world, and the Stars and Stripes is one of the world's oldest flags. No other major power goes back as far as 1776 in its modern form, in which the leadership generated by the new social changes has attained political control. The American Revolution itself was mainly pre-industrial, but was able to pass into the industrial phase without a second major shift of class power. France's modern reformation was later, and that of Great Britain was not really achieved until the Reform Bill of 1832. Germany, Italy, and Japan entered the modern world around 1870, when the first two became national entities; Russia, China, and India were born in our own generation. The nations that went Fascist, we notice, were those which were too late to compete in the struggle for colonies, and too early to succeed in transforming themselves into continental powers, as Germany and Japan tried so hard to do. The nations that went Communist were those which had inherited vast geopolitical resources and territories exploited by a corrupt and demoralized administration. Thus Fascism is evidently an aberrant phase of the transition from colonial to geopolitical power, and Communism similarly appears to be an aberrant phase of the transition from geopolitical conflict to a world federation. It is in America, in any case, that we should look for the original form of modern culture. This origi-

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nal form, which we are struggling to attach to the word "democracy," is a much less obviously logical response to the Industrial Revolution than its more recent rivals; but it appears to be outliving one of them already, and it may have outlived the other by the end of the century. In spite of its age, America is not necessarily the best or most mature of contemporary democracies, but it is the only geopolitical champion of democracy, and our own country revolves in its orbit, so we shall confine and attach ourselves at the moment to the American scene. The geopolitical America, unlike the European countries, was able to add its colonies to its own body, and hence it was a kind of proving ground for all the expansionist energies of its age, economic laissezfaire, political liberalism, and religious individualism included. The belief that men can be and have a right to be equal and independent is the growing point of this expansionism and the source of everything vital in it, and that belief, rather than any political modus operandi, is what is usually implied first of all by the word "democracy." As the conception of democracy has matured, it has separated itself from its vague background of Utopian optimism. Many Americans still believe that laissez-faire is the economic aspect of democracy, but there is a growing realization that laissez-faire by itself does not lead to democracy, but to oligarchy, and thence to managerial dictatorship.4 Laissez-faire by itself is antidemocratic: all progress in the conditions of the working classes has been wrung from it in a kind of cold civil war—not always so cold, as it has included lynchings, sadistic beatings, systematic starvation, and an occasional massacre. Again, the Rousseauist doctrine that man is by nature good, and has been corrupted by institutions, sank deeply into American life from the beginning: it is still quite generally believed that democracy implies an optimistic view of human nature. The second part of the Rousseauist doctrine contains a powerful social dynamic: it means that whatever man is, his institutions do not, in more than one sense, do him justice, and so leads to a relative view of human society which permits continuous experiment, opposition, and reformation. As for the statement about human nature, it certainly cannot in itself be accepted by any Christian, at least not without attaching a very different meaning to the word "nature." But, historically, this doctrine conflicted, not directly with original sin, but with the authoritarian political views which had been, quite illegitimately, deduced from it. It is clearly absurd to say that if man is born in sin, the majority of men ought to be bridled and bitted

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by a minority who cannot be any better than they are. Yet that is the traditional inference, and democratic sentiment was quite right to reject it. However, it is gradually becoming clearer that the real principle of democracy is not "faith in human nature," but the limitation of human power. The nauseous adulation of dictators is the feature of totalitarian life most shocking to a democrat, and this kind of adulation is the narcissism of the mob. The position of general leadership, in contrast to the position of specific responsibility, is always a projection of a mob's unconditioned will, and means that man has begun to worship himself. The view that man is by nature good does not lead to a very goodnatured view of man, and a satiric humour, based on a cheerful acceptance of human depravity as a fundamental social postulate, is one of the most reassuring features of American life. Democracy is normally thought of as progressive, and its goals are evidently very similar in some respects to the goals of Marxism: a classless society consisting entirely of workers, and a self-controlling administrative structure replacing the old "state," or government by rulers. Democracy is, however, trying to replace the Marxist proletarian dictatorship with a transitional phase of its own which we may call the open class society, in which class distinctions exist, but are founded on equality of opportunity rather than on hereditary or caste privilege. All thoughtful democrats agree that the main threat to democracy from within arises, not from disparities of wealth, but from disparities of opportunity. Antidemocratic activity consists in trying to put class distinctions on some permanent basis. We find this in, for instance, discrimination against Negroes and other minority groups, and in the kind of paternalism that industrialists with the worst labour records so often favour. Thus democracy attempts to contain its class conflict, and prevent the separating tendencies—oligarchy and pressure-group organization—from making a breach of the social contract. From the democratic point of view, Fascism is an oligarchic conspiracy against the open-class system, deriving its real power from the big oligarchs and its mass support from would-be oligarchs, the "independent" (i.e., unsuccessful) entrepreneurs. Communism is the corresponding conspiracy at the other end, addressing itself to those most likely to feel that society in its present form will permanently exclude them from its benefits. In many places (southern Italy, for example) Communist propaganda is so solidly based on facts that only reforms of equal radicalism are likely to make much headway against it. In the more prosperous America it may

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rely on some caricature and oversimplification, but even there it is never too far from the facts to be refuted by argument alone. It is far enough, however, to make Fascism a more imminent domestic threat. The unquestioned supremacy of civil over military power, and of public law over sealed orders, is of course a vital organ of democracy, and its functioning is greatly hampered by the essential nuisances of war. Unfortunately the Marxist claim that capitalism can in the long run only function under wartime conditions has not yet been disproved. The rise, both in power and in popularity, of a military autocracy and a secret police, and the standard features of wartime hysteria: purges, trials that are publicity stunts, and the use of frivolous political jockeying to protect the sin of bearing false witness—all these are signs of the possibility, however remote, of America's becoming what the Soviet press asserts her to be now. It would not be realistic, of course, to overlook the American ability to keep degenerate tendencies boiling away in open kettles, so to speak. A military leader may be hailed with all the maudlin devotion inspired by dictators elsewhere, but in a few weeks it is evident that he is not the object of the feeling, but merely the occasion for releasing it. The real danger is perhaps not so much one of giving up democracy, as one of failing to develop the energy, intelligence, and goodwill to evolve it out of its open-class stage. Up to 1929, American democracy to a great extent depended passively on the automatic stimulus of prosperity. The crash of that year brought to an end the Utopian illusion in American life, the hope of raising the standard of living to a classless level in America alone. The scrambling treasure hunt of laissez-faire is still a conspicuous feature of American economy; but in the last two decades the rise of social services, social sciences (which have not only developed in themselves but have acquired a quite new political importance), a civil service nurtured by long periods of unchanged government in the United States and Canada, and the first major efforts at integrating the political and economic structures have brought about a silent and gigantic revolution. Pure laissez-faire has gone the way of the dinosaurs—no political party in Canada now supports it, to judge from their published manifestos. The old "left" and "right" metaphors in politics, according to which all conservatives were hesitant Fascists and all social democrats hesitant Communists, are dead too, and it is slanderous nonsense to continue to talk in such terms. The major agreement that we must empirically work out the economic and social conditions, whatever they may be, under

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which democracy can develop towards its next stage is far more important than any differences about the means adopted. At present, both Communism and democracy promise eventually to eradicate the major sources of human tyranny and of needless human misery, Communism through proletarian dictatorship and revolution, democracy through equality of opportunity and reform. Each claims that the other is powerless to evolve from its present phase. Obvious as it sounds, there is yet some point in saying that we have nothing to gain from losing to Communism. It could be argued that Communism is an international revolution, and that its reckless cruelty, its venomous hatred, and the unceasing cannonade of its lies will automatically stop when the whole world becomes Communist. A little study of the relations of Russia with other Communist countries makes it clear, however, that in a completely Communist world there would be as much war, as sharp boundaries, and as constant suspicion and intrigue as ever. The terrible clarity of this fact has wiped out nearly all the intellectual sympathy with Communism in the democracies. If the struggle with Communism reaches the stage of a third world war, that war, like its predecessor, will have, to begin with, a right and a wrong side. The right side—ours—will derive its Tightness, not from the value of what it fights for, but from the evil of what it fights against. War only destroys, and there is no good in war except in the destruction of evil. At the end of a war there is no good ready to replace the evil, but only a disorganized situation that a surviving power may be able to take some advantage of, if it is not too exhausted and has any idea what to do. Whether there is major war or not, therefore, there is no hope for us either in defeat or in victory, but only in a constructive act of social evolution, which, if made in time, may avoid war, and, if not made in time, will in any case be the only means of ending war with a peace instead of a mere truce. If democracy attains the next stage of its evolution, it may soon gain control of the world without a major war. All other roads lead to totalitarianism, which is the art of prolonging a wartime situation. Contemporary Deism The cultural pattern behind the American war of independence was of a very curious weave, with Deism, Freemasonry, and a liberalized Protestantism among its most conspicuous strands. Culturally, the "American way of life" revolves around an unofficial established church which con-

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trols the allegedly nondoctrinal educational system from kindergarten to teachers' college. This catholic if not apostolic church has very few real dogmas, but it has many assumptions, a few of which may be roughly summarized as follows: Reality consists of a moral and a natural world. There is no effective spiritual reality, but the concept "God" is defensible as a hypothesis unifying the other two worlds. Such a "God" could be conceived as the evidence of intelligence and purpose indicated by the order of nature, and therefore as a mysterious sanction for morality. However, the best way to deal with this God is to place him in the background of the struggle of man and nature, holding both coats, so to speak. That leaves morality as the essence of religion, ritual and dogma being symptoms of intellectual decay. It also leaves the human mind as a function of the body, for man has received his body from nature, and his mind is his unique instrument for achieving a harmonious and comfortable adjustment to nature. The meaning of life is in, first of all, the removal of the obstacles presented by nature to human comfort, and, secondly, the removal of the corresponding moral obstacles, hatred, suspicion, and intolerance, presented by human life itself. Wisdom is the human capacity to apply knowledge, and hence if knowledge is progressive wisdom must be progressive too, so that the wisdom of the past derives its validity from its relevance to the present. It is characteristic of this creed of implicit assumptions that there is no name for it: let us call it Deism, which is inaccurate but indicates the general area. The cultural consequence of Deism is to throw the primary emphasis in education on the natural and social sciences, and subordinate to them the more elusive modes of apprehension represented by the humanities. The social sciences are so new, and so anxious to be sciences, that they are largely unaware of how naive their assumptions are, and of the extent to which they are forming a patristic commentary on the above oracles. The religious consequence of it is pure secularism. The Catholic church is better equipped to deal with Deism, because, in its doctrines of substance and of the real presence, its Thomist interpretation of reality, and its stress on the visibility of the Church, it holds all the high cards in this very suit. But Protestants affected by it tend to slip into a Pharisaic legality which tries to distinguish itself from the world by a shoddy fetishism. At least, that seems the best way to describe the notion that a drink of liquor is a more fateful event in the history of the soul than loss of faith in the Trinity. Millions of Protestant Americans have drifted,

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and are continuing to drift, away from their earlier religious moorings, not always through indifference, but very often because they feel that a secular life is the most mature, civilized, and serious form of the kind of Christian liberty offered them by Protestantism. Between the secularists and the churches are those who regard religion as a kind of palladium that it might be unlucky to throw away, or feel that religion has a place as a loyal conservative opposition, checking the overconfidence of human progress with reminders that all is not yet well. It is obvious that American Deism is an easy-going and tolerant version of dialectic materialism. The Leninist form of the latter creed asserts that a superhuman hypothesis can never be anything but a symbol of a permanent governing or ruling-class principle, and hence as long as the idea "God" exists, it will be the rallying point of all those who shrink from a classless society. In itself, this doctrine is merely clarified humanism, and helps to explain why Marxism during the 19305 had an influence in the democracies so vastly greater than its popularity. Even many clergymen at that time maintained that the Russians were Gentiles doing by nature the things contained in the law. The Communist influence has vanished because of political rivalry and because Communism failed to be as tolerant as Deism, not because the established church of America has modified its views. Protestantism has been so profoundly influenced by Deism that it is now in many quarters almost the exact opposite of a church based on the doctrine of justification by faith. There have been several attempts to combine the two traditions, of which the Unitarian movement of the nineteenth century was perhaps the most ambitious. Within recent years, however, a small minority of Protestants have, largely under European influence, begun to make more articulate objections to it, and to point out that Deism really amounts to saying: a few more bites out of the fruits of the tree of knowledge and morality, and we shall be as gods. Hence we are now hearing a great deal about the dilemma of modern man, and of how the events of the last two decades have proved that optimistic humanism is a house built on sands [Matthew 7:26]. But Deism is a resilient belief, and a few panicky desertions will not weaken it. It is also a hopeful, liberal, and active belief, and the truth of the religious case against it is less in the propositions religion makes than in the extent to which religion can comprehend Deism, and so expand and emancipate it. We have not yet brought into focus the strongest point in Deism, the

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one that commands all its real loyalty, and inspires the belief that it is the true faith of democracy. This is liberalism, the doctrine that society cannot attain freedom except by individualizing its culture. It is only when the individual is enabled to form an individual synthesis of ideas, beliefs, and tastes that a principle of freedom is established in society, and this alone distinguishes a people from a mob. A mob always has a leader, but a people is a larger human body in which there are no leaders or followers, but only individuals acting as functions of the group. Tolerance of disagreement and criticism among such individuals is necessary, not because uniform truth is nonexistent or unattainable, but because the mind is finite and passionate. We have tried to suggest above that Communism isolates the secular element in Deism, and that when it does so, liberalism instantly disappears. It seems to follow that the existence of liberalism in any society has a lot to do with the tolerated presence of the religious perspective. Protestantism was an important influence on liberal theory, and the role it ascribes to the individual is in many respects analogous. In Protestantism the individual does not work out his own theology, but tries to listen to the Word with his own ears. The attempt to listen signifies, on his part, a desire to become permanently attached to another community. This community is the City of God, the vision of which the churches struggle to represent. Belonging to it does not detach one from one's social function, nor does it project itself as a social class: the "rule of the elect" is an illusion. In liberal theory we have a similar process on the cultural level. The individual does not really "form his own opinions," as the saying is, but tries to understand the disciplines of truth with his own intelligence, and so to join another community. This community of searchers for truth is what the universities struggle to represent. Such a community again has no class affinities: the "rule of the elite" is another illusion. Outside these realms is the double community of actual society, the community of production and the community of distraction, the world of work and the world of amusements and hobbies, of gossip and complaint. This latter world is important, but it is not a free world: the most cynical tyrannies assume that man shall not live by bread alone [Luke 4:4], but by circuses.5 Conscience, principle, criticism, experiment, and all other elements of liberalism can only exist within the spiritual or the intellectual communities. The word "liberal" implies a disinterested pursuit of truth as its own end, in contrast to the attempt to manipulate it or press it into the ser-

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vice of an immediate social aim. It is the disinterested handling of the medium, whether facts, truths, words, or life itself, that distinguishes science from technology, philosophy from propaganda, literature from verbal communication, and freedom from anarchy. And just as there is a church wherever there are two or three believers, so there is a university wherever there is free discussion of liberal arts and sciences. It has been proved over and over again that it is only from such free discussion that real social benefits come. This is true even of dubious benefits: the Nazi conception of "target knowledge,"6 reducing science to military strategy, not only ruined German science but helped materially in losing the war. The Marxist conception of the social reference of all knowledge was a far better theory to begin with, but its application has been very similar. And in American Deism too, one wonders if the connection of reality is subtle enough to include the university and the church as above defined. For after all, the criterion of reality, in Deist theory, is what present man, say a normal American middle-class adult, thinks to be real. Hence education is largely a matter of getting the individual to meet the social norm. From this point of view religious and intellectual independence are essentially forms of play, ways of cultivating interests or hobbies, and so relaxing the pressure of the working world. But it is still actual society that pronounces on their value. This recurrence of a social norm is marked in Deist educational theories, which usually begin with the individual and his interests, then go on to "education for today"—or tomorrow, depending on taste—and finally become absorbed in participation, adjustment, integration, orientation, and other benevolent euphemisms for mass movement. Here, as above, the totalitarian theories of Marxism seem to be the logical and coherent form of the tendencies of Deism. The increase in the prestige of the sciences also tends to weaken the sense of the crucial importance of intellectual and spiritual independence, as it is so much easier in the sciences to absorb oneself in a methodology. Liberalism itself, if founded merely on the conception of relaxing the social order, finds it difficult to find reasons for surviving whenever society, through fear or anger or impatience or the prompting of unscrupulous leaders, begins to close together. In any case liberty in America, after two centuries of democratic experience, seems to be as seriously menaced as ever. The utilitarian and materialistic attitudes of Deism are no longer merely vulgar, now that "useful" is beginning to manifest its true meaning of "essential to waging war."

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It is only in a condition of freedom that democracy can make the evolution that will save it, and freedom is exclusively a matter of setting up the university and the church in the centre of society. The draft that draws the fire of freedom is liberal education, the pursuit of truth for its own sake by free men. This pursuit of truth is an act of faith, a kind of potential or tentative vision of an end in human life. Without this tentative vision, all activity can only be the implementing of the greedy passions produced by a will that can only see what it thinks it can reach. But the draft, to complete its work, needs a chimney reaching into the sky. Liberal education by itself cannot envisage the end of human life except as a vague future: the revolutionary's claim that liberalism is only a lazy way of postponing social action is so far true. With all his good will, the liberal is still involved in the moral horrors of a theory of progress. And all worship of the future is Moloch-worship [i Kings 11:17; Acts 7:43] whether it consists in murdering a hundred thousand farmers to get a more efficient collectivization of agriculture, or in sacrificing one's life for the perfunctory and generalized gratitude of posterity, or in trying to persuade the underprivileged not to make any disturbance until their betters think how to improve things. Man does not lose his claustrophobia and panic, and the process of liberty does not function, until the ideal of partial improvement expands to the ideal of infinite regeneration. This does not sacrifice a specific improvement to a muzzy benevolence: it merely replaces the tantalizing future goal with a real presence which extends over all life and death, and so guarantees the present value of every act of charity. When we act in this light, we find that we are not members of a social group, but of one body. Without this infinite expansion of the liberal ideal, liberalism cannot avoid the dilemma of either returning to a criterion of immediate usefulness or getting lost in an impossible objectivity. Such an infinite expansion includes, of course, God as well as man, and must be based on a definitive revelation of the way in which God and man are united. The Decisive Struggle However objective the knowledge we have may be in itself, the form in which we put it together shows clearly enough how impossible it is for any individual to get away from his own society. All the great philosophies of the past have shown striking analogies to the communities in which they were conceived. Plato's "ideas" belong to an impregnably

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fortified citadel, in the world but not of it, which only rigorously scrutinized souls are allowed to enter. Locke's "ideas" are a trading stock accumulated and exchanged by individuals: nobody has any to begin with, but one may collect and save them, put them out at interest, and insist on their being "clear and distinct," of full weight and sound value. One can see the same principle at work in all the major world outlooks traced in this book. The chain of being in medieval thought is clearly the intellectual form of a culture organized on a feudal economy and a hierarchic church. The political structure changes to the Renaissance absolute prince, the enlightened despot or Roi Soleil, and philosophy changes, with Descartes, to a dualism in which the enlightened conscious mind is exalted to a superior world, and the rest of nature follows it in a state of mechanized hypnotism. Our period begins when revolutions are shaking the world, and the conscious mind is deciding in consequence that perhaps it is not so much like the sun in the sky as like a boat on a perilous sea.7 This change began as soon as Kant distinguished the world as an object of conscious knowledge from the world in itself, and led on into the Romantic movement, in which, in nearly all branches of culture, the conscious mind is seen as deriving its strength from a subconscious reality greater than itself. Hence the importance of suggestion and evocation in Romantic art, of the surrender of conscious intelligence to spontaneous mythopoeia. After Schopenhauer, this subconscious world becomes evil, sinister, and yet immensely powerful, and visions of nightmarish terror begin increasingly to creep into the arts. No matter where we turn in the culture of the immediate past, the same picture meets us, a picture reminding us less of the harassed boat than of the young lady of the limerick who smiled as she rode on a tiger.8 In Schopenhauer the world of conscious idea thus rides on a cruel (except that it is unconscious) and inexorable world of will with the whole power of nature behind it. In Freud, the conscious mind attempts, with very partial success, to hold in check a mighty libidinous desire. In Darwin, the conscious mind is the sport of an unconscious evolutionary force. In Marx, civilization is the attempt of a dwindling minority to keep a vastly stronger majority away from its privileges. In liberal thought, freedom is the possession of integrity by a small group constantly threatened by a mob. In Kierkegaard, the consciousness of existence rests on a vast shapeless "dread" as big and real as life and death together. There is hardly a corner of modern thought where we do not find some image of a beleaguered custodian of

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conscious values trying to fend off something unconscious which is too strong to be defeated. It seems the appropriate cultural pattern for a period in which the tiny peninsula of Western Europe was encircling the world. If this age really does see the decisive struggle of liberty and terrorism for the fate of the world, the pattern of thought will make the necessary change—unless terrorism wins, in which case there will be no pattern at all. If liberty wins, we shall have, instead of the complacent and doomed young lady on the tiger, the image of a conquering hero with a dead dragon at his feet. As we continue to look at the hero, we shall see in him the image of a consciousness that has absorbed the unconscious and defeated all the dark powers of our present thought: a man armed with the power of God extending through all the eons and light years of nature, the conquered territory of death annexed to his life, fulfilling the desire and liberating the oppression of all men. As we continue to look at the dragon, we shall see in him the rotting body of what is now laying waste the world: the body of eternal bondage, the endlessly postponed vision of peace and leisure, the endless intrusion of temporary necessity to thrust us away from real life, the endless massing of lynching mobs to transfer our self-contempt to another scapegoat, the reduction of individual life to a hopeless isolation surrounded by threats of torture. In the present struggle we have been given great physical powers, but we have been given them only for the baffling of evil and tyranny. All construction has to come from the spiritual power great enough to bring peace on earth to men of good will. And it is impossible to exaggerate the physical weakness of that power: a new-born baby in a deserted stable in a forlorn village of a miserable province of an enslaved empire is not more weak. The important thing is that it should be a real presence, and when it is, all the wise and simple begin to meet one another around its cradle.

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Regina versus the World June 1953

From Canadian Forum, 33 (June 1953): 49-50. Reprinted in RW, 403-6. Typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 4.

Among the mass of historical curiosa recently dredged up by the press is the fact that the coronation of Queen Victoria was, ritually speaking, quite a mess. The ring was put on her wrong finger; peers of the realm fell over their own feet; bishops fluffed their lines, and one dignitary, as the Queen herself acidly recorded, was heard saying to another, "M'Lord, we should have had a rehearsal." But it didn't matter. No omens could alter the fact that the British Empire was on the up and up. By the time Queen Victoria was dead she was Empress of India1 and had seen the occupation of the Suez, the conquest of the Boers, and a series of decisive checks to the power of Russia administered all the way from the Crimea to Afghanistan. There will be no mistakes in this coronation. The present queen is as irreproachable, as handsome, and at least as intelligent as her predecessor. But she is not the Empress of India, and her title is reduced to a euphemism which actually means "Queen of whatever countries still want to admit that she is their queen." The British won the Boer War but evidently forgot to win the peace; British soldiers are being apoplectically ordered out of the Suez by a native; and the strongholds of Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, and the rest are now, like the Chinese wall, the ruins of an obsolete strategy.2 The punctiliousness surrounding the present coronation has all the anxiety of primitive magic in it: there is hope that a woman, especially a woman named Elizabeth, will bring luck, and that

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the spell-binding formula "Elizabeth by the grace of God Queen" will, if uttered with enough conviction, somehow work its old power again. Gibbon's great narrative of the decline of Rome reaches its first full close at the time of the secular games of the Emperor Philip, instituted to mark the thousandth anniversary of the founding of the city. "Every circumstance of the secular games," says Gibbon, was skillfully adapted to inspire . . . solemn reverence. . . . The Campus Martius resounded with music and dances, and was illuminated with innumerable lamps and torches. Slaves and strangers were excluded from any participation in these national ceremonies. . . . The devout were employed in the rites of superstition, whilst the reflecting few revolved in their anxious minds the past history and the future fate of the empire. . . . The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled. . . . The strength of the frontiers, which had always consisted in arms rather than in fortifications, was insensibly undermined; and the fairest provinces were left exposed to the rapaciousness or ambition of the barbarians.3

The irony of the coronation, especially in the fair province of Canada which lies between America and Russia, is in fact so obvious that anybody who can read a newspaper may regard himself this time as one of the "reflecting few." Yet there is a curious process in history that seems to make institutions grow as ideas when they decline in physical strength. This has happened to the monarchy itself, which has gained popularity in proportion as it has lost effective power. It happened even to the Roman Empire, which became the great organizing idea of medieval Christendom after it had fallen. And it may yet happen to the tiny royal figure at the centre of the retreating and beleaguered Commonwealth. Royalty has always had a unique power to fascinate, but it is only with the last two British monarchs that pathos has become an essential part of that fascination. Very few people envy the Queen for being a queen: nearly everyone pities her for being also a human being. This discrepancy between the office and the person hardly existed for, say, Elizabeth I. With her, royalty was a function of character: she was a ruler with the power to rule. The character of Elizabeth II is a function of her royalty: she dramatizes the idea of royalty, and belongs in the class of things represented by the Unknown Soldier, not in the class of things

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represented by presidents or premiers.4 The monarch today has become the exact opposite of the dictator, who stands for personality alone. Respect paid to a monarch is paid to a symbol of society; respect paid to a dictator is the narcissism of the mob. In the Commonwealth, at any rate, we have certainly got over the notion that royalty is undemocratic. Nobody associates royalty any more with aristocracy, or even with a privileged class. If it were nothing more, the Crown would still be a pretty solid obstacle to any British McCarthy or Malenkov5 trying to weasel his way into dictatorship. But the Crown is more than that. In an age of neurotic egotism, the Queen is a centripetal social focus who can still remind us that in some dim and mysterious way we are all members of one body. In an age of barbaric rapaciousness and ambition, the Queen stands above all attainable power, as the honour of wearing the crown is too great to be deserved or won; it can only be gained by accident. And in an age of social pressure where everyone feels compelled to assert his loyalty or justify the value of his services to society, the Queen, being a perfectly ordinary person except for her situation, stands for the simple birthright of human existence. When royalty is separated from the class structure of society, it becomes perhaps the most genuinely popular of all social symbols. The feelings it represents are part of the deepest faith of our age, a faith in human brotherhood that would still be treason in Russia and disloyal in many parts of America. It is unlikely that the present Queen will ever see India, South Africa, or Egypt more closely united to the British Crown than they are now. But she may, by simply remaining gentle and patient under the extravagant attention paid to her, find herself slowly becoming, in a more catholic sense than has yet been seen, the defender of the faith.6

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Oswald Spengler 23 November 1955

Originally broadcast on 23 November 1955 on CBC Radio. The text is from Architects of Modern Thought, ist ser. (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1955), 83-90. Reprinted in RW, 315-25.

In the summer of 1918, when Germany and Austria were just on the point of collapse, a book appeared called The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. Oswald Spengler was nobody in particular, which was a serious handicap in Germany, where scholars are as carefully ranked as army officers. More accurately, he was a high school teacher who had thrown up his job in 1910 in order to write, whose health was so bad he was never called up for war service, and who was so poor he could hardly buy food and clothes, much less books. So his book had been refused by all the best publishers, and was brought out in a small edition. Within a year it was one of the most widely read and discussed books in Europe, and Spengler began to revise and expand it. In 1923 the final two-volume edition was complete. Three years later it had sold 100,000 copies in German, and an English translation was begun by C.F. Atkinson and published by Alfred Knopf. It's a big book. One of the notices of this broadcast said that I was going to "weigh" Oswald Spengler. Complete, The Decline of the West weighs four and a half pounds on my bathroom scales. The Decline of the West is an essay on human history that tries to take a broader view than the usual one. The usual one is that the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans gave us our religion, culture, and law; that the ancient world became the Middle Ages, the Middle Ages produced the modern world, and the modern world produced us. Anything outside

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this isn't really history. China and India had very little to do with producing us: they just produced more Chinese and Indians, so they're not progressive. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay," as Tennyson says.1 Spengler thinks it's possible to make the same kind of distinction in a less provincial way. If we read the history of a great civilization, Spengler says, we read a story that seems to make sense: there seems to be a shape and meaning in what happens. There are laws of cause and effect; institutions evolve, classes rise, and conquests expand in a logical direction. But if we try to write a history of Patagonians or Zulus or Mongols, all we can produce is just a series of events or incidents. These peoples live and die and reproduce; they trade and think and fight just as we do; they make poems and pots and buildings. But somehow we feel that their stories are chronicles or annals, not coherent histories. If we compare Lapland in the eighteenth century with Lapland in the thirteenth, there's not much difference, at least in Laplanders. But if we compare England in the eighteenth century with England in the thirteenth, we feel that it's five centuries older. The whole nation seems to be moving with the same kind of inner purpose that an individual does, through definite stages of what historians themselves call rise, growth, decline, and fall. We get this sense of directed history in human life, according to Spengler, when certain developments like those of a living, maturing, and aging organism take place in it. These developments Spengler calls "cultures," and cultures are much bigger than nations or empires. England has a history because it belongs to one of these cultures, the "Western" culture of Europe, which has now expanded over the world. This Western culture began to grow up a thousand years ago, and what we call the Middle Ages was its youth or springtime. Society was then run by nobles and priests; its literature was largely about heroes and knights errant; its economy was agricultural and feudal; its art, especially its architecture, largely anonymous. The Renaissance was its summer; nobles and priests gave way to princes and courtiers, the feudal system to the city-state, anonymous architects to Shakespeare and Michelangelo. By the end of the eighteenth century, in the poetry of Goethe, the music of Mozart, the philosophy of Kant, Western culture reached its autumn and exhausted its creative possibilities. Whatever comes later in our arts, Spengler says, will be just repeating or living off what has already been done. With Napoleon and his bid for world empire Western "culture" becomes Western "civilization," and enters its

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final winter period. The main interest changes from art to technology, and we enter a phase of empire-building, huge engineering feats, enormous cities, and finally mass annihilation wars and dictatorships. We can figure out our cultural age by comparing ourselves with an earlier culture, as all cultures have roughly the same lifespan. The one we know best is the Classical culture, which was in its spring at the time of Homer. Here again we have a society run by nobles and priests, where literature was heroic and economics feudal and agricultural. The next stage came with the early philosophers like Heraclitus, on whom Spengler wrote his doctoral thesis, and with the rise of city-states like Athens and Sparta. With the great Greek dramas, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and the last glories of Athens, Classical culture gathered in its harvest. Then came Alexander the Great, who corresponds to Napoleon in our culture. We're about a century later than Napoleon, so we're about where Classical civilization was around two hundred years before Christ, when the great empires, Macedonia, Rome, and Carthage, were fighting for supremacy. What's ahead of us is something like the Roman Empire. One of our great nations will grow to a world empire— Spengler hopes it will be Germany. Cecil Rhodes the empire builder is typical, Spengler says, of the kind of Caesars we'll be getting in the next few centuries. By "the decline of the West," then, Spengler means that our culture is getting on in years, about where a man is in his late sixties, still vigorous, but with no more youth ahead of him. In between the Classical culture and our own was an Arabian or Near Eastern one. That had its spring in the time of Christ, its summer in the Byzantine period, and its imperial world-conquering phase began with Mohammed. This Near Eastern culture is a hard one to identify. Spengler says that's because it grew up under the weight and prestige of the older Classical culture. It got twisted out of shape and had to express itself in Classical forms that weren't appropriate to it. Spengler calls this deforming of a young culture by an old one a pseudomorphosis, or false formation, and he says another one is going on now. The only young culture in the world today is the Russian one, which is in its late spring, or would be if it weren't getting deformed by Western influences. The first edition of Spengler explains that the West was declining and that Russia had more of a creative future; the second volume explains that the Western philosophy of Communism was choking the life out of Russia's natural development. The first edition sold widely in the Soviet Union; the second volume was banned. Besides these four cultures,

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Spengler names four others, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Central American—certainly not an exhaustive list. The moral of Spengler's book is that most of the great intellects of our time will be devoting themselves to technology, war, and force-politics. They'll be Julius Caesars, not Shakespeares. Spengler would like to see Germany seize its chance for leadership in such a world, the chance that its superior discipline and organization gives it. Liberalism, parliamentary democracy, pacifism, progress, are all either illusions or ghosts of the past. Socialism is more in keeping with our time, but whatever socialism Germany has should be national or Prussian socialism. We can see that Spengler, as a political thinker, was one of the group of sentimental conservatives among the German intellectuals of the 19205, who played with such words as nobility, blood, soil, heroism, national destiny, and so on, and who talked so much about being hard and realistic that they didn't notice they were dreaming. When the Nazis turned up and announced that they were these dreams come true—which of course they were—the intellectuals backed away shuddering. Spengler greeted the Nazis with a book called The Hour of Decision, in which he said, naturally in a rather roundabout way, that they were not quite what he had in mind. He had previously remarked that what Germany needed was a hero, not a heroic tenor—which seems mild enough for Hitler's falsetto screech. The Nazis stopped the sale of his book, and although he wasn't personally molested, he lived under a cloud until he died in 1936. Ever since it appeared, The Decline of the West has been under nearly continuous attack, and many of the attacks are violent and contemptuous. There has hardly been a time when we haven't been assured, on the best authority, that Spengler is old hat. The Decline of the West is one of those books that have always been utterly refuted last Tuesday, but somehow won't go away. Spengler's book is a vision rather than a theory or a philosophy, and a vision of haunting imaginative power. Its truth is the truth of poetry or prophecy, not of science. But it's possible to get a first-rate vision from a second-rate mind. A good deal of Spengler's mind was second-rate, and he continually misunderstood and misapplied his own thesis. So there are many attacks on him that miss the real point of his book, but still they're attacks that Spengler really asked for. Spengler is often called a fatalist—he is for instance by Toynbee. Spengler certainly believes that his cultures behave like organisms: they

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are things that get born, like babies and puppies. Consequently they will die: that is, they will return sooner or later to the primitive life of mere events out of which they grew. But that doesn't make Spengler a fatalist, unless it's fatalism to say that anything that's alive gets older every year. If a man wants to box or play the violin, how well he will do these things will depend largely on how old he is when he starts, and the same, according to Spengler, is true of a culture. On the other hand, most people realize that there's a good deal of sheer chance in history: as Pascal said, the history of Rome would have been quite different if Cleopatra's nose had been an inch longer.2 Spengler would say that it would have been different in its incidents, but not in its underlying form, or what he calls its destiny. The incidents of a man's life will depend on what job he takes, what girl he marries, what town he settles in, and much of that will turn on chance. But nothing will alter the fact that it will be his life. Then again, some people have believed that history moves in cycles, and that whatever we do has been done before and will be done again. This is both an ancient and a modern superstition, and Spengler has often been scolded for believing in inevitable recurrence of this kind. But Spengler has no theory of cycles at all: his cultures grow up irregularly, like dandelions. Most of the objections to Spengler are not to his real arguments, but to his sound effects. And his sound effects are sometimes pretty hard to take. He has all the faults of a prophetic style: harsh, dogmatic, prejudiced, certain that history will do exactly what he says, determined to rub his reader's nose into all the toughness and grimness of his outlook. He has little humour, but plenty of savage and sardonic wit. And he has a fine gift for gloomy eloquence. If it were nothing else, The Decline of the West would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems. He's fond of murky biological language, like calling man a "splendid beast of prey,"3 and the imagery is of the Halloween type that we so often find in German poets and philosophers. That is, it's full of woo-woo noises and shivery Wagnerian whinnies about the dark goings-on of nature and destiny. Then again, he sees everything a culture produces as characteristic of that culture: in other words as a symbol of it. History consequently becomes a collection of symbols representing something that can hardly be expressed in words at all, because the existence of a culture can't really be proved; it can only be pointed out, and felt or intuited by the reader, through the arrangement of the symbols. All his cultures are

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presented in terms of some key symbol: his Arabian culture is a cavern culture, the Russian one a flat-plane culture, and so on. A Canadian reader, brought up in a more concrete world, is apt to get a bit stuck when he runs into chapter headings like "Soul-image and Life-feeling" [DW, vol. i, chap. 9]. Nowadays a good many people will tell you that there is no meaning whatever in ideas of this kind, and that all you'll get out of studying them is mildew on the brain. But I myself think that trying to understand Spengler is a fine exercise in intellectual tolerance. Besides, many of Spengler's virtues spring from these same characteristics. It has been said that he became popular only because Germans were looking for a philosophy of pessimism to rationalize their defeat. I don't believe it. When I first read Spengler I was neither a German nor a pessimist: I was a Canadian undergraduate of a rather hopeful disposition, and I could see then as clearly as I can now what nonsense he could sometimes talk. Yet I practically slept with Spengler under my pillow for several years. The boldness of his leaping imagination, the kaleidoscopic patterns that facts made when he threw them together, the sense of the whole of human thought and culture spread out in front of me—all these made an experience I never expect to duplicate. There is probably not a statement in Spengler that has not been regarded as scientific absurdity or mystical balderdash by some critic or other. But Spengler has the power to expand and exhilarate the mind, as critics of that type usually have not, and he will probably survive them all even if all of them are right. Another misunderstanding of Spengler that Spengler himself fell into concerns his view of the arts in the modern world. Spengler's whole case really rests on the evidence of the arts: they're as decisive for his view of history as the rocks are for geology. For him there is, on the whole, no difference in value between the arts of a culture's spring, summer, or autumn. Western poetry from Dante to Goethe, Western painting from Giotto to Goya, Western music from plain chant to Beethoven, doesn't get any better or worse: it just gets older. But suddenly he starts to insist on the inferiority of all art produced in the winter or civilization stage. The reason for this is that he has his own political axe to grind: he wants Germany to go in for Prussianism and world conquest, not for music or philosophy. The age of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the kind of age he says is ahead of us, was also the age of Virgil and Horace and Ovid. Spengler doesn't talk about these poets, because they prove that cultures can produce great poetry much later than they ought to be doing accord-

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ing to his charts. Here again Spengler has been his own worst enemy: the jingoist has corrupted the prophet. If we're going to attack Spengler's real argument we have to attack his central assumption, or metaphor, whichever it is. The assumption is that there are cultures, or huge social developments in history, that behave like organisms and follow the same rhythm of birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death that an individual goes through. We don't have to assume that cultures are organisms, as Spengler himself does, but only that they behave like organisms. I don't want to argue directly either for or against Spengler on this point, only to bring up two other considerations that I find very impressive—impressive enough to make me feel that Spengler really belongs in a series on makers of modern thought. In the first place, several other scholars in our time who have tried to take a universal view of history have finally come up with something very like Spengler's organic culture. The best known of these scholars is Toynbee. Toynbee says he was fascinated by Spengler, but thought he'd do better with a less dogmatic method. Toynbee has twenty-one civilizations against Spengler's eight, and for twenty of them he's quite happy with Spengler's organic metaphors. They grow to maturity, they decline into what he calls a "time of troubles," then they form empires and eventually die out. In his analysis of these late stages I think he has some improvements on Spengler. But the twenty-first civilization is his own, and there he balks. Western civilization has just got to be different; he won't be a fatalist and say that it's going to behave the way the other twenty have done. In 1939 Toynbee said that it was too early to say whether we've come to our time of troubles yet or not. Personally, I find Toynbee's hopes for a last chance more woebegone than Spengler's outright pessimism. We may prefer Toynbee to Spengler, just as we may prefer a more up-to-date authority to Freud or Marx. But in both its strength and its weakness, Toynbee's work is a significant tribute to the originality and power of Spengler, all the more significant for being a somewhat unwilling tribute. My second consideration is this: if we look at the thinkers who have permanently changed the shape of human thought, such as Darwin, Marx, Freud, or Einstein, we find, naturally, that their books are complex and difficult and require years of study. Yet the central themes of their work are of massive simplicity. Evolution, class struggle, the subconscious mind, are all things that have been staring mankind in the face for centuries. It's the ability to see what's straight in front of his

