Northrop Frye's Uncollected Prose [1 ed.] 9781442621299, 9781442649729

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Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose

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Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose

Edited by Robert D. Denham

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto  Buffalo  London

© University of Toronto Press 2015 All material written by the editor © Robert D. Denham All material written by Northrop Frye and belonging to the Northrop Frye Estate © Victoria University Toronto  Buffalo  London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. isbn 978-1-4426-4972-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 [Works. Selections] Northrop Frye’s uncollected prose / edited by Robert D. Denham. (Frye studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4972-9 (bound) 1. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991.  2. Criticism.  i. Denham, Robert D., editor ii. Title.  iii. Title: Uncollected prose.  iv. Series: Frye studies pn75.f7a5 2015   801′.95092   c2015-900429-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. Additional funding for the publication of this book was generously provided by the Michael G. DeGroote family through McMaster University.

For Tibor Fabiny, Sára Tóth, and Péter Pásztor

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations of Volumes in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye

xi

Introduction   1 1932 Notebook (mid‑1930s)

xiii 3

  2 Intoxicated with Words: The Colours of Rhetoric (1940s)

61

  3 Review of Books by Rosemond Tuve and Douglas Bush (1953)

75

  4 Neoclassical Agony: On Wyndham Lewis (1957)

78

  5 Review of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1958)

85

  6 On T.S. Eliot and Other Observations: From Notebook 13 (1960s)

89

  7 On Finnegans Wake (1961)

96

  8 Notes on the Massey Lectures, Yeats, and Other Topics: From Notebook 9 (1962)

97

  9 Introduction to Fables of Identity (1963)

111

10 Response to the Macpherson Report (1967)

114

11 Communication and the Arts: A Humanist Looks at Science and Technology (1969)

120

12 Preface to The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (1969)

133

13 Notes on Romance (56b) (1974)

137

14 Romance as Secular Scripture: Interview and Discussion at the Thomas More Institute, Montreal (1976)

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15 Preface to ­Spiritus Mundi (1976)

347

16 Victoria College’s Contribution to the Development of Canadian Culture (1977)

352

17 Seeing, Hearing, Praying, Loving (1985)

355

18 The Soviet Union and Russia (1989)

358

19 Notes for The Double Vision: Notebook 51 (1990)

363

20 Notes on Miscellaneous Subjects

368

21 The Victoria Chapel Windows

382

Notes

387

Works Cited

417

Index

421

Acknowledgments

I express my thanks to the following people for providing help of one kind or another: Germaine Warkentin, Thomas Willard, Jane Widdicombe, Nicholas Graham, James Carscallen, Alvin Lee, Robert Brandeis, Kristin Denham, Siobhan McMenemy, Jean O’Grady, Michael Dolzani, the two external readers of the manuscript, and the late Ron Schoeffel. Special thanks to my copy editor, Margaret Allen, and to Anne Laughlin, managing editor, whose steady hand has been guiding me through the publication of Frye’s Collected Works for more than twenty years now. The acknowledgment for permission to publish or to reprint is recorded in the headnote of each of the individual pieces.

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Abbreviations of Volumes in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye

CW 1 CW 3 CW 4 CW 5 CW 6 CW 7 CW 8 CW 9 CW 10 CW 11 CW 12 CW 13 CW 15 CW 16 CW 17

The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932–1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Goldwin French and Jean O’Grady. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Northrop Frye on Canada. Ed. Jean O’Grady and David Staines. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005.

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Abbreviations

CW 18 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. CW 19 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Ed. Alvin A. Lee. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. CW 20 Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. CW 21 “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933– 1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. CW 22 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. CW 23 Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism.” Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. CW 25 Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. CW 26 Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. CW 27 “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory. Ed. Eva Kushner and Jean O’Grady. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. CW 28 Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Ed. Gary Sherbert and Troni Grande. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. CW 29 Northrop Frye’s Writings on Twentieth-Century Literature. Ed. Glen Robert Gill. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009.

Introduction

Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose contains twenty‑one pieces that for one reason or another were not included in the now completed thirty‑volume Collected Works. The present volume includes talks Frye gave that were tape‑recorded but for which there is no extant manuscript; taped interviews and responses to questions not included in the volume of interviews of the Collected Works; a previously undiscovered notebook and portions of others, including an extensive series of notes on romance (93,000 words); a brief in opposition to the Macpherson Report on undergraduate education at the University of Toronto; an address about the contribution of Victoria College to Canadian culture; reviews that were until recently unknown to me and the other editors of the Collected Works; a reply to a questionnaire from the American Scholar; and an early essay on poetic diction. One justification for such a miscellany is that it adds to the expansive Frye canon already in print. Very few things Frye wrote are without merit, and so the second justification is that these twenty-one pieces come from the pen or, in a few cases, the voice of Northrop Frye, one of the seminal humanistic thinkers of the last century. In seeking to understand his remarkable achievement it is good to have before us as complete a record as possible of what he wrote and said, no matter how fragmentary the collection as a whole is and how discontinuous the reading experience it provides. Like the published notebooks (Collected Works 5, 6, 9, 15, 20, 23), Uncollected Prose will no doubt often be used as a reference work, which, with the aid of the index, can be consulted by Frye specialists and all other readers. The twenty‑one items are arranged chronologically as best this can be determined, and the headnote for each piece has information on its provenance, location in the Frye Fonds, publication data for previously published items, and the like. Two items that are not possible to date have been placed at the end. The aim of what now follows is to provide a brief context for each of the pieces. •••

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The 1932 Notebook came to the Victoria University Library in 2013 as part of the papers of Frye’s colleague the late Jay Macpherson. The head librarian at Victoria University, Robert Brandeis, informed me of the existence of the notebook in October 2012, and on 1 April 2013, he sent it to me as a scanned pdf file. Why the notebook was in Macpherson’s possession is uncertain. Many of the pages in the “diary” have been left blank (there are entries for only 117 days), suggesting that Frye’s attention to the notebook entries was somewhat random: whatever day he determined to write he turned to that day in the notebook. Although it is written in a blank “diary,” the material is consistent not with Frye’s other diaries but with his other notebooks, as these were defined by the Collected Works project. “1932” is printed on the cover and title page, but whereas some of the entries may date from that year, there is internal evidence that some of the entries are from 1934 and following. Frye used most of his notebooks as preparation for his writing projects. That does not seem to be the case with the 1932 Notebook, even though several of the entries anticipate later essays. Still, readers will discover a number of connections between the notebook entries and Frye’s later work. For example, an early reference to the anatomy as a form of prose fiction appears in the entry for 13 July. And in the entry for 16 January, we have an embryonic form of the Platonic triad—justice, beauty, and truth—which Frye would use in his Emmanuel College essay “The Relation of Religion to the Arts” and which would develop into the larger schematic triad at the beginning of his theory of genres in Anatomy of Criticism. The entry for 17 July contains Frye’s earliest use of the word “interpenetration,” denoting a concept that would develop into a key idea in his visionary poetics. A number of the entries have to do with familiar topics—with Shakespeare and with music, for example. And then we have an early notebook version of the literary stock‑market metaphor that begins like this: There is really no such thing as a wrong critical attitude. Take any of the big names at random, say, Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley. Critic A, for instance, is an individualist and hero‑worshipper who admires the strength and independence of Milton and Shelley, and resents the lack of a strong personality in Shakespeare. Critic B is a tricky sprite who soars off into the blue with Shakespeare and Shelley and talks about the leaden feet and crabbed Puritanism of Milton. Critic C is a classicist and a bit of a pedant with a strong sense of form who feels safe with Shakespeare and Milton and regards Shelley as a precariously balanced epiphyle. Critic D says the English have no feeling for poetry and have never produced any poet, except, by some miracle, Shakespeare. . . . (entry of 13 September)

Compare that to a passage, some twenty years later, from the “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism, where Frye outlines the kinds of judgments that