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nose that marks the thinker of first-rate importance. Now what I find most deeply convincing in Spengler is the fact that everybody really takes his thesis for granted, even if they've never heard of Spengler, even if they've read him and hate his guts. Everybody who thinks about the matter at all thinks in terms of a "Western" culture; everybody thinks of that culture as old, not young; everybody is struck by the difference between us and the Middle Ages and by the similarity between us and the Roman Empire; everybody assumes that some crucial change in our fortunes took place around Napoleon's time. And at that I'm not counting the people who have a sentimental admiration for medieval culture because it represents our own lost youth, and try to imitate or revive it in our times. Nor do I count the people who can't listen with pleasure to any music later than Mozart, or whatever terminal they choose. Nor the people who think that everything produced in the nineteenth century was too awful for words. Nor the Marxists who talk about the "decadence" of bourgeois culture, nor the alarmists who talk about a return to a new Dark Ages. Every one of these has a more or less muddled version of Spengler's argument as his basis. Whether we are trying to think for ourselves, or whether we are just repeating whatever catchwords are going around, the decline of the West is as much a part of our mental outlook as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians today. Still, we can't help but sympathize with the feeling that Spengler predicts too much.4 Unless a prophet has unusual sources of information, he's well advised to stick to analysing the present instead of foretelling the future. And Spengler wraps up too big a parcel when he tries to suggest that his is the last major book that needs to be written. We can perhaps claim for him that he's isolated a most important group of facts in our time, facts that can only be explained by his book, or some book like his. If so, he's an essential contributor to modern thought, and it would be silly to ignore him. It's another thing to claim, as he does, that reading his book will let us in on what will happen during the next few centuries. Spengler says that Western man is characterized by infinite expansion, which is why Western culture has spread all over the world. But perhaps something else is happening. Perhaps our science and technology will bring in a new phase of human life, which will supersede the history of cultures just as the history of cultures superseded the Stone Age. Perhaps that's the whole point about science: that it's a universal structure of knowledge that will help mankind to break out of cul-

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hire-group barriers, and get rid of war by moving into a higher area of conflict. Spengler, naturally, thinks this is a pipe dream. He insists that one culture can't learn from another, and that the people of Asia and Africa have no interest in our technology except as a means of destroying us. But Marx is a more effective prophet today in a large part of the world than Spengler, and I suspect that one reason for this is that Marx emphasizes the uniformity of human nature and conditions all over the world. Marx has his limitations too, of course, and is just as dangerous to use for crystal-gazing. In fact many if not most of our greatest thinkers have become great partly through exaggeration and over-emphasis. They have thrown their whole weight behind one solid and genuine idea, and because they are great they are limited, and have to be fitted into a larger structure than they ever recognized. Spengler is no exception, and it's nothing against him to say that there are more things still on earth, to say nothing of heaven, than are dreamt of in Spengler's philosophy.5

48

Preserving Human Values 27 April 1961

Address to the annual meeting of the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, delivered at Eaton Auditorium during Frye's term of office as principal of Victoria College. From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 47, file i. Published in RW, 325-33. I have been wondering what common ground for communication I could establish with the Social Planning Council and the part of the university with which I am concerned. It is obvious that I should not attempt to talk as though I knew anything about social work, as you would see through me in about thirty seconds. I think my best role is perhaps that of an appreciative audience, sitting back where I can see in perspective, or think I can see, the importance of what you are doing. We are often told that we need some sort of statement of what we, in the democracies, actually believe in; that we need a clearer view of the axioms and assumptions about the nature of society and about the nature of man on which we are proceeding. Public figures like the prime minister say this publicly, but in a general sense we should do better to clarify our own dogmas, if we have any. Now it seems to me that there are two ways of approaching the problem of defining one's belief. I might call them the Sunday method and the Monday method. One way is to draw up a list of impressive and sonorous statements about human dignity and freedom. These should be carefully cadenced; they should sound provocative and yet actually be reassuring, and they should increase our own self-esteem. That is one way of approaching the problem of belief—to draw up a statement of what we say we believe in. The other way is to see what our actions

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reveal about what we believe. Our actions do show what our actual beliefs are, sometimes against our will. A man may go to church on Sunday morning and find himself repeating an extremely impressive statement of what he believes in, but by Monday evening he may have demonstrated that his real conception of human society is a very different one. I wonder, therefore, what the axioms and assumptions are, which are evident by what we are doing, and in particular by what a group of people devoted to social welfare is doing. We find ourselves of course in a context of a world pressed between two major philosophies in politics, and the propaganda statement of each side leads to a complete deadlock. One side says the world is divided between the democratic and the totalitarian state, and the other side says it is divided between the socialist state and the tools of capitalist imperialism. We can get no further on that basis. We do not feel particularly as though we belong to a capitalist economy—at least it is not something that presses in on our conscience. And similarly, Russia and China have no conception in their own mind corresponding to the word "totalitarian." I think if the Russians, let us say, were not issuing propaganda statements, they would say that they were not living in a socialist state; that they were living through a proletarian revolution which is trying to become a socialist state. And we, I think, might very well say, not that we are living in a democracy, but that we are living in something much more like a bourgeois oligarchy trying to become a democracy. In other words, our society, like theirs, is a society in a state of process, and it is a revolutionary state proceeding towards a goal which is in part an ideal—that is, we shall not realize all of it. As such, therefore, democracy is not to be judged by what it does but by what it aims at in spite of what it does. Certain principles such as the supremacy of civil over military power, the publication of all acts of government, and the toleration of unpopular opinion, are still principles of democracy no matter how often they may be flouted. I am sorry to see this sense of revolution declining in North American society, as I think to some extent it is. It seems to me that the United States has much less of a sense of an open class society than it had a century ago. As we can see from the career of President Kennedy,1 American presidents no longer have to take the precaution to get themselves born in log cabins. I was a little shocked a day or so ago to find that some of my stu-

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dents, after they had finished their exams, were slipping down to the Royal York and taking strike-breaking jobs down there. For a person who lived through the Depression, as I did, that seemed a very strange procedure on the part of students. And yet I have to remember that their generation has been brought up to think of labour unions as really just one more racket, and as something to be associated with someone like Hoffa2 rather than with any kind of social cause. And I feel for example that if such an organization as the American Senate Committee on Un-American Activities were called, for example, a committee on "Counter-Revolutionary Activities," what it did would perhaps be no less of an affront to human decency, but at least it would make more sense from its own point of view, and perhaps it would be less inspired to do infallibly everything that the enemies of America would want to see it do. I imagine that our ultimate goals are not very different from those of our Communist rivals. I imagine that a classless society, a withering away of the state, are our own ideals as well. For democracy, if it is a goal and in part an ideal, is not a system of government like a republic or a monarchy. If the United States were to adopt a Soviet system, or if it were to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth as its Queen (as the Americans do in Bernard Shaw's play The Apple Cart), that might be an undesirable move, but it would not be in itself a threat to democracy. It will be too bad, I think, if democracy suffers from a sense of fixation about its own political machinery. It is possible that voting on grossly oversimplified issues for candidates who are controlled by political machines rather than by their electors may be something that in time to come we shall decide is a bit expendable. The rise of social sciences and the proliferation of the civil service may mean that much in our political system might prove an anachronism in time to come. We should do better, I think, to think of ourselves as moving in a certain direction, a direction that I should characterize as a gradual dissolving of classes, a moving toward a society in which class barriers or class distinctions have, as far as is humanly possible, disappeared. In doing that, we shall discover many new important and exciting social facts. When we discover that we do not need an aristocracy we shall discover who our real aristocracy are. Our real aristocracy, of course, are the children. They are the ones who are entitled to leisure, to privilege, to expensive playgrounds, and to be supported by the rest of society. Any of you who have handed a tip to a taxi driver have probably felt that you

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are engaged in a social ritual which is both embarrassing to you and humiliating to the taxi driver. The reason is that what you do when you hand the tip over is to dramatize a social situation, the relationship of a gentleman to a flunky which society is trying to outgrow. One of the great difficulties in trying to express the ideals and axioms of our society is that many of our ideas are of religious origin. They come from the Judaeo-Christian tradition with which most of us have some connection. Perhaps they are not fully intelligible outside their religious context, though many of them have become secularized. In Christianity at any rate, there has always been a curious yeasty and fermenting radicalism which has survived centuries of feudalism and enlightened despots, and perhaps is really beginning to work itself out in our own day. In this religious origin of many of our important ideas, one of the most significant is the word "charity." Charity in its original context in Christianity means primarily God's love for man. And it includes many other conceptions, one of them being the conception that no human being is inherently better than any other human being. It may seem self-evident to say that a saint is a better man than a sinner, otherwise the word "better" would have no meaning, but the saint himself is very unlikely to hold such a view. And this view of charity, that no human being is inherently better than another human being, is the basis, I think, of the conception of equality in which our society has invested many of its ideals. Whenever this conception of equality is denied, as it was denied in Nazi Germany with the Jews and in South Africa today, we know that something has settled into society which corresponds to cancer in the individual.3 And it is a very curious fact for anyone interested in the history of words to see how the word "charity" finally degenerated to the point at which it became a class word. It meant giving handouts to the less privileged, to keep them from feeling too restless, and perhaps to coax out of them a certain amount of gratitude. Charity in this sense is of course not an activity that any grown man or woman today would care to indulge in, but it does indicate how much of our own society is permeated with the vestiges of class notions. I remember speaking with a primary teacher a while ago who taught children from three areas—one normal middle-class, one lower middle-class, and one underprivileged. She was applying some intelligence and vocabulary recognition tests to her children, and one of the words they were expected to recognize was the word "gown." The middle-class group said that a gown was what

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mummy wore when she went to a party; the lower middle-class group said it was what mummy wore when she went to bed; and the underprivileged group had never heard of the word at all. In other words, what purported to be a test of intelligence was actually a test of the father's social status. This kind of relentless self-examination to see when we are actually falling back on class ideas instead of on democratic ones is a part of the difficulty of our lives. I should define the conception of equality, I think, rather differently, as the conviction that a social function is essential to every human being's life, and that to deprive any individual of a social function is a kind of murder. The white segregationist who spits on a Negro carrying an antisegregation placard is of course being as silly and perverse as he can be, as he very well knows. But I think that that is a less deadly insult to human dignity than unemployment, that faceless, anonymous, refusal to find any social function for an individual. It is a less deadly insult than the black night that settles down on the elderly and the retired when they are face to face with the fact that there is no longer anything in society for which their contribution is of any importance. An individual deprived of his social function is like an animal so mutilated that he can only crawl away to die, and the assumption behind all efforts at relief is the assumption that society has failed in its primary duty and must fall back on some kind of secondary first aid. If a social system such as Communism can achieve success in giving a social function to large groups of people who did not have it, what more is needed? We say perhaps that the system would lack liberty. A totalitarian society may perhaps be reminded that it can pursue equality to the point of forgetting about liberty. A society like ours can be reminded that we can pursue liberty to the point of forgetting about equality. But the conception of liberty is by no means a simple one. If we think of some of the things that we are proudest of in our society over the last century we notice that they are things which seem to curtail individual freedom. The advance of science, for example, has brought about measures in public health of which we thoroughly approve but which certainly do curtail, in many respects, the range and variety of human freedom. It has brought people into a closer organization and has made them more readily marked and identifiable. Compulsory education again, the assumption that everybody under sixteen who is not in school on Monday morning is a truant, is a very considerable infringement on what we ordinarily think of as human freedom, though we have other

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reasons for approving of it. And social welfare itself may place many restrictions on personal freedom on the part of many people, as some of you may have noticed while making out your income tax recently. Now here again there seems to be a notion, of religious origin, of some kind of paradox in the view of the human self. We seem to be caught in a contradictory statement. In religion the human soul is of infinite worth and it is immortal; and yet the same religion seems to take a very dim view of human nature. It talks about original sin and says that man's efforts are worth very little. Similarly, democracy was not founded on any maudlin enthusiasm for the common man. It was founded on the belief in something very like the depravity of man; that is, it was founded on the belief that serious matters like the kingdom, the power, and the glory, are something that men are not fit to be trusted with. The doctrine that man is by nature good is a doctrine that does not lead to a very good-natured view of man. A rather sardonic humour, a conviction that many of the people who serve it are probably scoundrels, is one of the more reassuring features of North American life, and it seems to be a view of human nature essential to a society that gives a primary place to criticism and reform. Religion has always taught that man has two selves. There is the selfish self which is worth very little and which we try to get rid of, and then there is the genuine self, the soul that we are trying to save in religion. We feel a similar division, I think, in the secular world. If you do casework you are aware that every human being is a "case," that his dilemmas and problems are of a type that you have met before—people even fall mentally ill in highly conventional ways. Yet at the same time you are equally well aware that no human being is really a "case" and that every human problem is unique. Similarly in society we have a conception of an ordinary self, the economic man, the man whose behaviour is statistically predictable, the Status Seeker, the inevitable target of the Wastemakers and Hidden Persuaders,4 a man who is gregarious but not friendly, who lives apart from his neighbour in a state of spiritual isolation. This aggressive or acquisitive man is a man who seems to have very little dignity, and whose freedom hardly seems to be worth preserving. He is the cornerstone of laissez-faire; he has nothing to do with liberalism, for all our political parties are now running away from laissez-faire and they differ among themselves only in their estimate of how fast and how far they can run. The conception of freedom, therefore, must apply to a very different

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conception of the self. I should define freedom as the power to do what one has learned to do. I do not see that the conception of freedom makes any sense at all without the learning of a discipline. Until one has learned music, one is not free to express oneself musically. Until one has learned to walk, one is not free to move. I have spoken of liberty and equality. The French revolution had a third ideal—the ideal of fraternity, and fraternity has to do, I suppose, with the sense of identity which is really a part of the sense of a social function—the sense of identity which gives you a nationality, a religion, a political affiliation, and which may take perverted forms like the delinquent gang. It seems to me that the genuine fraternity, the genuine social group, is a group united by some kind of common knowledge or skill. There has been a good deal of talk about the possibility of replacing a class by an elite, but I cannot imagine the society of the future producing just one elite. Anybody who has any social function at all will think of his particular job as central to society, as something on which society as a whole turns, and in that sense every group of people with a social function belongs to an elite. This sense of a central focus of knowledge or skill as something which creates a community can be observed from the very earliest time. A while ago, I saw a comic strip that I thought had made an extremely shrewd point. It depicted two children in kindergarten out for recess. A plane passes overhead. One of them says it is a jet, the other says it isn't, and there follows a long and quite technical discussion of the difference between jets and piston engines. Then the bell rings and one of them says to the other, "Come on, Mike, we got to go back and string them beads." Now, that to my mind dramatizes a very important and central fact about the learning process. I have often thought that the really scholarly instincts we try to develop in our Ph.D. students are much more clearly realized in, for example, teenage girls discussing movie stars. They use documents, they compare authorities, they trace sources and influences, and their knowledge is in every sense of the term scholarly. Some time ago when I was visiting an American university I was walking along the street with my hostess who was complaining about the way in which one's intellectual life seemed to be lost after one had graduated from university. She then met another lady and said, "Good morning, Mrs. Smith," and Mrs. Smith said, "You know how I think I could have made that no-trump bid last night?" Now there is the continuance of a certain

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intensity of mental processes, not perhaps in a very socially productive form; but that is one example of a community being created around an impersonal knowledge and skill. And I remember also talking to a thirteen-year-old boy about baseball and trying to amuse him by telling him James Thurber's wonderful story of the losing team that put in a midget at bat because of the unusual difficulties that the pitcher would have in getting a strike on him.5 He listened for a few seconds and then said, "Yeah, that happened in a game between Oklahoma and Arkansas on June 13,1906." I don't guarantee that those dates are accurate but I guarantee that his were. And this is the kind of intellectual keenness which we struggle for in more productive ways in the university, and that is the form in which these true communities begin to take shape. A community of interest like this is one which demands a certain playing down of the acquisitive or aggressive self. A man cannot join a profession without making some gesture such as the Hippocratic oath in medicine, putting the interest of his profession above his own interests. Pursued far enough, these things that are focuses of a community are, in their genuine form, the sciences and the arts. That is, the visions of reality and of imagination; for science is the vision of the world as it is, and art is the vision of the world that man wants to build. Religion tells us that there are two worlds—one visible and one invisible—and that the invisible one is the one that makes sense. And similarly you must have felt in your own work that there were two Torontos in your mind—the one in front of you, and the invisible one, the clean, free, and happy city which you were struggling to realize in all that you did. That was the Toronto that made sense, and that was the one that you were determined was going to come into being. We feel sometimes discouraged when we find ourselves up against a human nature which apparently can never be improved. But there is no such thing as human nature in the abstract. Human nature is always to be found in social contacts, and those social contacts can be improved. Man's nature is expressed in man's institutions, and it is not his nature but his destiny that may be good.

49

The War in Vietnam 1967

Reply to a questionnaire, Authors Take Sides on Vietnam: Two Questions on the War in Vietnam Answered by the Authors of Several Nations, ed. Cecil Woolfand John Bagguley (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 35.

I am strongly against the war in Vietnam, which is being waged with a brutality justified only by a "they do it too" type of argument, and which makes America's role in the Nuremberg trials twenty years ago the most miserable hypocrisy.1 It is a genocidal war, one which the Americans cannot win, and which they keep on fighting only because of some obsession about face-saving. Its public support is simply the result of the bloodshed itself, i.e., it is very difficult to accept the fact that one's fellow countrymen are dying for nothing. I think the conflict should be resolved by a planned series of strategic withdrawals with the final objective of getting out of Southeast Asia and reverting to the Monroe Doctrine.2 The reason for gradual withdrawal would be to try to build up some of the social infrastructures that would enable Vietnam to survive as a democracy. The notion that Vietnam would inevitably go Communist if there were any withdrawal at all is not necessarily true: the examples of Malaysia and Indonesia indicate that social movements are more complicated in that part of the world than public opinion thinks. In any case, the continued presence of an American army in South Vietnam is a continuous source of demoralization, and the propping up of a corrupt and unpopular regime, as the example of Chiang Kai-shek ought to have shown long ago, will only make a Communist takeover eventually inevitable, far more bloody when it occurs, and much more aggressive and imperialistic in its mood when it does come.

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The Two Contexts 1968

From Probings: A Collection of Essays Contributed to the Canadian Mental Health Association for Its Golden Jubilee, 1918-68 (Toronto: Canadian Mental Health Association, 1968), 38. On 16 May 1968, Frye was invited by Leonard Crainford, publisher to the association, to participate in a "fiftieth anniversary party . . . held in print rather than in person." Frye's deadline was 29 June and his word limit three hundred words; no payment would be made. Faced with such an unrefusable offer, he replied with this 359word essay on 20 June. There are two contexts in which the question of mental health exists, and they are directly opposite to one another. The first is the therapeutic context. Here society is the norm, and the individual suffers from some psychic disability that prevents his full social functioning. All forms of mental illness, including the schizophrenic and the manic-depressive, come under this category, and their antisocial actions range from committing suicide to murdering public figures. In the other context, society as a whole is sick and paranoid, and mental health can be attained only by the individual as a result of some detachment from the hysteria around him.1 Some societies, like Nazi Germany, are more obviously insane than others, and some are more obviously controlled and manipulated than others. But the same principle, that the mob is always insane and that only the individual can be sane, is always present. Society itself, of course, cannot distinguish the mentally sick person from the healthy person who repudiates its own sickness. The psychiatrist, the clergyman, and all those concerned with education, have to keep in mind the double focus. Frequently individual detachment and

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neurosis are found in the same person, and many forms of rejection of social values have themselves their neurotic aspects. Those concerned with mental health have to be both healers and social critics, just as architects have to be concerned both with individual buildings and with much larger issues of technological planning.

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The Quality of Life in the '705 14 February 1971

From University of Toronto Graduate, 3, no. 5 (June 1971): 38-48. Reprinted in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times, ed. Hugh A. Stevenson et al. (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 33-41. Also reprinted in RW, 349-62. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 4, files e,f, and g. Frye gave his talk at Seminar '71, an event sponsored by the University of Toronto Alumni Association. As the 19705 have only started, I suppose this is an exercise in prophecy. A good deal has been written about the future in recent years, and a most unpleasant word to describe such writing, futurology, has been invented. A book of essays on this subject was sent me a while ago. The first thing I noticed about it was that it was dated 1971, although it was published in November 1970. The next thing I noticed was that the editor was born in 1940. On the first page the book said, "The world of, say, 1950, if we came upon it today, would seem a quaint exhibition in a museum or perhaps even a flea market." That remark put in their place all readers of my age, for whom the world of 1950 is practically last Tuesday. The next sentence said that a book the editor had published back in 1968 "already feels a long, long time ago." I turned over the first page of this patriarchal youth's prose, and he was saying that the old left and right wing categories for classifying people's political attitudes were out of date. "If we are to use dichotomies," he said, "it now seems more valid to divide thinkers into backward-lookers and forward-lookers—respectively, those who regard present life as similar to the past... and those who see today as radically different." Well, to begin with, there is no such thing as a forward-looking per-

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son.1 That is a metaphor from car-driving, and it applies to space but not to time. In time we all face the past, and are dragged backwards into the future. Nobody knows the future: it isn't there to be known. The past is what we know, and it is all that we know. Those concerned with prediction and forecasting, like statisticians, can deal with the future only as the analogy of the past. Some people, of course, are more receptive to social change than others, but when it comes to "regarding present life as similar to the past," we are all in precisely the same boat. Further, all of us, to some extent, fear and hate change, at least the changes that are going to affect us. The most ferocious of radicals can only keep going as long as he can live in the relatively stable society created by his radicalism: the society of those who agree with him and support his views. Whatever else he wants to change, he never wants to change that. The prophet, therefore, is not a person who foretells the future, but the person who tries to get some insight into the present through his knowledge of the past. As such, he has two main functions. One is to warn of approaching disaster if certain lines of conduct are persisted in. This is not my main concern now, because warning is already one of the verbal heavy industries of our time. Everybody likes to warn, from terrorists to the people who put up signs on highways reading "Prepare to meet thy God" or "Watch for falling rock." The other function of prophecy is to point out the opportunities available for a better life, to say, not what is likely to happen, but what could happen. It is this aspect of the future that I want to stress, but, of course, I have to start with the immediate past, the world of the late 19605. It struck me that the confident, get-with-it tone of the book I have quoted contained an undercurrent of hysteria, and that it was a hysteria I had heard before. I am old enough to remember the newspapers of the spring and summer months of 1929, and how they said that very soon the world, or the United States leading the world, would have abolished poverty, distributed income and purchasing power, provided a final answer to socialism, turned every citizen into a profit-making investor, and got to Utopia by express. There has been quite a market recently for books about the technological advances we may expect between now and the year 2000: the ones I have seen have mostly taken a fullspeed-ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes line. But few if any of them seemed to realize that this attitude was a by-product of a boom period in the economy. Society tends to move from one plateau to another, periods of rapid change being followed by periods of consolidation. My

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guess is that the 19603 were a period of advance, notably in the technique of communication, and that the 19705, which begin with inflation, unemployment, and depression, will be a period of some retrenchment. Whether this is so or not, I can at any rate state my first principle, which is that the future which may be technically possible is not the future that society can absorb. In science and technology there is a good deal of automatic advance: one discovery leads to another, and when any given form of technology has a clear field to develop, it can do so with extraordinary speed. Technology can improve the efficiency of aeroplanes to a degree that outstrips the wildest dreams with which it began. But no sooner has it done so than airline companies go broke, airports get clogged up, citizens complain about sonic-boom noise, and terrorists develop a taste for free rides to Cuba. Over a century ago, Karl Marx said that history, up to his time, had shown a consistent pattern of one class exploiting another, but that industrial production had introduced a revolutionary process into history, and that this was creating contradictions within the class structure of capitalism. We could not both have industrial production and go on playing the same old exploiting game. So there was really a double revolutionary process, one the development of production on an industrial basis, the other the gaining of power over this production by society as a whole. A generation ago, we were still arguing this point on the same assumptions. Everybody agreed that industrial production was a revolutionary force; everybody assumed that this force could only function by being united to a certain kind of social system. The left wing argued that socialism was the only possible form of this system; the right wing argued the opposite, that leaving a good many things to private enterprise was the best way of keeping society flexible. Neither side questioned the work ethic of production itself; both assumed that the increasing of its efficiency was the essential function of any social system. After 1917, the Marxist side of this argument turned increasingly to rationalizing everything that was happening in the Soviet Union. For the past twenty years or so it has been fairly obvious that Soviet society is a more conservative one than ours, and so most Marxist rhetoric has shifted its ground to China, where the present is less known and the future less predictable. It has become clearer, nevertheless, that the advance of knowledge, along with the technological breakthroughs which accompany it, is the only revolutionary force of our time, and that changing the economic system, whatever arguments there may other-

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wise be for it, is not an inseparable part of this revolution. The main function of all economic systems whatever is to put brakes on social change, to cushion society against too much of what is now being called future shock.2 Capitalist and Communist societies have their rigidities and inflexibilities in different places, but they both have them, and have them for the same purpose. That is why all governments have such a curious sense of priorities: why atom bombs and moon landings play so large a role in the budgets of major powers. Such things are part of the Great International Handicap: the tacit agreement not to rush too far or too fast into the future. The people who find the revolutionary mood of the late 19605 hardest to understand, I should think, are the old-line Marxists. Old-line Marxism was directed toward an end: it saw everything that happened as part of a step by step advance toward a revolution that would put an end to history as we have known it. Those who accepted the Marxist analysis felt that it gave them a tremendous insight into the reality of what was happening. All events were, in their deeper meaning, symbols of the progress towards the final takeover. And, as Marxism regarded theory and practice as inseparable, this analysis also gave a new meaning to the lives of those who adopted it: it gave historical significance to every strike, every demonstration, even every committee meeting they attended. Contemporary radicalism may use, as it often does, the same arguments, the same Marxist jargon, the same tactics, the same violent denunciations of the evils of capitalism. But, even when it calls itself Maoist or Trotskyist, it is really an anarchism that no longer identifies revolution with seizing control of production. There have always been two kinds of anarchists, the peaceful kind and the violent kind. Violent anarchism does not want to take over production so much as to smash and sabotage it. Its tactics have the plausibility of the argument that the one really effective way to stop a car is to aim it at a tree. The more thoughtful anarchists differ in tactics, but not in ultimate aims. The tendency of technical change is towards greater centralization, and anarchism is a decentralizing mode of thought. It is in the long run a doctrine of organizing society so as to provide for the greatest possible amount of stability and the slowest possible rate of change. To understand this mood, we have to remember that it is really, from its own point of view, counteranarchist. The really anarchic force, it feels, is the productive machinery itself, which has got out of control of

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society and has become autonomous, or is acting as though it were. Government, it feels, is a sorcerer's apprentice compelled to stand helplessly by while all the technology of war rolls into Vietnam, because it has to go somewhere. The United States, it feels, is the worst country in the world, precisely because it is the most efficient and productive country in the world. We should not condemn this view without realizing how much of it the most conservative among us share. For instance: capitalism produces automobiles; then it mass-produces automobiles; then it saturates the country with automobiles; then it chokes the landscape with tenlane highways, clover-leaf intersections, parking lots, used-car lots; it develops enormous police forces to cope with the resulting chaos; it kills hundreds of people every holiday weekend; all over the land the incense of tons of carbon monoxide rolls upward to the nostrils of its stinking and murderous god. Perhaps we should control the production a little, but that would wreck the economy: what's good for General Motors is good for the country,3 and the production must go on and on and on. The Spadina Expressway must be built in Toronto.4 All reason and evidence seem unanimous that this expressway was a bad thing to have started and a worse thing to try to finish. But what are reason and evidence against a compulsion neurosis? All such projects cut down the amount of taxable land: this means a harder squeeze on universities, schools, churches, libraries, and everything else at all likely to improve the quality of life in the 19705. It doesn't matter: you can't stop progress. If I wanted a single phrase to characterize the late 19605,1 should call it the age of undirected revolution. There have been all kinds of revolutionary movements, of blacks, of women, of students, of unions, of any group whatever that can work out an argument to distinguish itself from the "establishment." Many of these movements have been split by internal dissensions before they could get off the ground. But many of them did not really care about getting off the ground: their motives cannot be interpreted by the old revolutionary standard of seizing power. These outbreaks now seem to be giving place to a more serious commitment to such things as pollution and population control, but the principle remains the same. We can no longer assume that the automatic production of anything, even human beings, is necessarily a good thing. Production has to meet certain moral criteria first, to answer questions about its relation to animals and plants, to pure air and water, to housing and town planning, to the landscape and historical landmarks, to

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the balance of human society itself. I imagine that the 19705 will be deeply concerned with these moral criteria of production. The 19605 were also a period of becoming adjusted to new techniques of communication, more particularly the electronic ones. It was the McLuhan age, the age of intense preoccupation with the effect of communications on society, and with the aspect of life that we call news. Many of the worst features of the late '6os, its extravagant silliness, its orgies of lying, its pointless terrorism and repression, revolved around the television set and the cult of the "image." So the nature of news is the next thing we ought to look at. I was recently reading the report of the Senate's committee on the mass media, and came across, in the third volume, the stock question: why do the papers, and news media generally, seem to report only bad news?5 This is, as I say, a familiar, even a tedious question, but it raises more interesting ones, two in particular. First, what is it that is really happening? Second, what is it that the news media are really set up to record? I shall try to deal with the second question first. The greater part of our lives consists of continuity and routine. As long as the continuity and routine are functioning, we are living in a world of non-news. As the Senate report remarked, it is not news if the Air Canada flight from Vancouver arrives on time with everyone safe. News is whatever breaks into routine, and such news is of two main kinds: events and issues. Events, things that cut across routine, are very often the result of a breakdown in routine. That is why so large a proportion of news events are disasters, and why all disaster is news. The issue operates in the same way. Intellectually, we go on with our mental routines, repeating our ideas and prejudices as long as we meet with no opposition. The issue breaks into this by dramatizing opposition: everybody has to line up on one side or other of an issue. The fact that in the mental life only the confronting issue is news is the reason for the pious devotion of newspapers and other media to anything called "controversial." Now this polarizing of attitude, lining everybody up on one side or the other, is also what revolutionary strategy aims at doing. Thus the news media also have, already built into them, as a necessity of their existence, the quality of undirected revolution. The emphasis on "confrontation" and similar words, the obsession with the discontinuous and unstructured, the tendency to argue automatically that whatever one disagreed with was "out of date," show how the anarchism and the preoccupation with media in the late 19605 were aspects of the same thing.

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Revolution without direction bears a close resemblance to war. Two wars in succeeding generations devastated the twentieth century, and we appear to be getting the violence of the generation following as a kind of substitute for a third one. If so, then however bad it may be we are lucky to be getting it instead of starting where Hiroshima left off. William James said that we needed a moral equivalent of war,6 and we may actually have begun to find such an equivalent, if hardly of the type he had in mind. The atmosphere of the later 19605 resembled a wartime period in many ways. There was the same projection of an "enemy." In wartime we know very well that the "enemy" consists of people like ourselves, but we suppress this awareness: to fight a war we must assume that our "enemy" is antihuman. In our day the attitude toward the "establishment" on the one side, and to the "long hairs" or what not on the other, have the same paranoid quality: both sides wish to forget that these "enemies" are part of their own community, and that they cannot eliminate them without eliminating themselves as well. Then again, in wartime there is an irritable postponing of all serious or complex issues until after the war has been "won." In war we are not concerned with thinking of what we are doing: what we have to do is generate enough emotional heat to keep on fighting. Heat is generated by a deliberate creation of hysteria, which takes such forms as violent language, a constant suppression of dissent, shouting slogans, breaking up meetings, invoking emergency measures to get rid of troublemakers, and so on. Again, the psychosis of war takes a manic-depressive shape: the horror of the war itself is compensated for by fantasies about all the wonderful things we can do after we win it. In our day the manic phase is represented by, let us say, the "revolution is fun" thesis of the Yippies and by President Nixon's remark that the moon landing of 1969 was the greatest event since the creation.7 Well, of course, revolution, like wife-beating, may be fun for some people, and perhaps the moon landing was the greatest event since the creation if you forget a good deal of what happened in between, such as the fall of man. But such moods are quickly succeeded by depressive ones, an administration grousing glumly about permissiveness, radicals retreating into phases of "re-examination" and wondering whether their hopes and ideals have any substance at all. The large scale of self-destructive activities in the younger generation also has an analogy to the casualty lists of wartime. It is seldom that I risk a prediction about the future, but I did say, in a

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paper given in the fall of 1968, that while nothing seemed less likely then than a return to the introspection of the Eisenhower period, I was convinced that such a return was just around the corner. At the moment we appear to have turned such a corner: of course the mood may change again overnight, but it may be worth mentioning my reasons for making the statement. In the first place, technological developments during the last two decades have tended towards greater introversion. The passenger aeroplane is more introverted than the train, the high-rise apartment more introverted than the bungalow suburb, the television set more introverted than the neighbourhood movie, and so on. Similarly, much radical opposition to the social ethos has taken intensely introverted forms. The drug cults are an obvious example: rock music, which wraps up its listeners in a completely insulating cloak of noise, is another. But such things differ very little from the mood of society as a whole. A few years ago the magic word which explained everything that was going on was the word "subculture," but I doubt if there really is such a thing as a subculture: everything the word describes has its equivalent in, or is taken up by, the rest of society. Recently, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, with which I have a connection,8 has been trying to impose standards of Canadian content on broadcasters. I expected many broadcasters to be opposed to these regulations: what surprised me much more was the howl of protest from so many viewers, many of whom said, very explicitly, that it was part of the inalienable and God-given birthright of every free-born Canadian to listen to all the American programs he could get his hands on. A broadcaster made a remark at a recent hearing which seemed to me to throw some light on this. The viewer, he said, is an addict. He keeps twisting the dial until he gets his fix: then he's happy. There is much more to be said about viewers than this, but it is true that for many people television constitutes a socially acceptable form of drug culture. Similarly in other areas. The newspapers express a good deal of indignation about Rochdale,9 but I should imagine that most of the conditions complained of there—the litter, the drugs, the sexual promiscuity, the petty delinquencies—could be duplicated in a good many university residences, male or female. What has happened, I think, is a considerable decline in the capacity for community living. Perhaps the hippies will be bellwethers here, as they have been before. A few years ago it was they who led the cult of doing one's own thing, but now they are turning increasingly to communes and social settlements, rather like the Utopian projects of the nineteenth century.

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This introversion is connected with one of the central problems of our time, the fragmenting of the social vision. The reason for the fragmenting is a perverted notion of freedom. Introversion always thinks of freedom as what the individual wants to do. What he does, in this view, is what he wants to do minus what society will stop him doing, and the freer the society, the fewer restraints it imposes. Society is thus considered to be the antithesis of the individual, an external authority, an "establishment," a father-figure to be destroyed. Such a view of freedom is, of course, wrong side out. The individual as such is entirely incapable of freedom: he wants to do what he likes, which means that he wants to obey a series of internal compulsions. Man is primarily and essentially social: he belongs to something before he is anything, before he is even born. Whatever individuality he may have strikes its roots into his social context and flowers out of it. His freedom is his own adaptation of his society's freedom, and if one society is freer than another, it is so mainly because of the amount of criticism it permits. But if such criticism is genuinely free, loyalty to the society, to the community as a whole, is its premise. If things are wrong in society, it does not follow that society as a whole is corrupt: what follows is that if criticism can be expressed, society has, to that extent, some strength and flexibility, and consequently is worth loyalty. It may be difficult for many to feel loyalty to the community as a whole, even among those who can distinguish the real community from its "establishment," because the tendency of a mechanically overproductive society is to alienate more and more groups of people from it. To function at top capacity, it needs to turn as many people as possible into full-time consumers. Hence it alienates women by trying to turn them all into consumers whose lives are a continuous round of shopping and buying. It needs to keep large groups of people off the labour market: hence it alienates young people, whom it keeps in a limbo of adolescence, forcing them to walk a treadmill of "education" that deprives them of all real social function. Again, it needs to have large pockets of cheaper labour, and so alienates black and other "third world" elements, whom it wishes to retain in a subordinate social role. For the 19705, it may be too much to hope for concern without panic, but we may reasonably hope for less panic and more genuine concern. I imagine that we shall have contained television by then, and become less obsessed with the impact of instant news. If so, we may be released, to some degree, from the tyranny of the issue, the constant polarizing of

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opinion, the constant vociferating of pro and con views. Nothing deteriorates the character more quickly than the deliberate telling of half-truths, where each side tries to expose the lies on the other side and suppress the lies on its own, to denounce evils in some parts of the world and overlook the same evils elsewhere, to put its case by shouting down the opponent or calling the police to jail him. This is merely another kind of drug culture: it may be exhilarating at the time, but its only permanent result is hangover. The hangover in this case consists of a facile and self-pitying sense of alienation. Through all the confusion and violence of the late 19605, the thing that anarchism most wants, the decentralizing of power and influence, has been steadily growing. It will continue to grow through the 19705, I think, in many areas. For example, the possibilities of cable for breaking into the monologue of communication and giving the local community some articulateness and sense of coherence are enormous. And as real decentralizing grows and we get nearer to what is called participatory democracy, the false forms of it, separatism, neo-fascism, the jockeying of pressure groups, and all the other things that fragment the social vision instead of diversifying it, will, I hope, begin to break off from it. I said before that the question of what is news raises another question: what is it that really happens? I said too that most of our lives is spent in repetition and routine, the world of non-news. But there are two kinds of repetition. There is the repetition of ordinary habit, three meals a day, going to the job, driving the car, and all the continuous activities that preserve our sense of identity. There is also the repetition of practice, as when we learn to play the piano or memorize the alphabet or the multiplication table. This is directed and progressive repetition, and it is the basis of all education. The ability to think is just as much a matter of habit and practice as the ability to play the piano. Whenever anything that we see, or pick up in conversation, or get as an idea, is added to and becomes a part of an expanding body of experience, we are continuing our education. In that sense we may say that nothing is really happening in the world except the education of the people in it. The news gives us another aspect of what is happening, what I called a vertical cross-section of it. But the world the news gives us changes with bewildering rapidity, and we can never understand why it is changing from the news alone. We can only understand that through the continuous and structured forms of apprehension, the forms of the arts and sciences. Education, then, is not a preparation for real life: it is the encounter with

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real life, and the only way in which reality can be grasped at all. Production in society is the result of technological developments; technological developments are the result of the advance of knowledge. The advance of knowledge is what is really happening in the world, and the more we direct our attention to it the more real our lives become. I speak of the advance of knowledge, which relates mostly to science, but of course I have a special interest in literature and the arts, whose function is to intensify experience rather than advance it. The dominance of communication media in the 19605 tended to assimilate painting, music, and literature, especially drama, to the news. They all took the form of a sequence of movements or vogues appearing and disappearing with great speed. Like other things, the arts were overproduced and had to adopt a technique of planned obsolescence. They resembled in this the demands for "relevance" in education, which brought a similar built-in obsolescence into university teaching. A time of "confrontation" and the like is very hard on the arts for many reasons. I think of Ralph Ellison, a highly intelligent and sensitive black writer, who published his novel Invisible Man some time ago and worked for years on his next one. It sounds like a most honourable career, but a friend tells me of a student he has, a girl very involved in black power movements, who furiously denounced Ellison's devotion to his art as "a personality cult like Stalin's." Her view was that a black novelist should not be just writing but writing up: he should be making novels out of news, immediate issues, and crises, and helping to support the black power movement by doing so. This is, of course, a variant of Stalin's own view of "socialist realism," which in practice meant that Russian writers had to support his regime or else. It is a view that many of the best Russian writers today are going to jail rather than submit to. I would hope for the 19703 a development of the arts in which they would have recovered something of their real function of binding together the community in time as well as space, reshaping the past and addressing the unborn as well as the present. The arts are always a product of leisure, leisure not in the sense of privilege but in the sense of relaxation of panic. The free imagination cannot be hurried; it cannot be partisan; it cannot live on simplistic half-truths; it cannot yield to the fear of not being up-to-date. It must look at the whole of what is in front of it, and communicate that sense of wholeness to society. And perhaps, if the arts could recover their proper social function, they could lead us on to the highest effort, perhaps, that the 19705 could

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make. I said that I thought the 'yos were likely to be much preoccupied with the question of the moral criteria of production. But moral criteria cannot be separated from aesthetic ones. At a certain point the pollution of Lake Erie or Jasper Park10 is bound to expand into a much bigger problem, the problem of noise pollution and shape pollution, the hideousness of so much of the sight and sound of contemporary civilization. We unconsciously keep giving ourselves sedatives so that we will not notice this hideousness, but it constantly affects and influences our lives in all sorts of subtle ways, and the higher our sense of reality, the more obvious its effects will be. One of the more genuinely attractive aspects of the protest movements of the late 19605 has been the insistence with which they have raised the question "Why not?" Some time ago one of the Beatles put up advertisements over Toronto saying "War is over—if you want it."11 It was not perhaps a very successful enterprise, but what it said was true enough. War is over if we want it, and so is the whole nightmare of human folly and tyranny. It will probably not be over in the 19705, but there is nothing in the will of God, the malice of the devil, or the unconsciousness of nature to prevent it from going. What prevents it are the bogies and demons inside us. We have been calling these demons up pretty frequently during the past few years of confused and infantile illusions, and they have never failed to respond to our call.12 But they have no power except what they get from us, and certainly no power to stop us, if we want it, from making the 19705 an era of grace, dignity, and peace.