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are used to promote or demote Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley on the basis of justifiable but nevertheless arbitrary criteria: A selective approach to tradition, then, invariably has some ultracritical joker concealed in it. There is no question of accepting the whole of literature as the basis of study, but a tradition (or, of course, “the” tradition) is abstracted from it and attached to contemporary social values, being then used to document those values. The hesitant reader is invited to try the following exercise. Pick three big names at random, work out the eight possible combinations of promotion and demotion (on a simplified, or two-class, basis) and defend each in turn. Thus if the three names picked were Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, the agenda would run:   1. Demoting Shelley, on the ground that he is immature in technique and profundity of thought compared to the others.   2. Demoting Milton, on the ground that his religious obscurantism and heavy doctrinal content impair the spontaneity of his utterance.   3. Demoting Shakespeare, on the ground that his detachment from ideas makes his dramas a reflection of life rather than a creative attempt to improve it.   4. Promoting Shakespeare, on the ground that he preserves an integrity of poetic vision which in the others is obfuscated by didacticism.   5. Promoting Milton, on the ground that his penetration of the highest mysteries of faith raises him above Shakespeare’s unvarying worldliness and Shelley’s callowness.   6. Promoting Shelley, on the ground that his love of freedom speaks to the heart of modern man more immediately than poets who accepted outworn social or religious values.   7. Promoting all three (for this a special style, which we may call the peroration style, should be used).   8. Demoting all three, on the ground of the untidiness of English genius when examined by French or Classical or Chinese standards. (CW 22: 24–5)

As one would expect, the 1932 notebook reveals a number of familiar topics. Frye was always interested in colour symbolism, and one can find rather extravagant instances of such interest in the entries for 31 January and 11–12 March. Surprisingly, Blake makes relatively few appearances in the notebook (passing mention in eight entries), whereas Shakespeare is very much on Frye’s mind (twenty entries, almost all of which references are more than passing). Fourteen of the entries have to do with music. But the topics are wide‑ranging: parody, detective stories, the Scotch influence in Canada, analogies, connotations, the sceptic, Marxism, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, excessive introspection, women’s faces in advertising, Edward Lear and the limerick, Twain’s A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, D’Annunzio, Händel, music in poetry, wars immortalized by

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women, Fowler and Fowler’s The King’s English, critics and criticism, superstitions, the word “and,” Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, teaching Latin in the public schools, Pilgrim’s Progress, Joyce’s Ulysses, the Canadian National Railways, and the Nordic influence in America, among scores of other topics. Frye tosses off epigrams, sometimes witty and sometimes strained, gives us a limerick, and even tries his hand at such poetic forms as the cinquain (24 June) and triolet (10 July). Then there are the jokes (Emerson speaks in Plato-tudes) and overheard remarks (“Give me the history of drums and trumpets, not the history of bums and strumpets”). There are occasional vignettes that appear to be scenes from a contemplated short story or novel, although none of them appears later in Frye’s published or unpublished fiction writing. As a student, Frye always appeared more mature and advanced in his thinking than his years would suggest. Much later in his life, after the triumph of feminism, Frye was occasionally brought to task for using sexist language. But in the notebook we find Frye, about age twenty-four or twenty-five, revealing that he is quite aware of the sexism of English pronouns: “One thing a universal language ought to do is give us a separate personal pronoun of common gender to use for words like ‘student,’ ‘author,’ ‘member,’ ‘person,’ etc. where we now have to say ‘he or she,’ or, insultingly ‘he’ ” (entry of 27 June). The final entry in the notebook contains several puzzles. First, Frye refers to the several parts of what has become, since the publication of his notebooks, his well‑known ogdoad, the eight parts that he decided early on would provide a structural outline of his life’s work. The references to early, middle, and late apparently have to do with the periods of his own life; that is, Liberal would be written early, Twilight late, and so forth. But why do the eight parts fall under the heading “NOVEL”? At an early age Frye had conceived of a grand project that would result in eight concerti. After several years this scheme modulated into eight novels, and by the time he had finished his undergraduate education the ogdoad had become eight critical works. However, Frye’s marginal note in the present notebook indicates that although he had “outgrown” the schema set down here, his eight‑part vision of the novels “still holds.” A crucial word in the marginal annotation is indecipherable, but we do know that by the time of his college years the ogdoad had begun to shape itself in Frye’s mind as eight critical works. The marginal note, therefore, seems to indicate that although Frye had abandoned his eight‑novel project, he would not be scrapping the names he attached to his eightfold project: Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, and Twilight would be transferred from a fictional context to a critical one. In any event, it is perhaps worth remarking that in Frye’s earliest notebook he refers to the names of the eight projects that were still providing an outline for his writing up through the Late Notebooks of the 1980s.

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The word “SUMMA” in the final entry represents something that will also be a “late” work. Frye did use the word “Summa” as the title of a transcript he wrote during his Emmanuel College years, where he outlines what might become his comprehensive summing up of the Protestant vision. In the notebook entry, the “Summa” is an “ESSAY,” so that it perhaps points to what would become the comprehensive critical principles set down in the four essays of Anatomy of Criticism. But as the Summa is to come late in Frye’s life, he may be in effect announcing a definitive and comprehensive work that synthesizes his imaginative vision of the Bible. “I suppose,” Frye says, “a diary should be a self‑confession. It is good, of course, to know oneself, and to realize the expression of your personality in one’s views of others. But I can’t bring myself entirely to confess in ink” (entry of 18 July). Very little confession appears in this notebook. Nonetheless, it projects the persona of a thoughtful and highly intelligent young man recording his wide‑ranging speculations. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, he has withdrawn momentarily from the bustle of life around him to let us see what is going on in his hyperactive mind. ••• The essay on poetic diction, “Intoxicated with Words,” is a fragment of a project in literary history that Frye contemplated but never completed. He wrote a number of essays, many of them on individual writers and some on historical periods, that could well take their place as chapters in a literary history of English or American literature. But even though the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism contains his well-known theory of literary history, the actual writing of a continuous literary history was not something to which he devoted substantial attention. None of his books, except perhaps A Study of English Romanticism, is a literary history in any conventional sense. But writing such a history was a long-standing desire, going back to his university days in the 1930s, and the urge became formalized throughout his notebooks as one of the parts of what Frye called his ogdoad. Notebook 14 contains an outline and a series of notes for a history of English literature, as well as a draft of the text for this, which seems to be organized on the basis of imagery. But Frye’s dream of publishing such a literary history was never realized, though he did write an essay of some 50,000 words that was intended to serve as the introduction of a textbook anthology of English literature, a project that was eventually aborted. This is the closest thing we have from Frye’s pen of a genuine literary history. It was published as “Rencontre” in Northrop Frye on Literature and Society (CW 10). The essay on the history of poetic diction (no. 2), probably written when Frye was in his early thirties, is another chapter of the history of English literature that for him was never realized. It is perhaps worth observing that the essay does reveal the substantial knowledge of Old and Middle English Frye picked up at Oxford, where his Anglo-Saxon

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teacher was J.R.R. Tolkien and where he wrote about Chaucer for his tutor, Edmund Blunden. The essay appeared originally in the issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly devoted to Frye on the occasion of his centenary. ••• Although Frye reviewed only two books after 1960—books by Joseph Campbell and Paul de Man—earlier in his career he was a prolific book reviewer. Reviews of more than 125 books are scattered throughout the pages of the Collected Works. I served as Frye’s unofficial bibliographer, but I overlooked two reviews, one on books by Douglas Bush and Rosemond Tuve (no. 3) and the other on Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (no. 5). Bush and Tuve were distinguished scholars, both of whom Frye knew. Bush, a Canadian who received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and who was a distinguished professor at Harvard, became a reader for a manuscript called Structural Poetics, which Frye had submitted to Princeton University Press in 1955 and which turned out to become Anatomy of Criticism. A graduate of Victoria College and a student of Frye’s own mentor there, Pelham Edgar, Bush makes a number of appearances throughout Frye’s writings, and Frye refers at one point to his “genial and urbane scholarship.” Tuve had once stayed with the Fryes in Toronto, and in a 1985 letter Frye recalls for her biographer some anecdotes from that visit. In any event, Frye had a personal as well as a professional connection with the authors of both books he reviewed for Renaissance News—Tuve’s A Reading of George Herbert and Bush’s Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature. The reviews of both Bush and Tuve reveal a generous measure of appreciation and goodwill towards two fellow scholars. Pasternak is not a writer to whom Frye devoted much attention—he is mentioned in passing in The Modern Century and again in the Late Notebooks—but in the review of Doctor Zhivago (no. 5) it is clear that Frye has a high opinion of Pasternak’s gifts as a writer, and the tentativeness with which he expresses his judgments about the novel come only from his not being able to read it in Russian. ••• Frye was a regular book reviewer for the Hudson Review in the 1950s, contributing fourteen review‑essays to the journal over the course of nine years. These are now scattered throughout four volumes of the Collected Works (11, 17, 21, and 29). One that was inexplicably overlooked—on Wyndham Lewis—is reproduced here as number 4. Like the other Hudson Review pieces, which begin as reviews but are transformed into essays, this one finds Frye reaching out beyond the book under review, Geoffrey Wagner’s Wyndham Lewis, to engage the substance and form of a number of Lewis’s books. Twenty‑one years earlier, when Frye was in his second year at Emmanuel College, he had written a long essay (14,600

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words) on the diatribes of Lewis (CW 3: 345–80), and part of that paper made its way into “Wyndham Lewis: Anti‑Spenglerian,” one of Frye’s early contributions to the Canadian Forum (CW 11: 178–83). The imprint on Frye of both Spengler and Lewis can be found in the present review. Lewis called himself one of the four “men of 1914,” the other three being Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. Why would the twenty‑four‑year‑old Frye have initially become interested in a writer demonstrating such self‑importance? I think it must have been because of Spengler, a writer whom he completely assimilated as an undergraduate and whom he saw as a cultural historian of formative influence, in spite of Spengler’s being so antipathetic to Frye’s general disposition (Frye once called him “a kraut clunkhead as dumb as the beer barrels in Munich”). Lewis had attacked Spengler in Time and Western Man, and it seems likely that this was what drew Frye to read Lewis. In addition to Time and Western Man, Frye owned four of Lewis’s other books: The Apes of God, The Childermass, The Wild Body, and The Human Age. And in preparation for his 1936 essay Frye read these additional volumes: Tarr, The Enemy of the Stars, The Art of Being Ruled, Hitler, The Lion and the Fox, Men without Art, Paleface, The Dithyrambic Spectator, and The Diabolical Principle. Frye had done his homework, and thus he can say in his review with some authority that, except for an occasional satiric hit, neither the matter nor the manner of Lewis’s prose measures up. ••• Frye’s Notebook 13 (no. 6), one of the seventy‑seven holograph notebooks in the Frye Fonds at the Victoria University Library, contains his reflections on a number of writers, including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, T.S. Eliot, Poe, and Milton. From this notebook Michael Dolzani included Frye’s comments on Shakespeare’s sonnets and on Ben Jonson in his edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW 20). But when the two of us were collecting material for Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW 25), we neglected to extract for that volume several sets of entries from Notebook 13—notes for his book on T.S. Eliot, as well as a miscellaneous set of reflections on the imagination, false gods, Romanticism, Poe, and other topics. These notes now take their place alongside the eight volumes of holograph and typed notebook material. ••• The editors of the American Scholar, for its thirtieth‑anniversary issue, asked a number of distinguished scholars, writers, and critics to select what were for them the outstanding books of the past thirty years (1931–61)—books notable for originality or enduring significance or for changes in thoughts and attitudes. Frye’s reply (no. 7), a brief comment on why he has selected Finnegans Wake, has now expanded the Frye canon by seventy-two words. It is, of course, no secret

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that Frye was a great admirer of Finnegans Wake. The book figures importantly in Anatomy of Criticism, where at the conclusion of the taxonomy of the four forms of prose fiction Frye remarks: “The forms we have been isolating in fiction, and which depend for their existence on the common‑sense dichotomies of the daylight consciousness, vanish in Finnegans Wake into a fifth and quintessential form. This form is the one traditionally associated with scriptures and sacred books, and treats life in terms of the fall and awakening of the human soul and the creation and apocalypse of nature. The Bible is the definitive example of it; the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Icelandic Prose Edda, both of which have left deep imprints on Finnegans Wake, also belong to it” (CW 22: 294–5). Frye wrote two essays, separated by thirty years, on this “quintessential form”: “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake” (1957) and “Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake” (1987) (CW 29: 105–13, 332–49). In his reply to the questionnaire he concludes by saying that Finnegans Wake “always has on every page something to astonish and delight”—which is perhaps one reason that he kept his copiously annotated copy of the book on the shelves directly behind his desk chair in his Victoria College office. ••• Most of the material in Notebook 9 relates to Shakespeare—Frye’s notes for the Bampton Lectures and the Alexander Lectures, which became A Natural Perspective and Fools of Time (CW 28: 127–225, 250–327). This material was included in Michael Dolzani’s edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. The first part of the notebook contains on the flyleaf a diagram of the cycle of verbal structures, followed by Frye’s notes for the Massey Lectures, an outline of the various projects he had under way in 1962, cancelled pages of his drafts for the Massey Lectures, and notes in preparation for writing an essay on Yeats’s A Vision. None of this material was selected for inclusion in the Collected Works. But given the fact that the notes for the Massey Lectures, which became The Educated Imagination, and for the Yeats article are similar in form and content to many of the notes for Frye’s books and essays that were included in the Collected Works, this material no doubt should have been published. In the interest, then, of having a more complete account of Frye’s writing, these two sets of notes are reproduced as number 8. ••• The individual items in Frye’s three collections of essays are naturally scattered throughout the volumes of the Collected Works. Given the principles that governed the materials to be included in each of the CW volumes, the prefaces to each of Frye’s three collections—Fables of Identity (1963), The Stubborn Structure (1969), and Spiritus Mundi (1976)—did not have an obvious CW home, except

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perhaps in the miscellany volume (CW 25). Whatever the reason for their omission, they are much more than pro forma exercises and deserve to be restored or, perhaps better, re‑stored. The prefaces (one is called an introduction)—numbers 9, 12, and 15—reveal Frye’s commenting on his own work and disclose quite a few things not found elsewhere in his writing. How do the post‑Anatomy essays relate to that book? How does Frye define the three features of the central mythopoeic tradition that consciously set him apart from Eliot’s dispositions (Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics)? How does Frye adapt his talks to the different audiences before him? How does the conception of Romanticism serve to give the separate essays a unity and coherence? How do Joyce, Yeats, Stevens, and Dickinson represent the different Romantic values found in Blake, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other? What are the sources of Frye’s book titles? Which two essays show how Frye’s ideas have “taken shape genetically”? What does Frye’s interest in structuralism have to do with interpenetration? How does Frye relate himself to Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and George Steiner? How do Yeats’s schematisms relate to the second half of Spiritus Mundi? Where does Frye say “as some of those who write about me are still asserting that I ignore the social reference of literary criticism, the sub-title calls the attention of those who read me to the fact that I have written about practically nothing else”? Answers to these and numerous other questions can be found in the introduction to Fables of Identity and the prefaces to The Stubborn Structure and Spiritus Mundi. ••• Number 10 is Frye’s personal response to the so-called Macpherson Report— Undergraduate Instruction in Arts and Science, University of Toronto, Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Science (1967). The report, which resulted in part from the student unrest of the 1960s, recommended a less elitist form of undergraduate instruction and more student involvement in university governance. One of its central proposals was that “the present distinction between Honour and General degree courses should be removed.” Frye, a tireless defender of the Honour Course, was very much opposed to the recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Committee, chaired by C.B. Macpherson, recommendations that were shortly accepted for implementation, beginning in 1969–70. In 1970 Frye wrote, At the University of Toronto there used to be a distinction between a three-year General Course and a four-year Honour Course, but this has been swept away in a great wave of exuberant hysteria. The theories of these two courses were complementary. The theory of the General Course assumed a certain coordinating of disciplines, so that the student could see a broad area of knowledge from different points of view.