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Spengler Revisited Winter 1974

From SM, 179-98. Originally published in Daedalus, 103, no. i (Winter 1974): 1-13. The issue of Daedalus for which Frye wrote had as its general theme "Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited." References to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West are to the two-volumes-in-one edition published in 1939 (New York: Knopf), and to Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man to the edition published in 1957 (Boston: Beacon Press). NFF, 1988, box 4, files ee, ff, and gg contain typescripts and printed proofs prepared for this article entitled "Life after Death: Spengler's Vision of Decline," "Life after Death ...," and "The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler." The first is dated 1973, and Frye has added to it pencilled corrections and revisions subsequently incorporated into the manuscript. Where the changes are interesting or significant, the original is given in an endnote. The logic of Frye's revisions is driven by his apparent decision to immerse his readers as far as possible in Spengler's controlling ideas and language. Only in this way, Frye seems to assume, will they understand his work as an imaginative vision rather than a network of propositions or a body of dogma.

In July 1918, when the German armies were on the point of collapse, a book appeared called Der Untergang des Abendlandes, by someone called Oswald Spengler. I use that phrase because Spengler then was nobody in particular, an Oberlehrer or Gymnasium teacher who had thrown up his job in 1910 in order to write, whose health was so bad he was never called up for military service even in the warm-body months of 1918, and who was so poor he could hardly buy enough food or clothing, much less books. Anonymity was a serious handicap in a country where scholars were ranked in a quasi-military hierarchy, and Spengler's book

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was refused by many publishers before being brought out in a small edition. Within a year it was one of the most widely read and discussed books in Europe, and Spengler began to revise and expand it. He was decoyed into other projects before he completed his masterwork, but finally did complete it with a second volume, as long and detailed as the first. The second volume, however, adds relatively little to the essential argument, though it provides more documentation. In 1926 an English translation of the first volume by C.F. Atkinson, called The Decline of the West, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, the second volume appearing in 1928. It is an admirable translation, with many helpful footnotes added by the translator. In English there is an excellent study of Spengler by H. Stuart Hughes (1952). It is a short book, but even so it takes in a much wider sweep of argument than I can take here: I am concerned only with The Decline of the West as a "revisited classic." The philosophical framework of Spengler's argument is a Romantic one, derived ultimately from Fichte's adaptation of Kant. The objective world, the world that we know and perceive, the phenomenal world, is essentially a spatial world: it is the domain of Nature explored by science and mathematics, and so far as it is so explored, it is a mechanical world, for when living things are seen objectively they are seen as mechanisms. Over against this is the world of time, organism, life, and history. The essential reality of this world eludes the reasoner and experimenter: it is to be attained rather by feeling, intuition, imaginative insight, and, above all, by symbolism. The time in which this reality exists is a quite different time from the mechanical or clock time of science, which is really a dimension of space. It follows that methods adequate for the study of nature are not adequate for the study of history. The true method of studying living forms, Spengler says, is by analogy, and his whole procedure is explicitly and avowedly analogical. The problem is to determine what analogies in history are purely accidental, and which ones point to the real shape of history itself. Thanks to such works as Bernard Lonergan's Insight (i957)/ we know rather more about the positive role of analogy in constructive thought than was generally known in 1918, and it is no longer possible to dismiss Spengler contemptuously as "mystical" or "irrational" merely because his method is analogical. He may be, but for other reasons. Everything that is alive shows an organic rhythm, moving through stages of birth, growth, maturity, decline, and eventual death. If this happens to all individual men without exception, there is surely no inherent

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improbability in supposing that the same organic rhythm extends to larger human units of life. In Spengler's day, philosophy was still largely dominated by the Cartesian model of the individual perceiver completely detached from his social context. But this is an unreal abstraction, however useful as a heuristic principle; man also perceives as a representative of a larger social unit. The next step is to identify that unit. Spengler finds that it is not the nation, which is too shifting and fluctuating to be a unit, not the race (though he wobbles on this point, for reasons to be examined presently), not the class, which is a source mainly of limitation and prejudice, not the continent, but the culture. The culture to which we belong is the "Western" culture, with its roots in Western Europe, though now extended to the Americas and Australia. This culture has gone through four main stages, which Spengler symbolizes by the seasons of the year. It had its "spring" in medieval times, and the features of such a cultural spring are a warrior aristocracy, a priesthood, a peasantry bound to the soil, a limited urban development, anonymous and impersonal art, mainly in the service of the priests and the fighters (churches and castles), and intense spiritual aspiration. It reached its "summer" with the Renaissance, consolidating in city-states, princes surrounded by courtiers, a growing merchant class, and a high development of the arts in which names and personalities become important. Its "autumn" took place in the eighteenth century, when it began to exhaust its inner possibilities, of music in Mozart and Beethoven, of literature in Goethe, of philosophy in Kant. Then it moved into its "winter" phase, which Spengler calls a "civilization" as distinct from a culture. Here its accomplishments in the arts and philosophy are either a further exhaustion of possibilities or an inorganic repetition of what has been done. Its distinctive energies are now technological. It goes in for great engineering feats, for annihilation wars and dictatorships; its population shifts from the countryside into huge amorphous cities which produce a new kind of mass man. The first significant representative of this winter civilization was Napoleon the world-conqueror; Bismarck and Cecil Rhodes the empire-builder are examples of a type of force-man who will increase through the next centuries. Before this culture we had the Classical culture, which exemplifies the pattern for us, as it completed its winter phase. Classical culture had its "spring" with the Homeric aristocracy, its "summer" with the Greek city-states, and its "autumn" with Periclean Athens and the Peloponnesian War. Plato and Aristotle, corresponding to Goethe and Kant,

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exhausted the inner organic possibilities of Classical philosophy, and Alexander the world-conqueror corresponds to Napoleon. The break we express by the phrase "Greek and Roman" is now occurring for us; we are now about where Classical culture was at the time of the Punic Wars, with the world-states of the future fighting it out for supremacy. Of these world-states, only the Prussian tradition that runs through Bismarck seems really to have grasped the facts of the contemporary world, and to have embarked on the "self-determination" which Spengler sees as essential to a state in the winter phase of its culture. Although the theme is very muted in The Decline of the West, Spengler seems to have a hope—he regards it as a hope—that Germany may yet become the Rome of the future. In addition to these two cultures, there is a "Magian" one, which comes in between the Classical and the Western. This culture is Arabian, Syrian, Jewish, Byzantine, and eastern Levantine generally: it had its "spring" in the time of Jesus, its Baroque expansion in the age of Mohammed, and it began to exhaust its possibilities in what we should call the later Middle Ages. Spengler also identifies an Egyptian, a Chinese, and an Indian culture, all of which have lasted the same length of time and gone through the same phases. A new culture, Spengler says, is growing up in Russia now, and is still (1918) in its springtime phase. When a new culture, however, grows up within the confines or influence of an older one, it is subject to what Spengler calls a "pseudomorphosis," having its genuine shape twisted and deformed by the prestige of its senior. Thus although the "Magian" culture practically took over the Roman Empire, even eventually shifting its centre to Byzantium, still the domination of the Classical culture forced it to express itself in many ways that were alien to it. The same thing is happening in Russia now, where the prestige of an aging culture, as Russia's adoption of Marxism shows, is squeezing the indigenous life out of the younger development. Such cultures differ profoundly from one another, so profoundly that no mind in a Western culture can really understand what is going on in a Classical or Egyptian or Chinese mind. The differences can only be expressed by some kind of central symbol. The Greek is a purely natural man, in Spengler's sense of the word "nature": he cared nothing for past or future, had no history although he invented it for certain occasions, produced his arts without taking thought for the morrow, and lived in the pure present, the symbol of which for Spengler is the Doric column. Spengler suggests primary symbols for most of the other cultures: the

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garden for the Chinese, who "wanders" in his world; the straight way for the Egyptian, who was as obsessed by past and future life as the Greek was careless of them; the cavern for Magian culture, expressed architecturally as the mosque—the Pantheon in Rome being, Spengler says, the first mosque. As Yeats remarks in his Vision, taking his cue from Ezra Pound, Spengler probably got his cavern symbol from Frobenius.2 The new Russian culture is best symbolized as a flat plane: it expresses a "denial of height" [D W, 1:201] in both its architecture and its Communism.3 The central symbol for the Western, or, as Spengler usually calls it, the "Faustian" culture seems to be that of a centre with radiating points. Faustian culture is strongly historical in sense, with a drive into infinite distance that makes it unique among other cultures. The central art of Faustian man is contrapuntal music; Classical culture expressed its sense of the pure present in its sculpture. The approaches of the two cultures even to mathematics are quite different. Classical man thinks of a number as a thing, a magnitude; Western man thinks of it as a relation to other numbers. This morphological view of history, which sees history as a plurality of cultural developments, is, Spengler claims, an immense improvement on the ordinary "linear" one which divides history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Here Spengler seems to me to be on very solid ground, at least to the extent that linear history is really, at bottom, a vulgar and complacent assumption that we represent the inner purpose of all human history. The Hebrews gave us our religion, the Greeks our philosophy, the Romans our law, and these contributions to our welfare descended from the Middle Ages to us. The Chinese and Indians had little to do with producing us; they only produced more Chinese and Indians, so they don't really belong to history. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay," as the man says in Tennyson.4 Hegel has been often and most unfairly ridiculed for advocating a view of history which made the Prussian state of his day its supreme achievement.5 But whenever we adopt this linear view, especially in its progressive form, which asserts that the later we come in time the better we are, we do far worse than Hegel. The linear view of history is intellectually dead, and Spengler has had a by no means ignoble role in assisting at its demise. Spengler's view of history includes, however, a rather similar distinction between human life with history and human life without it. If we study the history of one of the great cultures, we find that institutions

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evolve, classes rise, and conquests expand in what seems a logical, but is really an organic, way. But if we try to write a history of Patagonians or Zulus or Mongols, we can produce only a series of events or incidents. These people live and die and reproduce; they trade and think and fight as we do; they make poems and pots and buildings. But their stories are chronicles or annals, not coherent histories. Lapland in the eighteenth century is much like Lapland in the thirteenth: we do not feel, as we feel when we compare eighteenth-century with thirteenth-century England, that it is five centuries older. Similarly, after a culture has completely exhausted itself, it passes out of "history." There are, therefore, two forms of human life: a primitive existence with the maximum of continuity and the minimum of change, and life within a growing or declining culture, which is history properly speaking. A parallel distinction reappears within the cultural developments themselves. People have constantly been fascinated by the degree of accident in history, by the fact that, as Pascal says, history would have been quite different if Cleopatra's nose had been longer.6 Spengler distinguishes what he calls destiny from incident. The incidents of a man's life will depend on the job he takes, the woman he marries, the town he decides to live in, and these are often determined by sheer accident. But nothing will alter the fact that it will be his life. Cultures, too, have their real lives as well as the incidents those lives bring to the surface. Spengler does not mention Cleopatra's nose, but he does say that if Mark Antony had won the battle of Actium the shape of Magian culture would have been much easier to recognize [DW, 2:191-2]. The incidents of Western history would have been quite different if Harold had won at Hastings or Napoleon at the Nile, but the same kind of history would have appeared in other forms. A modern reader would doubtless prefer some other word to "destiny," but the distinction itself is valid, granted Spengler's premises. In what a culture produces, whether it is art, philosophy, military strategy, or political and economic developments, there are no accidents: everything a culture produces is equally a symbol of that culture. Certain stock responses to Spengler may be set aside at once. In the first place, his view of history is not a cyclical view, even if he does use the names of the four seasons to describe its main phases. A cyclical theory would see a mechanical principle, like the one symbolized by Yeats's double gyre, as controlling the life of organisms, and for Spengler the organism is supreme: there is no superorganic mechanism. Brooks

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Adams's The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), which appears to have wrought such disaster in the impressionable mind of Ezra Pound/ does give us a rather crude cyclical theory of history as an alternating series of movements of aggressiveness and usury, with apparently some preference for the former. Yeats's Vision, as just implied, is also cyclical, because it is astrological, and therefore sees history as following the mechanical rhythms of nature rather than the organic ones. It seems to me that Spengler's distinction between primitive and historical existence is the real basis of Yeats's distinction between "primary" cultures8 and the "antithetical" ones that rise out of them, but the spirits who supplied Yeats with his vision did not know much history. In a way Spengler does give an illusion of a cyclical view: he knows very little about Chinese and Indian civilizations, and relegates the possibility of other such developments in Babylonia or pre-Columbian America to bare mentions. Fair enough: nobody expects omniscience. But this leaves us with a series of five that do run in sequence: the Egyptian, the Classical, the Magian, the Western, and the Russian. This sequence may have its importance, as I shall suggest later, but for Spengler himself cultures grow up irregularly, like dandelions. There was no inevitability that a new Russian culture would appear in the decline of a Western one, nor is there any carryover of contrasting characteristics from one to the other (except in the negative and distorting form of "pseudomorphosis"), such as a genuinely cyclical theory would postulate. Spengler's analogical method of course rests, not only on the analogies among the cultures themselves, but on a further analogy between a culture and an organism. It is no good saying that a culture is not an organism, and that therefore we can throw out his whole argument. The question whether a culture "is" an organism or not belongs to what I call the fallacy of the unnecessary essence. It is an insoluble problem, and insoluble problems are insoluble because they have been wrongly formulated. The question is not whether a culture is an organism, but whether it behaves enough like one to be studied on an organic model. "Let the words youth, growth, maturity, decay . . . be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states," Spengler says. Spengler's massed evidence for these characteristics in a variety of cultures seems to me impressive enough to take seriously. It is no good either denouncing him on the ground that his attitude is "fatalistic" or "pessimistic," and that one ought not to be those things. It is not fatalism to say that

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one grows older every year; it is not pessimism to say that whatever is alive will eventually die. Or if it is, it doesn't matter. Again, I am not much worried about the "contradictions" or "ambiguities," which can probably be found by job-lots in Spengler's work. Anybody can find contradictions in any long and complex argument. Most of them are verbal only, and disappear with a little application to the real structure of the argument itself. Most of the rest arise from the fact that the reader's point of view differs from that of the writer, and he is apt to project these differences into the book as inconsistencies within it. There may remain a number of genuine contradictions which really do erode the author's own case, and I think there are some in Spengler. But for a book of the kind he wrote the general principle holds that if one is in broad sympathy with what he is trying to do, no errors or contradictions or exaggerations seem fatal to the general aim; if one is not in sympathy with it, everything, however correct in itself, dissolves into chaos. Spengler's book is not a work of history; it is a work of historical popularization. It outlines one of the mythical shapes in which history reaches everybody except professional historians. Spengler would not care for the term popularization: he is proud of the length and difficulty of his work, speaks with contempt of the popular; and of his efforts to popularize his own thesis, such as Prussianism and Socialism (1919) or Man and Technics (1931), the less said the better. Nevertheless, his book is addressed to the world at large, and historians are the last people who should be influenced by it. What Spengler has produced is a vision of history which is very close to being a work of literature—close enough, at least, for me to feel some appropriateness in examining it as a literary critic. If The Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems. There are limits to this, of course: Spengler had no intention of producing a work of pure imagination, nor did he do so. A work of literature, as such, cannot be argued about or refuted, and Spengler's book has been constantly and utterly refuted ever since it appeared. But it won't go away, because in sixty years there has been no alternative vision of the data it contemplates. What seems to me most impressive about Spengler is the fact that everybody does accept his main thesis in practice, whatever they think or say they accept. Everybody thinks in terms of a "Western" culture to which Europeans and Americans belong; everybody thinks of that culture as old, not young; everybody realizes that its most striking parallels

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are with the Roman period of Classical culture; everybody realizes that some crucial change in our way of life took place around Napoleon's time. At that I am not counting the people who have a sentimental admiration for medieval culture because it represents our own lost youth, or the people who cannot listen with pleasure to any music later than Mozart or Beethoven, or the people who regard the nineteenth century as a degenerate horror, or the Marxists who talk about the decadence of bourgeois culture, or the alarmists who talk about a return to a new Dark Ages, or the Hellenists who regard Latin literature as a second-hand imitation of Greek literature. All these have a more or less muddled version of Spengler's vision as their basis. The decline, or aging, of the West is as much a part of our mental outlook today as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians. Thus T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published in 1922, was written without reference to Spengler, an author of whom Eliot would not be likely to take an exalted view. But look at the imagery of the poem: spring morning youth spring rain Middle Ages

summer noon maturity river Thames Elizabethans

autumn evening age estuary i8th century

winter night death sea 2Oth century

The medieval references, it is true, come mainly through Wagner, and the eighteenth-century section was cut out on the advice of Pound, but the Spenglerian analogy is there in full force. The parallels with Classical culture are also there, even to the explicit allusion to the Punic Wars in the reference to the "ships at Mylae."9 W.H. Auden's The Fall of Rome [1947], and much of the imagery of For the Time Being [1944] are unintelligible without some comprehension, however slight, of Spengler's thesis. Similarly with many poems of Yeats and Pound, where the influence of Spengler is more conscious, especially in Yeats. James Thurber tells us of a man who read somewhere that if one did not acquire sexual knowledge from one's parents one got it out of the gutter, so, having learned nothing from his parents, he undertook an exhaustive analysis of the gutters of several American cities.10 In other areas we can be more fortunate. If we do not acquire our knowledge of Spengler's vision from Spengler we have to get it out of the air, but get it we will; we have no choice in the matter.

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For students of English literature, at least, the most famous attack on Spengler occurs in Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man, as part of his general onslaught on the "time philosophy." And a most instructive attack it is. In the first place, we notice that Lewis has no alternative philosophy. He makes vague remarks about attaching more importance to space and painting and less to time and music, and says such things as "I am for the physical world" (113). But his book is actually a quite lucid, often brilliant, example of the very procedure he proposes to attack. He shows how twentieth-century philosophy, literature, politics, popular entertainment, music and ballet, and half a dozen other social phenomena all form a single interwoven texture of "time philosophy," and are all interchangeable symbols of it. We are thus not surprised to find that Lewis's targets of attack are formative influences on his other work, as Joyce influenced his fiction and Bergson his theory of satire. And as Time and Western Man is really a Spenglerian book, doing essentially the kind of thing Spengler would do, including taking a hostile and polemical tone toward most contemporary culture, we are not surprised either to find that Lewis seldom comes to grips with Spengler's actual arguments. He does make some effective points, such as showing how a Zeitgeist patter can rationalize irresponsible political leadership by explaining that history says it's "time" for another war. But this would apply to a lot of people besides Spengler. What Lewis mainly attacks and ridicules are Spengler's sound effects. It is true that Spengler's sound effects are sometimes hard to take, and the reason for their existence brings us to a problem that the literary critic is constantly having to face. I have elsewhere tried to show that it is intellectually dishonest to call a man's work reactionary, whatever his personal attitudes may have been, because it is the use made of it by others that will determine whether it will be reactionary or not.11 The pseudocritic is constantly looking for some feature of a writer's attitude, inside or outside his books, that will enable him to plaster some ready-made label on his author. Genuine criticism is a much more difficult and delicate operation, especially in literature, where a man may be a great poet and still be little better than an idiot in many of his personal attitudes. In a large number, at least, of important writers we find an imagination which makes them important, and something else, call it an ego, which represents the personality trying to say something, to assert and argue and impress. A great deal of criticism revolves around the prob-

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lem of trying to separate these two elements. We have Eliot the poet and Eliot the snob; Pound the poet and Pound the crank; Yeats the poet and Yeats the poseur; Lawrence the poet and Lawrence the hysteric. Further back, Milton, Pope, Blake, Shelley, Whitman, all present aspects of personality so distasteful to some critics that they cannot really deal critically with their poetry at all. For somebody on the periphery of literature, like Spengler, the task of separation is still more difficult, and requires even more patience. It does a writer no service to pretend that the things which obstruct his imagination are not there, or, if there, can be rationalized or explained away. In my opinion Spengler has a permanent place in twentieth-century thought, but so far as his reputation is concerned, he was often his own worst enemy, and a stupid and confused Spengler is continually getting in the way of the genuine prophet and visionary. We may suspect, perhaps, some illegitimate motivation in Spengler's writing, some desire to win the war on the intellectual front after being left out of the army. It would be easy to make too much of this, but he does say in the preface to the revised edition that he has produced what he is "proud to call a German philosophy" ([DW, i:xiv] italics original), although the real thesis of his book is that there are no German philosophies, only Western ones. In any case, he belonged all his life to the far right of the German political spectrum, and carried a load of the dismal Volkisch imbecilities that played so important a part in bringing Hitler to power. Hitler in fact represents something of a nemesis for Spengler the prophet, even though Spengler died in 1936, before Hitler had got really started on his lemming march. Unless he has unusual sources of information, a prophet is well advised to stick to analysing the present instead of foretelling the future. Spengler wanted and expected a German leader in the Bismarckian and Prussian military tradition, and he doubted whether this screaming lumpen-Kunstler was it. He greeted the Nazis in a book called in English The Hour of Decision (1933), which the Nazis, when they got around to reading it, banned from circulation. But his general political attitude was sufficiently close to Nazism to enable him to die in his bed. These personal attitudes account for many of the more unattractive elements in his rhetoric, which has all the faults of a prophetic style: harsh, dogmatic, prejudiced, certain that history will do exactly what he says, determined to rub his reader's nose into all the toughness and grimness of his outlook. He has little humour, though plenty of savage

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and sardonic wit, and a fine gift for gloomy eloquence. He is fond of murky biological language, like calling man a "splendid beast of prey,"12 and much of his imagery is Halloween imagery, full of woowoo noises and shivery Wagnerian whinnies about the "dark" goings-on of nature and destiny. Thus: With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the "eternal" peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth. . . . There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual—and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it—but it is there. [DW, 2:435] It may not be everybody's poetry, but it is genuine enough of its kind. But occasionally we come across elements connected with this kind of rhetoric that are more objectionable. For example, Spengler knows that his argument really has nothing to do with the conception of "race," and in The Hour of Decision he makes it clear—well, fairly clear—that he regards the Nazi attitude to race as suicidal frenzy. But he cannot give up the notion that Jews are a separate entity: if he did, one of the most dearly cherished Volkisch prejudices would go down the drain: Spinoza, a Jew and therefore, spiritually, a member of the Magian Culture, could not absorb the Faustian force-concept at all, and it has no place in his system. And it is an astounding proof of the secret power of root-ideas that Heinrich Hertz, the only Jew amongst the great physicists of the recent past, was also the only one of them who tried to resolve the dilemma of mechanics by eliminating the idea of force. [DW, 1:413-14] According to Spengler's own thesis, a man who spends his life in seventeenth-century Holland belongs to the Western Baroque, whatever his religious or racial affinities. Most of Spinoza's contemporaries called themselves Christians, which is equally a "Magian" religion according

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to Spengler. But of course one never knows when such a prejudice will come in handy. "It is something fundamental in the essence of the Magian soul that leads the Jew, as entrepreneur and engineer, to stand aside from the creation proper of machines and devote himself to the business side of their production" [DW, 2:504]. This remark follows closely on a critique of Marx. As the Nazis said, capitalism and Communism are both Jewish inventions. The biological function of women is also a fruitful topic for dark symbolization: Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood. Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. [DW, 2:267]

It is little surprise to learn that Ibsen's Nora "is the very type of the provincial derailed by reading" [DW, 1:33]. That is, if Nora had really responded to the Zeitgeist, and understood that she was Time and Destiny, she would have done nothing so unfeminine as read books, but would have remained illiterate, pregnant, and absorbed in her doll-house.13 There is also the unnecessary value judgment implied in the word "decline" itself. Strictly speaking, according to Spengler Western art is not getting any better or worse as it changes from medieval to Renaissance to Baroque conventions; it is simply growing older. But Spengler wants it to decline and exhaust its possibilities, because he wants his contemporaries, at least the German ones, to devote themselves to the things required by their cultural age, which for him are technological, national socialist, and military: I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of present-day "arts and crafts," architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues . . . [DW, 1:43-4]

The Romans who built aqueducts and carried out huge massacres and

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purges also produced Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Catullus. Not one of these names appears in Spengler's indexes (except Horace by courtesy of the translator). He would say, with the Hellenists mentioned above, that Latin poetry was an inorganic repetition of Greek poetry, but it wasn't. But, of course, for him as for others the word "decline" is an easy way of dismissing anything in the contemporary arts that one finds puzzling or disturbing. When Spengler's book was published, the fashionable myth was the myth of progress,14 and Spengler's evidence that technological advance could just as easily be seen as a hardening of the cultural arteries was useful as a counterweight. But its usefulness, like so many other things in history, has exhausted its possibilities now that this aspect of technology is obvious to everybody. After all this has been said, and a great deal more that could be said taken for granted, it is still true that very few books, in my experience, have anything like Spengler's power to expand and exhilarate the mind. The boldness of his leaping imagination, the kaleidoscopic patterns that facts make when he throws them together, the sense of the whole of human thought and culture spread out in front of one, the feeling that the blinkers of time and space have been removed from one's inward eyes when Greek sculptors are treated as the "contemporaries" of Western composers, all make up an experience not easily duplicated. I first encountered him as an undergraduate, and I think this is the best time to read him, because his perspective is long-range and presbyopic, and his specific judgments all too often wrong-headed. Some of his comparative passages, such as his juxtaposing of colours in Western painting with tonal effects in Western music, read almost like free association. Any number of critics could call these comparisons absurd or mystical balderdash. But Spengler has the power to challenge the reader's imagination, as critics of that type usually have not, and he will probably survive them all even if all of them are right. The best-known philosophy of history after Spengler, at least in English, is that of Arnold Toynbee, whose Study of History began appearing while Spengler was still alive. Toynbee has twenty-one cultures to Spengler's seven or eight, and twenty of them follow, more or less, Spengler's organic scheme of youth, maturity, decline (accompanied by a "time of troubles"), and dissolution. But the twenty-first is Toynbee's own Western culture, and that one has just got to be different: to assume that it will go the way of the others would be "fatalism," which is what he professes to object to in Spengler. So he develops a "challenge and

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response" theory which enables him to use a mechanical metaphor instead of an organic one at the stage corresponding to "decline," and talk of "breakdown" instead. But the sequence of genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration in Toynbee seems more jumbled than Spengler's consistently organic model. He begins his discussion of the causes of "breakdown," at the beginning of volume 4, with a critique of Spengler which has all the air of a dodged issue. He says that it is too early to say whether Western culture has come to its "time of troubles" yet, which is quite a statement to make in 1939; he says Spengler is a "fatalist," which as we have seen is irrelevant, and he says that Spengler treats a metaphor as though it were a fact. But every historical overview of this kind, including Toynbee's, is and has to be metaphorical. When we look at Toynbee's own table of contents we find "nemesis of creativity," "schism and palingenesis," "withdrawal and return," and if those are not metaphors I don't know the meaning of the word. He also seems to feel that ignoring Spengler's distinction between destiny and incident will give more sense of freedom to man by putting more emphasis on the accidental factors of history. There is of course a great deal that is of value and interest in Toynbee's books, but as a Spenglerian revisionist he seems to me to be something of a bust. Except for one thing. That one thing is his account of the passing of Classical into Western culture. He says that when a culture dies it forms an internal and an external proletariat. The late Roman Empire had its internal proletariat in the bread-and-circus mobs of Rome and the other big cities, and its external proletariat in the Goths and Vandals breaking through the periphery of the empire. Out of these two forms of proletariat there emerged a "Universal Church," which acted as the tomb of the old culture and the womb of the new one. Spengler also speaks of a "second religiousness" which enters a culture in its final stages: it seems to be one of his most useful and suggestive ideas. But he thinks of Toynbee's internal proletariat simply as a rabble: "The mass is the end, the radical nullity," he says [DW, 2:358]. He overlooks both the connection of primitive Christianity with the proletariat and its extraordinary power of organization. It seems to me that Toynbee gives a more rational explanation of the historical role of Christianity in this period than Spengler gives. He ignores Spengler's "Magian" intermediate culture, but his own view does not necessarily do away with it: it merely points to something else that was also happening, to different aspects of what was happening, and to a process which would also account for the "cav-

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ern" imagery that Spengler associates with Byzantine culture. It also provides a means of explaining something very important that Spengler leaves out. This is the curious fascination15 of Western culture with the idea of making itself into a reborn Classical culture. In its "spring" period its poets devoted great energies to recreating the visions of Virgil and Ovid; in its political life, it revolved around the conception of a reborn Augustus, a Christianized Roman emperor. Why is the central mythical figure of English literature King Arthur, who has so vague and hazy a historical existence? At best he was merely a local British leader making a temporary rally against the Saxons, who of course won in the end. Why not make more of, say, Alfred, who really was a great man, and whose historical existence is not open to doubt? When we read in Geoffrey of Monmouth that Arthur conquered the armies of Rome, and remember that his colleague in romance was Charlemagne, we get a clue: he is a prototype of the reborn Christian Caesar, the Holy Roman Emperor. This symbolism of recreating Classical culture reaches its climax with the Renaissance, a word which means the "rebirth" of Classicism. It is highly significant that Spengler is rather silly about the Renaissance, which he treats as an un-German interruption of the development of German Gothic into German Baroque. He also seems unaware of the extent to which the same idea dominated, to or past the verge of obsession, a long series of German writers, from Winckelmann through Holderlin to Nietzsche and George, the last two of whom Spengler certainly knew well. Of course Toynbee's death and rebirth pattern does introduce a more cyclical element into history than Spengler admits. Vico is often regarded as a precursor of Spengler, though I see no evidence that Spengler had read him, but Toynbee brings us much closer to what Vico means by the ricorso than anything in Spengler. If one culture can recreate another one in this way, we have to abandon what seems to me in any case a profoundly unacceptable element in Spengler's argument: his insistence that every culture is a windowless monad, and cannot be genuinely influenced by another culture. "To the true Russian the basic proposition of Darwinism is as devoid of meaning as that of Copernicus is to a true Arab" [DW, i: 23]. This remark may be a curious anticipation of the Lysenko business in Stalinist Russia,16 but on the whole such observations are clearly nonsense: there are a lot of Arabs who know that the earth goes round the sun, and they are not bogus ones. In fact science, in general, is the great obstacle to Spengler's

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cultural solipsism. Granted that different cultures will construct different scientific world-pictures, there is an obviously translatable quality in science, which makes its principles quite as comprehensible to Chinese or Indians as to Germans or Americans. Such science might even develop a world view on a supercultural scale. We notice that Spengler casts some uneasy glances at what he calls "the ruthlessly cynical hypothesis of the Relativity theory" [DW, 1:419]. He tries to see it, of course, as "exhausting the possibilities" of Western science, but he seems to be not quite sure17 that its view of time will be content to confine itself to the world of measurement and stay out of his dark existential territory. Apart from this, however, perhaps the fact that Western culture has spread over the world means something more than simply the capacity for expansion which Spengler assigns to the Faustian spirit. If science is a universal structure of knowledge, it can18 help mankind to break out of culture-group barriers. Spengler of course thinks this is a pipe dream, and insists that the people of Asia and Africa have no interest in Western science or technology except as a means of destroying the West. But Marx is a far more effective prophet in the world today than Spengler, and the reason is that he emphasizes something uniform and global in the human situation. The factors which are the same throughout the world, such as the exploitation of labour, have always been, if not less important, at any rate less powerful in history than conflicts of civilizations. Now they are more important, and growing in power. The industrial revolution brings a new factor into the situation which cannot be wholly absorbed into a dialectic of separate "cultures," important as those have been. The question whether Western civilization will survive, decline, or break down is out of date, for the world is trying to outgrow the conception of "a" civilization and reach a different kind of perspective.19 If the death-to-rebirth transition from Classical to Western culture happened once, something similar could happen again in our day, though the transition would be to something bigger than another culture. This would imply three major periods of human existence: the period of primitive societies, the period of the organic cultures, and a third period now beginning. Spengler, we saw, attacks and ridicules the three-period view of ancient, medieval, and modern ages with, we said, a good deal of justification. But he also remarks that the notion of three ages has had a profound appeal to the Faustian consciousness, from

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Joachim of Fiore in the thirteenth century onward. It is possible that what is now beginning to take shape is the real "Third Reich," of which the Nazis produced so hideous a parody. The detail of Spengler's vision is all around us, in the restless wandering of great masses of people, in the violence and overcrowding of our almost unmanageable cities, in the strong ethical sense in some social areas, which Spengler compares with Buddhism in India and Stoicism in Rome, neutralized by dictatorships and police states in others, in the "second religiousness" of Oriental cults and the like, in the brutality and vacuousness of our standard forms of entertainment, in the physical self-indulgence paralleling the Roman cult of the bath, in the rapid series of vogues and fashions in the arts which distract us from their inner emptiness. It would be disastrous to pretend that these are not features of cultural aging. It would be still more disastrous to underestimate the powerful inertia in society that wants to "decline" still further, give up the freedom that demands responsibility, and drop out of history. What Spengler said would happen is happening, to a very considerable degree. But while Spengler is one of our genuine prophets, he is not our definitive prophet: other things are also happening, in areas that still invite our energies and loyalties and are not marked off with the words "too late."

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Originally the keynote address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, 3 January 1981. From Science, 212, no. 4491 (10 April 1981): 127-32. Partial reprints appear as "Detachment Not Possible/' Globe and Mail, 5 January 1981, 8; "Another Look at the 'Two Cultures/" Chemical and Engineering News, 59 (19 January 1981): 9; "Scientists: Professional Detachment vs. Social Concern/' Perception, 4 (March-April 1981): 18-19. Reprinted in its entirety in OE, 153-67. The editor of Science introduced a number of subheadings, here omitted. As I understand it, my chief qualification for addressing you here is my total ignorance of everything you know. That gives a certain detachment to one's perspective, but it does not provide many other clues. I think that, broadly speaking, the "two cultures" situation described by C.P. Snow some twenty years ago still holds in most respects.1 Lord Snow, you will remember, suggested that humanists and scientists did not see much of one another's point of view, and that humanists in particular tended to be intellectual Luddites or machine-breakers, probably members of a secret right-wing organization devoted to carbon power and the destruction of silicon chips. The literary critic F.R. Leavis, you will also remember, undertook to refute this case by asserting that in his opinion Lord Snow was a bad novelist.2 It seemed to me that what I hope might be a more civilized and pertinent statement of the humanist attitude, Ludditism and all, might be of interest to you. Although this article is called "The Bridge of Language," I am not a linguist but a literary critic, and that has led me into a different area of study concerned with the social use of words.

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Lord Snow remarked that scientists "had the future in their bones" [The Two Cultures, 11]. I take it that this is a reference to the fact that a progressive element is built into scientific method, so that any freshman today may know facts in physics or chemistry unknown to Newton or Lavoisier. As far as knowledge is concerned, this is equally true of the humanities: any freshman can also learn more about drama before Shakespeare or music before Mozart than Shakespeare or Mozart ever knew. But the arts themselves (to quote the title of a famous essay on the subject) are not progressive.3 They have been assumed to be the ornaments of a highly developed civilization, and of course they are that; but they seem to have a curious affinity too with everything that is most primitive and archaic in human society. Poetry thrives on superstition and fantasy; the formulas of popular fiction are the formulas of the folk tales of preliterary cultures; the structures and stock characters of romance or comedy have persisted with astonishingly little change in two thousand years. Science is generally assumed to have something to do with the pursuit of truth, but the poet, as Aristotle pointed out [Poetics, i45ib], is not directly concerned with truth because he says nothing in particular, and only particular statements can be true. So while the mad scientist may be a stock figure of popular fiction, it is perhaps significant that one of the great characters of literature should be Don Quixote, a mad humanist trying to make the world over in the pattern of his books. This primitive quality of literature means, among other things, that the humanist has the past in his bones: his focus of study is the classic, the definitive masterpiece which may be many centuries old. Research in the humanities, however new in itself, always has an aspect in which it is more light on square one. In caricature, and to some extent occupationally as well, the humanist seems to resemble that heroic if somewhat confused bird mentioned by Borges, who always flies backward because he doesn't care about where he's going, only about where he's been.4 Because of the progressive element in science, questions of science and technology are closely bound up with questions of the future of society, and of how society is going to adjust to the discoveries and techniques that have developed within it. We soon realize, however, that not everything that is technically feasible is going to happen; what will happen is only what society is capable of absorbing. That in turn depends on society's present situation, more particularly that of its power structures, and its inherited habits. Any such subject as "futurology," in short, is based on the fact that we know nothing of the future except by analogy

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with the past; hence the perspectives on the past, including the perspectives of the historian and the humanist, are inseparable from the future-directed concerns of science. Further, we notice that we hear much less about future shock and the like than we did a few years ago. One reason is that a widened horizon capable of taking in some speculation about the future is a by-product of economic expansion and political detente. Such conditions of clearing weather are not habitual to human life, however, and before long we are back in the recessions and political storm warnings that seem to be the normal lot of mankind. A future-directed perspective is, in itself, very natural to the young, but it also is dependent on what for them is a well-functioning economy. Anyone who has taught students during the 19505 and is still teaching is aware how their time perspective lifts during expansive periods and how it shrinks again in times like ours. During the 19605 the "activists" looking for revolutionary social change were mainly students of middle-class background, who seldom realized how much they had been conditioned by the assumptions of that background. These were largely the assumptions of American progressivism, the feeling that as their society had been moving ahead like an express train for two centuries, it was in the nature of the historical process for it to continue to do so, except that it ought to speed up. The students of the 19705, and probably of most of the 19805 as well, have been forced into an involuntary caution like that of Cardinal Newman's hymn: . . . I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.5

In my own student days much the same thing happened: a native bourgeois progressivism was checked by the Depression, and collided with Marxist views about how a socialist economy would avoid such setbacks. We were assured, in a great deal of Marxist propaganda, that once man stopped wasting his energies in exploiting his fellow men the way would be open for the release of those energies in transforming nature. The assumption was that nature was still an unlimited field of exploitation, and the Marxist literature of fifty years ago resounded with hymns of praise to the tractors and hydro plants of the Soviet Union. But it is now painfully obvious that nature, at any rate as far as this planet extends, is finite too, and that the industrializing of human life is not an endless vista either.

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It seems strange that the human race took so long to make a serious effort to develop its science and technology. The technology of the most advanced parts of the world in the early eighteenth century was closer to the Neolithic age than it is to us. Even in the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution fairly started, the speed and extent of the transformation of the world that a concentrated effort at technology would make was still beyond the most far-out imaginations. Edgar Allan Poe had about as far-out an imagination as the century produced, and used it partly to invent the modern forms of detective and science fiction. Yet in his story laid in the future, Mellonta tauta (the things about to be), people are crossing the Atlantic in balloons at a hundred miles an hour a thousand years after his own time, and even the balloon in which the story is supposed to be written falls into the Atlantic instead of landing. The obvious answer is that for most of his history man has been preoccupied with small-scale social coherence. Once the essential needs of life and survival are met for a sufficient number of people, the rest of human energy has to be reserved for intensifying the strength of a particular social unit. We can understand the past on this point well enough from the present, even though the social units are much bigger. Our governments feel that if they spent as much on science and technology as they do on armaments, they would create a political vacuum that other powers would be prompt to fill. At present there are certain kinds of scientific projects that only the United States or the Soviet Union can attempt, and it is obvious that some kind of global unity and cooperation is a necessary condition for the unfettered growth of science in the future. Science and technology thus follow the great centralizing movements of economics, which will eventually, we may hope, transform the world into a global unity. The contrast with cultural developments, in literature and the arts, is curious and striking. The more a country's arts develop, the more they tend to decentralize, to break down into smaller units, or, more positively, to bring increasingly smaller areas into articulateness. We speak of American literature, but a great deal of what we learn about America through its literature we learn by adding up what Faulkner tells us about Mississippi, Robert Frost about New Hampshire, Hemingway about expatriates in Paris or Spain, John Steinbeck about northern California, Peter De Vries about New York. A similar decentralizing movement has been very marked in Canada in the last twenty years, and whatever "Canada" may mean

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politically, "Canadian literature" means very largely a group of regional developments. It is a mysterious law of literature that a very specific and local setting often goes along with universality of appeal: Faulkner confines himself to an unpronounceable county in Mississippi and gets the Nobel Prize for literature in Sweden. One hopes that this decentralizing movement will gradually loosen its grip on political activities, where it is mostly a nuisance, and confine itself to cultural ones, where it belongs. In some respects, clearly, the world should be a single unit; in other respects it should be a mass of small communities, where people can be aware of others as people. One reason for the difference in social context is the kind of language literature uses, in contrast to the language of science or philosophy. In science or philosophy there is an underlying international language of subject matter, so that abstracts of articles in foreign journals can be read even with a limited command of their languages. But literature enters into all the accidents and nuances of language, similarities in sound that make certain rhymes possible, associations in the meanings of words that one language may have and another may not, colloquial idioms that can be rendered into another tongue only by the most complete rephrasing of them. Science and philosophy remind us that language is a total human effort at communication; literature reminds us that language is also one of the most fragmented of human activities, so that it is a life's work to master completely more than one or two. The word "science," I assume, describes primarily a method, used wherever such a method is appropriate. A method involves the use of language, and so far as science uses the language of words in addition to the language of mathematics, it is committed to a certain kind of verbal style. Its language is descriptive, and, of necessity, highly technical, and except in popularized science, it avoids metaphors and similar figures of speech. It also avoids ambiguity, or using the same word in different senses. The language of poetry is a complete contrast: it is largely based on figurative and metaphorical language, and it thrives on manifold meanings and puns of all kinds. Poetry has a very limited tolerance for the abstract language of philosophy or the technical language of science, not because poets dislike these subjects—many poets are deeply interested in them—but because the language poetry uses has a limited power of assimilating their modes of language. The normal language of poetry is a language of colour and sound and movement, of immediate

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sense perception and concrete experience, of the existential rather than the contemplative or practical sides of human life, of the appearances of things rather than their underlying form. In the eighteenth century, the work of Isaac Newton had a powerful impact on poets and humanists of all kinds. The sense of a regular and uniform natural law was like a new world to those tired of the anomalies and injustices of civil law, and his obviously sincere religious attitude was deeply reassuring too. So a great deal of poetry was written on the assumption that this new science could inspire a new kind of poetry, and we get such expressions of enthusiasm as this: Let curious minds, who would the air inspect, On its elastic energy reflect.6

The eighteenth century was also the age of Jenner's discovery of vaccine, and another poem of the period begins, "Inoculation, Heavenly Maid, descend!" But this does not seem to be the kind of thing poetry can do. Obviously a more tactful and skilful poet would do a more convincing job, but it is the failures that point up the real problem. What is involved is not a matter of vocabulary or subject matter but of the inner structure of the discipline used. If we set a poem to music, we are putting two arts together, but each art communicates within its own conventions: we are not merging the structures of poetry and music. Similarly, poet and scientist may use, up to a point, the same language, or even treat the same themes, but the structure of poetry and the structure of science remain two things. The scientist quantifies his data; the poet, so to speak, qualifies his: he expresses its whatness, its impact on concrete experience, and at a certain point they start going in opposite directions. "I do not frame hypotheses," said Newton,7 meaning, I suppose, that he did not take anything seriously until he had verified it. But literature is a hypothesis from beginning to end, assuming anything and verifying nothing. The same principle applies to science fiction, which is a form of romance, continuing the formulas of fantasy, Utopian vision, Utopian satire, philosophical fiction, adventure story, and myth that have been part of the structure of literature from the beginning. What the hero of a science fiction story finds on a planet of Arcturus, however elaborate and plausible the hardware that got him there, is still essentially what heroes of earlier romances found in lost civilizations buried in Africa or

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Asia. The conventions of literature have to take over at some point, and what we see, in science fiction no less than in Homer or in Dante, is, in the title of a seventeenth-century satire set on the moon, mundus alter et idem,8 another world, but the same world. There are different ways in which language can be used, three of them of particular importance. One is the descriptive way that we find in science and everywhere else where the aim is to convey information about an objective world. Then there is the language of transcendence that we find in large areas of philosophy and religion, an abstract, analogical language that expresses what by definition is really beyond verbal expression. And there is the language of immanence, the metaphorical language that poetry speaks, where anything can be identified with anything else, where natural objects can become images of human emotions. These are different languages, which accounts for the differences in structure I speak of; but they are mutually intelligible languages, so I should like to look at their relation again from a different point of view. Even in the smallest social units, man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like the animals. Human societies live within a semitransparent envelope that we call culture or civilization, and they see nature only through it. Societies vary a good deal in the extent to which their cultural assumptions distort their view of nature, but all views of nature are conditioned by them. There are no noble savages, in the sense of purely natural men for whom this cultural envelope has disappeared, nor any form of human life that does not restructure the world in front of it into some kind of human vision. I am concerned here with the role of words in this situation. In most societies, at least, there seem to be traditional verbal structures that are particularly important for the members of that society, or some of its members, to become acquainted with. Laws, including rituals and customs, are at the centre of this material; myths and stories about the traditional gods and heroes, magical formulas, proverbs, and the like also enter into it. In some communities much of it is a secret knowledge, sometimes imparted to boys in initiation ceremonies. In its higher developments it comes closer to what in Judaism is meant by "Torah," the instruction of primary importance for the social identity of the student, which includes the law, but a good many other things as well. We may call this a structure of concern or social coherence, and it is usually a mixture of the religious and the political. Religious concerns, Christian,

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Moslem, Jewish, or Hindu, invariably operate in some political context; political concerns, democratic, Marxist, or Fascist, always have a religious dimension to them as well. This structure of concern is often called an ideology, but I think that that is a rather limited and inflexible term, one that does not allow for all its variety and its capacity for growth. I prefer to call it a mythology, in spite of all the misleading emotional reactions to that word. We tend to think of such words as "myth," "fable," or "fiction" as meaning something not really true. This is partly because they are literary words, and literature is often thought of as a form of socially acceptable lying. Even more important, they are words for verbal structures, and there is a long-standing habit of mind that associates truth with a content that can be separated from structure. Thus we often say of a doubtful proposition that there may be some truth in it. We mean that if it were restated in a different structure it might become true, but we speak as though the truth could be extracted from the structure, like grains of gold from river mud. Both of these attitudes, in my view, are products of prejudice and sloppy thinking, so I shall keep the word "mythology." I speak of a religious or political concern rather than belief, because the conviction of its truth is less important than the sense of the social necessity of accepting it. In practice, this means that everybody should say that they accept it, or at least refrain from saying that they do not. For some societies, perhaps, the only really essential doctrine that holds them together is the conviction of their superiority to all other societies. For others, heresy, revisionism, or scepticism may become criminal or subversive attitudes. The social crisis of a battle is a good example of the way in which questions of truth or falsehood are ignored in order to meet the crisis. In the battle of Agincourt there was an English army with a war cry addressed to St. George and a French army with a war cry addressed to St. Denis. Neither saint had a very solid existence: one developed out of a folk tale and the other mostly out of a pious fraud. Even if they had existed, the question of whether they were still available for invocation, or would automatically respond if they were, might still remain open. But if one were present at the battle, one would be well advised to ignore all such doubts and shout with the rest. The creative arts grow up in most societies mainly as vehicles for carrying the central messages that society regards as primarily important. Hymns of praise to the recognized gods or epics and tragedies about tra-

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ditional heroes appear early in literature; sculpture developed in Greece because a polytheistic religion needs statues to distinguish one god from another; in the Middle Ages painting and sculpture and stained glass were largely absorbed in producing icons for Christianity. But this introduces a complication into culture: the arts turn out to have structural principles of their own, so a tension arises between what the artist wants to say as an artist and what he is obliged to say as an artist commissioned by a church or government or other agent of social concern. No art ever gets completely away from its social and historical conditioning; nevertheless it has two poles, the pole of concern, or what society wants from its arts, and the pole of style, or what the poet or painter or composer is discovering within his art. Concern is what makes the artist socially responsible and gives him a social function; style is what demonstrates the coherence, power, and influence of the art itself, style being, as Wallace Stevens says in a remarkable poem on the subject (Description without Place), the quality that makes everything in Spain look Spanish. The arts are older than the sciences, but the development of science follows the same pattern. A mythology is not, except incidentally, a protoscientific structure: it is meant to draw a circumference around a society and face inward to its hopes and fears and imaginative needs and desires, not to face outward toward nature. But of course it is bound to make or assume statements about the natural order: these often conflict with what further observation of that order suggests, and so, because of their sacrosanct quality, they become obstacles to science when science develops. An obvious example is the doctrine of a divine creation in 4000 B.C. When such conflict occurs, a mythological view of some aspect of nature has to be replaced by a scientific one. But a conflict of science and mythology means only that the sciences, like the arts, have inner structures of their own, and are trying to follow the trends of those inner structures instead of conforming to the prevailing mythological formulations. There is always tension between the inner growth of the arts and sciences and the anxieties of a controlling mythology. The philosopher Berdyaev complains that nobody wants a disinterested philosopher: it is felt that if he is going to philosophize he should earn his keep, that is, justify or rationalize what people want to see generally believed.9 In the arts, everywhere we look we see the struggle of imagination against the restrictions of mythology. Islamic countries condemn representational

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art; the Soviet Union condemns nonrepresentational art; some Marxist regimes, notably the so-called cultural revolution in China, maintain that no art is socially conscious unless it devotes itself entirely to proclaiming the dominant social faith; in our own countries censors to the right of us and censors to the left of us volley and thunder.10 As for science, there can hardly be a member of this audience who has not had to answer, perhaps many times, the question, Why should we spend money on that 1 from someone in control of funds. Such a question, when genuine, always indicates a clash between the inner development of science itself and the social concerns connected with what I have called mythology. The Greek satirist Lucian, writing in the second century A.D., who was apprenticed to a sculptor before becoming a writer, has a dialogue in which Zeus calls a conference of gods, who come represented by their statues.11 Zeus tells Hermes, who is marshalling the procession, to arrange them in order of costliness of material, gold statues in the front row, silver ones behind, bronze and marble in the back benches. Hermes protests that some consideration should be given to quality of workmanship: on Zeus's arrangement all the Greek gods would have to go to the bleachers, because only barbarians can afford gold statues. Zeus says that quality of workmanship certainly ought to come first, but preference has to be given to gold. It is not hard to see why. Giving praise and prestige to expense fosters the industry of the care and feeding of gods; and if workmanship became too important, the question would arise of the extent to which gods are really human constructs. Workmanship represents the language of culture and civilization; expense represents the language of concern, which may lag behind imagination and intelligence, but usually controls the power. The arts and sciences, then, for all their obvious differences, have a common origin in social concern. In proportion as they follow their own inner structures, they become specialized and pluralistic. This is simply a condition of civilized life: they have to do this, and the degree to which an art is allowed to follow its own line of development is of immense importance in determining the level of a society's culture and, ultimately, the level of the life of its citizens. The same applies to science, and resistance to political or religious interference with the arts and sciences is the sign of a mature society. Such resistance organized on an international scale could become an essential instrument of human progress. As Thomas Pynchon points out in his brilliant novel Gravity's

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Rainbow, an exclusive devotion to a mythology shuttles between a belief that everything has been made for man's sake and a belief that man is a uniquely cursed and doomed species, both views being paranoid.12 At the same time it is only their common social concern, their interests as citizens of the human community of which they are equally members, that can bring artists and scientists together. They cannot be brought together by trying to learn more about one another's totally different disciplines, any more than we can bring about world peace by trying to learn all the world's languages. The reason is much the same: there are more like two hundred cultures than two. But the notion that we can do without a common sense of concern, that religion can be absorbed by literature or all mythology replaced by science, seems to me a very muddled one. Such a civilization would be at best only another Tower of Babel, an unfinishable structure worked on by people who no longer understand each other. What does happen, in the course of time, is that as the arts and sciences develop, religio-political units become larger and fewer, the unity of the world becomes a visible possibility, and so the different mythologies of concern become broader and simpler in scope. This becomes very clear when a nonhuman danger or catastrophe unites them in the sense of a common need for coexistence. Camus's novel The Plague (La Peste) is a brilliantly concentrated study of the way in which, in the face of a raging epidemic, all human concerns vanish into the two basic ones: survival and deliverance. Deliverance or emancipation includes all the forms of the expansion of consciousness and energy that are at the heart of the major mythologies: salvation in Christianity, enlightenment in Buddhism, equality in Marxism, liberty in democracy. If the question of survival is less urgent, these decline into various donkey's carrots of reward and punishment, either coming immediately from social authority or associated with a future life of some kind, either for ourselves in another world or our posterity in this one. But in the limit situation of crisis, all human mythologies reduce to a very elementary basis: that life is better than death, freedom better than bondage, health better than disease, happiness better than misery. The twentieth century has seen a growth of a sense of common crisis in which the essential concerns of survival and emancipation have slowly moved into the foreground. It is unnecessary to rehearse the major elements in this sense of crisis—the atom bomb, the shrinking of natural resources, the feeling that central economic forces, such as the

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value of money, have gone out of control, the overcrowding of the earth by the one organism too irresponsible to play the game of natural selection fairly. Long before in literature, in Blake, Ruskin, and Morris in the nineteenth century and Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and others in the early twentieth, there had been a strong attack on the ugliness that modern civilization was creating out of its surroundings. Writers looked at the blasted and blighted outskirts of cities, at once beautiful landscapes buried in tombs of concrete, and felt that even if nature were the whore that she is said to be in some of our earlier mythologies, there was no excuse for treating her like that. This was what produced the "two cultures" situation that Lord Snow misrepresented so grossly. For even at its most wrongheaded this protest was not a merely aesthetic one, and it was not a Luddite attack on science or technology as such. It was a protest in the name of human concern for survival and freedom against what these writers felt to be a death impulse in the human mind, an impulse that they saw as trying to get control of science and technology. More important, they saw the exploitation of nature to be essentially the same evil thing as the exploitation of other men that has produced all the slavery and tyranny of history. Snow [The Two Cultures, chap, i] speaks of Orwell's 1984 as typical of the humanist's wish that the future did not exist. But it is reasonable enough to wish that that future would not exist. Man is quite capable of producing the hell on earth that that book records: to deny or refuse to face this is to be a far more reckless Luddite than the most reactionary of poets. We are very near to the chronological 1984 now, and if the particular fear that Orwell's book expresses is no longer our primary one, at least for ourselves, it is mainly because a new element has entered the picture: the sense that human survival depends on the well-being of the nature from which humanity has sprung. The days when a scientist could use his scientific detachment and the artist his freedom of expression as excuses for withdrawing from this concern are long past. At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a strong sense that reality was divided into the subjective and the objective, and that science was concerned only with the latter. But even in the physical sciences it soon became clear that the observer himself was a part of the scene to be observed, and of course the social sciences are entirely based on this principle. The corresponding development has taken place in the arts: such a movement as Abstract Expressionism in painting, for example, does not mean that the painter has gone on an ego trip of "self

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expression": it means that he is studying the expressing process in himself as a part of his pictorial vision of the world. In the twentieth century Einstein has had an impact on the popular consciousness rather similar to that of Newton in the eighteenth century. Like Newton's, this impact was based on his obvious concern with the implications of his work in physics for human survival and emancipation. He made several cryptic, even mystical, utterances in this area,13 and Niels Bohr is said to have urged him, rather impatiently, to stop telling God what to do.14 On closer inspection, however, he seems to have been talking less about God than about the way in which nature, though with no language of its own, nonetheless makes humanly intelligible responses to the mind. The inference is that the structures of physical nature and the human mind are linked in a common destiny, discoveries in nature being also discoveries in human nature. I suspect that this is as central an intuition for us as the sense of the regularity of natural law was for the contemporaries of Newton. Further, it is an intuition that the metaphorical language of poetry, where natural objects and human emotions are so often identified with each other, can help to express. If we split the world into subject and object, we tend to assume that the objective is real, the world of waking consciousness that we can agree we are seeing, and that the subjective world is one of dreams and resentments and wishes and desires and similar products of illusion. This was the view, fifty years ago, of Freudian psychology with all its hydraulic metaphors of blocks and drives and channels and cathects, and with its assumption that we retreat every night into a world of dream and futile wish-fulfilment, waking up again to face the real world. But this distinction between reality and illusion arises only when we stare at the world passively. For the 19805,1 think, we need different assumptions. First, practically all the reality we wake up facing is a human construct left over from yesterday. Second, some of that construct is rubbish, and needs to be cleared away. The important difference is not between reality and illusion, but between what we can make real and what it is time to get rid of. When we think of things this way, we can see that the arts and sciences, though they have different functions, have essentially the same kind of place in the human scene. If we think in terms of reality and illusion, we may concede that science deals with reality, but we don't know what kind of status to give the arts, because they are so concerned with

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subjective elements of desire and other products of the dream world. But when we think of reality in terms of a world to be remade, we find that we need a model or imaginative vision of what we are trying to achieve. The world of dream and fantasy can be a source of models as well as illusions, and models are the first product of the chaos of hunch and intuition and guesswork and free association out of which the realities of art and science are made. This is the starting point of all creative work in any area, however different the products may be. If we go to the theatre, the show we see on the stage is, we may say, an illusion. But we could search the wings and dressing rooms forever without finding any reality behind it. The reality-illusion distinction clearly does not work for plays: the illusion is the reality. If the play is, let us say, a comedy of Shakespeare, there are things inside it that look like real things, such as law courts, and other things, like fairies and love potions and magic rings, that look impossible. What is important is where all this is going. At the end of the play a new society is created: four or five couples get married, and things which looked strong and threatening at first, like Shylock, get left behind. We look back over the play, and see that what we thought was just fantasy and wish-thinking was actually a force strong enough to impose itself on things that looked so well established at first, and transform them into a quite different shape and direction. The comedy is a miniature example of that drive toward deliverance that has fostered all the great myths of emancipation in the world, and is still capable of fostering the great emancipation myths of the future. It is not for nothing that dramas are called plays: in fact Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson came in for some ridicule when he published his dramas in 1616 under the title of The Works of Ben Jonson. In his endlessly suggestive book Homo Ludens, the Dutch scholar Huizinga distinguishes play and work on the basis, more or less, that work is energy expended for a further end in view, and that play is energy expended for its own sake, or as a manifestation of what the end in view is. A chess or tennis player may work hard to win a game or improve his skill, but chess and tennis are forms of play. An artist may work hard to perfect a work of art, but the work perfected is an expression of play, an energy complete in itself that shows what the work has been done for. Science and technology work hard to help achieve what would be, once achieved, a life of play, where nature is no longer conquered territory held down by man but lived in as his home, and where the mental work

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of solving problems has become scientia or philosophia, the love of knowing, the play at the heart of all genuine work. The Book of Proverbs in the Bible describes wisdom as a female principle who was a part of God's mind at the creation. The King James translation speaks of her as "rejoicing" [Proverbs 31:25-6], but this is a very weak form of the tremendous Vulgate phrase ludens in orbe terrarum, playing throughout the earth. This world of play or spontaneous energy is the deliverance to which all religious and political ideals point, and some glimpse of it is accessible to any artist or scientist at any moment. The ordinary division of our lives into work and play makes work the endless pursuit of a donkey's carrot into the future, and play a relaxation from this that reminds us of the carefree days of our childhood. But the genuine human energy of the arts and sciences converges on a world where work and play have become the same thing. A gathering together of such people with such interests, including this one, would be in the deepest and most serious sense a play ground, a common meeting point where all forms of language are interchangeable, all statements of identity, whether metaphors or equations, balance out, and scientists and humanists shake the past and the future out of their bones and join together in a present life.

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Notes

Introduction 1 See Frederick Crews, "Anaesthetic Criticism," in Out of My System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), especially 64-71,73-4. Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) classifies NF as a would-be emancipator in fact bound by "his own middle-class liberal values" (94). 2 "The Two Europes," Canadian Forum, 27 (February 1948): 243. 3 See Hilda Kirkwood's extremely valuable interview "Frye at the Forum," Canadian Forum, 69 (March 1991): 15-17. 4 See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 49, 75. 5 See A Group of Classical Graduates: Honour Classics in the University of Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1929) for more on the objectives and atmosphere of the Honour courses at this time and their independence of textbooks. 6 Ernest Sirluck, First Generation: An Autobiography (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1996), 88. See also H.A. Innis, "Charles Norris Cochrane, 18891945," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 12, no. i (1946): 95-7. 7 See the editorial to the Canadian Forum, i (October 1920): 3. 8 Sandra Djwa, "The Canadian Forum: Literary Catalyst," Studies in Canadian Literature, i (Winter, 1976): 7-25. 9 Barker Fairley, "A Peep at the Galleries," Canadian Forum, i (October 1920): 19-21. See also Fairley's Forum articles: "Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924," 5 (October 1924): 19-20; "Two of Our Conquerors," 9 (January 1929): 130-1; "Hugh MacDiarmid," 15 (February 1936): 24-5. See also Fairley's play The Runaway, 5 (March 1925): 175-8 and his poems Wild Geese, 4 (February 1924): 143; The Rock, Winter, Day Dream, Hunger, all published 4 (April 1924): 209; and Hurdy-Gurdy, 5 (December, 1924): 85. 10 Eric Havelock, "Russia—Recantation," Canadian Forum, 16 (October 1936): 29.

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Notes to pages xxx-6

Subsequent paragraphs refer to the following Forum articles by Havelock: "Apology for Toronto," 15 (August 1935): 322; "Teaching the Young to Drive," 16 (June 1936): 8 "The Philosophy of John Dewey," 19 (July 1939): 121-3. 11 T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 16,19-20. 12 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 86. 13 T.S. Eliot, "London Letter," The Dial, 71 (August 1921): 213-17. 14 Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1962), 239. 15 The militant campaign of T.E. Hulme—poet, philosopher, aesthetician, and polemicist—for a hard, dry classicism in verse composition had a major influence on modern poetry and poetics. Arguably his fascination with authoritarian violence had just as much impact on the cultural assumptions of modern artists. See his posthumously published Speculations (1925). French social thinker and novelist Julien Benda's works include Belphegor (1919) and The Yoke of Pity (1913). His influential analysis of the political infractions of modern intellectuals, La Trahison des Clercs (1927) (translated by Richard Aldington as The Great Betrayal in 1934), was the subject of a lengthy review by Eliot in The New Republic. 16 Eric Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 6. 17 See McLuhan's introduction to Explorations in Communication: An Anthology, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), xi. Henceforth quotations will be cited within the text as Explorations followed by a page number. 18 See Raymond Williams, "Drama in a Dramatized Society," in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), 11-21. i. The Modern Century 1 Archibald Lampman (1861-99) was educated at Trinity College, Toronto. A longtime clerk in the Post Office Department in Ottawa, his The City of the End of Things was published in 1894. Irving Layton (b. 1912) was born in Romania, but grew up in Montreal. His The Improved Binoculars appeared in 1955. Clair de lune intellectuel, by the Montreal poete maudit Emile Nelligan (1879-1941), appeared in Louis Dantin's volume Emile Nelligan et son oeuvre in 1903. 2 In the modern biography Disraeli (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966), Robert Blake credits Lord Derby with the invention of this phrase, used as he recalled the events leading to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1867 during his third minority administration (474). 3 For the parent of NF's aphorism, see "The Decay of Lying," in Oscar Wilde's Intentions (New York and London: Putnam, 1920), 1-54. When Cyril asks

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Vivian incredulously, "You don't mean to say that you seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?" Vivian replies, "Certainly I do" (30). 4 Thomas Hardy's 1967 was published in Time's Laughing-Stocks (London: Macmillan, 1909), 53. One of a group classified as "More Love Lyrics," the poem may arguably be judged a less pessimistic vehicle than NF remembers. The speaker in the poem speculates that the coming century may "at its prime" surpass "this blinkered time." 5 The Oxford (Canadian branch) edition of 1967 misleadingly printed "mature." Reprinted editions (1969) read "immature." 6 Unfortunately, the play and its reviewer have so far not been identified. 7 A witticism at the expense of T.S. Eliot's sophisticated metropolitan comedy The Cocktail Party (1950). 8 Percy Wyndham Lewis was born 18 November 1882 on his father's yacht, then moored near Amherst, Nova Scotia. Lewis's Self Condemned (1954) is an angry and despairing novel shaped by the author's wartime experience in Toronto where, not for the first time, he swiftly alienated most of the people he met and plunged into severe financial hardship. 9 Nigeria gained full independence from Great Britain in 1960, but was rocked by a long fierce civil war when the Ibos of the Eastern region declared a breakaway republic of Biafra in 1967. Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands in 1949, only to enjoy a chequered history that erupted in massacres two years before NF's lectures. 10 NF's notes to the French translation indicate that this is an allusion to George Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), although he adds, "I don't know if it's worth picking up in French" (NFF, 1988, box 62, file i). Grant (1918-88) was a Canadian philosopher and member of the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster from 1961 until 1980, and chair of the department at the time NF's lectures were delivered. See the introduction to the present volume (xxxixxl, xlii) for further discussion of the relationship between Grant's short, bleak work, and MC. 11 This phrase introduces an intriguing feature of MC, namely NF's apparent intention to represent the century in its own idiom. To achieve this end, he packed his lectures with many words of twentieth-century origin or that passed into common usage only in "the modern century." The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), cited henceforth as OED, records 1939 as the earliest date for the use of the phrase "mass culture" and cites Life magazine as its source: "The state of Texas has never been properly recognized for its contributions to U.S. mass culture." 12 OED records only one instance of "public relations"—with a different meaning—before the twentieth century.

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Notes to pages 10-15

13 Most of these phrases are offspring of the artistic subculture of "the modern century." "Hip" and "square" are both linked to jazz subculture: the former, first recorded in 1904, refers to someone "in the know." OED dates "square" from 1944, offering as a definition "anyone who is not cognizant of the beauties of true jazz." Musical culture also accounts for "corny," tracked by OED to Melody Maker in 1932: "The 'bounce' of the brass section has degenerated into a definitely 'corny' and staccato style of playing." Nancy Mitford formulated and Jessica Mitford popularized the distinction between "U" and "non-U" for the readers of Encounter in the 19505, while Susan Sontag enlightened readers of Partisan Review on the status of "camp" in 1964. All these examples substantiate NF's point about the rift between artistic subculture and the larger middle-class culture. 14 "Happenings": OED defines a happening as "a spontaneous theatrical or pseudotheatrical entertainment," and cites Nation, 24 October 1959, as its earliest usage: "The first exhibition is not of painting but is an 'event' consisting of eighteen 'happenings' by Allan Kaprow." In 1989 Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson launched a series published by Duke University Press titled "Postcontemporary Interventions." The word "postcontemporary" is not recorded in OED. 15 See Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1983), 33-7, for a lexical history of alienation that traces many of the semantic shifts NF describes here. 16 Bunyan read Luther's Commentary on Galatians as an exact diagnosis of his own spiritual condition. 17 When Apollyon first meets Christian in the Valley of Humiliation, he claims him as one of his subjects. Christian replies, "I was born indeed in your Dominions, but your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, for the Wages of Sin is death." See The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. J.B. Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 57. 18 Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a famous black comedy about nuclear war, starred Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Sterling Hayden. The screenplay, co-authored by Kubrick and Terry Southern, was based on a novel by Peter George published in the U.S. as Red Alert (first published in England under the pseudonym Peter Bryant with the title Two Hours to Doom) as a response to the apocalyptic fears of the 19505. 19 The "tabloid" newspaper, compact in size and frequently demagogic in content, is regarded as the brainchild of Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. OED gives the date of entry of the word into popular usage as 1902. 20 Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov discussed the extreme vulnerability to suggestions displayed by the neurotic personality in Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (London: Wishart and Dickson, 1928-47), 1:378,2:108-10. 21 For "stock response," see LA. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (Lon-

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don: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924), 202-3. See also Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), chap. 5, "Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses," 235-54. Richards contrasts audience responses to poetry governed by "social suggestion" with those produced by "genuine experience" and finds that the former are more likely to impair understanding of poetry. 22 Cf. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford, 1967), 93-4: "When you read, as you must almost every passing day, that ours is the great age of crisis—technological, military, cultural—you may well simply nod and proceed calmly to your business; for this assertion, upon which a multitude of important books is founded, is nowadays no more surprising than the opinion that the earth is round." 23 See J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London: Macmillan, 1932). 24 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 3325 The Marquis de Condorcet's work was first published in 1794. June Barraclough's English translation was published as Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955). 26 See John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, chap. 5, "A Crisis in My Mental History: One Stage Onward." 27 T.R. Malthus argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798,1803) that poverty could not be relieved because the means of subsistence rises in inverse proportion to the rise of population. 28 Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) concerns itself with these extensions of the body, seeing in them the key to the distinctive qualities of modern culture and the inspiration for its leading social images. A year after NF published MC, in War and Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), co-authored with Quentin Fiore, McLuhan wrote, "Man is not only a robot in his private reflexes but in his civilized behavior and in all his responses to the extensions of his body, which we call technology. The extensions of man with their ensuing environments, it's now fairly clear, are the principal area of manifestation of the evolutionary process" (19). The contrast with NF's position could hardly be more explicit. 29 NF refers to, respectively, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai (1857), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), and Emile Verhaeren's Les Villes Tentaculaires (1895). 30 NF's immersion in Dickens was possibly a preparation for his English Institute lecture later in 1967, subsequently published as "Dickens and the Comedy of Humours" and collected in StS, 218-40. 31 See particularly McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and Understanding Media. "Medium and message" are discussed in the first chapter of Understanding Media.

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Notes to pages 21-9

32 This dogma took a modified form in "The Roots of Canada's Geography," by Andrew Hill Clark and Donald Q. Innis. In this essay, the authors state that "The Grand Trunk Railway and the Welland and St. Lawrence canals made Confederation possible." See the essay as published by John Warkentin a year after NF's lectures in the collection Canada: A Geographical Interpretation (Toronto: Methuen, 1968), 13-53; the passage cited is on p. 15. 33 Harold C. Innis's The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951) had a major impact on the study of the relationship between communications systems and national identity in Canada, as well as in the modern world as a whole. 34 In the notes he wrote in response to the French translation of MC, NF makes it clear that "target knowledge" is his own translation of the German Zwechwissenschaft: knowledge with a purpose, directed learning (NFF, 1988, box 62, file 6). 35 The title of Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (1935) has passed into common usage as an expression of bewildered complacency in the light of drastic social or political change elsewhere. The novel is sharply critical of the fascist tendencies Lewis sees as growing from U.S. nationalism, so NF may well have been making an implied criticism of Canadian variants of nationalism. 36 "We've lost our rights?" is the exact quotation, cited from Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 19. NF also quotes from pp. 79,19-20,86. Waiting for Godot received its first French performance (as En Attendant Godot) on 5 January 1953. The first British performance took place on 3 August 1955. 37 Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: Signet, 1983), act 2, "Walpurgisnacht," 178. Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was first performed on 13 October 1962. 38 In September 1965 Andre Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel were arrested on charges of writing and circulating stories that slandered the Soviet Union. News of their plight soon reached the international media, especially since this marked the first time since Stalin's era that literary works had formed the basis for prosecution in the Soviet Union. The two authors were convicted and sentenced to seven years imprisonment in a labour camp in February 1966, but were released in 1971. As NF surmised, their arrest triggered a larger crackdown on freedom of artistic expression by the Soviet government. 39 See, for example, Morris's News from Nowhere (1891), chap. 12, "Concerning the Arrangement of Life." 40 See Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), particularly chap. 3, "Unity and Diversity: The Region." NF is referring to the poet's controversial views about limiting the mobility of specific

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modern citizens and ethnic groups, which appear in After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 19-21. 41 See, for example, William Morris's The Roots of the Mountains (1890), where Morris refers to "manslayings," "sheer-rocks" and "foot-mounds" in his first chapter. 42 NF's reference is to the Jindyworobak club, founded in 1938 by poet Rex Ingamells, whose manifesto "Conditional Culture" spelled out the objectives of the movement. The group, dedicated to the idea of "Australian only" materials and content and eager to forge alliances with aboriginal culture, issued anthologies until 1953. 43 See Jean Paul Desbiens, The Impertinences of Brother Anonymous, the English translation of Les Insolences de Frere Untel (Canada: Les Editions de 1'homme, 1960). Joual is a popular idiom in Canadian French, used widely in rural Quebec. 44 This comment proved to be prophetic. In September 1980, a Gdansk (Danzig) shipyard worker called Lech Walesa formed an independent Trade Union movement he named Solidarity. This rapidly grew to international prominence and is widely regarded as one of the first major cracks in Soviet bloc unity. 45 The words "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us" come from "A General Confession" in The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 50. 46 For an early, firm statement of this viewpoint see NF's essay on "Canada and Its Poetry" (1943). Here he attacks "the Ferdinand the Bull theory of poetry" that "talks about a first-hand contact with life as opposed to a second-hand contact with it through books." NF counters this theory by saying that "Practically all important poetry has been the fruit of endless study and reading" (BG, 135-6; rpt. in the Collected Works in Northrop Frye on Canada, CW, 12 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003]). 47 These sentiments are to be found in George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589). In bk. 3, chap. 25, Puttenham contrasts the "reminiscens naturall" of logic and rhetoric with the "bare imitations and worke in a forraine subject" on show in "the painter or kervers craft." See the edition by Baxter Hathaway (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 311-12. 48 In "On Poesy or Art," Coleridge observes: "If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry!... Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man." See Biographia Literaria, ed. John H. Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 2:257. 49 Edouard Vuillard, French painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, was espe-

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daily known for his power to infuse mystery and suggestiveness into mundane interiors. He was admired by French poet Stephane Mallarme. 50 The theory of "socialist realism," which NF grapples with so often in this collection, was presented initially by Lenin and promoted even more fervently by Stalin. The aim, to harness art to the task of social reconstruction, in practice left little room for the kind of art NF sees as most worthwhile. 51 Sam Hunter, Modern American Painting and Sculpture (New York: Dell, 1959), 126-7, derives the term "ashcan school" from an American version of the battle of realisms as outlined by NF in this chapter. The protagonists were "the eight," a group that included Arthur Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, George B. Luks, Maurice Prendergast, and John Sloan. Their foes were the Leftist critics of Masses. Hunter quotes the criticism of Art Young, then Masses' art director, who protested that "The five dissenting artists want to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street—regardless of ideas—and without title." 52 The artistic wing of the U.S. Works Progress [later Work Projects] Administration (1935-43) was actually administered by various branches of the Federal Arts Project, the Federal Writers' Project, etc. 53 These and other artistic movements subsequently mentioned by NF in this chapter are outlined economically in Tony Richardson and Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). 54 NF's immediate predecessor as Whidden Lecturer, Anthony Blunt, devoted his lectures to the genesis of Picasso's painting in 1966. His efforts were subsequently published as Picasso's "Guernica" (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). This painting had great personal significance for NF. In November 1938 he reported to Helen Frye that he had seen it in London along with "studies of bulls, murdered horses, and weeping men and women" Picasso made as preparatory sketches and studies for the work. At this point NF admitted, "I couldn't have got much out of the picture itself without them," although he recognized that "It's the best contemporary work I've ever seen, I'm quite sure of that" (NFHK, 2:811). A month later NF sent Helen a postcard of the painting. 55 See William Billings: Three Fuguing Tunes for Four Part Mixed Chorus, ed. Clarence Dickinson (New York: Mercury Music, 1940), 2. 56 George Bernard Shaw's preface to Back to Methuselah notes: "Beethoven never heard of radio-activity nor of electrons dancing in dances of inconceivable energy; but pray can anyone explain the last movement of his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, otherwise than as a musical picture of these whirling electrons?" See Bernard Shaw, Collected Plays with Their Prefaces (New York: Dodd Mead, 1975), 6:334. 57 OED defines streamlining as "to remodel on smooth, uncluttered lines" and dates this usage from 1935.