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The principle of the Honour Course was that every area of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge. Both these theories may have required too much sophistication from both students and teachers, but I would hope that after the dust settles and the university becomes restructured, it will become restructured along the older patterns. (“The Definition of a University,” Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, CW 7: 419)

Earlier Frye had written that his brief “could hardly have been more completely ignored than it was by the Macpherson Commission.”1 ••• Frye was of course often called on to present public lectures, both inside and outside the academy. Sometimes he would speak from a manuscript, but often his remarks came from only a few notes or from none at all. He once said in a letter to me that for him “the difference between writing and speaking from notes is a chalk-and-cheese difference,” adding that “when I’m asked to speak I often make it a condition that I am not to produce a manuscript. But of course when I turn up either a tape recorder is revolving somewhere or the CBC has gone into action, and they produce what purports to be a manuscript” (letter of 14 February 1972, Selected Letters, 138). Whether a manuscript existed for “Communication and the Arts” (no. 11) is impossible to say, but my guess is that there wasn’t one. After Jane Widdicombe became Frye’s secretary in 1968, she began to keep a list of his engagements along with a list of the manuscripts she typed for him. “Communication and the Arts” is on neither list. I understand the difference between writing and speaking from notes, but I am not convinced, in Frye’s case, that speaking from notes and speaking from a prepared manuscript is really a chalkand-cheese difference. In any case, Frye taught himself to speak in paragraphs, and I cannot think of a transcription of a recorded talk where Frye is any less articulate than if he had been speaking from a manuscript. “Communication and the Arts” ranges widely over a number of educational issues, including the role of the media, about which Frye’s intuitions are developed in large part in opposition to those of his colleague Marshall McLuhan. But the punchline of the essay is another variation on Frye’s long‑held conviction that communication depends on community, a theme he was still advancing more than thirty years later in Words with Power. ••• The other recorded talk (no. 18) is about the Soviet Union and Russia. It illustrates how prescient Frye was about political movements, a perceptiveness that went back to his student days. From 30 September to 27 October 1989 he had lectured in Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad, where he also met with Russian teach-

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ers and intellectuals. This was at a time when radical changes were happening in the Eastern Bloc and, less than two weeks after Frye returned to Canada, the fall of the Berlin Wall had begun, as the East German government announced that all East German citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Frye doesn’t predict the breakup of the Soviet Union, but he does take note of the absence of Marxist assumptions in the questions the Russians put to him, of the crowded bookshops, and of the glasnost that had begun to permeate the Soviet government. This talk also contains an account of Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novel The Master and Margarita Frye refers to as “one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.” He had read Bulgakov some fifteen years earlier, and this talk is the only place in his published work where he refers to Bulgakov, outside of a 1973 letter to his friend Roy Daniells.2 It is the only place as well where Frye refers to the life and work of the fiction writer and journalist Andriy Babiuk, who had come to Canada from Ukraine in the 1920s. ••• Because the entry entitled “Notes on Romance” (no. 13) constitutes about half of the present collection, its sheer length deserves a word of explanation. The “Notes on Romance” were written in preparation for the six Norton Lectures that Frye gave at Harvard University in April 1975. The revised and expanded lectures were published as The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (CW 18: 3–124). The typescript is a series of forty-seven separate sections of notes on Frye’s reading in the “romance” tradition—from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century, including two secondary sources by Moses Hadas. The texts are examples of what Frye called “sentimental romance,” which were developments from the formulas of naive romance that we find in folk and fairy tales. The bulk of the notes consists of Frye’s summaries and commentaries on thirty‑nine texts. Seven of the sections (8–11, 19, 22, and 25) correspond fairly closely to the substance and shape of Frye’s other, expansive note taking, most of which has now been published in the Collected Works. These seven sections were extracted by Michael Dolzani for inclusion in his edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, where they are identified as “Notes 56a” (CW 15: 182–210). At the time, Dolzani and I decided not to include the remaining notes in the Notebooks on Romance, primarily because we were constrained by the length of the volume: we drew back from extending its 500 pages by another 200 (90,000 words). In an appendix to the Notebooks on Romance Dolzani lists the omitted material, which we designated as “Notes 56b.” These notes are devoted to the works of the following writers:   1. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe   2. Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesiaca

xxiv   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Introduction Moses Hadas’s “Introduction” to Three Greek Romances Thomas Lodge, Rosalind Robert Greene, Pandosto Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale Heliodorus of Emesa, An Aethiopian History Apollonius of Tyre Parthenius of Nicaea, Love Romances Clementine Recognitions Chariton of Aphrodisias, Chaereas and Callirhoe Barlaam and Ioasaph Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White The Harlequin, Goldoni, and Gozzi Indian Drama Sir Walter Scott, Waverley Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet Sidney, Arcadia Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate Sir Walter Scott, Anne of Geierstein The Volsunga Saga Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha William Morris, The Wood beyond the World William Morris, The Well at the World’s End William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains William Morris, The Sundering Flood George MacDonald, Phantastes George MacDonald, Essay on the Imagination George MacDonald, Lilith George MacDonald, The Portent Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Thomas De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach Achilles Tatius, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon

A case can be made that the “Notes on Romance” are as significant as many of the entries in the seven volumes of notebooks now published in the Collected Works. In any event, the material in “Notes 56b” is now available for all, and the

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several Frye researchers who have asked me how they might get access to the romance notes no longer have to dig the typescripts out of the Frye Fonds in the Victoria University Library. The romance notes do contain a good measure of plot summary, but they disclose a great deal more. They reveal, first of all, the extraordinarily detailed attention Frye devoted to preparing for his lectures. In The Secular Scripture Frye makes two incidental references to Achilles Tatius, and in his only substantive reference to this Greek writer of the Roman era, about whom we know next to nothing, he says this in chapter 3: In another Greek romance by Achilles Tatius, Clitophon and Leucippe, which is, by and large, a rather silly story, the heroine is separated from her lover, is kidnapped and reduced to slavery, is threatened with torture and lashes; yet she still defies her tormentors and talks about the freedom of her soul. We can distinguish between the preposterous and contrived melodrama of this particular romance, and the convention expressed by it, where some kind of genuine human dignity does come through. Deep within the stock convention of virgin‑baiting is a vision of human integrity imprisoned in a world it is in but not of, often forced by weakness into all kinds of ruses and stratagems, yet always managing to avoid the one fate which really is worse than death, the annihilation of one’s identity. In Achilles Tatius we are a very long way, in power and splendour, from anything like “I am Duchess of Malfi still.” But we are in the same imaginative area for all that. (CW 18: 58–9)

This brief commentary (167 words) is distilled from some 3,700 words in Frye’s notes about Clitophon and Leucippe. But what might be seen as excessive preparation is typical of his approach. His notebooks for Words with Power and The Double Vision, for example, are more than twice as extensive as the published volumes. Some of these notes—for example, those on Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White—are close to completed essays, lacking only a bit of connective tissue. Other notes anticipate themes that we find developed in Words with Power. Frye’s late work often focuses on ecstatic states and the revolutionizing and expanding of consciousness that results from the kerygmatic experience of ecstasis. Kerygma moves beyond the poetic, embracing the reader’s existential experience. The highest states of this experience are a function of what Frye calls existential or, following Heidegger, ecstatic metaphor. At the conclusion of his notes on the Indian play The Later Story of Rama in the present volume, Frye writes about the ways in which that play, along with The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, heightens the role of the arts, and he concludes his note taking by saying, “All this appears to mean that the arts, brought together by drama, have a crucial role in uniting a dream with an awakened life, and by that union bringing about a form of higher consciousness which is what the cognitio at the end

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symbolizes. Drama, which partakes of both dream and wakened life, points to a form of consciousness transcending the schizophrenic alternation of dreams and waking ‘reality.’ ” Sometimes it’s as if Frye has laboured and brought forth a mouse. After devoting some 16,000 words to the various versions of Sidney’s Arcadia, Frye says tersely, “Silly story, except for the archetypes.” Frye, nevertheless, takes a great deal of delight in summarizing the unlikely plots of these romances and seldom passes up a chance to describe the erotic themes, sublimated and otherwise, in impishly indecorous terms and with many witty asides, including linguistic jokes. He refers to Minna in Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate as “inscrewtable.” He mentions the “touch of self-mockery as Scott recognizes the affinity of his own scene to mellerdrammer.” Another Scott character is said to have thought that the heroine had “been supplied with a sin twister—I mean a twin sister—but the displacement is pretty dismal.” Then there are the kinds of judgments about the style of the romances that one won’t find in Frye’s manual of style in The Well‑Tempered Critic: I noticed in reading Richardson’s Wacousta how the very badness of the style seemed in a way appropriate to the romance form. I haven’t got this clear, but it seems to me that writing of Jane Austen’s quality goes with a strong degree of realistic displacement, and that Scott’s creaky hay-waggon style really does seem the right medium for a romance where there’s a removal from reality: the characters aren’t speaking to you but are just being swept down the narrative current. I noticed that particularly in Anne of Geierstein, which is a late story, written after the financial collapse. In a sense the book isn’t written at all: it’s a draft written out, and the dialogue is too stilted to be believed. And yet it has an extraordinary pulling power, and I think it’s partly that goddam style.

William Morris doesn’t fare much better: “Curious that I remember so little of the early part when it’s repeated because of that synthetic glup Morris writes in: if he’d written his story in anything resembling the English language it’d be a lot easier to follow.” And Frye finds that after taking detailed notes on some thirty‑seven romances, his own style seems to suffer: “The prose style [of Sidney’s Arcadia] is getting opaque: in the previous chapter the summary of Pyrocles’ adventures includes one sentence about thirty lines of closely packed type long. My prose style ain’t anything to write epic poems about nuther.” Frye is always on the lookout for connections among the romances and links to other literary works, and, as in all of his note taking, to give only one example, he keeps an eye out for archetypes (he identifies more than eighty in the 56b material). In the notes on Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, for example, Frye spots the Gadarene swine archetype, the red-and-white archetype of Eros, the cherry-

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tree-carol archetype, the Alcinous archetype, the archetype of the master turning into the father, and the Sarah archetype. In Sidney’s Arcadia he discovers a whole string of archetypes: amnesia, death and rebirth, loathly lady, twin, disdainful mistress, Omphale, Demeter-Proserpine or Venus-Psyche, Eunuchus, Damon and Pythias, Bosworth field, Gonzalo, Ligeia, Philomela, and the left‑ behind‑for‑sacrifice archetype. Frye is also interested in exploring themes, images, Shakespearean parallels, and the like, and he keeps an eye out for the “recognition scenes”—the phrase appears several dozen times, along with its shorthand version, “cognitio.” Throughout his often painstaking recreation of the intricate plots of these romances, Frye is ever alert not just to archetypes but to parallels and allusions to earlier works, to echoes from the literary tradition, to correspondences with what has come before—all in keeping with his principle that literature is made out of other literature. Producing The Secular Scripture was often a three-part process. Frye began with all the detail he accumulated in “Notes on Romance.” These notes then became the source of further musings in his notebooks. An entire volume of the Collected Works (vol. 15) is devoted to romance. This notebook material was then transmuted into The Secular Scripture. But sometimes the spadework Frye did in preparation for his study of sentimental romance made its way into places other than The Secular Scripture. The reflections on De Quincey in “Notes on Romance” (nos. 37 and 38), for example, do not appear in that book, which is completely silent about The English Mail-Coach and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. But the attraction those two essays held for Frye can be seen in other places: “Vision and Cosmos,” “The Survival of Eros in Poetry,” and the section on fictional meaning in The Practical Imagination (CW 18: 190, 228, 265). Frye’s “Notes on Romance” reveal an astonishing attention to detail, and though the reader may sometimes weary, as Frye himself did, of the mazelike plots and the hundreds of characters that move the stories along, these notes are a substantial body of work, and there is nothing quite like them in the rest of the Frye corpus. After having written some 3,500 words on Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate, Frye enjoins himself, “don’t ever again take so long to summarize one of these damn stories.” Nevertheless, patience is a virtue in preparing for another task, like giving the Norton lectures at Harvard, and most, no doubt, will agree, that Frye’s views on the romance tradition would have been incomplete without the notes that are being published here. ••• A significant genre in the Frye oeuvre is the interview. Jean O’Grady’s exemplary volume of interviews in the Collected Works contains 111 interviews and lists more than 50 others that remain lost, unavailable, or untraced. One of the missing ones that O’Grady lists is published here (no. 14). This interview, which takes

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the form of answers to questions by a dozen or so people at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal, was intended to focus on The Secular Scripture, but it is a long and wide‑ranging interview (some 14,000 words, transcribed by Nicholas W. Graham), which explores dozens of topics. The second interview (no. 17), which I’ve entitled “Seeing, Hearing, Praying, Loving,” is more focused. It comes from a tape made by Nicholas W. Graham of a question‑and‑answer session following Frye’s lecture “The Dialectic of Belief and Vision.” ••• Victoria College, where Frye spent his entire academic life (from 1929 to 1991), is the focus of two of the items in the present collection, “Victoria College’s Contribution to the Development of Canadian Culture” (no. 16) and “The Victoria Chapel Windows” (no. 21). The former ends quite abruptly, and if it weren’t for the fact that the last page of the typescript fills only two‑thirds of the page, one would be tempted to say that some pages appear to be missing. Frye’s argument, in any case, is that Victoria’s contribution to culture is one that gets beyond the faith-versus-reason debate so as to centre on the educated imagination. The entry titled “The Victoria Chapel Windows” is a set of sketchy notes that appear to have been typed by Frye for a talk or, perhaps more likely, a chapel service held in the Victoria College chapel on the second floor of the Old Vic building (built in 1892). The chapel is decorated with five stained-glass windows. The central window displays the Victoria College crest and motto (Abeunt studia in mores [Studies develop into habit]). The other windows contain images of John Milton, John Wesley, Martin Luther, and Sir Isaac Newton. Germaine Warkentin, one of Frye’s colleagues, kindly provided me with this description of the windows, which is helpful in deciphering Frye’s concise and sometimes cryptic notes: Each of the portraits is a circular medallion, with the appropriate text (very brief) on a ribbon around the face. I don’t quote exactly, just the gist. They are, from left to right: 1) Milton—to justify the ways of God to man 2) Wesley—the best of all is, God is with us 3) Luther—here I stand . . . God help me (in German) 4) Newton—the great ocean of truth lay before me undiscovered

About the Newton window, Frye writes, “End of life—get quote / —last phrase on window the key.” The last phrase is the “great ocean of truth,” which comes from this passage: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea‑shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,

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whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” (Brewster 2: 331 [ch. 27]). The passage became a touchstone for Frye, who returned to the passage in three sermons. In the first, “To Come to Light,” he said, We may remember the chapel windows in the college building, with the portrait of Isaac Newton accompanied by his famous remark that he felt like a child playing with pebbles on a beach with an undiscovered ocean still in front of him. But the ocean has no wish to remain undiscovered. The longing to know and create is deeply entrenched in the human mind, but when we pursue knowledge or creation we begin to feel something else moving beyond the control of our wills. Some of us at that point will become frightened at the prospect of doing without the sedating drugs of habit. Others may realize that this is the movement of a Spirit who, we are told, does not shrink from searching all things, even the deep things of God. (CW 4: 365–6)

In the second, “Wisdom and Knowledge,” he wrote, Sir Isaac Newton is said to have remarked near the end of his life that however he may have appeared to the world, he seemed to himself like a child playing with pebbles on a beach, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. I do not think this remark expressed either false modesty or world weariness. I think what it expressed was a sense of exhilaration in coming to the end of a great effort, and so back to a beginning again, a point where everything has yet to be known. One finds that the ultimate aim in some long and complex effort of knowledge, such as writing a book, is not really to accomplish something by writing it. The ultimate aim rather is to get rid of it, for the sake of that instant of breathless innocence before one starts the next book, the instant when all the possibilities of knowledge are still before one. The bankruptcy of knowledge is one of the most genuine and tangible rewards of knowledge. (CW 4: 307–8)

And in still another sermon he said: I often think of the remark of Isaac Newton, made toward the end of his life, which is commemorated on one of these chapel windows: “I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been a child playing with stones on a beach, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That is the kind of detachment that a wise and good man can attain from his own life. Without some measure of such a detachment, we shall make ourselves very miserable, if we try to judge our own lives as a body of things achieved, accomplished, or done. Society is a better judge of what we have done, partly because it knows less. If there is a final or last judgment to be made on our lives, it cannot be made by ourselves, or by our friends, or even by those who love us, who come much closer to it than anyone else.