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58 See "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 126-40, where Eliot comments, "We say, in a vague way, that Shakespeare, or Dante, or Lucretius, is a poet who thinks, and that Swinburne is a poet who does not think, even that Tennyson is a poet who does not think" (134-5). 59 Paul Verlaine in Art Poetique urges would-be authors to 'Trends 1'eloquence et tords-lui son cou"—"Seize eloquence and wring its neck!" See Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, trans. C.F. Maclntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 180-3. 60 "I maintain that the phrase, a long poem, is simply a flat contradiction in terms." See Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle" (1850), in Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 71-2. Also in "The Poetic Principle," Poe states that "a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement" (71). This definition leads Poe to see a long poem like Paradise Lost as a practical impossibility and to conclude that "even the best epic under the sun is a nullity" (72). For Poe even the Iliad accordingly metamorphoses into a cycle of short lyrics. 61 A tachistoscope is an apparatus used to expose words, images, etc., for a fraction of a second. Educators use it to increase reading scope or to test memory and perception. OED cites C.S. Myers's Textbook of Experimental Psychology (1909) as the source for its first usage. 62 Fernand Leger was a twentieth-century French painter and designer who played a leading role in the Cubist movement. Arnaldo Modigliani, an Italian painter and sculptor who operated in France, is best known for his stylized and elongated sculptures of the human body. 63 See T.E. Hulme's "Romanticism and Classicism" in Speculations (1924; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 111-40, and "Notes on Language and Style," in Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 77-100. 64 Wyndham Lewis rarely passed up an opportunity to attack Gertrude Stein, but see particularly his running diatribe against the verbal pattern he termed "Steining" in The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931). 65 The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), a work that emphasized play and game as constitutive of human identity, was clearly important for NF. For Auden's sense of play in relation to poetry see, for example, his poem The Truest Poetry is the most Feigning and its description of "the luck of verbal playing" as a distinctive property of "the only creature ever made who fakes." 66 Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 17, 60.

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Notes to pages 39-42

67 See Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence (New York: Doubleday, 1953), where Malraux distinguishes between the sketch as "working study" and the sketch that "records the artist's direct, 'raw' expression." The latter Malraux controversially considers "an end in itself" (109-10). 68 See particularly Brecht's essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91-9. 69 At the time NF spoke, James Reaney's Listen to the Wind had been performed in London and Hamilton, but not in Toronto. In 1972 Talonbooks of Vancouver published the play. Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers was published in 1966 by McClelland and Stewart. 70 The preface to bk. i of William Carlos Williams's Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1946) begins: To make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means— In "The Delineaments of the Giants," also from Paterson, Williams utters his famous maxim, "No ideas but in things." 71 John Cage's experiments with dice, the Chinese / Ching manual, his random noise experiments, and the pure silence of 4' 33" (1952), all made his aleatory music a talking-point for lecturers on artistic experiment and the fate of the avant-garde in this period. 72 Chosisme is a narrative technique that rejects as outmoded humanism the notion of any necessary link—sympathetic, cognitive, or other—between human beings and the environments, social or natural, in which they find themselves. See Alain Robbe-Grillet, Towards a New Novel (1963,1965), which sees the downfall of bourgeois society imminent in the resistance mounted by practitioners of the nouveau roman to this kind of order. The same author's The Erasers (1953,1964) parodies and ultimately destroys the conventions of detective fiction. 73 The Maginot Line, named in honour of its sponsor, French Minister of War Andre Maginot, extended from the Swiss to the Belgian borders in an effort to protect the territories of Alsace-Lorraine returned to France after the First World War. However, the Germans entered France through Belgium in 1940. 74 Lenin asked this question most trenchantly in his pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902), the title of which was taken from a novel published in 1864 by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. 75 See The God that Failed, ed. Richard Grossman (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), for several "confessional" accounts by Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, and others of the growing disillusionment

Notes to pages 43-6

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among intellectuals sympathetic to socialism with the practical consequences involved in translating the socialist agenda into practice. Anarchist, Utopian, and countercultural sage, Paul Goodman (1911-72) was highly prolific. Growing Up Absurd is a sympathetic inside story of juvenile delinquency in the U.S. From Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the opening of the theatre in Drury Lane, 1747, in Samuel Johnson, Collected Poems, ed. J.D. Fleeman (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1971), 82. Johnson's words are actually humbler than NF remembers, since he acknowledges, "We that live to please, etc." NF may have been thinking of works such as Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and Norman O. Brown's Life against Death (1959) and Love's Body (1966). In all these works, the specifically sexually repressive features of bourgeois capitalist society, rather than its economically exploitative nature, come into the foreground. Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac, published Dharma Bums in 1958. Kerouac's rebellious, rootless pose, exemplified in On the Road (1957), made him a leading figure with the Beat Generation in postwar letters. Nostalgie de la boue can be roughly translated as "hankering after the dirt": usually used of a willed primitivism or excrementalism on the part of intellectuals, e.g., Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Jean Giono, French novelist, and Knut Hamsun, Norwegian novelist, playwright, and poet, share humble backgrounds, wartime notoriety, and peasant or rural subject matter. Hamsun's Hunger (1890; translated 1899) and Giono's Que Ma Joie Demeure (1935; translated as Joy of Man's Desiring in 1949) are deeply individualistic works. A rough translation of this phrase would be "cling to the earth." In his introduction to The Prospect of Change: Proposals for Canada's Future, ed. Abraham Rotstein (Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1965), NF made it clear that he associated the phrase with a self-defeating retreat from modernity. I am grateful to Jean O'Grady for supplying this reference. Jean-Franqois Millet's Angelus (1859) depicts peasant labour, and has been widely reproduced; however, its alleged sentimentality has found many detractors. Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine (1916,1921), a particular irritant for NF on these very grounds, is a tale of fidelity and virtue set in an icy rural Quebec. See Twelve Southerners, /'// Take My Stand (1930), a far more indirect and intellectual myth of agrarian society than many of the literary works NF describes in these paragraphs. Charles Maurras was very worried about the subversive implications of monotheism and Christianity. In Trois Idees Politiques, he remarks that "Le merite et 1'honneur du catholicisme furent d'organiser 1'idee de Dieu et de lui oter ce venin" ("The merit and the honour of Catholicism was to organize the

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idea of God and to remove its poison"). See Maurras, Romantisme et Revolution (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922), 274. My thanks to Ian Singer for this reference. 86 See T.S. Eliot, preface to For Launcelot Andreives: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927), vii. NF overlooks Eliot's efforts to align himself also with American efforts at neo-orthodoxy, like those made by Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, to rejuvenate a conservative or "neohumanist" revival in North America. 87 Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1. 23. 88 This quotation is not quite accurate: Yeats reports Johnson as saying, "I wish those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realize their unspeakable vulgarity" (W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies [London: Macmillan, 1955], 223). 89 An allusion, as NF's notes to the French translation of MC make clear, to Thomas Mann's novel The Holy Sinner, published in German in 1951 (English translation, 1952). 90 Stavrogin appears in Dostoevsky's The Possessed; Lafcadio in Gide's Les Caves du Vatican, sometimes translated as Lafcadio's Adventures; Camus's protagonist in L'Etranger is named Merseault. 91 Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself (London: Panther Books, 1968) devotes pt. 4 to "Hipsters" and contains Mailer's infamous apologia for violence as existential self-definition in "The White Negro." Leroi Jones's Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave (1964) all dramatize the issues NF describes in this passage (Jones subsequently took the name Imamu Imiri Baraka). They also mark a significant episode in the representation of black Americans in American culture as agents of violent retribution rather than as dignified victims. See also Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968). 92 Jean Genet, The Balcony (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 33. 93 OED records the Bulletin Bureau of Business Research's definition of "feather-bedding" as "getting pay for work not done" in 1921 as its earliest usage. 94 See C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration (1957). 95 See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963). 96 See Juvenal, Satires, 10.81, for the reference to "bread and circuses." 97 In his lecture "The Lesser Arts," first given as "The Decorative Arts," 12 April 1877, and published as a pamphlet a year later, Morris refers to the huge industry "comprising the crafts of house-building, painting, joinery and carpentry, smiths' work, pottery and glass-making, weaving, and many others." Ideally, such activities would be designed to foster ties between human beings and their material environment; but in nineteenth-century society, Morris argues, they are too often left to exploitative industrialists and care-

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less workmen. See Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A.L. Morton (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 31-56, especially p. 32. 98 Dutch painter and theosophist Piet Mondrian exerted great influence over industrial and decorative artists from the 19305, even among those who did not share his austere, geometrical abstract goals—partly driven by his theosophical beliefs—for the art of painting. 99 Andre Malraux coined the expression "museum without walls" and used it as the title for pt. i of The Voices of Silence (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 11-128. 100 See Wyndham Lewis, Paleface (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), 103. Lewis in fact uses the phrase "cavemen of the new mental wilderness." 101 The Quebec chansons have a distinct identity. Strong preservation efforts began with Ernest Gagnon's Chansons Populaires du Canada (1865). Gilles Vigneault was born in Quebec and made his debut as a chansonnier in Montreal in 1960. Although favoured by separatists, he emphasizes the craft and emotion that go into his work, not its political allegiances. 102 The Canada Council, an independent agency, was created by an act of Parliament in October 1957 following recommendations by the Massey Commission. Its first full-time chairman was Brooke Claxton and its aim was "to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts, humanities and social sciences." It administers grants and fellowships and derives funds from three main sources: i) an annual grant made by the Canadian government, ii) an endowment established when the Council was created, and iii) private funds willed or donated to the Council. In 1977, many of the Council's responsibilities for the funding of research in the humanities and social sciences were transferred to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), which was founded by an act of Parliament in that year. 103 "Psychotherapy" is another word coined during "the modern century." OED records 1923 as its first usage and cites the London Daily Mail as its source. In his description of dramatic analogues for psychotherapy NF may have been thinking of the work of Canadian-born sociologist Ervin Goffman, whose The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) enjoyed great popular esteem and used a dramaturgical perspective as its theoretical basis. 104 OED attributes the earliest usage of "totalitarian" to B.S. Carter in a comment made in 1926 on the rise of fascism in Italy. NF's own reference point is Hannah Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951). His comment on "our dislike of the word 'totalitarian'" may have been provoked by the title given to Arendt's work by its British publishers: The Burden of Our Time (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1951). 105 In "A Word About America," Arnold remarks, "The Americans . . . have liberty; they have, too, over and above what we have, they have an excellent

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Notes to pages 58-66

thing—equality." See Philistinism in England and America, ed. R.H. Super, vol. 10 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 21. 106 Faulkner's address of 10 December 1950, on receiving the Nobel Prize, repeatedly invokes the "universal" features of art. See The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1967), 723-4. 107 As the context of Voltaire's famous line, "If God didn't exist, we'd have to invent him" (A L'Auteur du Lime des Trois Imposteurs, 1. 22), makes clear. 108 Barbara Barksdale Clowse's Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Education Act of 1958 (Freeport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 163-7, usefully tabulates the enormous explosion of federal programs and quantifies the massive injection of U.S. federal funds for education that occurred in the years following Sputnik. 109 NF may be alluding to the famous reply of French scientist the Marquis de la Place, who, when asked by Napoleon about the absence of any mention of God in his Treatise on Celestial Mechanics (1799-1825), is said to have remarked, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." no NF probably has in mind Sir James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe (1930). in See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford, 1967), 39-41, for a different point of view. See also the contributions by NF and Kermode to The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, ed. Thomas B. Stroup (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966) on myth and fiction. NF's essay "Speculation and Concern" was subsequently reprinted in StS, 38-55. The central difference between the two thinkers lies in NF's willingness to view the future of humanity as inseparable from the "reservoir of truth" available solely through the perpetually adjusted narratives he calls an "open mythology." Kermode, on the other hand, throws his intellectual weight behind the repeated habit of self-correction he describes as "clerical skepticism" (The Sense of an Ending, 57,109). Taken together, these works amount to two important efforts by mature humanists to make sense of the turbulent late 19605. 112 See chap. 2 of Culture and Anarchy (1869), "Doing As One Likes." 113 See Pascal, Pensees, 2nd sen, "The Wager." 114 Vaihinger's The Theory of "As If": A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935), 283n. 4, defines "assumed fictions" as fictions that stand in a demonstrable relationship to empirical reality. Their relationship to practical reality—as distinct from questions of method—is therefore, as NF points out, a much closer one than that possessed by the other fictions Vaihinger analyses. 115 The "General Strike," described most expansively in Reflections on Violence (1907), was Georges Sorel's central social myth, and the end to which

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he thought all authentic working class politics logically—and bloodily— gravitated. 116 Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society in 1958 as a right-wing organization strongly opposed to Communism and the welfare state. 117 See T.S. Eliot, "Matthew Arnold," in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933): "For Arnold the best poetry supersedes both religion and philosophy.... The most generalised form of my own view is simply this: that nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else; and if you find that you must do without something, such as religious faith or philosophic belief, then you must just do without it" (113). Two critics express these sentiments most openly. In "The Study of Poetry," Matthew Arnold affirms that "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay . . . The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry." See Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ist and 2nd ser., introduced by G.K. Chesterton and revised by Kenneth Allott (London: Everyman, 1964), 235. In Science and Poetry (London: Paul, Trench, Tubner, 1926), LA. Richards sees the "pseudo-statements" of poetry as the best solution to the "pseudo-questions" science cannot answer, questions that "prove, when we examine them, not to be questions at all; but requests—for emotional satisfaction" (58). Richards looks to poetry to provide these for bewildered modern citizens. See also chap. 5, "The Neutralization of Nature." 118 In chap. 20 of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900), Stein, the reclusive German entrepreneur and insect collector, judges Jim's only hope for redemption to be in his seizure of the opportunity to "in the destructive element immerse" (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1986), 200. 119 A new official Canadian flag had been in use for less than two years when NF delivered his lecture. It was officially adopted on 15 February 1965. The national anthem, O Canada, had to wait until 1980 for official adoption. 120 In the spirit of Canadian unity, NF balances two painters from Quebec with two English-speaking painters. He also ranges nicely across "the modern century." Paul-Emile Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, and was, with his student Jean-Paul Riopelle, a member of les automatistes, a Surrealist-inspired group. His manifesto Refus Global was a challenging eye-opener for the province. In its contrast between a daily world ruled by fear and conformity and the visionary fraternity glimpsed in art, it possesses many affinities with MC. Riopelle, a co-signatory to this document, became one of North America's foremost abstract artists and was also a leading member of the tachiste group. Emily Carr and Tom Thomson were inspirational figures in Canadian experimental art, championed in the pages of the Canadian Forum by Barker Fairley.

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Notes to pages 69-75

121 See Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto, 11. 97-8: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" 122 Edwin John Pratt (1882-1964), NF's teacher and subsequently his colleague at Victoria College, was the author of learned, expansive poems, including The Witches' Brew (1925) and The Titanic (1935). German-born Philip Grove (1879-1948) was the author of several important novels about the harshness of life in Canada, including The Master of the Mill (1944) and In Search of Myself (1946). See also Search for America (1927). For Emile Nelligan, see n. i, above. 2. Current Opera: A Housecleaning 1 See Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.22, for Hamlet's famous analysis of drama in performance and the responsibility of actors to "hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature." 2 Some readers may welcome expansion of NF's quickfire musical history. The comedie larmoyante was in fact an eighteenth-century operatic vehicle, the result of the successive efforts made by Egidio Duni (1756) and Niccolo Piccini (1760) to set Carlo Goldoni's sentimental comedy Cecchina ossia la buona figliuola (Cecchina, or, the Good Girl) to music. Handel and Bononcini were rival composers at the Royal Academy; at the time the acclaim for Bononcini's operas outstripped that extended to Handel's. NF's remark about a feud between the supporters of Gliick and Piccini refers to the fact that Piccini's court supporters were fiercely critical of Gliick's operas. 3 Adelina Patti, Italian soprano, made her stage debut at the New York Academy of Music in 1859. For NF, she served as a perpetual reminder of the "star" fetish that blemished the genre of opera. In an interview with Carl Mollins conducted just six weeks before his death, NF laughed at "how Patti ... used to make a career out of farewell tours." See Northrop Frye Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 8. The Italian tenor Enrico Caruso enjoyed a similar celebrity status in the early twentieth century. 4 John Gay's comic-satirical The Beggar's Opera was first performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, on 29 January 1728. Dame Ethyl Smyth, composer and advocate for female suffrage, enjoyed great success with her comedy The Boatswain's Mate (1916), adapted from the sea stories of W.W. Jacobs. 5 Faust, the French composer Charles Gounod's first popular success, was performed in Paris on 19 March 1859. 6 This distinction connects Wagnerian opera to the destructive, ecstatic energies that Nietzsche invests in the Dionysian deity in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). 7 Alban Berg's Wozzeck was first performed on 14 December 1925. Its protagonist, a humble, bullied soldier-servant, is a long way from the Nazi military elite. By the "catacomb period" NF may be referring to the intense, revela-

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tory strain in modern art. In the first two chapters of MC, he discusses this at length as a standing rebuke to what is referred to in no. 2 as the "ermine and diamond pseudo-culture" (75), which he here recognizes as an inescapable feature of the artistic scene in the twentieth century. 3. Ballet Russe 1 Wagner's ideas of "unending" or "infinite" melody are developed in his essay of 1860 on "Zukunftmusik" ("the music of the future"). Here he emphasizes the functional necessity of every element in a musical work in a manner that literary students may find analogous to Coleridge's view of the "organic" properties of a Shakespeare play. 2 The distinction between allegory and symbol NF makes here, conventional wisdom for this phase of critical history, is described most clearly in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual (1816). For Coleridge, allegory is only "a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language," while symbol participates in "the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal." See Lay Sermons, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. R.J. White (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 30. 4. The Jooss Ballet 1 NF frequently acknowledged his debt to the so-called "Cambridge school" of ritual anthropology, whose number included P.M. Cornford, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Gilbert Murray. All these scholars argued strongly for the origins of Greek drama in religious ritual. See Gilbert Murray, "Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy," included in Jane Harrison's Themis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 341-63, a work NF owned and annotated. Here Murray states that he "assumes that Tragedy is in origin a Ritual Dance, a Sacer Ludus" (341). 2 First performed 3 July 1932 in Paris, The Green Table, described as "a dance of death in eight scenes," became the best-known work of the Jooss ballet. 3 "Program music" is a term introduced by Franz Liszt, who saw it as a means of protecting his music from the arbitrary projections and misinterpretations of its listeners. In the entry on program music in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), Roger Scruton laments that the term now frequently stretches to include all music attempting "to represent extra-musical concepts without resort to sung words" (15:283). 5. Frederick Delius

i The "variation form" allows for successive statements of a musical theme to be altered or presented in altered settings. The theme may vary from a short

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Notes to pages 84-8

motif to a complete melody. Elizabethan masters in this form include William Byrd and John Bull. 2 Cesar Franck, French composer, was born in Belgium. His formal skills in balancing traditional forms and counterpoint are shown to their fullest in his Piano Quintet (1879), Prelude, Choral, et Fugue for piano (ca. 1884), and Violin Sonata (1886). Claude Debussy was a French composer for whom the early influence of Wagner receded as he encountered the work of symbolistes like Mallarme and Maeterlinck. He put the former's work to music in Prelude a I'apres-midi d'un faune (1894) and worked with the latter on Pelleas et Melisande (1902). 3 Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian pianist, composer, and mystic. A frequent performer in Western Europe, Scriabin promulgated his theosophist and spiritual philosophy in ambitious atonal compositions like Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus (1910). 4 See Blake's letter of 2 October 1800—mainly in verse—to Thomas Butts: "Cloud, Meteor & Star, / Are Men Seen Afar" in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 805 (11. 31-2). All subsequent references to Blake in this volume are keyed to the Keynes edition. 5 NF is referring here to Ernest Dowson's Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae ("I am not as I was in the reign of Cynara the Good"), sometimes described as the most famous lyric poem of the decadent 18905. 6 Gustav Hoist, an English composer and a close friend of Vaughan Williams, shared Williams's interests in the English folk tradition. In The Planets (1916) and The Hymn of Jesus (1917) his astrological and occult concerns are very prominent. Cyril Scott, English composer and pianist, was also a well-known writer on occultism with a keen interest in Blake. Among his works is The Alchemist (1917). 7 George Antheil, an American avant-garde composer, whose eagerness to integrate satire of contemporary American life into his compositions in Airplane Sonata (1922), Sonata Sauvage (1923), and Ballet mecanique (1925) brought his work to worldwide attention. 6. Three-Cornered Revival at Headington 1 The edge of the page of the photocopy of the article, acquired courtesy of Robert D. Denham, is cut off here, and a replacement could not be obtained. 2 In this film, first known as Bombshell (1933), Jean Harlow played a manipulated, edgy star whose life strongly resembled the actress's own. 7. Music and the Savage Breast i See no. 4, n. i.

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2 See The Merchant of Venice, in which Lorenzo declares: The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus; Let no such man be trusted. (5.1.83-8) 3 See the description of a cosmic music in Paradise Lost, bk. 5,11. 624-5 (ed. Fowler): "Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem." 4 Juvenal, Satires, 10.81. 5 The Sung dynasty reigned over all China from 960 to 1127, retaining command of southern China until 1279. In the more commercial atmosphere of their reign, covered theatres became more and more common in the country and were frequented by all classes. In the north, the plays were a multimedia experience, combining music, acrobatics, comic exchanges, masks, and a core play, short and sometimes satirical. From the twelfth century, the south developed longer and more complex theatre with a repertoire of male and female roles and singing by all characters. 6 See Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, 1. 70. 8. Men As Trees Walking 1 The title of the article is taken from the Biblical story of the blind man who, recovering his sight in a miracle performed by Jesus, said, "I see men as trees, walking" (Mark 8:24). I am grateful to Jean O'Grady for this reference. 2 Robert Denham describes the significance of the CNE [Canadian National Exhibition] in the national life at this time in NFHK, 1:61. 3 The Group of Seven, Canada's earliest experimental group of painters, were based in Toronto. Their inspiration was the landscape of northern Ontario, and they were championed in the Canadian Forum by Barker Fairley. The seven painters were Frank Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Fred Varley. 4 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 11. 5,13, for references to the "glittering eye" of the mariner. 5 In A Short History of Surrealism (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1936), David Gascoyne declares that "surrealism possesses its devotee like the voice of the ancient oracles" (66). 6 See Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford, 1933), for extensive examples of the imagery of pain, suffering, violence, and sadism in European Romantic literature. 7 German-born artist Max Ernst played a leading role in launching the Dada and Surrealist movements. His interest in the comic book and "collage nov-

35O

Notes to pages 93-5

els," especially Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness) (1934), substantiates NF's comment about the popular basis for his work. 8 Yves Tanguy was spurred to become a painter by the work of Giorgio de Chirico, which he saw in 1923. Two years later a meeting with Andre Breton led him into the Surrealist movement. From 1939 he lived in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1948. Tanguy's work is often compared to Dali's, and taps the same trance-like presentation of the sea and sky. 9 Norman Dawson did not achieve great esteem among historians of surrealism, but Blue Mouth of Paradise, the painting that NF describes here, with its deep suspicion of official institutions of authority, is a typical example of his work. His later painting British Diplomacy, exhibited in 1938, uses a tangled mass of springs, darts, and limbs to reiterate its outrage at official handling of international politics at that time. 10 Spanish artist Salvador Dali encountered Andre Breton in 1928, and began collaborating with Surrealists like Luis Bunuel in the same year. His public notoriety, even among this infamous group, often leads to slighting of the skill visible in paintings like The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Inventions of the Monsters (1937). 11 NF's list shows the variety of surrealist art and its international range. Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico lived in Paris from 1911 to 1915, where he befriended Apollinaire and Picasso. His Surrealist art questions accepted reality by presenting it with geometrical fidelity, but stripped of all conventional spatio-temporal associations and familiar landmarks. NF wrote to Helen Kemp Frye a month after the publication of this review that he had just been "to see a show of early Chiricos, the clapboarding and egg-face period" in London (NFHK, 2:811). For Andre Breton, the purified abstraction of Joan Miro the Spanish artist made him "probably the most Surrealistic of us all" (Surrealism in Painting [London: Macdonald, 1972], 86). In Paul Nash: A Portfolio of Colour Plates (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1948), Herbert Read describes how, on returning from World War I, he discovered in Nash "someone who could convey, as no other artist, the phantasmagoric atmosphere of No Man's Land" (8). 12 David Gascoyne's A Short History of Surrealism (1936) preceded the London Surrealist exhibition by a year, and, with its combination of party-line Marxism and avant-garde artistic sympathies, displays much of the "idealism" NF describes here. Pt. 4 of Gascoyne's Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) contains his "Surrealist Poems, 1933-36." 13 Sir Roland Penrose, a British patron, painter, sculptor, and collagist, organized the first international surrealist exhibition at the New Brighton Galleries, London, in 1936. He subsequently played a significant role in the institutional advancement of modern and experimental art as one of the

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founding members of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, serving as its chair from 1947 to 1969, and as its president from 1969 to 1976. 14 Paul Klee was in fact Swiss; his collaborations with the Russian Wassily Kandinsky in the Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter [Blue Rider] group between 1911 and 1914 may have confused NF. 15 Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter and printmaker. 16 Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) was one of Mexico's most significant mural painters for his own and subsequent generations. 9. K.R. Srinivasa's Lytton Strachey 1 "Babu" is a rather condescending term that refers to an Anglo-Indian version of correct written English notorious for its florid and grandiloquent quality. According to British observers, its currency was particularly strong among the superficially educated, minor clerical functionaries of the Bengal region. 2 Guy Boas's study Lytton Strachey (1935) appeared as an English Association Pamphlet published by the Oxford University Press. 3 In All and Sundry (London: T.F. Unwin, 1919), E.T. Raymond reports: "Young England thinks lightly enough of the old men who could neither ensure peace nor prepare to make war with vigour. 'You got the country into this mess; we got it out: we (and not you) are going to have the say in the future.' Such, in effect, is what the young men are thinking, and what many of them are saying" (10). 4 NF alludes here to "Lenvoy de Chaucer." Chaucer appends to The Clerk's Tale: Griselde is deed and eek hir pacience, And bothe atones buried in Itaile. 10. The Great Charlie 1 PWA was the Provincial Workman's Association, Canada's equivalent of the Works Projects Administration in the U.S. (see no. i, n. 52), and with allied objectives of finding work for the unemployed. 2 Lenin's interest in cinema as a revolutionary force led him in 1917 to set up a film subsection of his newly-formed State Department of Education. His wife Nadezhda Krupskaya headed the unit, and massive changes in production distribution and film content followed. 3 Madeleine Carroll was at that time a famous leading lady in British and American cinema. The New York Times praised her "charming and skillful" performance in Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935).

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Notes to pages 100-4

4 In his preface to An Evening's Love: or The Mock Astrologer (1671), Dryden complains about how, to a vulgar audience, his own work or "the zany of a mountebank or ... the appearance of an antic on the theatre" each promotes equal laughter and applause among his audience. See OfDramatick Poesy and Other Essays, ed. George Watson (London: J.M. Dent, 1962), 1:145. 5 See the short poem To the States, in Walt Whitman: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 172: To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty. 6 Dorothy Thompson was an important syndicated newspaper columnist with extensive experience in Europe. Archibald MacLeish, poet, librarian of Congress, and subsequently assistant secretary of state from 1944 to 1945, made the switch from avant-garde experiment to intensely political verse in 1932 when he published Conquistador. 7 Isaiah 35:8 promises: "And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein." In Plato's Phaedrus, 2443, Socrates observes that "the greatest of good things come to us through madness, when sent as a gift from the gods" (trans. Jowett). 8 In a journal entry for 7 September 1851, Thoreau records that "Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself." Thoreau goes on to explain this by saying that most "faith" is no more than timid habit "guiltless of thought and reflection." See Henry David Thoreau's Journal, ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 4:468-9. 9 Apelles, a Greek painter, is said to have been the sole painter granted the privilege of portraying Alexander the Great. Praised as the greatest artist of antiquity, his most famous work, now lost, portrayed Aphrodite rising from the sea. 11. Reflections at a Movie 1 Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the U.S., occupied the White House from 1923 to 1929. He was renowned for his taciturnity. The first talking picture, Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, was released in October 1927. 2 The preface of W.M. Thayer's From Log Cabin to White House (1882) rehearses the log cabin childhoods of presidents Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield.

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3 Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet To R.B. describes "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation." 4 Amy Lowell was an American poet, biographer of Keats, and promoter of the the Imagist movement. Between 1915 and 1917 she edited three Imagist anthologies, leading Ezra Pound, who had launched the movement with Des Imagistes in 1914, to rename the movement Amygism. Edgar Lee Masters is best known as the author of the Spoon River Anthology (1915), a book-length collection of mordant epitaphs voiced by the occupants of a cemetery in rural Illinois. 5 These are the very different mounts of Don Quixote and Alexander the Great. 6 "Erse" is the name given by Lowland Scots to the language of the West Highlands, but is also sometimes used more generally for Irish Gaelic. 7 Founded in Montreal in 1900, the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) was created to encourage a body of women committed to furthering Britain and British imperialism, primarily through education and the schools. The Order was active in both world wars; also in immigration, public health, and child welfare. With the waning of British influence in Canada membership has declined but the organization still has more than 9000 members in more than 400 branches across the country, active mainly in educational and cultural activities. I am grateful to Alvin Lee for this reference. 8 Here NF courted trouble and found it. Two months later James Muir, a Canadian civil servant, wrote to the Canadian Forum protesting against NF's assumptions about "the universality of cowshed," championing the Canadian credentials of "byre," and concluding that "to gibe at Marjorie Pickthall . . . must be offensive to a vast number of Canadian people." NF apologized and withdrew his comment, although at the same time he repeated his claim that Ms. Pickthall was an exotic and derivative poet, unable to see rural Canada with the direct vision Robert Frost brought to his poems of rural New England. See Canadian Forum, 22 (December 1942): 274. 9 In his famous essay "Lardner," reprinted in Prejudices, 5th ser. ([New York: Knopf, 1926], 49-56), H.L. Mencken praises American humorist Ring Lardner by declaring, "I doubt that anyone who has not given close and deliberate attention to the American vulgate will ever realize how magnificently Lardner handles it" (51). The fourth edition of Mencken's The American Language, "corrected, enlarged, and rewritten" (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1936), contains a lengthy discussion of "the American vulgate" in chap. 9, "The American Common Speech." 10 NF's reference is to Sir Winston Churchill's celebrated comments to the House of Commons about the war effort: "I would say to the House, as I have said to those who have joined this Government: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'" See Hansard, 13 May 1940, col. 1502.

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Notes to pages 108-14 12. Music in the Movies

1 NF refers to Erno Rapee's Motion-Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists: A Rapid-Reference Collection of Selected Pieces Adapted to 52 Moods and Situations (1924). 2 George Cukor directed Romeo and Juliet in 1936. It starred Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, and John Barrymore, with music by Herbert Stothart. 3 Harold Lloyd, a star of silent comedy, combined a nondescript appearance with breathtakingly risky stunts that called for considerable understated athleticism. 4 Sigmund Romberg composed several scores directly for film, including The Desert Song (1929) and New Moon (1931). George Gershwin composed the scores of King of Jazz (1930) and Girl Crazy (1932) for screen. Jerome Kern composed the Oscar-winning score for Show Boat (1936). Irving Berlin won an Oscar for the song White Christmas, which he wrote for Holiday Inn (1942). 5 A 1930 film directed by Rene Clair and starring Albert Prejean and Polla Illery. 6 The Reluctant Dragon (1941) is a Walt Disney production in which Robert Benchley receives a tour of Disney's studio at work. 13. Max Graf's Modern Music i This is an allusion to the "Chicago Semite Viennese" origins of the second eponymous protagonist of Eliot's Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar. The phrase also, by implication, supplies an evaluation of the book's "tourist" view of musical history. 15. Russian Art 1 Eliezar Lissitsky was a Russian Suprematist draughtsman and architect. From 1919, he produced a series of abstract paintings called Proun. Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter born in Ukraine, was a pioneer of Suprematist art, producing works like Black Square on White (1913), and White on White (1918). However, his mystic tendencies and overtly stated sympathies with the peasant class led him to fall foul of the Soviet authorities. Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky, probably best known for their other major contributions to twentieth-century art, were energetically involved in Soviet artistic and political activity from 1914 to 1922. 2 The adoption of "socialist realism" followed a resolution from the Party Central Committee in 1932. In the volume reviewed here by NF, Helen Rubissow suggests that in this phase "the theme of social struggle was replaced with that of social construction" (20).

Notes to pages 114-25

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3 For the WPA, see no. i, n. 52.

16. Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye 1 In his preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927), T.S. Eliot controversially declared himself to be "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion" (vii). 2 Herbert Read's volume Surrealism (1936) includes his own proselytizing introduction on behalf of the surrealist movement, together with contributions by Andre Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Eluard, and Georges Hugnet. 17. The Eternal Tramp 1 One reason for the identification of Chaplin with Communism may lie in his speeches and actions during the period following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. At large meetings throughout the summer and fall of 1942, Chaplin spoke of his sympathy for the Russian people, and hinted at greater involvement with left-wing political organizations targeted by American authorities. See the artist's own bewildered but revealing discussion in Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), chap. 26. 2 The U.S.'s entry into World War II followed the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor of 7 December 1941 that left approximately 2,300 Americans dead. 3 George Mosse's Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), supplies the following Nazi grace: Fiihrer, my Fiihrer, bequeathed to me by the Lord, Protect and preserve me as long as I live! Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress, I thank thee today for my daily bread. (241) 4 Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) starred Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre. 5 Actress, singer, and comedienne Martha Raye was well known for rambunctious roles. 18. On Book Reviewing 1 Horace, Ars Poetica, 1. 333. 2 In S0ren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-),

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Notes to pages 125-9

Kierkegaard complains about the tyranny exerted over an author by the subscription list of any magazine. He describes this as "power like bedbugs or a foul smell, which always has the advantage of denying pathos to the one being abused" (4:197). Kierkegaard is probably the most colourful and pathological reporter on the author's relationship to his reviewers; however, after a long sojourn in the menagerie Kierkegaard builds to commemorate this relationship, the present editor has been unable to track NF's exact reference. 3 "The truth is, the consideration of so vain a creature as man, is not worth our pains." See "To the Right Honourable, John, Earl of Mulgrave," dedication to Aureng-Zebe, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 12, Plays, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 154. 19. Academy without Walls 1 NF's title alludes to Andre Malraux's "museum without walls" in The Voices of Silence. See no. i, n. 99. 2 The Haida, an Indian population indigenous to the coast of the Pacific Northwest, particularly British Columbia, are famous for the art displayed in their masks, totem poles, dwellings, and canoes. 3 Tachism, a European movement in abstract art, dated from the 19405 and 19505. The term entered into common usage among art critics in 1952 with the publication of Michel Tapie's Un art autre (1952). The "otherness" of tachism lies in the search for living rhythms expressed through the medium of paint. 4 Plain chant (often one word) is, according to both the Oxford Encyclopedic Dictionary and the New Oxford Companion to Music, the same thing as plainsong. Plainsong is traditional church music in medieval modes and free rhythm depending on accentuation of the words, sung in unison, with a single line of vocal melody taken for the liturgy, as in "Gregorian" chant, after Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604). Gregory probably standardized the various schools of chant then in use. It was Pepin, King of the Franks, however, who in the eighth century enthusiastically composed plain chant. 5 See no. 18, n. i. 6 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (New York: Modern Library, 1955), 126. NF's quotation from Butler is not quite accurate. The original reads: "it must be born anew and grow up from infancy as a new thing, working out its own salvation from effort to effort in all fear and trembling." 7 NF refers to a controversial series of seven articles written by Harold Greer for the Toronto Globe and Mail between Monday, 27 March 1961, and Tuesday, 4 April 1961. In a familiar argument, Greer pointed to the gap in taste between the taxpayers subsidizing art and the artists producing it. Greer's

Notes to pages 130-7

8

9

10

11

12

357

coverage of the conference itself appears to have proceeded in the mocking, satirical vein of the philistine ratepayer. In the final sentence of his monograph T.S. Eliot (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), NF observes that "The greatness of his achievement will finally be understood, not in the context of the tradition he chose, but in the context of the tradition that chose him" (99). "Salon de Refuses" was the famous art exhibition held in 1863—by command of Napoleon III—for those artists the official salon jury had turned down. Exhibitors included Cezanne, Whistler, and Manet, whose Dejeuner sur I'herbe caused enormous controversy. T.S. Eliot's Order of Merit was conferred in 1948. The "drunken helot" tag is Ezra Pound's recasting of the "drunken slave" label Arthur Waugh fastened on Eliot in "The New Poetry," Quarterly Review, 226 (October 1916): 386. See Ezra Pound, "Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot," Egoist, 4, no. 3 (June 1917): 724. Waugh saw in Eliot's poetry an exemplification of the absurd claims made by modern poetry and used him, in the way Spartans used their drunken slaves, as a warning of what would happen to English verse if its young practitioners were to attempt to emulate Eliot's modern methods. In the essay "Tradition in Poetry," collected in Lay Thoughts of a Dean ([New York and London: Putnam's, 1926], 28-34), me Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, W.R. Inge, numbered Eliot among the "cultural Bolsheviks" dedicated to the overthrow of conventional English poetry. These quotations are NF's markers for an avant-garde art before its absorption into society. For the Canada Council, see no. i, n. 102. NF obviously aims to quash any of the familiar arguments that associate public funding of artists with their control by the public. In "Notes of a Journey through France and Italy," William Hazlitt wrote that "music . . . requires the deepest feeling, and admits the least of the impertinence of explanation . . . has no witness or vouchers but the inward sense of delight, the rich, circling intoxication of heart-felt sounds." See The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (London: J.M. Dent, 1932), 10:169. 20. Communications

1 At this time demands for independence or participation in a loose confederation were mounting in Quebec, and three months after this article's publication revolutionary separatists from the Front de liberation du Quebec kidnapped a British cultural attache and a Liberal cabinet minister. 2 In his broadcast, NF added, "And even of the genuinely directed radicals it may be said that they can never win until they know what they are fighting." 3 See particularly McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

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Notes to pages 139-48

4 In his broadcast, NF included this closing sentence: "For a long time the tolerance of Hyde Park oratory was taken to be a symbol of the maturity of British society: now that Hyde Park oratory has become visible as well as audible, and has entered our cars, our homes, our beds, and our dreams, the ability to contain it becomes a much more serious test." 21. The Renaissance of Books 1 Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1920), 52 (chap. 4, sec. 4). 2 NF may have overestimated the amount of Baudelaire available in the ten volumes of The World's Best Essays, ed. David Brewer (St. Louis: P.P. Kaiser, 1900). The collection contains translations of just three prose poems by Charles Baudelaire, The Gallant Marksman, At Twilight, and The Clock. A brief and discerning introductory section defends the poet against the charges of decadence levelled against him by Tolstoy. 3 Alexander Woollcott's Reunion in Paris, described as a "true story" by its author, has been collected by Joseph Hennessey in The Portable Woollcott (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 58-61. NF has slightly misquoted the ending, in which Woollcott refers to occasions in our lives "when we thus catch life in the very act of rhyming" (61). 4 The first Penguins appeared in July 1935. The firm's official historians emphasize the low-key, amateur nature of the advertising methods employed by the founder of the operation, Allen Lane. Consequently, they pay no attention to the "hard sell" feature of the firm's operations described by NF. See W.E. Williams, The Penguin Story (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1956) and J.E. Morpurgo, King Penguin (London: Hutchinson, 1979). 5 NF's comments arguably underplay Brett's versatility. He was also the first editor of UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], and the author of "Shelley's Relation to Berkeley and Drummond," in Studies in English by Members of University College, compiled by Malcolm W. Wallace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1931), 170-202. 6 Ayer made his most famous assault on metaphysics in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). 7 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (New York: Coward-McCann, 1953), 300. 8 NF here very slightly misquotes from chap. 2, sec. 2 of Main Street: "they say he writes regular poetry" (17). 9 These comments come from Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying: An Observation," in Wilde's Intentions (New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1920), 17, 53. 10 Truman Capote based his "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood (1966) on the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock.