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It could only be made by an omniscient but infinitely compassionate being. (CW 4: 284–5)

There are, then, three different emphases that the Newton window triggers in Frye’s gloss on the passage—the desire for knowledge, the exhilaration that that brings, and the ability to detach oneself from one’s own life—three things that are also a part of the great ocean of truth. ••• Seven volumes of the Collected Works and a portion of another volume contain material from Frye’s notebooks. Upon his death, seventy-seven holograph notebooks were discovered among the effects of his estate, along with close to 4,000 pages of typed material that is referred to in the Collected Works project as “notes.” This material came to the Victoria University Library. For five years during the mid‑1990s Michael Dolzani and I transcribed the holograph notebooks into computer files, and I had the typed notes scanned into digital format. In 1997 after the death of Frye’s second wife, Elizabeth Eedy Frye, two notebooks, one large and the other small, were discovered at her bedside table. The large notebook—Notebook 50—was included in the Late Notebooks (vols. 5 and 6 of the Collected Works), but for reasons that are now murky I did not include the small one—Notebook 51. Like Notebook 50, 51 is a Double Vision notebook. It is now published (no. 19) as a supplement to the published notebook material from the last decade of Frye’s life. Interestingly, Notebook 51 opens with several entries about Frye’s long-standing desire to write a work of fiction, which had begun at age eight when he proposed to write a series of eight historical novels. Here he calls it the cena, the banquet colloquy or dialogue that he had tried his hand at in the 1930s, producing eight “fables,” six of which were published. These were brief forms of the type of longer fiction that Frye called the anatomy. In the 1940s he also worked on a novel, a more or less realistic piece of fiction, called The Locust‑Eaters. It appears to be the beginning of a novel in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism, with a heavy dose of satire. We know from Frye’s notebooks that he fantasized about writing other kinds of fiction: the thriller, the detective story, the intellectual comedy of understatement, the “theme with variations” novel, the academic novel in a university setting, a symposium, a novel about the discovery of a fifth gospel, and a fictional form in which the central character journeys through various states of being. It is this last form that remained in Frye’s consciousness until the end. Sometimes he refers to it as a bardo novel, and he points to various models: in Katherine Ann Porter’s Ship of Fools, Charles Williams’s All Hallow’s Eve, Henry James’s A Sense of the Past and The Next Time, and Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie. To this list we can now add Sweet Rocket by the Virginia novelist Mary John-

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ston, mentioned in the second entry of Notebook 51 and nowhere else in Frye’s work. The novel was reprinted in Six Novels of the Supernatural, an annotated copy of which is in Northrop Frye’s own library.3 Johnston, we are told, was widely read in Blake and Swedenborg and sympathetic to Theosophy, and in her later novels the mysticism perceptible in her earlier books became more pronounced. This development was doubtless linked to the shock of the World War and the widespread conviction that only through far‑ranging changes in human nature could world cataclysm be avoided. Although she contended that her mystical emphasis had begun as early as 1908 with Lewis Rand, it was in Foes (1918), Michael Forth (1919), and Sweet Rocket (1920) that this became the dominant theme of her work. The heroes of these novels possess a larger awareness in which “time, space and causation” are perceived “with a greater completeness” and the barriers of individuality transcended. (James 2: 283)4

One can understand why Frye would be interested in Sweet Rocket: it provided another model for his fiction‑writing dreams, and it conformed to the theme of expanded consciousness or heightened awareness that appears everywhere in his late work. ••• The notebooks contain occasional personal reflections—remembering what it was like to see movies in Moncton as a child or recalling, when his mother read Sir Walter Scott to him, “how the descriptions made sense when the presentation was oral: had nothing to do but listen, and they could build up in my mind, point by point.” Sometimes he smiles at himself, as if issuing a caveat not to take himself too seriously: “Naturally this idea is as full of bugs as a slum tenement, but if I crack it the Bampton lectures will be a piece of cake. I’m not sure what holds these metaphors together. ‘Dialogue’ with oneself is a risky business.” Frye confesses throughout the notebooks his doubts and uncertainties: “I’m not quite sure what this means”; “If I could figure out the interconnection of amnesia and identical twin themes I’d have this tied up”; “I haven’t got all the details clear”; “I forget what happens in this complication”; “I don’t get any of this.” Then there is a more extended misgiving about being able to solve a problem: Something I haven’t quite got about the relation between elements of thought, or the imaginative identity, & elements of existence, individual human beings. In Blake the birth, development, death & reincarnation of imaginative units is described in such a way as to suggest that Blake is talking about actual human life, both during & after its earthly existence. Perhaps he intends this overtone, as the role of Milton in Milton suggests. But Yeats, it seems to me, completely confuses the two, & projects

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the immortality of imagery (Byzantium) into actual existence. If I could solve this problem, of course, I could do anything. Certainly I could write my third book easily enough.

Frye was of course not able to complete the third book—that is, the major work that was intended to follow on Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. Given the amount of energy he devoted to writing the third book, there is a certain poignancy in his remark that “maybe I’m getting into my tertiary period without having really had a secondary one.” This is, from my point of view, an accurate self‑assessment. Frye really didn’t have a secondary phase that was comparable to the Aristotelian phase of the Anatomy at one end and the Longinian phase of The Great Code and Words with Power at the other. ••• Finally, there is an eleven‑unit miscellany (no. 20), which is drawn from Notebooks 42, 30m, 16, 25, and from scattered typescripts. It includes brief entries on Jung, Blake, Morris, Milton, The Great Code, and other topics, and so it is, like the collection itself, a salmagundi.

Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose

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1 1932 Notebook (mid-1930s)

This notebook was written in a 1932 Canadian Diary (published by Brown Brothers stationers in Toronto), which had one lined page for each day of the year. According to the distinctions used in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, the material, though written in a daybook or diary—and referred to several times by Frye as a diary—is similar in both form and content to the reflections and speculations in Frye’s other notebooks. It is difficult to date the notebook with certainty, although it is clear that many of the notebook entries, perhaps even a majority, were written after 1932. In the entry of 13 March Frye refers to his experience on the mission field in Saskatchewan, which occurred in 1934. On 17 March he mentions Eliot’s After Strange Gods, which was published in 1934. A reference to the “current depression” in the entry of 23 May could suggest a date as late as 1939: it was only then, with the advent of World War II, that the Canadian economy began to recover. In a marginal notation to the entry for 13 July Frye identifies the entry as an early form of his anatomy theory. He began to develop this theory in 1932 and his first published version of it was 1942. This suggests a date sometime after 1932 and perhaps as late as 1940 or 1941. In the final entry for 31 January Frye refers to “My B.D. Thesis.” Although the lines that follow are a light‑hearted and joking couplet, they suggest a mid‑1930s date for the notebook, as Frye began to lay plans for writing a B.D. thesis on Christianity and music during his first year at Emmanuel College, 1933–34. Frye also refers to his “tendency to novel‑writing” (7 July), and if this refers to the one extant though unfinished novel he wrote, then the date of this notebook entry could be as late as the early 1940s. Still, the material here is earlier than in any of Frye’s other notebooks. The difficulty in dating the notebook can be seen in the entry on rugby of 29 November, which is written in the present tense and so appears not to be a flashback. Given this assumption, the date would appear to be the year that the University of Toronto varsity rugby team (The Blues) was in the cellar and that the Victoria team, which included Don Amos and John Stinson, lost in its bid to win the final competition for the Mulock Cup, the trophy awarded to the champion of the Uni‑ versity of Toronto intramural rugby league. But Jean O’Grady has uncovered the following facts: Victoria did play Trinity College for the championship in 1931, and Trinity won, but neither Amos nor Stinson played. The year before, Victoria beat Trinity once again, but Amos and Stinson were not on the team. In 1933 the Toronto Blues were not in the cellar because they defeated Queen’s

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1932 Notebook

University for the Senior Intercollegiate Championship. This rules out 1931 through 1933 for that particular entry. Frye was an Emmanuel College student from 1933 to 1936. For the 1936–37 academic year he was studying at Oxford. There is nothing in the notebook that would point to its being written when he was at Merton College. The best guess seems to be that the notebook comes from Frye’s time at Emmanuel College, and it is quite possible that he wrote the entries over the course of sev‑ eral years. In his later, somewhat obsessive note‑taking he would pick up a notebook at his home or office, write in it, and come back to it later, sometimes years later. It is clear from the orthography of this notebook that Frye did come back to some of the entries. The writing is in both pencil and pen, and when writing in ink Frye used pens with different nibs and with different colours of ink. When we have different styles of handwriting appearing on the same page, it seems unlikely that all of the writing on that page was done at a single sitting. The two paragraphs for 9 March, for example, were written with different pens, and the pen used in the second paragraph was also used to insert two sentences in the first paragraph. Frye has obviously edited what he first wrote. The diary has two vertical columns on the right-hand side of each page, and in the first column Frye makes a notation for almost all of the separate entries. This is the only Frye notebook in which such annotations appear. It is as if he has gone back through the notebook at a later date and made notes about which entries to “leave,” which are “OK,” which need improvement (“possible if re‑ vised”), and the like, although some of the notations remain mysterious. (Is “S.G.” an abbreviation for “sehr gut”? “sola gratia”?) What the disposition of the notebook entries might have eventually been is uncertain. I have recorded the marginal notations in square brackets at the end of the entry where they stand opposite. Words that I have been unable to decipher are designated by a question mark in square brackets; sometimes these question marks follow what I think the word might be. Words that Frye underlined have been italicized. I have retained his punctuation and spelling. An exception, in the interest of clarity, is the addition of quotation marks in several places where Frye refers to words as words. The 1932 Notebook is published with the permission of Victoria University.

January 9 Of all literary abortions there is nothing more damnable than the chattering of an armchair smiling egoist. The familiar essay, like the personal impression in criticism, succeeds insofar as it is systematic or presupposes a systematic outlook. Insofar as it fails in this, it wastes the time of those looking for something useful and nauseates those looking for something beautiful. January 13 Parody must be an extraordinarily difficult art. If you parody a man, you are nec-

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essarily trying to pick out weak spots, and as that cannot be done so objectively with thought, you must concentrate on style. Style is expression; parody inverts both. Now once style is divorced from man, the effect is as forced and laboratoried as hydrogen taken from water. If the man is earnest and sincere, the parodist possibly feels like a cad—sincerity and difficulty of parody being commensurate in any case. Now if you parody a school—a small individual artist is too petty a mark—there is always a lunatic fringe which has already parodied it. One cannot parody Gertrude Stein any more than The Hunting of the Snark. Take that famous indiscretion of Crashaw: Two walking baths; two weeping motions; Portable, and compendious oceans.1 [Saint Mary Magdalene or The Weeper, stanza 19]

If a parodist could think that one up, he might collect a pension and retire, but Crashaw himself wrote it, and parody can only shrug its shoulders. [margin: “not too bad”] January 15 Poetry is any form of literary expression which the creator wishes to call poetry. It may not be any good but it is poetry all the same. [margin: “OK”] Obscenity is well‑nigh essential to satire, but that does not mean that a writer should scrape material for his work off the walls of a public lavatory. [margin: “OK”] I think an underlying cause of the pervading imbecility of detective‑story writers can be found in the fact that they think in terms of short stories and yet insist on producing novels. Books which at best have barely enough material for an effective three‑thousand word tale become excruciating when padded—or rather swelled—to the larger dimension which often requires a deliberate obstruction of the story such as a love‑interest. [margin: “OK”] To me, how a man with the mellow wisdom and rich humor of Oliver Wendell Holmes could have produced a monstrosity like “Elsie Venner” is a deep mystery, which only a thoroughly competent psychoanalyst can solve.2 [margin: “useless”] I think there are few things more drearily and irritatingly commonplace than cleverness. [margin: “trite”]

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The creation of a work of art consists in the infusion of a rhythmic pattern into Nature. Art conquers space by time, science by space again. [margin: “useless as is”] January 16 Continuing with the last thought of yesterday, there are three compulsions in the world. First, the time‑compulsion to action, or morals. Second, the space‑compulsion to thought, or logic. Third, the interfusion of time in space, or aesthetics, and of action in thought, or feeling.3 [margin: “expand”] Therefore art is the precipitate of history and the catalyzer of science, as well as the expressed form of religion. [margin: “useless”] January 21 The Faustian drive into the infinite can be symbolized by one figure only, the Cross. But the cross must have a long shaft to emphasize the upward urge. The Greek square cross, and still more the Maltese, is an inclusive, self‑satisfied figure. The cross squares down with the Anglicans and the moribund Byzantines. To have the centre in the centre is the symbol of egotistic criticism. The Latin cross implies the ellipse—the double rapport centre, one being an indefinite and consequently infinite locus. [margin: “OK”] One occasionally feels that had Judge Jeffreys never lived, all the nineteenth‑cen[margin: “S.G.”] tury historians would have died of apoplexy.4 Magical formulas in the Leyden Papyrus W [Dieterich, Abraxas 202, 15 ff]. “Enter, act with your eyes shut, bellow as much as you can, then take in your breath with a sigh, and let it out again with a whistle.”5 January 25 The racial make‑up of this country is more Scotch than English. Due partly, I suppose, to the affinity of Northern nations. As a result Canada is more apt to work out an abstract skeleton framework for the Americans in theology, philosophy, and science than develop a distinctive culture, just as the Scotch have done for England. What culture we would produce would seem to be provincial craft‑art. The United Church of Canada is our first move along the other line. [margin: “OK”]

1932 Notebook

7 January 31

It should be remembered that Jesus cursed the fig‑tree because it bore no fruit, not because it bore no fig‑leaves. [margin: “OK”] Red is the color of sexuality; even animals know that. In the nineteenth century the tomato was called the “love‑apple” and regarded as poisonous. That seems to sum up a good deal of the Victorian attitude to sexuality, and I think it a probable explanation of the origin of this grotesque superstition. I suppose the reason red is sexual in nature is that it is nearest the heat rays. [margin: “OK”] There was also the prejudice against red hair. There are three primary colors. Blue and yellow both represent spatial abstractions, the first Catholic, real, & mystical, the second Protestant, nominal & scientific. Red is the great [time?]‑color underlying time. [margin: “vague”] My B.D. Thesis An attempt to mutter a long surmise That is blankly questioned among the wise.

[margin: “leave alone”]

February 4 “The way to understand living forms is by analogy,” says Spengler [Decline 1: 4]. It is also the only way to acquire perspective. A new thing dazzles, blinds, confounds as long as it is regarded as new. I have just read a vicious but trivial attack on Freud by Dr. Collins in which the psychologist calls the psychoanalyst by the psychological equivalents of heretic, blasphemer, innovator and iconoclast. This seems to me a waste of time.6 Collins would have no difficulty in considering Thomas Hobbes in his true light without prepossessions, and Sigmund Freud is Thomas Hobbes. Similarly a relationship exists between the two sentimental reactionaries Bertrand Russell and Rousseau. Spengler’s “morphological equivalents” are only a special case of analogies. All analogies deserve investigation in order to arrive at an underlying similarity. Thus the parallel between Plato and Bernard Shaw should be noticed as well as that between Plato and Goethe, though it has not the same implication or significance. The superficial resemblance has its importance as well as the underlying one, though it may only be a coincidence or of merely individual preference. Special notice, too, should be taken of cases of morphological equivalents, where the younger is more or less aware of his relationship to the older, as Milton to Euripides, as distinguished from conscious attempts at such a relationship, as Blake to Milton. The direct