Notes to pages 148-59

359

Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel: The Novel as History (1968) focuses on his attempts to participate in a protest march on the Pentagon against the war in Vietnam. 11 See Edmund Burke's reference to society as "a partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born," in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 85. 12 The Watergate hearings were televised in 1973, incriminating senior members of President Richard Nixon's administration, including Attorney General John Mitchell, in burglary and phone tapping. On 9 August 1974, Nixon, whose involvement subsequent investigation has revealed to be of major proportions, resigned from office. In notes written on file cards contained in NFF, 1991, box 28, file 3, NF characterizes the transcripts of the Watergate tapes as "intolerable, interminable drivel. Seven or eight speakers, but without the initials you couldn't tell one from another. A language of pure dither. No power of choice and no leadership. Any teacher of literature and language would feel at once that this is the enemy: this is what we have to fight. So the same problem comes to us, as it must to every country." 22. Violence and Television 1 The typescript continues, "and it has much the same relationship to genuine energy that Playboy and the movies have to sexual love. And, consequently, the controlling of violence is really a matter of setting energy free to its appointed and proper tasks." 2 This speech was delivered at a time of escalating terrorist violence. One of the most visible and appalling of these episodes occurred before dawn on 5 September 1972, when eight Palestinians entered the Israeli compound at Olympic Village, Munich, killed two residents, and took nine hostages. They demanded the release of two hundred Palestinians held in Israel. Twentythree hours later in a shootout at a Munich airport, five Palestinians, a German policeman, and all the hostages were killed. 3 Ted Kotcheff, a director of features for the CBC with experience as a Hollywood director, contributed an essay called "How Can the Quality of Popular Programming Be Improved?" to the symposium. See Symposium, 125-36. 4 Garth Jowett, then an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Windsor, gave the first paper of the conference, "A Brief History of Opinion on the Social Effects of Mass Media." See Symposium, 1-11. 5 In 1919 the i8th amendment established Prohibition in the United States. Following much violence and illegality, the 2ist amendment repealed it in 1933. 6 Les Brown, then television correspondent for the New York Times, contrib-

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Notes to pages 160-3

uted to the panel discussion "Canadian Industry Realities—Can We Do without Violence?" See Symposium, 141-5. 7 The Pastore hearings were held before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications of the Committee of Commerce on 21-24 March 1972 under the chairmanship of Senator John O. Pastore of Rhode Island. They examined closely the publication in 1971 of the five-volume Surgeon General's Advisory Report on Television and Social Behavior and attempted, despite much sensationalized and confused media reporting, to build some broad consensus about the effects of televised violence. 8 Robert M. Liebert, at that time a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the State University of New York (SUNY)-Stonybrook, reported to the symposium on "The Effects of Violence: Experimental and Research Findings." See Symposium, 87-90. 9 The typescript reads, "Education, so far as it is schooling, falls into my own area, I think, of literary criticism—because the medium, whether it is cold or hot, whether it is electronic or linear, can only convey sounds and images and this means that the conveyance of words is always a central part of it." 10 Jean Basile, a journalist and author, participated in the panel discussion on "Violence as a Dramatic Convention in the Arts and Mass Media." 11 J.W. Mohr, then a commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Canada, spoke on "Media and Controls." See Symposium, 200-5. 12 The typescript begins a new paragraph with the statement, "Similarly, when television deals with the current issues of the day, the easiest way is to polarize them." 13 See Daniel Boorstin, The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1961), particularly the first two chapters. 14 This is added to the manuscript as published and is not in the typescript of the talk. 15 See the first chapter of McLuhan's Understanding Media for an explanation of the phrase "the medium is the message." The same author's The Gutenberg Galaxy asks, "Is not the essence of education civil defence against media fallout?" (246). 16 The typescript continues, "That, as I say, is a traditional distinction, it's a morbid distinction. It is something civilization has to outgrow sooner or later, and the electronic media are doing a good job, I think, in helping us to outgrow it. It is no virtue of theirs, it is simply the nature of the medium itself that does this." 17 Mannix, a prime time television production from the U.S., starred Mike Connors as Joe Mannix and ran for eight seasons between 1967 and 1975. The hero worked as a private investigator for a computer-obsessed company called Intertect during the show's first season but was afterwards selfemployed.

Notes to pages 163-8

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18 The typescript adds, "That is, all concerned citizens should learn as soon as possible that what they have is not a mirror on the world, but a prism." The following paragraph begins, "Another educational operation is the education of the emotions." 19 The typescript reads "a little while longer." 20 The typescript adds, "Consequently, it is a very important step in emotional education whether we identify with the agent or with the victim of violence." 21 Guy Cote, a film producer with the National Film Board of Canada at that time, did not deliver a paper, but participated in group discussion by recalling "the socially positive effects" narrated in "that tale of injustice" the Crucifixion. See Symposium, 102. 22 The typescript reads, "Everything that is civilizing in our traditions—Classical and Biblical, all comes to focus on the same point, that every development of emotional education and character runs through that sense of concern for the victim." 23 The new paragraph in the typescript begins, "With tragedy, the reaction is very different. In tragedy everything is focused on the tragic hero, and the tragic hero is a person capable of being an agent of violence who ends up a victim of violence, and for him we feel a certain concern. We may feel that he got what was coming to him, like Macbeth, or we may feel sympathetic with him as we do with Romeo and Juliet. But that doesn't matter. When we see a violent action, we are intended to pass through certain violent feelings of our own, then emerge from them and look at what is happening as concerned people, detached but not indifferent, concerned but not involved, for or against the violence." NF then resumes at "This attitude of detached concern..." 24 See Aristotle, Poetics, i449b. 23. Introduction to Art and Reality 1 Robert Irwin's "The Elements of 'Art'" is the first essay in this collection. Irwin was at that time a painter and sculptor from Los Angeles. 2 All these contributors appeared in the section of Art and Reality dedicated to "Patronage: The Double-Edged Sword." Andrea Hull, then Director of Public Policy and Planning for The Australia Council, and Jean-Claude Germain, Artistic Director of Theatre Aujourd'hui in Montreal, both delivered papers under this title, and Michael Straight, former Deputy Director for the National Endowment for the Arts at Washington D.C., acted as respondent. Andre Fortier, President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, delivered a paper "On Patronage." Uriel Luft delivered a paper on "Arts in Society: The Economic and Business Factors." 3 Giordano Bruno, the "terrible heretic" Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait

362

Notes to pages 168-71

of the Artist as a Young Man thought had been "terribly burned" by the Roman Catholic Church, defended the Copernican theory in La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) (1584). 4 John Bentley Mays, at that time art critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, spoke on "Art and Reality?" For Irwin's paper, see n. i, above. 5 This is NF's witty and rueful recognition of the popularity of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, filmed in 1939, famous ever since, and a tribute to the commercial success of escapism even when escape seems inconceivable. 6 John Ayto's Twentieth-Century Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) defines "back-to-basics" as "a catch phrase applied to a movement or enthusiasm for a return to fundamental principles, (e.g., in education), or to policies reflecting them." Ayto sees the mid-1970s and the 19805 as the peak period for the politicization of this phrase. 7 Jorge Alberto Lozoya, professor and research fellow at El Colegio de Mexico, delivered a paper on "Culture, Freedom and Change." The remainder of the contributors NF mentions here comprise the members of the panel on "Art and National Survival." David Watmough, listed as a writer and critic from Vancouver, offered "A Vertical Viewpoint." Jean Gagne, Director-General of the Quebec Institute for Research on Culture, spoke on "Art and National Survival: A View from Quebec." John Hirsch, Artistic Director, Stratford Festival, Ontario, served as respondent to the panelists. 8 Jan van der Marck, Director of the Centre for the Fine Arts in Metropolitan County, Miami, Florida, spoke on "Museum Strategies: Sisyphus or Lysistrata?" 9 Sisyphus was in Greek mythology the most cunning of men, able to outwit deities and even Death with repeated success. However, the punishment devised for him by the gods required him to repeatedly roll a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down again as it reached the summit. His myth has thus become a byword for futile labour. 10 Prem Kirpal, Founder-President of the Institute of Cultural Relations and Development Studies in New Delhi, India, spoke on "Arts and Internationalism." 11 UNESCO is an acronym for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, founded in 1946. The League of Nations, formed after World War I with the intention of promoting world peace and international security, has passed into English usage as the locus dassicus of good intentions blasted by political machinations. 12 Carl Oglesby's paper was titled "Art and the Apocalypse." Oglesby, a writer and activist from Cambridge, Mass., was a leading member of the Students for a Democratic Society. D. Paul Schafer, a Canadian cultural adviser based in Toronto, spoke on "The Cultural Interpretation of History: Beacon of the Future."

Notes to pages 175-7

3^3 24. Pro Patria Mori

1 This famous Oxford Union debate took place 9 February 1933, when a proposal that "This house will under no circumstances fight for King and Country" was carried by a substantial majority of the membership present at the meeting. The British popular press subsequently denounced this as a victory for the "sexual indeterminates of Oxford." Yet student response throughout the Empire was sympathetic, and in the final session of Victoria College's Debating Parliament the same motion passed by a majority of six, triggering derisive and patronizing responses from the local press. See also Norm Knight's "For King and Country," Ada Victoriana, 57 (April 1933): 39, and Arthur R. Cragg's "Young Men in Their Teens Have Queer Notions," Acta Victoriana, 57 (May 1933): 19-22. 2 A variation on the Victoria College motto abeunt studia in mores, i.e., "studies are moulded into habits" (Ovid, Heroides, 15.83). The Rowland version might be rendered as "studies trail off into follies." Henry Edgar (Hank) Rowland was an active and energetic contemporary of NF's at Victoria College. 3 Lytton Strachey's public opposition to the Military Service bill of January 1916 brought him before a draft board on 7 March 1916, where he declared that his opposition to conscription was "not based on religious belief, but upon moral considerations." Although Strachey was subsequently exempted from service on medical grounds on 10 April, by the end of May 1917 he was re-examined, medically reclassified, and subsequently ordered to report to the board every six months. 4 J.A. Hobson's The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) and The German Panic (1913) are valuable studies of the relationship between media ownership, opinion formation, and the role of manufactured hysteria in the modern state. 5 Hansard, 11 November 1918, col. 2463, records Lloyd George's announcement of "an end to all wars." An earlier possible derivation for this phrase is H.G. Wells's The War That Will End War (1914). In 1934, Wells told Liberty Magazine that "I launched the phrase The War to End War' and that was not the least of my crimes." 6 Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, entered World War I as late as 1917 with the expressed hope of making the world "safe for democracy." He conducted peace negotiations in the same spirit, but is widely felt to have been out-manoeuvred by French premier Georges Clemenceau and British prime minister Lloyd George. His hopes for a League of Nations that would further the cause of world peace were stymied when the U.S. itself did not join the organization. 7 The Hindenburg line was the ninety-mile line the German commander Paul von Hindenburg formed on the Western Front. From March 1917 to September 1918 it proved impossible to dislodge German troops from this position.

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Notes to pages 177-90

8 "It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country" (Horace, Odes, 3.2.13). 25. Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian 1 Ezra Pound contributed poetry and prose to the two issues of Lewis's frenetic Blast (1914-15) and made many energetic efforts to find him financial support and to promote his work. Their relationship understandably cooled following the appearance of Lewis's typically patronizing comments about him in Time and Western Man. See Time and Western Man, bk. i, chap. 9, "Ezra Pound, etc." 2 Vilfredo Pareto's discussion of these "mental states" is in vol. i of Mind and Society (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935), pars. 172-6. 3 John Gawsworth, author of the enthusiastic and belle-lettristic Apes, Japes, and Hitlerism: A Study and Bibliography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Unicorn Press, 1932), claimed Lewis "ground Spengler's pretensions to powder" (312). (John Gawsworth is the pseudonym of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong.) 26. War on the Cultural Front 1 Otto Strasser was a German politician and author who joined the Nazi Party in 1925, but subsequently broke with Hitler. Following his exile in 1933 he lived in Vienna, Prague, Zurich, and Paris. He published Germany Tomorrow in 1940, and in the same year fled to Canada. 2 Zollverein, a customs union that abolished tariffs between German states. By 1854 it included most German states. It proved to be a crucial agent in Prussia's hegemony over Austria, and subsequently of Germany's unification. 27. Two Italian Sketches, 1939 1 From Browning's Responses to Challenges to Rhyme, 11. 8-9. 2 See William Wordsworth, Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland, 11.1-4: Two Voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice. They were thy chosen music, Liberty! 3 Art historians have viewed the Florentine Domenico Ghirlandaio as an excellent and industrious craftsman but not a particularly inspired artist. To many of his contemporaries, Ghirlandaio's fame lay in his ability to integrate episodes of the sacred narrative with the manners and decor of contemporary bourgeois Florence. 4 Taddeo di Bartolo was an Italian painter. Son of a barber, he is first listed as

Notes to pages 190-2

365

an independent painter in 1389. His fresco series Roman Gods and Heroes and Cardinal and Political Virtues (1413-14) are exemplary efforts in the Renaissance tradition of civic humanism. 5 In Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), chap. 9, "The Moral of the Story," G.K. Chesterton observes that "Medieval philosophy and culture, with all the crimes and errors of its exponents, was always seeking equilibrium. It can be seen in every line of its rhythmic and balanced art; in every sentence of its carefully qualified and self-questioning philosophy" (277). 6 Bartolo di Fredi produced innovative altar designs that combined realistic surfaces with mystical meanings. His Trinity for the altarpiece of S. Domenico, Siena, is his most famous work. Bernhard Berenson's "The Central Italian Painters," in The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1930) (Glasgow: Collins, 1966), sees Taddeo di Bartolo, Barna, and Bartolo di Fredi as representative of a Sienese art that had reached its peak, and would "never again . . . receive that replenishment of force without which art is doomed to dwindle away" (127). 7 According to Ghiberti's I Commentari and the first edition of Vasari's Lives (1550), Barna (da Siena), a Sienese painter, painted many Old and New Testament scenes in Tuscany. Vasari's second edition of the Lives (1568) refers only to New Testament scenes in the San Gemignano church. The slenderness of documentation referring to any single artist and the stylistic variety of the frescoes has led modern art historians to posit collaborative production rather than the work of a single hand. 8 Veronese was born in Verona but worked in Venice from mid-century. His extravagant, ornamental paintings were frequently considered excessive by the more orthodox institutions which commissioned them. Among the generation of artists in Venice who emerged after Titian's death, Tintoretto vied with Veronese for public esteem. His paintings, like Veronese's, exhibit some liking for the unexpected and even grotesque. Carpaccio is most famous for his two cycles of saints' lives, Scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula and Scenes from the Lives of Saint George and Saint Jerome. His love for crowded detail and fantasy features in both works. 9 NF is referring to T.S. Eliot's Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar. In this poem, Bleistein is described as "Chicago Semite Viennese" (1. 16). Cf. also: . . . On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs.... (11. 21-4) 10 NF's handwritten version adds, "And of course they hate him because he won't be a hypocrite and pretend to believe in anything beyond trading and keeping bargains."

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Notes to pages 193-8

11 NF initially closed his essay with the harsher comment that "They understand each other, wop and rat. Anti-red ant, not degenerate stuff—has a real place in the New Germany's Dept. of Propaganda. Germany has accelerated her production of cannon, and the doctore must stimulate the output of fodder." 12 NF refers to the Italian translation of Dale Carnegie's How to Make Friends and Influence People (Milan: V. Bompiani, 1938). 28. G.M. Young's Basic i The Cambridge linguist C.K. Ogden invented Basic English between 1925 and 1927, hoping that its total vocabulary of 850 words would operate as an "auxiliary international language" able to ease everyday communication across the globe. In the 19405, however, LA. Richards, convinced that the threat to world peace derived from problems in communication, took the lead in a renewed crusade for the adoption of Basic English as a world language. See Richards's "reconstruction book" Basic English and Its Uses (1943)29. Revenge or Justice? 1 NF's title alludes to Sir Francis Bacon's essay "Of Revenge." In his Essays: or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625), Bacon states that "Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out" (Essays [London: J.M. Dent, 1906], 13). 2 The Soviet judge I.T. Nikitchenko dissented from the verdicts of acquittal for three of the defendants—Hans Fritzsche, Hjamar Schacht, and Franz Von Papen—and from the decision to stop short of asserting the criminality of the German General Staff and High Command. He also called for the defendant Rudolf Hess to be executed. 3 Of Streicher, Airey Neave, remembering the trial in On Trial at Nuremberg (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), wrote: "Streicher represented the most revolting aspects of Nazism. He was the true anti-semite who delighted in the destruction of synagogues, the burning of shops, and beatings in the streets. Without him and his followers, who whipped up racial fury, Hitler could never have carried out the Final Solution" (88). 30. F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West 1 "America is a Utopia.... It is the name of a human hope." See Alfonso Reyes, Ultima Tule (Imprenta Universitaria: Mexico, 1942), 93,89. 2 The contrast between civilization, the total acquired skills and machinery of a

Notes to pages 198-208

367

society, and culture, the shaping spirit that informs them, is one familiar to late eighteenth-century thought, but is sharpened to an extreme degree in Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, where each stands for a radically opposite phase of human history. It seems likely that NF had Spengler's work in mind when he made this distinction. 3 Northrop's essay appeared in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 56 (November 1941): 1-17. It undertakes a comparative study of models in Newtonian mechanics and economic theory, concluding that no economic model so far devised can predict the future operations of a complex, dynamic system of market behaviour. Of course, as NF's review points out, such conclusions hardly advance the case for centralized economic planning along Soviet lines. 31. Wallace Notestein's The Scot in History i NF is referring to John Duns Scotus, critic of Aquinas, whose major work Opus Oxoniense includes commentaries on Aristotle, the Bible, and Peter of Lombard's Sentences. 32. Toynbee and Spengler 1 The philosopher's stone was an apocryphal entity, much sought after in medieval and Renaissance Europe because of its alleged capacity to turn base metals into gold. NF views the equivalent for modern thought in the "philosophy of history" with deep ambivalence, displaying a quizzical scepticism as well as a profound interest in the quest of modern intellectuals for a set of scientific laws that will enable them to understand historical change. 2 NF refers to the following articles: "Civilization: Crisis in Britain," Time, 17 March 1947,71-81; and James A. Linen, "A Letter from the Publisher," Time, 28 April 1947,17. 3 A two-volume edition of Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough appeared in 1890. The full twelve-volume work was completed in 1915. 4 In A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), Toynbee comments that, where the issue of whether Western civilization is disintegrating is concerned, "In our generation . . . we must be content to leave this question unanswered" (4:4). 5 See Pascal, Pensees, no. 413. 6 The United Nations was at this time a relatively new institution, founded only after World War II. The term was first used, however, in 1941 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to describe the countries fighting against Axis powers. On i January 1942 a joint declaration by twenty-six nations to

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Notes to pages 210-20

continue the war effort and not to make a separate peace grouped these states together as "the United Nations." 33. Gandhi i Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary leader who overthrew the C'hing dynasty and formed the Chinese republic in 1912. Influenced by Karl Marx, his forging of the Three People's Principles of nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood led to his heroic reputation as the founder of modern China. 35. Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor 1 John Davidson Ketchum, who reviewed the Kinsey report for the Forum (see Canadian Forum, 28 [May 1948]: 44-5), was editor of the Canadian Journal of Psychology between 1953 and 1958 and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. 2 NF continued to worry about the anomaly of the continuing existence of censorship in a civilized democracy. In "Culture and the National Will," an address delivered at Carleton University in Ottawa in 1957, he lamented to his audience that "Canada, like all other countries, has laws of book censorship no serious student of literature can have the slightest respect for" (NFF, 1991, box 38, file 2). 3 In 1950, a subsection was added to Section 207 of the Criminal Code of Canada making it an offence to publish or distribute "crime comics." 4 NF discusses the censorship of Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County in "Undemocratic Censorship," Canadian Forum, 26 (July 1946): 76. James T. Farrell protests against Canadian censorship and the banning of his novel Bernard Clare in "Canada Bans Another Book," Canadian Forum, 26 (November 1946): 176-8. 5 On its publication in 1944, Kathleen Winsor's historical novel Forever Amber was greeted by A.D.H. Smith in the Saturday Review of Literature, 14 October 1944, as "the bawdiest novel I have read in years." 36. Cardinal Mindszenty i Following the recommendations of a hastily convened Royal Commission, a number of suspected Communist spies were detained on 15 February 1946 at the RCMP training barracks at Rockcliffe, near Ottawa. They were not allowed contact with lawyers or relatives for security reasons. This provoked widespread criticism from press and public as did the subsequent in camera investigation undertaken by the Commission.

Notes to pages 221-6

369

2 J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey was chair of the constantly vigilant Senate Committee on Un-American Activities from 1947. 37. The Two Camps 1 As early as 1946, Liu Shao-chi had spoken of "a Chinese or Asiatic form of Marxism" ripe for export throughout all Asia. After the declaration of China as a People's Republic six months after NF's article was written in October 1949, the whole of Southeast Asia was considered vulnerable to Communist takeover. A month later, Mao—to the considerable dismay of the Western powers—made his way to Moscow for a dialogue with Stalin. 2 Chiang Kai-shek's ascent to the presidency of Nationalist China, Taiwan, in 1950 owed much to U.S. aid. At that time, the U.S. government hoped to overturn the Communist government of China. 38. Law and Disorder 1 William Leuchtenberg's The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32 (1958) narrates the course of this earlier "red scare" and the many bizarre incidents surrounding it. In 1919, for example, conservative Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee proposed the construction of a penal colony in Guam to house native-born American radicals. 2 Senator Martin Dies of Texas was the first chair of the Special House Committee on Un-American activities created 6 June 1938. In 1946, Dies wrote to President Harry Truman to inform him of the broad base of national support for the stiffer anti-Communist measures to which NF alludes here. For Thomas, see no. 36, n. 2, above. 3 In September 1950, the U.S. Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security bill. This required all Communist organizations to register with the attorney general. Since the Smith Act of 1940 prohibited membership of any group calling for the violent overthrow of the government, such registration amounted to an admission of guilt. Further measures provided for the deportation of aliens who had been Communists at any time. The act passed despite presidential veto. 39. Two Books on Christianity and History i Karl Lowith was in fact a philosopher of Jewish origin, who had left Germany in 1934 as Nazi control over the universities tightened. When NF wrote, he may have thought Lowith would continue in his appointment at the Hartford Theological Seminary, but 1949 was the year of his move to the

370

2

3

4 5

Notes to pages 226-32

New School of Social Research. I am grateful to Nick Halmi for alerting me to this problem. Joachim of Floris, or Fiore, left the Cistercian order to found his own order in Calabria. His three ages were the age of the Father, the age of the Son, and the imminent age of the Spirit, a time of new religious orders, world conversion, and the advent of a "Spiritual Church." Charles Norris Cochrane shared NF's Canadian roots, Protestant beliefs, and intellectual energy. From 1929 he was professor of ancient history at the University of Toronto. He published Thucydides and the Science of History in 1929 and Christianity and Classical Culture in 1940. See J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Growth and Origin (1932), for the standard account of this concept. See Wyndham Lewis, Paleface (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), which NF thought possibly Lewis's best book. In the introduction to pt. 2 Lewis declares, "We are the cave-men of the new mental wilderness" (103). 40. Nothing to Fear but Fear

1 Barker Fairley was the author of Goethe as Revealed in His Poetry (1932) and A Study of Goethe (1947) as well as translator of Goethe's Selected Poems (1954) and Faust (1970). Fairley was also a poet, the first literary editor of the Canadian Forum, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Group of Seven. See also Introduction, xxvi-xxvii, xxix. Stephen Endicott's Rebel out of China reports that Mrs. Margaret Fairley had a much stronger interest in Marxism than her husband. She was in fact a member of the Labour Progressive Party. Professor Glen Shortliffe's work includes his Cornell doctoral thesis The Socialist Novel before Naturalism (1939) and (co-authored with Edouard Sonet) Review of Standard French (1954). Stephen Endicott suggests that Shortliffe's greatest crime against the state may have been driving Hewlett Johnson from Malton airport to Hamilton (Rebel out of China [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980], 274). Dr. Hewlett Johnson, known as the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, was from 1938 a champion of the Communist state and Marxist ideas and the author of The Socialist Sixth of the World (1939). 2 Burdick Anderson Trestrail, an American-born millionaire and entrepreneur, published a series of apocalyptic postwar pamphlets against the trend toward "statism" and government control. Trestrail used the methods and vocabulary of tabloid journalism to make his point, as his Is Democracy in Canada Doomed? (Toronto: Public Information Association, 1949) demonstrates. (Thanks to the staff at the Northrop Frye Centre for information on Trestrail and a sample of his work.)

Notes to pages 236-42

371 41. The Ideal of Democracy

1 See the abridged edition of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 230-40, 421-5, 460-5, for further discussion of "creative minorities." 2 OED offers 1941 as its earliest entry for "welfare state," and cites William Temple's Citizen and Churchman. Temple observes that modern citizens have moved from the "conception of the Power-State . . . to that of the WelfareState." 42. The Church and Modern Culture 1 A reference to Tennyson, In Memoriam, 56,11.15-16: Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek'd against his creed— 2 NF refers to Oswald Spengler's book The Hour of Decision (1934). 3 Lister Sinclair, a key figure in the history of broadcast drama in Canada, has acted, written, adapted, and supervised many CBC productions. His own plays, now numbering over eighty, include All about Emily (1945) and Socrates (1947). 4 Spring Thaw began as a makeshift response to a production emergency at the Museum Theatre in 1948 and became an annual national institution until 1971. Often a showcase for emerging Canadian talent, it has exerted an immeasurable influence on the flourishing contemporary field of Canadian satire. 5 Fridolin was the Chaplinesque central character of Gratien Gelinas's satirical revue Fridolinons, first heard in 1937 as part of a radio series. From 1938 a stage revue ran in tandem with the radio series, but after 1941 an annual theatrical revue became the sole focus of Gelinas's creative energies. 6 Open City (1945) and Shoeshine (1946) both belong to the golden age of Italian neorealism. The first of these films, directed by Roberto Rossellini, co-written by Federico Fellini, and starring Anna Magnani, concerns the Italian resistance movement in Rome. The second, directed by Vittoria de Sica and using a nonprofessional cast, follows the fortunes of two poor youths in an impoverished Italy just after the fall of Fascism. Commedia dell'arte was the popular comedy, complete with stock characters, situations, and grotesque stage properties, of Italian drama from the middle of the sixteenth century. Its European influence stretched wide and readers of English drama can sample it in Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607). 7 Charles Williams and Clive Staples Lewis were scholars, amateur theologians, members of the Oxford-based Inkling group, and writers of romance

372

Notes to pages 244-6

and fantasy. Lewis dedicated his A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), an important document in the twentieth-century Milton controversy, to Williams. Williams described his own fictional works as "metaphysical thrillers." They include War in Heaven (1930) and Descent into Hell (1937). Lewis's allegorical works include, among others, his scientific trilogy, comprising Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1939), and That Hideous Strength (1945). 43. And There Is No Peace 1 In the spring of 1950, the World Council of Peace, formed a year before in Paris, made an international delegation to Moscow to call for arms reduction and the outlawing of nuclear weapons. Its members included Chinese-born James Endicott, chair of the Canadian Peace Congress, former missionary for the United Church in China, and self-styled Christian Marxist. 2 Lester Pearson was at that time the Canadian Minister of External Affairs and a Liberal MP. Major J.W. Coldwell was House Leader of the CCF. They responded unfavourably to Endicott's overtures. Pearson, a former student, teacher, and chancellor at Victoria College, became prime minister of Canada in 1963. 3 This was the second visit of Dr. Hewlett Johnson (see no. 40, n. i), and it brought an audience of three thousand to Massey Hall in Toronto. Efforts at intimidation were made at his meetings and public denunciation of his character and political affiliations were common on both his visits. Norman Penner's analysis of the Canadian Peace Congress in Canadian Communism: The Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto: Methuen, 1988), 226-7, corroborates NF's assertions about Communist influence over the movement. 4 NF appears to be referring to Clarence Eugene Duffy, author of Christian Democracy: End of the Conquest and Death Knell of Capitalism (1936), and frequent contributor to Catholic Worker (1937-). 5 Proposed by the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front was a political alliance of left-wing parties against dictatorships in the light of the Fascist threat. A Popular Front government formed in Spain in 1936 soon met brutal nationalist opposition led by General Franco. NF's use of the phrase appears to recall the currents of militant sympathy for the Socialist cause among young Western intellectuals in the 19305 and to indicate the changing political climate of contemporary society. 44. Caution or Dither? i Robert Schuman, then foreign minister in the fourth French Republic, projected a plan for a European Coal and Steel Committee in 1950 that was realized two years later. This economic union of six European nations proved to

Notes to pages 246-60

373

be the foundation for the subsequent formation of the European Economic Community, known popularly as the Common Market. The newly re-elected British Labour Government's opposition to these ideas, referred to later in this article, appeared in the National Executive Committee's European Policy a month before NF wrote this column. 2 General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army Chief of Staff from 1939 to 1945, proposed his plan for European economic recovery on 5 June 1947, clearing the way for the dispensing of more than $12 billion in American aid. 3 Clement Attlee assumed office as prime minister after the Labour victory in the general election of 1945 and again in the short-lived government of 1950 after his win by a slim majority. 4 The Bevan-Dalton group was a more radical wing of the governing Labour party led by Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health, and Dr. Hugh Dalton, formerly of the treasury. 45. Trends in Modern Culture 1 In Romans 12:6 St. Paul observes, "Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith." The Greek reading "kata ten analogian tes pisteos" translates as "analogy of faith." 2 Spengler's third book according to H. Stuart Hughes's Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (1952). Decline of the West (1918,1923) and Man and Technics (1931) preceded it. 3 For a more extensive discussion of the relationship between the leadership structure of Russian Communism and that of Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism, see NF's "Turning New Leaves" column in Canadian Forum, 26 (December 1946): 211-12. In these pages NF reviews George Orwell's Animal Farm. 4 See James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1942). 5 Juvenal, Satires, 10.81, refers to the famed "bread and circuses" necessary to keep the plebeians docile. 6 See no. i, n. 34. 7 See NF's essay "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," in StS, 200-17, where NF explores the relationship between chialistic sacred imagery and radical political ideas. 8 NF refers to the well-known limerick: There was a young lady of Niger Who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride With the lady inside And the smile on the face of the tiger.

374

Notes to pages 262-73 46. Regina versus the World

1 Queen Victoria was invested with the title Empress of India in 1876. 2 A sequel to pressures described in this article occurred in 1954, when the British government signed an agreement with the Egyptians to evacuate their troops from the nation's Suez Canal base. 3 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Heritage Press, 1946), 1:151-2. 4 The Unknown Soldier is the body of a British soldier who died in France during World War I. The body was randomly chosen by a blindfolded officer from a number of unidentifiable corpses and symbolically "buried among the Kings" at Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920. The implication appears to be that NF sees the monarchy as remote from narrower political considerations. 5 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's postwar campaign against Communism specialized in public disgrace, innuendo, and the fueling of suspicion of a vast conspiracy against the American way of life. The condemnation of the Senate in 1954 began his rapid descent from power. Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov, whose administrative and political skills raised him to favour with Stalin, was, as NF wrote, at the apex of his career as a reforming Soviet politician. Although he was prime minister between 1953 and 1955, Malenkov's rivalry with Nikita Khrushchev and their gradual estrangement forced his resignation in 1955. 6 Following the publication of his anti-Lutheran work Assertio Septem Sacramentorum in 1521, Henry VIII was given the title Defender of the Faith by Pope Leo X. By 1534, he had moved the country outside papal jurisdiction altogether and had assumed the title of "supreme head" of the English church. 47. Oswald Spengler 1 See Tennyson, Locksley Hall, 1. 184. 2 See no. 32, no. 5, above. 3 Spengler's "murky biological language" reaches its peak in vol. 2 of Decline of the West, particularly in the first two chapters. Spengler makes several references to man as a "beast of prey" [e.g., 2:474], but I have been unable to trace any reference to man as a "splendid beast of prey." 4 Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.230: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." 5 Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.166-7: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Notes to pages 275-86

375 48. Preserving Human Values

1 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Harvard-educated and of wealthy background, was elected as the thirty-fifth president of the United States and assumed office in January 1961, just four months before NF's address. 2 James Riddle Hoffa was an American labour leader who became president of the Teamsters Union in 1957, the year the union was expelled from the AFLCIO on corruption charges. Following his disappearance in 1975, Hoffa's body was never recovered, but his links with organized crime have since made his name synonymous with union corruption in the United States. 3 South Africa was to leave the Commonwealth in May 1961, only a week after the delivery of this lecture. 4 The author of all three of these books was Vance Packard, an American popular sociologist. NF recognized the greatly expanded market for studies of this sort in postwar society and appears to have read widely and critically in them. See the last lecture of MC (63-4) for his views about the psychological needs they serve. 5 The title of the Thurber story is "You Could Look It Up," published in the Saturday Evening Post, 5 April 1941, 9-11,114,116. Ten years later, the owner of the St. Louis Browns signed a midget as a pinch-hitter. 49. The War in Vietnam 1 Rebecca West shared NF's long memory and his sentiments, and noted that it was "a great pity" that "before Vietnam nobody troubled to remember Nuremberg." See her foreword to Airey Neave, On Trial at Nuremberg (Boston: Little Brown, 1978), 5-9. 2 Historians see the Monroe Doctrine, declared 2 December 1823, not only as a bid to erect a "keep out" notice to European powers with designs on the Americas, but also as a claim on behalf of U.S. sovereignty in the region. NF's application of the doctrine implies that the U.S. should practise a similar policy of nonintervention outside its own borders. 50. The Two Contexts i Compare NF's position on the pathological society with that taken by Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) or R.D. Laing and A. Esterson in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). 51. The Quality of Life in the '705 i Compare NF's comment to Harold Innis's note that "Most forward-looking

376

Notes to pages 288-96

people have their heads turned sideways," in The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 18. 2 See Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970). 3 Charles Wilson, president of General Motors from 1941 to 1953, is credited with coining this phrase. 4 The threat of what Rosemary Donegan, in Spadina Avenue (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1985), calls "a concrete and asphalt weapon aimed at the heart of downtown" (30) was averted when the provincial government stopped construction in 1971. 5 NF refers to The Uncertain Mirror: Report of the Special Senate Committee on Mass Media, 3 vols. (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1970). 6 See William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1281-93. 7 As U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on the moon on 20 July 1969, President Richard Nixon, speaking by telephone, told them, "For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this earth are truly one." 8 The Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) was created in 1968; it was renamed the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in 1976. NF worked as a part-time commissioner for the CRTC, viewing television programs and writing reports on them for the Commission's research department, from 1968 until April 1976. For a more detailed description of NF's work for the Commission and his articles and reviews written for it, see LS, xxvi, 266-301. 9 Rochdale College was founded and run by a cooperative from September 1958 until May 1975. Funding for the building, located at 341 Bloor St. W. on the northern edge of the University of Toronto campus, came from the federal government under the National Housing Act, through the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The college, which was not part of the University of Toronto, became a "hippie" haven with unstructured educational programs and few regulations. I am grateful to Barbara McDonald for this reference. 10 Both threatened by pollution in the 19605, and both outstanding sites of natural beauty. NF's comments emphasize that pollution extends to the western and eastern extremities of the country. 11 NF is referring to John Lennon's Christmas 1970 release Happy Christmas (War Is Over). Lennon himself paid for a billboard on Yonge St. that proclaimed this message to the citizens of Toronto. 12 NF's words are an adjustment of the exchange between Glendower and Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1,3.1.52-4. When Owen Glendower boasts that, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," Hotspur rejoins: Why, so can I, or so can any man, But will they come when you do call for them?

Notes to pages 298-309

377 52. Spengler Revisited

1 Bernard Lonergan was a major Catholic thinker and theologian. Born in Buckingham, Quebec, he taught at Harvard and Boston College as well as other major institutions in North America and Europe. Lonergan's thinking was influenced deeply by Aquinas, and he seems to have shared Frye's eagerness to understand how human beings make sense of experience in ways that transcend orthodox academic boundaries. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert H. Doran edited The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan in 1988. 2 See W.B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962), 258-60. 3 The typescript reads "its religion of Communism," in keeping with NF's firmly stated assessment of the institutional structure and philosophic direction of Soviet Communism as analogous to Roman Catholicism. 4 See no. 47, n. i, above. 5 One of the most sustained indictments of Hegel appears in the second volume of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, subtitled The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath (1945). The typescript reads "made the Prussian state of his day the embodiment of the inner purpose of history." 6 See no. 32, n. 5, above. 7 Pound was intensely excited by his discovery of Brooks Adams's philosophical history The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Macmillan, 1895). The reference in Canto 80 to "(Napoleon etc.) Since Waterloo / Nothing etc.," almost certainly derives from Adams's observation in chap. 12 that "after Waterloo" money-lenders began their steady ascent into the driving seat of the modern world. At the same time, "the decay of the soldier... in progress since the fall of Napoleon," accelerated rapidly (see pp. 352 ff.). 8 The typescript reads "cycles," but NF decides to go consistently with Spengler's world view rather than to slip into Yeats's. 9 See The Waste Land, pt. i, "The Burial of the Dead," 11. 69-70: There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson! You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!" 10 In "What Should Children Tell Parents?" chap. 6 of 7s Sex Necessary? (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1960), 87-9, Thurber describes the "remarkable case history" of Francois Delamater, a thirty-year-old parent, whose search for sex education took him to the gutters of eighteen cities in the United States. The results did not constitute a scientific breakthrough: Delamater, despite his name, ended up thinking that children were born to fathers. 11 See, for example, no. 25 in the present volume, where what NF says Wyndham Lewis does to Spengler seems particularly germane. 12 See no. 47, n. 3, above. 13 The typescript adds "obedient to history and her husband at once."

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Notes to pages 310-16

14 For a history of the development of the myth of progress, see no. 39 and n. 4, above. See also MC, chap, i (11,15-19), above. 15 The typescript reads "obsession." 16 Trofim Denisovic Lysenko, a biologist and agriculturalist, was the czar of Soviet biology. On 7 August 1948, in a speech delivered to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences on "The Situation in Biological Science," Lysenko denounced the theory of modern genetics and proposed a "theory of acquired characters" that harmonized much more unthreateningly with Stalinist and Marxist canons than any predecessor. Much of Lysenko's prestige did not survive Stalin's death. 17 The typescript reads "Relativity theory. He is evidently not sure ..." 18 The typescript reads "which will" rather than "it can." 19 The typescript reads "situation" rather than "perspective." 53. The Bridge of Language 1 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 2 Snow gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959 and his lecture appeared in book form in that same year. Snow compared the students of the humanities to the machine-breaking Luddites of the Industrial Revolution on the grounds that they, too, feared the future that science and technology was bringing to humanity. F.R. Leavis's "Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow" (Spectator, 9 March 1962, 297-303) chose to reopen the topic of the relationship between scientific and literary culture and to disagree violently with Snow's arguments. Lea vis also made an extremely harsh assessment of the intelligence exhibited in Snow's fiction, commenting that "as a novelist, Snow doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a novel is. The nonentity is apparent on every page of his fictions" (299). The controversy, and the lengthy correspondence in The Spectator contributed by supporters of the two combatants, still ranks as a high point of acrimony in the history of postwar criticism in English. Leavis's discussion subsequently appeared as a book, Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), and Snow weighed in with The Two Cultures and a Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 3 See William Hazlitt, "Why the Arts Are not Progressive?—A Fragment," in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London and Toronto: Dent, 1930), 4:160-4. 4 NF is referring to the "goofus bird" of Jorges Luis Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969). See the chapter titled "Fauna of the United States" ([Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1974], 69).

Notes to pages 317-27

379

5 NF is quoting from John Henry Newman's The Hymn of a Perplexed Soul, 11. 5-6 (1833), commonly known as "Lead, Kindly Light.". 6 NF's source is Sir Richard Blackmore, Creation, bk. 2,11. 636-7. 7 In a General Scholium added to a second edition of Principia, Sir Isaac Newton announced that "hypotheses non fingo" adding that "Quicquid enim ex phaenomenis non deducitur, Hypothesis vocanda est; & hypotheses, seu Metaphysicae, seu Physicae, seu Qualitatum Occultarum, seu Mechanicae, in Philosophia Experimentali locum non habent." ("I do not frame hypotheses . . . . Whatever cannot be deduced from the phenomena must be called hypotheses, and whether they be metaphysical, physical, concerning the occult properties, or mechanical, hypotheses have no place in experimental philosophy.") See Isaac Newton, Opera Quae Extant Omnia (Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann, 1964), 3:174. However, Alexander Koyre has argued that the proper translation is "I do not feign hypotheses." 8 The satire Mundus Alter et Idem (1605) was written by Joseph Hall (15741656), the self-styled "first English satirist," who subsequently became Bishop of Exeter and Norwich. A translation appeared in 1609. 9 In Solitude and Society (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938), Berdyaev complains that "the philosopher's position is never secure; he can never be sure of his independence" (11). Berdyaev protests throughout his work at the pressure which groups exert on independent thinking. 10 An allusion to stanzas 3 and 5 of Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. 11 See Zeus Rants, in Lucian, vol. 2, ed. and trans. A.M. Harmon (London: William Heinemann, 1915), 101-9. 12 NF's Late Notebooks indicate his great interest in Pynchon's baroque novel Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973. NF thought the book one of the few works of literature to deal seriously with the relationship between art and creative paranoia. See LN, 1:124, 381, 385,402. See also DG, 17-18, and DV, 25-6, or NFR, 185-6. 13 For Einstein's "cryptic and mystical utterances," sample his Cosmic Religion with Other Opinions and Aphorisms (New York: Covici Friede, 1931), esp. "On Science," 97-103. 14 Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) reports that Einstein and Bohr thrashed out their arguments most ferociously over hotel breakfasts during the Solvay Congress held in Brussels in the fall of 1927. Einstein clung tenaciously to his view that "God does not throw dice" before planning the physical universe, while the more sceptical Bohr replied, "Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world" (81).

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64/2 65/28 74/10 74/14 74/31 74/35 74/23 83/23 90/39 91/16 93/28 94/31 96/12-13 102/34 109/10 111/15 114/17 123/23 148/15 152/34

to be immature for to be mature (as in NFF, 1988, box 16, file 11134) Mind at the End for The Mind at the End Notes towards the Definition for Notes toward a Definition

organizing ideas of religion—original sin, Incarnation, a personal power of evil, and the like—as for organizing ideas of religion, original sin, Incarnation, a personal power of evil, and the like, as Being and Nothingness for Being and Nothing essay On Liberty for Essay on Liberty

Gluck-Piccini for Gluck-Puccini Germans expended on for Germans bent on appeared for appears serious than for serious that Tschaikowsky's for his advantage for advantages sane for saner a free hand to two authentic geniuses for two authentic geniuses a free hand with both Jung and for both with Jung and socialist realism for social realism E.T. Raymond for Ernest Raymond destroyed. Giotto's for destroyed, Giotto's latter for later than tuttis for that tuttis "socialist realism" for "social realism" of the book reviewer for of the book reviewers Armies of the Night for Armies in the Night (as in SM)

when the king had heard for when the king heard (AV)

382

153/21 163/7 176/1 *79/37 182/26 183/2 188/19 194/22 200/17 213/12 215/18 218/39 229/4 242/15-16 247 /13-14 251 / 37 252 / 6-7 2 55/!7 264/4 278/23-4 280/9 281/16 286/29 295/26 318/36

Emendations Bias of Communication for Bias of Communications the hypercritical for and hypercritical strikes for strike mass murder for massed murder octave counterpoint for octave counterpart (as in "The Diatribes of Wyndham Lewis") retired-colonel for retired colonial You may for One may (as in Browning's original) Mr. Young for Mr. Young's in his for in him in his film Alexander Nevsky for film of Alexander Nevsky hole-and-corner for hole-in-corner require for requires Mind for The Mind nothing like the outburst of technical experiment for nothing like the outburst of technical experiment like the one throw Socialism for throwing Socialism but with the for but the narcissism for narcism secondly, the removal for secondly, in the removal narcissism for narcism giving a social function to large groups, of people who for giving large groups of people a social function who a religion/or a religious above his own interests for above those of his own interests and how they said for and of how they said socialist realism for social realism northern California for southern California

Index

Abstract Expressionism, 34 Abstraction (in painting), 54, 94, 129. See also Formalism Absurd, the, 25 Ada Victoriana, NF edits, 175 Action-painting, 34 Activism, 65 Acts of the Apostles, 18, 259 Adam: in Beckett, 25; in Paradise, 128; and progress, 230 Adams, Brooks (1848-1927): The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), 302-3

Advertising, 9, 33, 36, 40, 49, 51, 56, 242; and convention, 163; as interested art, 39; and propaganda, 13, 14; and television, 135. See also Propaganda Aeroplane, 21-2, 136, 170; view from, 128 Aeschylus (ca. 525-456 B.C.), 91 Aesthetics, democratization of, 53 Africa, 22; communist revolt of, 223 Agency: in literature, 164-5; NF champions, xl Agincourt, Battle of, 322 Air travel. See Aeroplane Alaska, 6 Albee, Edward (b. 1928), 56; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), 26

Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), 22 Algebra, 131 Alienation, 18, 22, 25; creative form of, 39; and mechanization, 292-3; of progress, 11-12, 15, 16, 21, 25, 41, 44; technology causes, 136 Allegory, 78; in fiction, 242; in Kafka, 40-1 American Civil War, 8, 24; and Communism, 223 American Revolution, 17, 27, 61, 250 American Senate Committee on UnAmerican Activities, 276. See also McCarthyism; Dies, Martin Analogy: mythological, 65; Spengler's method of, 298, 303-4, 305 Anarchism, 115; American, 101; in American literature, 42-3; in art, 100-1; and Chaplin, 117; and democracy, 294; and the media, 291; and oral media, 139; production as, 288-9; and television, 150 Anarchy: and democracy, 186 Angel, 61 Antheil, George (1900-59), 86 Anthropology, 53, 93, 185 Antichrist, 101, 118-19, 121; and the modern age, 239 Anti-Semitism, 101, 164, 192

384 Anxiety, 12-13, 18, 22, 25, 27, 172 Apelles (4th century B.C.)/ 102 Apocalypse: aesthetic, 53; in history, 238-9 Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225-74), i&2 Archaeology, 53 Arendt, Hannah (1906-75): The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), 64 Aria form, 84 Aristocracy, children as, 276 Aristophanes (ca. 448-388 B.C.), 116 Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), 60, 123; Poetics, 88, 128, 316 Arms race, 171 Arnold, Matthew (1844-88), 96, 142; Culture and Anarchy, xxi, 65 Artist, the, 79; and audience, 38; contemporary, 126-7, 130-1; as criminal, 46-8, 121-2; and museums, 52; as neighbour, 58; in the nineteenth century, 85; sells out, 132; and society, 41-2, 62; struggles of, 167; and tradition, 45-6; 128-9; and the university, 55-6 Arts: creative, 9, 26; authority of, 169; autonomy of, 31; concern and style in, 323; cooperative, 90-1; decentralizing tendencies of, 318-19; emancipating force of, 34-5; and the First World War, 93; freedom of, 128-9; function of, 295; imperfect versus masterpiece in, 38-9; and labour, 42; and laissez-faire, 186; and leisure structure, 52-5; mechanization of, 35-7; minor, 53; and nature, 127-8, 133; primitive, 316; as prophetic, 62, 67; response to, 21; and society, 79-80, 132-3, 167-72; Spengler's view of, 270; and tradition, 45-6, 127-8; vision of, 281. See also Contemporary art; Modern art

Index Arts and sciences (as subjects of study), 324-5 Ashcan school, 34 Asia, 22; communist revolt of, 222 Assassination, 209-10 Astronomy, 168; in the Middle Ages, 60 Atheism, 61, 101 Athens, Periclean, 29 Atkinson, C(harles) F(rancis) (b. 1880), 265 Atomic bomb, 208, 223, 228, 245, 250, 325 Attlee, Clement Richard, ist Earl (1883-1967), 246 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907-73), 38, 183, 242; The Fall of Rome (1947), 305; For the Time Being (1944), 305 Audience: agency of, 166; in the modern age, 163 Augustine, St. (A.D. 354-430): City of God (A.D. 412-27), 229-30 Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 27; Northanger Abbey (1818), 147 Australia, 30 Author, the, 240. See also Novelist; Writer Authority, two kinds of, 168-9 Autobiography, 115 Automobile, 21, 136, 160, 167; evil of, 289 Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules (1910-89), 144-5 Babel, Isaak Emmanuelovich (1894I94i)/ 34 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750), 80, 84, 91; as Christian, 90; as peasant, 83; St. Matthew Passion (1729), 90 Ballads, oral, 54 Ballet, 76-8; as cooperative art, 91; as

Index new art form, 80-2; Russian, 74, 78, 81 Ballet Russe, 76-8 Balzac, Honore de (1799-1856), chef d'oeuvre inconnu, 38-9 Barna da Siena (fl. ca. 1350), 190 Bartolo di Fredi (ca. 1330-1410), 190 Baseball, 9, 14 Basile, Jean (1932-92), 161 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67), 19, 27, 54, 102, 142; his antagonism to society, 43 Beatle(s): haircuts, 28; in Toronto, 296 Beatnik movement, 31, 44, 55, 129 Beckett, Samuel (1906-89), 27, 38, 56; Waiting for Godot (1956), 25 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827), 85, 90; Opus 106, 35; Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) (1808), no; Rasoumovsky Quartet (1806), 35 Belief: defined, 274-5; and mythology, 65; structure of, 65-6, 67-8 Bellamy, Edward (1850-98): Looking Backward (1888), 17 Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1874-1948): Solitude and Society (1938), 323 Berg, Alban (1885-1935): Wozzeck (1925), 75 Bergman, Ingmar (b. 1918), 56 Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), 181, 182; influences Wyndham Lewis, 306 Berlin, Irving (1888-1989), no Berne, Eric (1910-70): Games People Play (1964), 63 Between-the-wars period, 96 Bevan, Aneurin (1897-1960), 247 Bible, 59, 60, 153, 226 Billings, William (1746-1800), 35 Bismarck, Prince Otto Edward Leopold von (1815-98): Spengler on, 299, 300

385 Blackmore, Sir Richard (1655-1729): Creation, 320 Blake, William (1757-1827), 54, 85, 171; innocence and experience in, 68; new Jerusalem of, 70; on tyranny, 24; Jerusalem (1804-20), 120; The Lamb (1789), 68; The Mental Traveller (i8oo?-4), 54; The Tyger (1794), 68 Blond Bombshell (film) (1933), 87 Body, mechanical extension of, 19 Boer War, 262 Bohemians, 43-4 Bohr, Niels (1885-1962), 327 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount (1678-1751), 23 Bononcini, Giovanni Battista (16701747)/ 74 Book(s): and freedom, 154; God writes, 139; and the individual, 150; in the modern age, 240; NF's early, 140-2; reviewing, 123-5; sacred, 150, 153; technological efficiency of, 144 Border, Canada-U.S., 8, 232 Borduas, Paul-Emile (1905-60): Refus Global (1948), 69 Borges, Jorge Luis (1898-1986): Book of Imaginary Beings (1969), 316 Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro Filipepi) (1444-1510), 95 Brahms, Johannes (1833-97), 40, 102 Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956), 39, 42 Brett, George Sidney (1879-1944): History of Psychology (1912-21), 144 Brewer, David (1837-1910): The World's Best Essays (1900), 142 Britain. See Great Britain Brown, Les: "Canadian Industry Realities: Can We Do without Violence?" (1975), 159 Brown, Norman O. (b. 1913): Life against Death (1959), 64

386 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (180662), 141 Browning, Robert (1812-89): Responses to Challenges to Rhyme (1914), 188 Brueghel, Pieter (ca. 1525-69): Slaughter of the Innocents, 35 Bruno, Giordano (1548-1600), 168 Bryn Mawr College, 233 Buber, Martin (1878-1965): land Thou (1923), 64 Bucephalus (Alexander the Great's horse), 105 Bunyan, John (1628-88): The Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84), 11, 39 Buonaparte, Napoleon (1769-1821), 176 Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 23; Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), 148 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902): Erewhon (1872), 129 Byron, George Gordon, Baron Byron of Rochdale (1788-1824), 27, 37 Byzantine art, 31, 34-5 Caesar (generic), 118 Cage, John (1912-92), 40 Cain and Abel: in Beckett, 25 Camus, Albert (1913-60): L'Etranger (1941), 47, 119; La Peste (1946), 1819, 325 Canada, 50; accent in, 103; Americanization of, 28, 30; Americans as seen by, 234; censorship in, 215, 216-17; Centennial of, 8, 13, 26, 27; character of, 6; Confederation of, 5-6, 21; cooperation in, xix, xxvi, xliii; culture of, 6-7; drama in, 240; elementary teaching in, 62-3; French language in, 28, 30; grain elevators in, 192; identity of, 69-70; language

Index of, 105; literature of, 318-19; loyalty in, 69-70; and the monarchy, 263; national status of, 7-8; and Nazism, 185; novel in, 146; peace movement in, 244-5; railway journeys in, 14; separatism in, 136; and Spengler, 270; spy trails in, 220; television in, 157; and the U.S., 232-3; writers in, 55/ 105 Canada Council, 56, 132 Canadian Art, 132 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. SeeCQC Canadian content, 292 Canadian Forum: on censorship, 217; funding of, 132; NF edits, xx, xxxvi; NF writes for, xxv-xxvi, 29 Canadian National Exhibition. See CNE Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. See CRTC Canon, the, 67 Capitalism, 12, 57, 184-5, 288; and literature, 152; wartime conditions of, 253 Capital punishment, 158 Caplow, Theodore (b. 1920): The Academic Market-Place (1958), 63 Capote, Truman (1924-84): In Cold Blood (1966), 148 Capra, Frank (1897-1991): Arsenic and Old Lace (film) (1944), 119 Car. See Automobile Caricature: and satire, 81 Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 36 Carnegie, Dale (1888-1955): How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), 193 Carpaccio, Vittore (1472-1526), 192 Carr, Emily (1871-1945), 69

Index Carrel, Alexis (1873-1944): Man, the Unknown (1935), 228 Carroll, Madeleine (1906-87), 99 Cartoons, 113 Caruso, Enrico (1873-1921), 74 Castiglione, Baldassare (1478-1529),

China, 184, 223; drama in, 90, no; future of, 287; modern, 237, 250; and the U.S., 13-14 Chirico, Giorgio de (1888-1978), 94 Chopin, Frederic-Francois (1810-49),

39 Catharsis, 165 Catholicism, 45-6; Communism parodies, 239; and Deism, 255 CBC, 55, 240 CCF, xxvi, 232-3 Censorship, 159; and democracy, 215-17; of literature, 217-18; and the mob, 169; and sex, 218-19; as violence, 159 Ceramics, 53 Cervantes, Saavedra, Miguel de (1547-1616): Don Quixote (1605-15), 24, 116, 147, 316 Cezanne, Paul (1839-1906), 34, 35 Chagall, Marc (1887-1985), 114 Chaplin, Sir Charles (Charlie) (18891977)/ 43/ 91/ 181; masterpieces of, 98-102; NF on, xxxv-xxxvi; as tramp, 116-22; City Lights (1931), 100, 117, 118, 119; The Gold Rush (1925), 100, 117; The Great Dictator (1940), 101-2, 116, 118-19, 121, 214; Modern Times (1936), 100-1, no, 118; Monsieur Verdoux (1947), 47/ 116, 119-22 Charity: imaginative, xlvi; present value of, 259; radical, 277 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345-1400), 152; The Clerk's Tale, 97 Chefd'oeuvre inconnu, 38-9 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (18741936): Chaucer (1925), 190 Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), 223, 282 Children, 329; as aristocracy, 276; and stories, 161; and violence, 164

Chosisme, 40 Christ, 68; and Chaplin, 121, 122; power of, 261 Christianity, 60; and Chaplin, 101; as closed mythology, 66; and Communism, 239-40; early, 23; and history, 227, 230; radical charity of, 277; and violence, 164; and war, 177 Christian mythology, 62-3, 88 Christmas, commercialization of, 13 Church, the, 57; and modern culture,

109

243

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874-1965), 103, 107, 186 Cinema: as cooperative art, 91 Circus, the, 89-90 City, the, 19-20, 60-1; as experience, 44-5; of God, 257; real, 231 Clair, Rene (1898-1981): Sous les toits de Paris (film) (1930), in Class conflict, 252 Claudel, Paul (1868-1955), 47, 242 Cliche, 15, 18, 36, 62, 63 Clown, 116-17 CNE, 92 Cochrane, Charles Norris (18891945), and NF, xxiv-xxv; Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), 227 Cocteau, Jean (1889-1963), 47 Codex, creation of, 143 Coffee table book, 144 Cohen, Leonard (b. 1934): Beautiful Losers (1966), 39 Coldwell, Major James William (1888-1974), 244 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-

388 1834): Lyrical Ballads (1798), 54; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798),

92 Comedie larmoyante, 74

Comedy, 116-17; as myth of deliverance, 328; in opera, 74 Comic books, 217, 241 Comic strips, 43 Commedia dell'arte, 241

Commerce: and literature, 241-2 Commonwealth Cooperative Federation. See CCF Commonwealth of Nations, 247; and royalty, 263-4 Communications media. See Mass media; Media Communication theory, 134-5 Communism, 12, 50, 184-5, 236/ 23840, 288; analogy in, 249; and Chaplin, 117; collapse in America of, 42; culture in, 30; as dystopia, 24; persecution for, 14, 220-1, 224-5, 245; and progress, 228; resists the modern, 28; social good of, 277; socialist realism in, 33-4; theology of, 17; and war, 254; world view of, 222-3 Community, 12, 19-20, 150; loyalty to, 293; of readers, 138; spiritual and intellectual, 257; and technology, 136-7; true, 280-1; ultimate, 61 Concern: and myth, 59, 321-2; mythologies of, 63-5, 323-5; and panic, 293; two levels of, 168-9, 171-2 Condorget, Antoine Nicolas, Marquis de (1743-94), 17 Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), 146; Lord Jim (1900), 147 Contemporary art, 126-7; academic, 129; educational, 131, 132-3. See also Modern art

Index Contemporary culture: and the university, 55-6, 58-9, 298 Contemporary literature, 9, 59. See also Modern literature Continuity: and art, 45-6 Continuum of life, 148-9, 161 Convention: and art, 127, 128-9; in literature, 163. See also Tradition Coolidge, John Calvin (1872-1933), 103 Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851), 42 Cooperation: and art, 90-1; in Canada, xix, xxvi, xliii Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. See CCF Copyright, 152 Cornford, F(rancis) M(acdonald) (1874-1943): influence on NF, xxxv Cote, Guy, 164 Cox, Harvey (b. 1929): The Secular City (1965), 64 Creation: and sex, 44 Criminal: as artist, 46-8, 121-2 Criticism, 169; free, 15, 293; as science of literature, 123; as simultaneous response, 138; and Spengler, 306; Wilde begins, 147 Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658), 176 Crown. See Monarchy; Royalty CRTC, 157, 159, 163; and Canadian content, 292 Crucifixion, 164 Cruden's Concordance, 141

Cubism, 37, 94 Culture: active and passive responses to, 9, 21, 26-7, 38, 153, 162-3, 16970, 327; Canadian, 6-7; coherence of, 30; as cult, 129-30; cycle of, 35; decentralized, 28-9; dialectic of, 89; expansion of, 144; genuine, 243; mass, 9, 33; and nature, 321; popu-

Index lar, 31; as prophetic, 62; revolutionary, 31-2, 241; and teaching, 58-9; visionary, xlii; Western as reborn Classical, 311-12 Czechoslovakia, 184 Dadaism, 93, 94 Dali, Salvador (1904-89), 94; Autumnal Cannibalism (1936), 95; Great Dreamer, 95 Dalton, Baron Hugh (1887-1962), 247 Dance: in ballet, 78; as origin of music and drama, 79-80, 91 Daniel, Book of, 45 Daniel, Yuli (Nikolai Arzhak) (192588), 34 Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 182; Inferno, 22, 23 Darwin, Charles (1809-82), 28, 62, 64, 179, 260, 271 Daumier, Honore (1808-78), 34 Dawson, P. Norman (b. 1902): Blue Mouth of Paradise, 93-4 Dean, Abner (b. 1910): It's a Long Way to Heaven (1945), 113 Death: consciousness of, 18; -wish, 12 Debussy, Claude Achille (1862-1918), 84,85 Decadence in art, 99 Degas, Edgar (1834-1917), 33 Deism, American culture as, 237-8, 254-9 Delius, Frederick (1862-1934), 83-6; Brigg Fair (1907), 83; On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912), 83; A Mass of Life (1904), 86; Sea Drift (1904), 86; Songs of Sunset (1907), 86 Deliverance. See Emancipation; Myth of deliverance Democracy, 14-15, 41, 49, 50, 57-8, 65, 160, 184-5; action in, 229; aims of, 274-5; in America, 250-4; and anar-

389 chism, 294; and the arts, 129, 168; the arts vulgarized by, 179-80; the book creates, 155; and censorship, 215-17; classless society of, 276-7; closed myth in, 66-7; and Communism, 223, 224-5; and concern, 169; and the depravity of man, 279; as dystopia, 24; and freedom, 259; the ideal of, 235-6; and the Kinsey report, 219; and laissez-faire, 185-6, 238; and the mass media, 149; and the police, 233-4; and the university, 169; writing creates, 138-9 Depression, the, 26, 42, 51, 119, 276 Descartes, Rene (1596-1650), 260 De Sica, Vittorio (1901-74): Shoeshine (film) (1946), 241 Design: in nature, 60, 62; unifies the arts, 53 Destiny, genuine human, 27 Detective fiction, 38, 39, 318 Deuteronomy, Book of, 153 Devil. See Satan De Vries, Peter (1910-93), 318 Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich (18721929), 81 Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 141, 147; and the city, 20; read aloud, 150; David Copperfield (1849-50), 116 Dictatorship. See Totalitarianism; Tyranny Dictionary of accepted ideas, 63 Dies, Martin (1900-72), 225 Discontinuity in modern poetry, 36,

38 Discordia concors, 37 Disney, Walt (1901-66), 91; Fantasia (1940), 108, no; Farmyard Symphony (1938), no; Reluctant Dragon (1941), in; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), 91 Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-81), 6

390 Dos Passes, John (1896-1970), 48, 104 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821-81), 28; Notes from Underground (1864), 37; The Possessed (1872), 47 Dowson, Ernest (1867-1900): Non Sum Qualis Emm Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae (1896), 86 Dragon: as bondage, 261 Drama, 56, 105, 170; and the book, 150; in Canada, 240; Elizabethan, 82; and music, 79-80, 88-9; and the news media, 162; and society, 98 Dream(s), 40; and Dadaism, 93 Dryden, John (1631-1700): An Evening's Love: or The Mock Astrologer (1671), 100; Aureng-Zebe (1675), 125 Duffy, Clarence Eugene (Father), 245 Duke Ellington (1899-1974), no Duns Scotus, Johannes (ca. 12651308): Opus Oxoniense, 201 Dutch realism, 33 Dystopia, 23, 24. See also Progress, Myth of Ecclesiasticus, Book of, 108 Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley (18821944), 65; The Nature of the Physical World (1928), 64 Eden, garden of, 61, 165, 230 Education: adult, 52; and art, 129, 131, 132; democratic, 235-6; genuine, 170; and leisure, 50; as leisure structure, 57-9; and production, 49; as real life, 294-5; and society, 51-2; and the victim, 164; and violence, 161; writing creates, 138 Egypt, 30 Eighteenth century, 61-2, 171; natural society of, 23; and primitivism, 45

Index Einstein, Albert (1879-1955), 182, 271, 327 Eisenhower, Dwight David (18901969), 292 Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich (1898-1948): Alexander Nevsky (film) (1938), 213 Electronic media: and anarchism, 139; and the book, 150; and oral culture, 137-8; and tyranny, 153-4; and violence, 163 Elgar, Sir Edward (1857-1934), 86; as patriot, 83 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-80), 146; Daniel Deronda (1876), 147; Middlemarch (1871-2), 147; Romola (1862-3), *47 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965), 30, 36, 67, 127, 145-6, 242; NF on, xxix-xxxii; odour of sanctity, 131-2; poet and snob, 307; as royalist, 46; self -defined, 115; table of imagery for, 305; Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (1919), 112, 192; Cousin Nancy (1915), 142; Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), 29; The Waste Land (1921), 10, 36, 38, 45, 46, 131-2 Elizabeth I (1533-1603), 262-3 Elizabeth II (b. 1926), 69, 262-4 Elizabethan drama, 90, no Elizabethan England, 30. See also Great Britain Ellison, Ralph (1914-94): Invisible Man (1952), 295 Emancipation: concern of, 325-7; myths of, 328 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82), 142 Encyclopedists, French, 27 English language, dominance of, 28 Epicurus (ca. 341-271 B.C.), 182

Index Equality, 57; charity the basis of, 277-8 Erie, Lake, 296 Ernst, Max (1891-1976): The Burning Woman, 93 Erotic, the, 218-19 Europe: education in, 58; imperialism of, 260-1; unification of, 246-7 Everyman, Chaplin as, 121, 122 Evolution, analogies of, 64-5 Existentialism, 63, 145; and mythology, 64; as thriller, 242-3 Exodus (not the book), 24 Experience: and innocence, 44-5 Expressionism, 180 Fairley, Barker (1887-1986), 232, 233; influence on NF, xxvi-xxvii, xxix, xxxi Fairy tales, 161 Faith, 66; loss of, 67; royalty stands for, 264; and truth, 259 Fall of man, 291 Falstaff, 116 Fantasy, 40, 146, 147, 148 Farmers, diction of, 105 Farrell, James (1904-79): Bernard Clare (1946), 217 Fascism, 46, 86, 176, 181, 236, 238-9; as oligarchy, 252 Fashion: as symbol, 10 Faulkner, William (1897-1962), 58, 318 Fear. See Anxiety Fellini, Federico (1920-93), 56 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814), 298 Fiction: and accepted ideas, 63; development of, 146-8; in the modern age, 242-3 Fiedler, Leslie (b. 1917): An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), 64

391 Fielding, Henry (1707-54): Joseph Andrews (1742), 147 Film. See Movies Finance, conspiracies of, 46 First World War, 176, 177, 180; art after, 93; and Spengler, 297 Flag, Canadian, 69 Flanders, 35 Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 28, 97; Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881), 63; Madame Bovary (1856), 147 Flemish, 28 Florence, Medicean, 29 Folk singing, 54 Folk song, 146 Fool, the, 116 Formalism, 34-5, 36; and museums, 53; in poetry, 54 Fortier, Andre (b. 1927): "On Patronage" (1986), 167 France, 22; and Germany, 246; modern, 237, 250 Franck, Cesar Auguste (1822-90), 84, 86 Frankenstein (film), 109, 241 Franklin, Benjamin (1706-90), 100 Fraternity: and community, 280; and leisure structure, 57-8 Frazer, Sir James George (1854-1941), 28; The Golden Bough (1907-15), 206 Frederick II (the Great) (1712-86), 182 Freedom, 23, 24, 26; of the arts, 128-9; battles of, 154-5; and Chaplin, 117, 122; and death, 326; and democracy, 235-6; and imagination, 53; and the individual, 293; and liberal education, 259; and print, 139; and the self, 278-80; and the Word, 243 Freemasonry, 254 Free press, 154, 159 Free verse, 129

Index

392 French Canada: chansonniers in, 54; in the nineteenth century, 45 French language in Canada, 28, 30 French Revolution, 17, 27, 61, 180, 237; fraternity in, 280 Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), 28, 63, 137, 180, 185, 260, 271; and Dadaism, 93; -inspired artistic movements, 40; reality and illusion in,

327

Freudian proletariat, 44-5 Friedan, Betty (b. 1921): The Feminine Mystique (1963), 49 Frost, Robert (1874-1963), 318 Frye, Herman Northrop (1912-91): and Acta Victoriana, 175; and agency, xl; bookshelf of, 63-4; and Canadian Forum, xx, xxv-xxvi, xxxvi, 29; as cultural critic, xlviiixlix; cultural criticism in three phases, xix-xxi; early life with books, 140-2; in Italy, 188-92; lectures at McMaster, 5; and myth of deliverance, xlv-xlvi; on postindustrial society, xliv-xlv; and the postwar world, xxxvi-xxxvii; predicts future, 291-2; and radio, 134; on reading, xlvi-xlvii; and secondhand bookshops, 142-3; as semiotician, xliv; speaking voice of, 104; as student, 317; teachers of, xxiv-xxv; and television, 134; and Toronto, xxiii; on university, xlvii-xlviii - works: Anatomy of Criticism (1957), xix, xxii-xxiii; "Conclusion," Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (1965), 5; "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism" (1963), 260; Fearful Symmetry (1947), xix, xxii; The Modern Century (1967), xx, xxxiv, xxxvii-xxxviii; "The Renais-

sance of Books" (1973), xlvi-xlvii; "Tenets of Modern Culture" (1950), xliii-xliv Future, 17, 18, 26, 288; as destruction, 24; NF predicts, 291-2; of society, 316-17; and technology, 134-5; as unknowable, 286 Futurist movement, 35 Futurology, 285, 316-17 Gable, Clark (1901-60), 87 Gagne, Jean (b. 1929), 170 Galbraith, John Kenneth (b. 1908): The Affluent Society (1958), 63 Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564-1642),

168 Gandhi, Mahatma (1869-1948), 162, 209-10 Gascoyne, David (1916-2001), 94; A Short History of Surrealism (1936),

93

Gawsworth, John (Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong) (1912-70): Apes, Japes, and Hitlerism: A Study and Bibliography of Wyndham Lewis (1932), 183 Gay, John (1685-1732): The Beggar's Opera (1728), 74-5 Gelinas, Gratien (1909-99): Fridolinons (1945), 240 General Motors, 289 Genesis, Book of, 124, 141, 231 Genet, Jean (1910-86): Le Balcon (1956), 47-8 George, St.: as liberty, 261 George, Stefan (1868-1933), 46 Germain, Jean-Claude (b. 1939),

168 German language, 29-30 Germany, 22, 30; and France, 246; intellectuals in, 211; modern, 90, 237, 250; and music, 74; painting in, 95; Romantics in, 46; Romanti-

Index cism in, 212; as Rome, 300; volkisch aspect of, 45 Gershwin, George (1898-1937), no Ghirlandaio, Domenico (di Tommaso Bigordi) (1449-94), 189, 191 Ghosts: and television, 162 Gibbon, Edward (1737-94): Decline

and Fall of the Roman Empire (177688), 60, 206, 263 Gide, Andre Paul Guillaume (1869-

1951), 102; Les Caves du Vatican (1914), 47; The Counterfeiters (1926), 39 Ginsberg, Allen (1926-97): Howl (1956), 146 Giono, Jean (1895-1970), 45 Giotto (di Bondone) (ca. 1266-1337), 34, 102 Global village, 136 Gliick, Christoph Willibald (1714-87), 74, 77, 80 God, 64; alienation from, n; and the book, 139; as creator, 60-1; hypothesis of, 61-2; as infinite, 259; and the lunatic, 101; in man, 261; in poetry, 242 Goebbels, Joseph (1897-1945), 193 Golding, William (1911-93): Lord of the Flies (1954), 23 Goodman, Paul (1911-72): Growing up Absurd (1960), 43 Good Samaritan, 58 Gorky, Maxim (1868-1936), 42 Gospels, the 18 Gounod, Charles (1818-93): Faust (1859), 75 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746-1828), 34, 127 Graf, Max (1873-1958): Modern Music (1946), 112 Grant, George (1918-88): Lament for a Nation (1965), xxxix

393 Great Britain, 6, 50, 184; accent in, 103; decentralization of, 29; empire of, 262; Labour Government of, 246-7; modern, 237, 250; the monarchy in, 235; and war, 175-7 Great Chain of Being, 260 Great War. See First World War Greece, ancient, 29, 30; drama in, 734; religious philosophy of, 88 Greene, Graham (1904-91), 243 Grieg, Edvard (1843-1907), 84, 109 Group of Seven, 92 Grove, Frederick Philip (1879-1948):

A Search for America (1927), 43, 69 Guggenheim Museum, 132 Gutenberg syndrome, 21 Hamilton, 20 Hamsun, Knut (1859-1952), 45 Handel, Georg Friedrich (1685-1759), 74, 80, 84 Hapsburg Empire, 30 Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928): 1967 (1867), 6 Harlequin, 116 Harlow, Jean (1911-37), 87 Harmony, 89 Havelock, Eric Alfred (1903-88): influence on NF, xxvii-xxix Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-64), 100 Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732-1809), 40 Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 132 Heaven, 61 Hebrew: culture, 30; language, 28 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831): on history, 301-2; Phe-

nomenology of Mind (1807), 143 Heliocentrism, 168 Hell, 22 Hemingway, Ernest Miller (18991961), 318

394 Hemon, Louis (1880-1913): Maria Chapdelaine (1914 and 1916), 45 Hero, totalitarian, 249 Hindenburg Line, 177 Hiroshima, 291 Hirsch, John (1930-89), 170 History: apocalypse in, 238-9; deliverance from, 24; development of, 137; progress in, 227-31 Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945), 100, 103, 171, 179, 268; and Chaplin, 102, 118, 119-20, 121; and Romanticism, 212; Spengler on, 307; and Wagner, 81, 90; Mein Kampf (1925-27), 223 Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679): on social contract, 41; Leviathan (1651), 187 Hobo figure, 43, 44 Hoffa, Jimmy (1913-75?), 276 Holland, 30 Hollywood, 91, 99, 109, 111, 240 Hoist, Gustav (1874-1934), 86 Holy sinner, 47 Homer (8th c. B.C.): as oratory, 104; Odyssey, 89 Homo ludens, 38 Hooker, Richard (1553/4-1600), 61 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89), 36 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65-8 B.C.): Ars Poetica, 124, 129; Odes, 177 Howe, Irving (1920-93): Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953-1966 (1966), 64 Hughes, H[enry] Stuart (1916-99): Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (1952), 298 Hugo, Victor-Marie (1802-85), 36, 102 Huizinga, Johan (1872-1945): Homo Ludens (1938), 328 Hull, Andrea, 167

Index Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (18831917), 37 Humanists: and scientists, 315-16, 329 Humanities: and contemporary culture, 58-9 Human nature, 281 Hungary, 30, 220 Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963): Antic Hay (1923), 180; Brave New World (1932), 23 Hysteria, 13; and the future, 286; and war, 291 Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906): Nora (1879), 309 Identity, personal, 134 Illusion, 14-15; breakdown in, 44; and reality, 26, 327-8 Imagination, 94, 95, 281; contemporary, 26-7; education of, 161; free, 295; and freedom, 53; modern, 56; and myth, 67-8; and mythology, 323-4; in primitive art, 53; and society, 132-3, 148; violence as lack of, 158 Imitation, 128; in the arts, 52; of nature, 32-3. See also Tradition Immanence, language of, 321 Immigration, Canada-U.S., 232-4 Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire. See IODE Impressionism, 28, 32-3, 35, 180. See also Painting Improvement. See Progress Incidental music. See Movies; Music Index, bad, 226 India, 184, 209-10; Empress of, 262; modern, 250 Individual: and the book, 150; and freedom, 293; and progress, 18; and society, 151, 259-60

Index Indonesia, 8, 282 Industrialization. See Mechanization Industrial Revolution, 27, 207, 230, 248-50, 318; modern age begins with, 48-9; and Spengler, 179, 313; and the will, 85-6 Industry, 57; as rival society, 49, 50 Innis, Harold Adams (1894-1952): and NF, xxiv-xxv; The Bias of Communication (1951), 21, 153 Innocence: and experience, 44-5 International modern. See International style; Modern age International style: begins in 1867, 27-8; resistance to, 28-31 Introversion: technology causes, 136, 170, 292 IODE (Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire), 105 Ireland, 30 Irish language, 28 Irony, 18; and advertising, 13 Irrational in modern art, 40 Irving, Washington (1753-1859): Rip Van Winkle (1819), 42, 117 Irwin, Robert (b. 1928): "The Elements of 'Art'" (1986), 167, 168 Isaiah, 19; Book of, 101 Italy, 29; Communism in, 252; futurist movement in, 35; modern, 237, 250; NF visits, 188-92; and opera, 74 lyengar, K.R. Srinivasa (1908-99): Lytton Strachey (1939), 96-7 James, Henry (1843-1916), 146; Portrait of a Lady (1881), 147 James, William (1842-1910): The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), 291 Japan, modern, 250 Jasper Park, 296 Jazz, 31

395 Jeans, Sir James Hopwood (18771946), 65 Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826), 117 Jeremiah, Book of, 151 Jews: and the Nazis, 101-2; Spengler on, 308-9 Joachim of Fiore (or Floris) (ca. 11351202), 226 John Birch Society, 66. See also the American Way John, Gospel of, 176, 221 Johnson, Hewlett (1874-1966), 245 Johnson, Lionel (1867-1902), 46 Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), 43; on mental life, 130 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) (b. 1934),

47 Jonson, Ben (1572-1637): publishes plays, 150; The Works of Ben Jonson (1616), 328 Jooss Ballet, 81-2 Jooss, Kurt (1901-79): The Green Table (1932), 81 Josephus, Flavius (ca. A.D. 37-100), 141 Jowett, Garth: "A Brief History of Opinion on the Social Effects of Mass Media" (1975), 158 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882-1941), 181; influences Wyndham Lewis, 306; Finnegans Wake (1939), 38; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 46; Ulysses (1922), 146, 218 Judaeo-Christian tradition, 277 Judaism: Nazism parodies, 239; Torah in, 321; and violence, 164 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961), 46, 93, 185; and Chaplin, 117 Jiinger, Ernst (1895-1998): On the Marble Cliffs (1939), 211-14 Justice: and torture, 221

396 Juvenal (ca. A.D. 55-127): Satires, 89 Kafka, Franz (1883-1924): The Castle (1926), 40-1 Kandinsky, Vasily (Wassily) (18661944), 95, H4 Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), 260; and Spengler, 298 Keats, John (1795-1821), 27; La Belle Dame sans Merci (1820), 54 Keats, John (b. 1920): The Insolent Chariots (1958), 63 Kern, Jerome (1885-1945), no Kerouac, Jack (1922-69): The Dharma Bums (1958), 44 Ketchum, John Davidson (18931962), 215 Kierkegaard, S0ren Aabye (1813-55), 124, 260; Either/Or (1843), 115 King Arthur, 312 Kings, Book of, 152, 177 Kinsey, Alfred C. (1894-1956): Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), 215 Kirpal, Prem: "Arts and Internationalism" (1986), 171 Klee, Paul (1879-1940), 94, 95 Knowledge: advance of, 295; coffins and flux of, 141; in a democracy, 217; as revolutionary, 287 Koestler, Arthur (1905-83): Darkness at Noon (1940), 229 Kotcheff, Ted (b. 1931): "How Can the Quality of Popular Programming be Improved?" (1975), 158, 161, 163 Kubrick, Stanley (1928-99): Dr. Strangelove (film) (1964), 12 Labour, 57; alienation of, 11; in the arts, 42; unions, 276 Laissez-faire, 16, 49, 50, 236; democracy as, 185-6; destroys democracy,

Index 238, 251; dinosauric, 253; and science, 169 Lampman, Archibald (1861-99), 5 Language: American, 104; of poetry, 319-20; purification of, 29-30; spoken, 103-7; three modes of, 321 Lao-tzu (6th c. B.C.), 200 Law (of God), 61-2, 321-2 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (18851930), 46; pastoralism in, 44, 45; poet and hysteric, 307; The Plumed Serpent (1926), 47; Women in Love (1920), 180 Layton, Irving (b. 1912), 5 League of Nations, 171 Leavis, Frank Raymond (1895-1978), 146; attacks C.P. Snow, 315 Leger, Fernand (1881-1955), 37 Leisure, 139; creates the arts, 295; growth of, 49-50; sphere of, xli; Leisure structure, 50-1; and the arts, 52-5; and education, 57-9; loyalty to, 57; and the university, 55-6 L'Enfant, Pierre Charles (1754-1825), 19 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870-1924), 114, 210, 233, 249; and deism, 255; and movies, 98; What is to be Done? (1902), 41 Levant, Oscar (1906-72), in; A Smattering of Ignorance (1940), 108 Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898-1963): religious allegory of, 242 Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair (1885-1951): Main Street (1920), 141-2, 145 Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (18821957), 37; on Canada, 7; on Spengler, 181-3; The Apes of God (1930), 180; The Art of Being Ruled (1926), 179, 182; The Dithyrambic Spectator (1931), 182; Hitler (1931), 182; The Lion and the Fox (1927), 181-2; Men

Index without Art (1934), 180; Paleface (1934), 180; Tan (1918), 180; Time and Western Man (1927), 179, 181, 182, 306 Liberal education, 58-9; and freedom, 259 Liberalism, 256-9 Liberty, 57, 61, 259, 278-80; and terrorism, 261 Liebert, Robert M. (b. 1942): "The Effects of Violence: Experimental and Research Findings" (1975), 160 Life: genuine human, 69-70; new, 11; present, 329; real, 18; strong as death, 151 Lincoln, Abraham (1809-65), 69; as orator, 104 Linear apprehension, 137-8 Linguistics, 54 Lissitsky, El (1890-1941), 114 Literature: authority of, 169; censorship of, 217-18; change from Romantic to modern, 35-7; and community, 150; development of, 152; erotic, 219; as hypothesis, 320; imitated by life, 147-50; language of, 319; in the modern age, 240-3; movies' impact on, 104, 107; phenomenal nature of, 150; principle of, 152; realism in, 54; regional, 31, 318-19; and totalitarianism, 211 Lloyd, Harold (1894-1971), no Locke, John (1632-1704), 260 Logos in poetry, 242 Lonergan, Bernard (1904-84): Insight (1957), 298 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-82), 141, 145 Long hair, 44 Loos, Anita (1893-1981), 181 Lowell, Amy (1874-1925), 104 Lowith, Karl (1897-1973): Meaning in

397 History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (1949), 226-31 Loy, Myrna (1905-93), 87 Loyalty, 57; in Canada, 69-70; problem of, 168; warranted by criticism, 293 Lozoya, Jorge Alberto: "Culture, Freedom and Change" (1986), 170 Lucian (ca. A.D. 120-80): Zeus Rants, 324 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca. 94-55 B.C.), 182 Luddites, humanists as, 315 Luke, Gospel of, 257 Luther, Martin (1483-1546), 229 Lutheran tradition, n Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (18981976), 312 MacDiarmid, Hugh (1892-1978), 48 Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527), 150, 182 MacLeish, Archibald (1892-1982), 100 Magazine(s), 51; little, 241 Magdalene, Mary, 31 Magic, 53; and books, 143; grammar as, 141 Maginot line, 40 Mailer, Norman Kingsley (b. 1923), 47; Armies of the Night (1968), 148 Malaysia, 282 Malevich, Kasimir (1878-1935), 114 Malraux, Andre (1901-76), 39 Man, 60; in God, 261; united with God, 259 Managerial dictatorship, 236, 238, 251 Mannix (television series), 163 Mantegna, Andrea (1431-1506), 95 Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979): Eros and Civilization (1955), 64

398 Marinetti, Emilio (1876-1944), 181 Mark, Gospel of, 101, 122 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of (1650-1722), 176 Marshall Plan, 246 Marx, Karl (1818-83), 28, 63, 69, 103, 239, 260, 271, 273, 313; on production, 249; on the social contract, 41; and Spengler, 202, 207; Das Kapital (1867), 6 Marxism, 24, 41, 44, 49, 202; artists under, 168; classless society of, 252; as closed mythology, 66; criticism, 34; and Deism, 255, 258; the Depression and, 317; on the future, 287-8; and leisure, 51; as religion, 67, 185; and revolution, 222-3; sci~ ence in, 66 Massine, Leonide (1896-1979), 81 Mass media, 51; and democracy, 149; resistance to, 135-6. See also Electronic media; Media Masterpiece, 316; decline of, 38-9 Masters, Edgar Lee (1869-1950): Spoon River Anthology (1915), 104

Matthew, Gospel of, 256 Maurras, Charles (1868-1952), 46 Mays, John Bentley (b. 1941): "Art and Reality?" (1986), 168 McCarthyism, 42, 149 McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (191180): on media fallout, 162; and the news, 290; and NF, xxxix-xli; on print, 137, 139, 154; and progress, 20-1; Understanding Media (1964), 64

McMaster University, 3-5 Meaning: reader determines, 40; and reality, 167 Mechanization, 35-7, 77-8, 118, 317; and alienation, 292-3; autonomous, 288-9; and violence, 158 Media, 20-1; and anarchism, 291; fall-

Index out, 162; and memory, 24; and the movies, 148. See also Electronic media Melodrama, 161, 164-5 Melody, 82, 84; in opera, 77 Melville, Herman (1819-91), 100; Moby Dick (1851), 101 Memory: destruction of, 24; and verse, 152; and writing, 135 Mencken, Henry Louis (1880-1956): Prejudices: Fifth Series (1926), 105

Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy), Felix (1809-47), 84, 109 Mental health, 283-4 Mesopotamia, 30 Messiah, totalitarian, 249 Metaphor, 54 Mexico, 30, 197 Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti) (1475-1564), 32 Middle Ages, 60, 66; culture of, 168; music and drama in, 88 Middle class: and the university, 55 Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), *7; On Liberty (1859), 65 Miller, Henry (1891-1980), 44, 45 Millet, Jean-Francois (1814-75): The Angelus (1859), 45 Milton, John (1608-74), 61; chaos of, 40; on music, 89; on oral society, 138-9 Mindszenty, Cardinal Jozsef (18921975), 220-1 Miro, Joan (1893-1983), 94 Mirror, 26-7 Mitchell, Margaret (1900-49): Gone with the Wind (1936), 108, 169 Mob rule, 24 Modern age, 22-3, 26, 27-8; antisocial attitudes in, 48; the arts in, 38, 41, 172; artists in, 126-7; audience in,

Index 163; ballet in, 78; begins with industrial revolution, 48-9; centre and orbit in, 128; cultural trends in, 248-61; defining characteristic, 8; information in, 151-2; literature in, 240-3; mythology of, 60, 62-3, 64; pollution of, 296; speed of change in, 10-11, 35, 295, 317; streamlining of, 35; tenets of, 237-40; Third Reich parodies, 314; ugliness of, 326 Modern art: irrational, 40; "isms" in, 94; militant, 38; movies in, 98; process over product in, 38-9 Modern culture. See Contemporary culture; Modern age Modern literature: anti-hero in, 37; discontinuity in, 36. See also Contemporary literature Modern poetry. See Poetry Modern style. See International style; Modern art Modigliani, Amadeo (1884-1920), 37 Mohr, J.W.: "Media and Controls" (1975), 161 Moloch, 18 MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), 132 Monarchy: and democracy, 235; power of, 263 Mondrian, Piet (1872-1944), 53 Monet, Claude (1840-1926), 32 Monroe Doctrine, 282 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (153392), 182 Moon landing, 291 Morris, William (1834-96), 20; on culture, 29; "The Lesser Arts" (1878), 53 Moscow Peace Congress, 244 Mother goddess, 62 Movies, 9, 14, 31, 56, 103, 105, 136; concentrates all art forms, 99; and literature, 104, 107; and the media,

399 148; as the modern art form, 98; music in, 108-11; and oratory, 240 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (175691), 77, 80, 84, 90, 91, 127, 144; and opera, 74; Symphony in C (Linz) d783),35 Museums, 53-4; birth of, 52; without walls, 53 Music, 56, 128, 129, 132; contemporary and classical, 40; and drama, 79-80, 88-9; and Germany, 74, 81; language of, 83; melody in, 77; in movies, 99, 108-11; popular, 89; and recordings, 52; rhythm in, 778; and Romanticism, 84-6; and technology, 170 Musical drama, 79-80, 81, 90-1, 111. See also Ballet; Opera Musil, Robert (1880-1942): The Man without Qualities (1930-43), 145 Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945), 118, 186; his pug-ugly sourpuss, 189 Myth, 54, 63; and concern, 59, 321-2; of concern, xli-xlii, 64; contemporary, 25; of deliverance, xlv-xlvi; as idea, 65. See also Mythology Mythological constructions, two primary, 60-5 Mythology: Christian, 88; closed, 65-7; of concern, 63-5, 323-5; modern, 62-3; open, 65, 68; premodern, 60-1, 62; social, 62-3; as structure, 59-60, 321-2. See also Myth My thopoeia, 146-8 Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977): Pale Fire (1962), 48 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769-1821), 22, 118 Narcissism, 14 Narcissus, 27 Nash, Paul (1899-1946), 94

Index

400

National Film Board, 55 Nationalism: cultural 30; in the modern age, 249-50; and music, 83; and regionalism, 23-4; Scottish, 29; Welsh, 29 Nationality: and the postnational world, 7-8 Nature, 60; and art, 127-8, 133; and culture, 321; and design, 62; and human nature, 326-7; as natura naturata or natura naturans, 32; and sadism, 46-7; scientific vision of, 25 Nazism, 28, 29-30, 45, 75, 102, 119; analogy in, 249; closed myth in, 66; denies charity, 277; insane, 283; and the Jews, 101-2; and literature, 211; as nationalism, 184-5; and race, 185-6; and Spengler, 307 Negroes, 42, 252, 278; alienation of, 12 Neighbour, defined, 58 Nelligan, Emile (1879-1941), 5, 69 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801-90): The Grammar of Assent (1870), 66; Hymn of a Perplexed Soul (1883), 317 News media, 148-50, 161-2; as bad news, 290. See also Electronic media; Mass media; Media Newspapers, 9, 51, 154; and the book, 150 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 320, 327 Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971): Faith and History (1949), 226-31 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (18441900), 28, 75, 118, 180, 181, 212; The Will to Power (1901), 86 Nigeria, 8 Nijinsky, Vaslav Fomich (1890-1950), 81 19605: middle-class activists of, 317; revolution of, 288-90; as war, 291

19705; life in the, 285-96 Nineteenth century: museums born in, 52; pastoralism of, 44-5; and progress, 15-16 Nixon, Richard Milhous (1913-94): on the moon landing, 291 Nonviolence, 157, 162 Northrop, F.S.C. (1894-1992): The Meeting of East and West (1946), 197-200 Nostalgie de la boue, 45 Notestein, Wallace (1878-1969): The Scot in History (1941), 201 Novel, the, 56, 127-8; development of, 146-8; and society, 98 Novelist, the, 241. See also Author; Writer Nuremberg trials, 24, 195-6, 282 O Canada, 69 O'Flaherty, Liam (1897-1984): Man of Aran (1934), m Oglesby, Carl (b. 1935): "Art and the Apocalyse" (1986), 171 One body, 259; the Queen as, 264 Ontario towns, 19 Opera, 80; and ballet, 77; and Italy, 74; Mozartian, 82; state of, 73-5 Oracular: in poetry, 37-8 Oral: culture, 137, 138-9; tradition, 135, 146 Oratorio, 80 Oratory, 104; revival of, 240 Orozco, Jose Clemente (1883-1949), 95 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-50), 24; ip&j (1949), 23, 154, 326 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.A.D. 17): Metamorphoses (ca. A.D. 8), 89 Oxford Union debate, 175, 176-7 Pacifism, 175-6

401

Index Packard, Vance Oakley (b. 1914): The Hidden Persuaders (1957), 63, 279; The Status Seekers (1959), 63, 279; The Waste Makers (1960), 279 Paganism, 85-6 Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 100 Painting, 9, 21, 34, 56, 127, 128, 129; action-, 38; ashcan, 34; and ballet, 91; and design, 53; fashions in, 11; formalism, 36, 54; Impressionist, 28, 32-3; medieval, 31; Renaissance, 31-2; representation in, 147; Russian, 114; sketch in, 39; Surrealist, 92-5 Panic: and concern, 293; over sex, 218-19 Pantaloon, 116 Pantomime, 80, 81, 91 Papacy, 30, 241; impact of the, 143-5 Pareto, Vilfredo (1848-1923): Mind and Society (1916), 181 Parkinson, C. Northcote (1909-93): Parkinson's Law (1958), 49 Pascal, Blaise (1623-62): wager of, 66; Pensees (1669), 207, 269 Passion, the, 190-1 Past, the, 26, 286; the arts reshape, 295; humanism and, 316 Pasternak, Boris (1890-1960), 34 Pastoral, the, 44-5, 46 Pastore hearings, 160 Pathos: of royalty, 263; as unbearable,

117 Patriotism, 102 Patti, Adelina (1843-1919), 74 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849-1936),

13

Peace movement, 244-5 Pearl Harbor, 117 Pearson, Lester Bowles (1897-1972),

244 Peguy, Charles (1873-1914), 242

Penguin paperbacks, 143 Penrose, Sir Roland (1900-84): The Human Frame or Nude in Window d937)/ 95 Persia, 30 Persian language, 29 Perspective: in painting, 31-2 Philosophy: development of, 137; and mythology, 64 Photocopying, impact of, 144 Photography: and movies, 109 Piano: as percussive, 81-2 Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973), 94, 127, 182; Guernica (1937), 35; Weeping Woman (1937), 94 Piccini, Niccolo (1728-1800), 74 Pickthall, Marjorie (1883-1922), 105 Pinter, Harold (b. 1930), 56 Plain chant, 129 Plane. See Aeroplane Plato (ca. 428-0. 348 B.C.), 57, 101, 259-60; Phaedrus, 135, 137; Republic, 164 Play: and work, 328-9 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49): Mellonta tauta (1850), 318; Tell-tale Heart (1843), 16 Poet, the, 241 Poetry, 9, 128, 129; cultural authority of, 145; double nature of, 37-8; language of, 319-20, 327; manuscript sales of, 39; modern, 10-11, 36, 3940; in the modern age, 240, 242; and the oral tradition, 135; and religion, 67; and rhetoric, 104; Romantic, 32; structure of, 320; as teaching, 137,

152 Poland, 30, 187 Polanyi, Karl (1886-1964): The Great Transformation (1944), 16-17 Police: and democracy, 233-4 Politics, radical, 56

Index

4O2

Pollution, 296 Pop art, 34 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 37 Pope, the, 37 Popeye (comic book): Olive Oyl as character in, 93 Popular Front, 245 Popular music, 89 Pornography, 44, 216 Pottery, 53 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885-1972), 145; poet and crank, 307; and Spengler, 303, 305; and Wyndham Lewis, 179 Pratt, E(dwin) J(ohn) (1882-1964), xxiv, 69 Praz, Mario (1896-1982): The Romantic Agony (1930), 93 Presence: real, 259, 261 Present, the, 17, 26; the arts reshape, 295; life, 329 Primitive art, 53, 54 Primitivism, 93, 180 Print: and freedom, 139, 154; as linear, 137-8; men of, 165; and society, 148. See also Writing Printing press, 143 Privacy, 20, 136, 139 Production: as anarchic force, 288-9; as revolutionary, 287 Progress, 25; and the individual, 18; myth of, 11, 15-19, 20-1, 22-4, 36, 310; theory of, 227-31, 259 Prohibition, 159 Proletariat, 41, 43; Freudian, 44-5 Propaganda, 9, 13-14/ 24, 33/ 36-7/ 38, 40, 56, 150, 242; Communist, 244; as interested art, 39; of war, 177. See also Advertising Prophecy, function of, 286 Prose, development of, 137 Prostitution, 157 Protestant Reformation, 153

Protestantism: and the American way, 254-7; laissez-faire parodies, 239 Protest movements, 296 Proust, Marcel (1871-1922), 181, 182 Proverbs, Book of, 329 Prudery: the church supports, 243; function of, 218-219 Psychology, 93 Psychotherapy, 56 Public library, the paperback attacks, 143 Publishing industry, 241 Publish-or-perish fetish, 144 Puccini, Giacomo (1858-1924): Madame Butterfly (1904), 73-5 Punishment: and pleasure, 165 Puttenham, George (d. 1590), 32 PWA (Provincial Workman's Association), 98 Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937), 146; Gravity's Rainbow (1973), 324-5 Quebec, separatism in, 24 Rabelais, Francois (14947-1553), 218 Radical politics, 56 Radio, 103, 105; drama, 240; and literature, 104, 106; and tyranny, 153 Railway, 170; and Beethoven, 35; Canadian Confederation from, 21; impact on landscape of, 19 Railway carriage, figure of, 14, 15, 26. See also mirror Rapee, Erno (1891-1945): MotionPicture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924), 108 Raye, Martha (1916-94), 120 Raymond, E.T. (1872-1928): All and Sundry (1919), 96 RCMP, 157

403

Index Read, Sir Herbert (1893-1968): The Innocent Eye (1946), 115

Reade, Charles (1814-84): The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), 147 Reader's Digest, 14

Reading: and freedom, 154; NF on, xlvi-xlvii Realism, 54; Dutch, 33; in fiction, 1467; growth of, 31-4; prophetic, 33; socialist, 114; stupid, 33-5, 36, 47 Reality, 281; in Deism, 258; and illusion, 26, 327-8; and meaning, 167 Reaney, James Crerar (b. 1926): Listen to the Wind (1972), 39 Reason, 60, 62 Recreation, 48 Reform Bill of 1832, 237, 250 Regeneration, infinite, 259 Regionalism: and nationalism, 23-4 Religion: and art, 67-8, 79; and the book, 150; and closed mythology, 67; and literature, 242-3 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn) (1606-69), 32 Renaissance: as Classicism reborn, 311-12; painting, 31-2 Renoir, Pierre Auguste (1841-1919), 32-3 Repetition, 170; and education, 294; in the oral tradition, 54 Reprints, 144 Revelation, Book of, 95 Revolution: in the 19605, 288-90; and leisure, 50-1; and television, 149; as war, 291; world, 222 Revolutionary realism. See Realism, prophetic Reyes, Alfonso (1889-1959): Ultima Tule (1942), 197 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-92), 102 Rhetoric, 104; and continuity, 36-7 Rhythm, 81-2, 84; and ballet, 77-8

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761): read aloud, 150 Riesman, David (1909-2002): The Lonely Crowd (1950), 63

Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (185491), 28, 43, 46; The Drunken Boat (1871), 260; Lettres du Voyant (1871), 40 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreevich (1844-1908), 76 Riopelle, Jean-Paul (1923-2002), 69 Ritual, 88; and art, 80; and television, 148-9 Robbe-Grillet, Alain (b. 1922), 40 Rochdale College, 292 Rock music, 136 Romance: in fiction, 146-8. See also Romanticism Romans, Epistle to the, 249 Romanticism, 115, 130, 180; German, 212; and music, 84-6. See also Romance Romantic movement, 27-8, 43-4, 62, 67, 260; in Germany, 46; poetry of, 32; and primitivism, 54; theories of, 29 Romberg, Sigmund (1887-1951), no Rome, ancient, 22-3, 50 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (18821945), 103, 105, 186 Rosenberg, Alfred (1893-1946): The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), 66 Rosenberg, Harold (1906-78): The Tradition of the New (1960), 64

Rossellini, Roberto (1906-77): Open City (1945), 241 Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio (17921868), 74 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78), 23, 46-7, 61, 63; and American life,

Index

404

251-2; and Sleeping Beauty, 60; on the social contract, 41 Rowland, Henry Edgar (Hank) (b. 1910), 175 Royalty, 263-4 Rozinante (Don Quixote's horse), 105 Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640), 32, 33 Rubissow, Helen: The Art of Russia (1946), 114 Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 20, 36 Russia, 6, 184; and the arms race, 171; ballet in, 74, 78, 81; modern, 237, 250; movies in, 98; painting in, 114; Tolstoy's, 146; and war, 244-5; world view of, 222-3; writers jailed in, 295. See also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 114, 180 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-Franc,ois, Marquis de (1740-1814), 46-7 Sadism, 46-7, 93 Salinger, J(erome) D(avid) (b. 1919): The Catcher in the Rye (1951), 43 Salon des Refuses, 131 Samuel, Book of, 89 San Gemignano, NF visits, 188 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80), 47; Being and Nothingness (1943), 64 Satan, 11, 12, 59, 101, 102, 120, 138; as accuser, 41; modern, 102 Satire: and ballet, 81 Schafer, D. Carl: "The Cultural Interpretation of History: Beacon of the Future" (1986), 171 Scholar: and the artist, 129, 130; as neighbour, 58 Scholarship, 141; changes in, 144-5; community of, 280-1; and the mythology of concern, 65 Schonberg, Arnold (1874-1951), 85,

86 School. See University

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860),

260 Schubert, Franz (1797-1828), 85 Schuman Plan, 246-7 Science, 16, 62; authority of, 168; and freedom, 278; global unity and, 318; language of, 319; and the myth of concern, 65; and nature, 25, 60; and play, 328-9; progressive, 316; and Spengler, 312-13; structure of, 320; and truth, 22; vision of, 281 Science fiction, 146, 318; as romance, 320-1 Scientists: and humanists, 315-16, 329 Scotland, culture of, 201 Scott, Cyril (1879-1970), 86 Scott, Frank R. (1899-1985): The Canadian Authors Meet (1945), 7 Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 141; Waverly (1814), 147 Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich (1872-1915), 85 Scroll, change from, 143 Sculpture: and design, 53; late Roman, 34-5 Sebastian, St., 31 Self: the selfish and the genuine, 279-

80 Sex, 157, 159; censorship of, 218-19; and creation, 44 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 56, 91; and his audience, 100, 165; and comedy, 116; and conciousness, 37; illusion in, 328; Wyndham Lewis on, 181; and Montaigne, 182; as oratory, 104; and tradition, 152; Hamlet (1604-5), 15, 73/ 125, 272; Henry IV (1600), 116; King Lear (1604-5), *63; Macbeth (1623), 37, 99; Measure for Measure (1604), 116; The Merchant of Venice (1600), 89, 192; Romeo and Juliet (1594-8), 109; The Tempest

Index (i6n), 141; Timon of Athens (1607), 48; Titus Andronicus (1623), 164; The Winter's Tale (ca. 1610), 32 Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), 35, 183; and evolution, 64 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 54; Ode to the West Wind (1820), 91; Ozymandias (1818), 151; Prometheus Unbound (1820), 29; The Witch of Atlas (1824), 35 Sherrington, Sir Charles (1857-1952), 65; Man on His Nature (1941), 64 Shortliffe, Glen (b. 1913), 232, 233 Siena, NF visits, 189-91 Simultaneous apprehension, 138 Sinclair, Lister (b. 1921): Socrates (1952), 240 Slavery, 23, 61 Smiles, Samuel (1812-1904): Self-Help (1859), 39 Smyth, Dame Ethyl (1858-1944): The Boatswain's Mate (1916), 74-5 Snow, Sir C(harles) P(ercy) (1905-80), 326; The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), 315-16 Social contract, 41-3, 46 Socialism in Great Britain, 246-7; and the mass media, 135 Socialist realism, 33-4, 94, 114, 295 Social work: and the university, 274 Society: as anti-art, 48; and the artist, 41-2, 62; and the arts, 79-80, 16772, 132-3; classless, 276-7; creation of a better, 69; destroys life, 119; freedom of, 154-5; future of, 31617; growth of, 6-7; ideal, 17; and imagination, 295; and the individual, 151, 259-60; introverted, 20; leisure structure of, 50-1; mechanization of, 118; mob rule in, 24; and nationalism, 8; natural, 23-4; new, 328; and the outcast, 43; participa-

405 tion in, 51-2; as repressive, 44, 48; as sadistic, 46-7; and science, 22; as a structure, 160; and symbols, xxxv; and violence, 157-8; and youth, 44 Sonata form, 85 Sorel, Georges (1847-1922), 180, 181; Reflections on Violence (1907), 66 South Africa: denies equality, 277 Soviet Union, 8, 23, 28; conservative nature of, 287-8; as federation, 199; liberalization of, 30; science in, 22 Spain, 35, 184 Speech, manner of, 103-7 Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903): and evolution, 64 Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), 179, 180, 185, 230; influence on NF, xxxiii-xxxiv, 310; in Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man, 181, 182; as militarist manque, 307; total impact of, 272; and Toynbee, 202-8; as visionary, 268; The Decline of the West (1918-22), 22-3, 63, 178, 202-5, 248-9, 265-73, 297-314; Hour of Decision (1934), 182, 204, 238, 249, 268, 307, 308; Man and Technics (1931), 304; Prussianism and Socialism (1919), 304 Spiritual world, 61 Spring Thaw (Museum Theatre production), 240 Stalin, Joseph (losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879-1953), 165, 171, 249; purge-trials, 149, 154 Stars and Stripes (flag), 237, 250 Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946), 38, 181 Steinbeck, John Ernst (1902-68), 104, 318 Sterne, Laurence (1713-68): A Sentimental Journey (1767), 22

406 Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955): Description without Place, 323 Stock response, 15, 62, 65, 244 Strachey, Lytton (1880-1932), 96-7; and war, 176; Elizabeth and Essex (1928), 96-7; Portraits in Miniature (1931), 96; Queen Victoria (1921), 96-7 Straight, Michael, 167 Stravinsky, Igor (1882-1971), 86, 127; and ballet, 80-1; Petroushka (1911), 78 Stream of conciousness, 38 Struther, Jan (1901-53): Mrs. Miniver (1942), 108 Stuart Hughes (1916-99): Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (1952), 298 Student(s): demonstrations, 149; and teaching, 58 Subject-object relation, 60, 326-7 Suez Canal, 262 Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), 210 Surrealism, 40, 115; exhibition of, 925. See also Painting Survival, concern of, 325-7 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745): Gulliver's Travels (1726), 23 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (18371909)7 36, 86 Symbolism: in art, 95; in movies, 10910

Symbolisme, 54 Symbol(s): language of, 93; and society, XXXV

Syncopation, no Tabloids, 12 Tachism, 129 Taddeo di Bartolo (ca. 1362-1422), 190 Tanguy, Yves (1900-55): The Questioning, 93

Index Taoism, 115 Teaching: literature, 163; via poetry, 137, 152; students determine, 58; in university, 59; and writing, 138 Technological revolution, 49. See also Industrial Revolution Technology, 16, 23; and the arts, 170; and freedom, 21-2; and the future, 134-5, 286-7; introversion due to, 136, 292 Television, 9, 14, 20-1, 51, 155, 170; and advertising, 135; and anarchy, 150; and the continuum of life, 1489; as drug culture, 292; and imagination, 161; in the 19605, 290; and tyranny, 153-4; and violence, 15666 Temperance movement, 45 Tennyson, Alfred, ist Baron Tennyson (1809-92): In Memoriam (1850), 237; Locksley Hall (1842), 266 Terrorism, 158; and liberty, 261 Textiles, 53 Theatre. See Drama Third World, 171 Thomas, John Parnell (1895-1970), 221,225 Thompson, Dorothy (1894-1961), 100 Thomson, Tom (1877-1917), 69 Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62), 69, 117; and civil disobedience, 100; Journal, 101; Walden (1854), 42-3 Thriller (genre): as existentialist, 242-3 Thurber, James Grover (1894-1961): "You Could Look It Up" (1941), 281; Is Sex Necessary? (1929), 305 Tillich, Paul Johannes (1886-1965): The Courage to Be (1952), 64; Systematic Theology (1951, 1957, 1963), 145 Time, awareness of, 16, 18, 25-6

Index Time magazine, 154, 202 Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1518-94), 33, 192 Titanic, the, 120 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) (1488-1576),

32 Tito, Josip Broz (1892-1980), 249 Toffler, Alvin (b. 1928): Future Shock (1970), 288, 317 Toleration in democracy, 236, 257 Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892-1973): The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), 146 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich (1828-1910): Anna Karenina (187577), 147; War and Peace (1863-69),

146 Toronto, 20; Art Gallery of, 131; the Beatles visit, 296; NF remembers, xxiii; Royal York Hotel, 276; second-hand bookshops in, 142-3; Social Planning Council, 274; Spadina Expressway in, 289; street cars in, 106; the two Torontos, 281 Torture: and Communism, 220-1 Totalitarianism, 56, 57; and the arts, 129, 168; the author under, 241-2; and literature, 211; music and, 90; revolutionary, 249-50; and war, 254 Tower of Babel, 200, 325; as progress, 230-1 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889-1975), 230; on Spengler, 202-8, 271; A Study of History (1934-61), 63-4, 202-8, 236, 310-12 Trade unions. See Labour Tradition: and art, 45-6; and the artist, 128-9. See also Imitation Tragedy, 164, 165; in opera, 74 Tramp, Chaplin's, 116-22 Transcendence, language of, 321 Translation, 144

407

Trestrail, Burdick Anderson (b. 1891), 232-3 Trollope, Anthony (1815-82): The Eustace Diamonds (1873), 147 Trotsky, Leon (alias of Lev Davidovich Bronstein) (1879-1940), 249 Truth: and faith, 259; liberalism aims at, 257-8; and science, 316 Tschaikowsky, Piotr Ilyich (1840-93), 80; Symphony No. 5, 76 Turner, Joseph Mallord William (1775-1851), 32, 54 Twain, Mark (Samuel Longhorne Clemens) (1835-1910): an as anarchist, 100; authentic American language of, 104; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), 100; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 43, loo, 101, 106, 118; The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), 100; The Prince and the Pauper (1882), 100 Twentieth-century poetry. See Poetry, modern Tyranny, 94; and the electronic media, 153-4; music and, 90; and the writer, 211-12; and writing, 138 Undefended border, 8 UNESCO, 171 Uniformity, civilization's progress toward, 19-20, 28, 170-1 Unitarian movement, 256 United Nations, 207-8 United States, 8, 24, 50, 184; accent in, 103-4; Alaska purchase, 6; American way, 62, 66, 67; anarchism in literature, 42-3; and the arms race, 171; art in, 100; buried, 69; and Canada, 232-3; and China, 13-14; Communism collapses in, 42; crash of 1929, 23; cruelty in literature of,

408

47; fiction in, 42; imperialism of, 199; mass media in, 135; as oldest modern country, 237, 250-1; preindustrial, 35; president of, 103; and progress, 228; science in, 22; sex in, 215-19; social mythology of, 62; Southern agrarian movement in, 45; as Utopia, 197-8, 239, 253; in Vietnam, 282; violence in, 156-7; war economy of, 244-5; world view of, 223; WPA in, 114 University, 50; adult education in, 52; and the artist, 55-6; and the arts, 127, 129; community of, 257, 281; and contemporary culture, 58-9, 127; as counter-environment, 169, 171; and democracy, 169; NF imagines, xlvii-xlviii; and social work, 274; teaching in, 59; and youth, 51-2 University of Toronto, NF formed by, xxiv-xxv Unknown masterpiece, 39 Unknown Soldier, 263 U.S.S.R. See Soviet Union Urban sprawl, 20 Utilitarians, 27 Utopia, xliii, 22, 23, 43, 57; and the atomic bomb, 228; and Canada, 6970; and the Depression, 286-7; hippies create, 292; illusion of, 253; U.S. as, 197-8, 239 Vaihinger, Hans (1852-1933): Theory of "As If" (1911), 66 Valery, Paul (1871-1945), 38 Van der Marck, Jan (b. 1929): "Museum Strategies: Sisyphus or Lysistrata?" (1986), 171 Vaughan Williams, Ralph (18721958), 86 Venice, NF visits, 191-3

Index Verdi, Giuseppe (1813-1901): Miserere (1853), no Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), 36 Verona, NF visits, 191 Veronese, 192 Verse: and memory, 152 Vice, the figure of, 116 Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 230, 312 Victims of violence, 164-5 Victoria, Queen (1819-1901), coronation of, 262 Victoria College, 175 Victorian age, 56; and the novel, 146 Vietnam war, 13, 24; NF opposes, 282; on television, 165-6 Vigneault, Gilles (b. 1928), 54 Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam, Auguste de, Compte (1838-89), 46 Violence: as counter-communication, 137; defined, 157; and education, 161; and television, 156-66 Violin: and melody, 84 Vision, 128; human, 321; imaginative, 328 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1778): A I'auteur du livre des trois imposteurs, 61

Vonnegut, Kurt (1922), 146 Vuillard, Edouard (1868-1940): 33 Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (181383), 80, no, 212; endless melody, 77; and Hitler, 90; influences The Waste Land, 305; and opera, 74-5; Ring der Niebelungen (1876), 99

War, 175-6, 199, 244-5; as auto-eroticism, 177; and capitalism, 253; good of, 254; over if we want it, 296; as revolution, 291 Warner, Rex (1905-86): The Aerodrome (1941), 213

409

Index Washington, City of, 19 Washington University, 233 Watergate, 149-50, 154 Watmough, David (b. 1926), 170 Watteau, (Jean) Antoine (1684-1721), 127 Welfare state, 236 Welles, (George) Orson (1915-85): Citizen Kane (1941), 109 Wellesley, Arthur (1769-1852), 176 Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (18661946): Men like Gods (1923), 229; Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), 23, 229; A Modern Utopia (1905), 229 Whidden lectures, 3-5; NF gives, xxxvii-xxxviii Whitehead, Alfred North (18611947): Science and the Modern World (1925), 64 Whitman, Walt (ca. 1819-92), 54, 69, 86; To the States, 100 Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807-92), 141 Whyte, William Hollingsworth (1917-99): The Organization Man (1956), 63 Wife versus Secretary (film) (1936), 87 Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900): "The Decay of Lying" (1889), 147-8 Wild Hunt, Legend of the, 11 Williams, Charles Walter Stansby (1886-1945), 242 Wilson, Edmund (1895-1972): and NF, xxxii-xxxiii; Memoirs of Hecate Country (1946), 217 Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow (18561924), 177 Winsor, Kathleen (b. 1919): Forever Amber (1944), 219 Wisdom, 59, 62, 329

Wit in poetry, 37-8 Women, education of, 52 Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (18821941), 26 Woollcott, Alexander (1887-1943): "Reunion in Paris" (1934), 142 Word, the: community of, 257; and freedom, 243; vitality of, 151 Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 37-8; Idiot Boy (1798), 35; Lyrical Ballads (1798), 54; Michael (1800), 45; Peter Bell (1819), 35; The Prelude (1805, 1850), 115; Thoughts of a Briton in the Subjugation of Switzerland (1807) 189; The Waggoner (1805), 35 Work: and play, 328-9 Working Class, 51 World Council of Peace, 244 World picture, 64 World state, 187 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 114; murals, 34 Writer, the: in Canada, 55, 105; and the novel, 146-7; as prophetic, 43; and the reader, 125; two sides of, 306-7; and tyranny, 211-12. See also Author; Novelist Writing, 137; automatic, 36-7; and democracy, 138; and memory, 135, 152; teleological, 39 Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), 46, 145-6; poet and poseur, 307; Spengler influences, 305; A Vision (1937), 301, 302-3 Young, George Malcolm (1882-1959): Basic (1943), 194 Youth: and society, 44; and university, 51-2 Zollverein, worldwide, 187