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path that often leads from one figure to a later similar one, as from Crabbe to E.A. Robinson, should be traced if it exists. The present tendency is merely to make an epigram out of a resemblance and let it go at that without further investigation. [margin: “leave alone”] It is extremely unlikely that Tennyson was ever aware of the damp soul of a housemaid,7 but at least he was more so than most of his successors. [margin: “leave alone”] February 12 Mencken calls Shaw an Ulster Polonius [140]. Somewhere in his prefaces Shaw speaks of Ophelia as having gone mad because she loved Hamlet but couldn’t get him [Shaw, A Selection 56], which is of course the complement of Polonius’ theory about the madness of Hamlet. February 14 One of the most insidiously unfair dialectic weapons in existence is the illegitimate use of the connotations of words. For instance, a Communist, mentioning Spengler, in that sort of abusive special pleading which they call the inevitable logic of dialectical materialism, says “his thesis is founded on an irrational mysticism.” Now the ordinary, careless, slipshod reader, too lazy to realize that “mystic” is a definite technical word with a definite technical meaning, or too stupid to find out what words mean at all, feels his way through the darkness of an exacting language with antennae of emotional associations. He has a sloppy sort of paronomasia at the surface of his vocabulary which draws “mystic” into “misty” and “mysterious” and makes it a vague term of abuse for vagueness. This is here deliberately exploited by the writer, if the writer is not himself on the level of the readers he convinces, or reassures. Of course, I suppose that saying “mystical” when all one means is “misty” is the result of snobbishness, pretending to be better acquainted with culture in its various aspects than one actually is, to have “seen through” mysticism when one is merely ignorant of it. [margin: “S.G.”] February 15 Conceit is not an exaggeration of self‑respect, as is so often thought, because it is unthinkable apart from a social background of applauding auditors; it is not easy to think of a conceited lighthouse keeper. Self‑respect means intelligent self‑appraisal, and intelligence implies an external compulsion to judgment. The exaggeration of self‑respect is the self‑abnegation of mysticism.

1932 Notebook

9 February 22

I succeeded today in repressing an impulse to strangle a friend of mine who claimed that he wanted to write, but could not do so except under ideal conditions. I said as gently as I could that anyone who had an essential urge to write would hardly be deterred by a lack of artistic surroundings, as long as it was quiet, and Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe and others had found gaol as good a place as any. He protested that what he was trying to write was much more fragile and delicate than that of the men named, to which I agreed. As I read the child, he is afraid of himself, and subconsciously is trying to get out of or postpone the actual ordeal of writing something likely to prove inferior to the masterpiece he dreams about. I think, too, that his impulse to write springs from a feverish neurotic urge to cover every sheet of blank paper he sees with writing. The wholesale way he buys scribblers, writing pads, notebooks, etc. without filling them suggests this. [margin: “not bad if revised”] It must be easy to write a Grande Valse Brillante.8 The rhythmic kick of the waltz is arresting enough to guarantee life without any help from the composer. This is true of most dance forms, so that many dances might be regarded as springs for a mattress of padding for the weary listener to pound his ears upon. [margin: “better leave”] March 1 It is a pity that the stereotype of the polite skeptic, always armed with a smirk and a snuff box, like the man who annoyed Hotspur,9 and like him loftily superior to battles, has gained such currency. The skeptic is a female mind, interested in balance and consummation of personality. He is fundamentally a parasite: if he happens, accidentally, to be an artist or a social reformer, we can tolerate him, but when changes occur in society, we have to have dogmatists to establish a cultural structure to fit it. That no dogmatic system is final says nothing about its truth (finality, of course, relates only to historical events, and so only a system based on a historical event, like Christianity, can be final) and of course its lack of finality is what makes it true. Now the apparent invulnerability of the skeptic is really given him by the dogmatic superstructure of his time, religious or political. Rousseau is the lowest grade of skeptic: Voltaire, supported by a political system, is a bit higher: Montaigne, working inside both a religious and political consciousness, still higher: and Erasmus, not only fully integrated but fully conscious of it, highest of all. The poet is always more or less female to the thinker: explicitly as with Dante and Lucretius, or implicitly, as with Shakespeare or Cervantes; but then the poet is not essentially either skeptic or believer, but maker.

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So is the dogmatist, but masculine. With an essentially skeptical age like the nineteenth century, the skeptic’s politeness begins to wear a bit thin. Schopenhauer’s skepticism is far more [corrosive?] than Voltaire’s, but Schopenhauer himself was as factious and irascible a [snorting?] dogmatist as Luther or Calvin. March 5 My minister recently preached a fiery sermon against the liquor traffic. I should like to support him in his contentions, but I cannot go all the way with him, as his attitude is neither sufficiently critical nor comprehensive. I have worked in public libraries too long not to know that it is high time the word “narcotic” was given a much wider significance than it has at present. [margin: “leave” / “trite”] I have visited upon the devoted head of the family radio enough curses to make Ernulphus10 howl with horror and rage, but I have just heard something really exquisite. In the middle of a particularly atrocious jazz programme the announcer said: “Not only do modern composers write jazz but even the old masters are arranged and made to do a bit of syncopation.” If jazz is syncopated, so is its lineal ancestor, the water torture of the Middle Ages. The old master, incidentally, was Offenbach. [margin: “leave”] March 8 A mystic is a fool who is always right.

[margin: “leave”]

Pity the poor lovers who suffer in an agony of protectiveness. [margin: “leave”] As regards love, three kinds of women—invertebrates, crustaceans, and carnivores. [margin: “better leave”] Women are natural‑born grand‑daughters. Consistency, thou art a fool.

[margin: “possible”] [margin: “OK”]

March 9 The three caskets story in the Merchant of Venice is a good example of the allegorical nature of the drama. No novelist could possibly use anything of this. Apart from the obvious platitudes, a barbarian will always choose gold; an aris-

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11

tocrat, silver.11 But in practical life Portia’s father would of course be a jackass, the most drivelling kind of an old fool, owing to the accidents of reality. It would not do for a novel. Anyone not actually subnormal would open the leaden casket at once, if obeying only an obscure interest that there was a catch in it somewhere. [margin: “OK”] Portia’s suitors would be divided into the direct, who would open the leaden casket at once because they would know there was a catch in it, and the over subtle who would suspect that there might be a catch in the catch and open another. But this has no real relation to Portia. March 10 The omniscient method will not work in a detective story, for if the author knows the minds and characters of several he presumably knows who the murderer is as well and is merely holding out on his readers. And if the author once enters into the mind of one of his characters, the latter is automatically disqualified as a suspect. [margin: “OK”] March 11 How about a spectral analysis of history? Take Western cultures, for instance. In the Romanesque violet, color of passion and terror, of fury and cruelty, splendour and intuition, gorgeous as a child, fierce as a birth. In the great Catholic period indigo, deep mystical power, childlike ecstasy of clean color. In the Scholastic period blue, color of cold, metaphysical subtlety, unearthly and remote from life. Then the Renaissance, green, a swing out to nature (hence its association with the Protestant brown), a desire for naturalness, for sanity, for empiricism, for attempting to make art organic and living—hence the Classical–Hebrew search for origins. Then the Baroque yellow, the color of splendid and intense pomp, of illuminating blinding intensity, lightening all painting like the sun which gives it off, striving after a search for light. Then the Industrial Revolution and orange, the color of gold, the showy, artificial color. Lastly red, the color of blood and fire, symbolic of Communist brutality and capitalistic ruthlessness, the color of sex, irritation, and restlessness. It is truly a long way from Augustine’s ultra‑violet perspicacity to our swelterings in the intolerably sapping infra‑red, but we are constantly plunging into deeper and deeper black and may rest our eyes in peace sometime. Jesus is still white, and a few religious spirits may not go blind. [margin: “OK”]

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Red is symbolic of Catholicism, but that is the wine‑red from violet. The red formed from orange,—scarlet—was regarded as the color of a whore. [margin: “leave”] God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far‑flung battalion.12

[margin: [?] ] March 12

England takes the lead in the final stages of the spectrum; that is why she has been associated with red, “painting the map red.” In the terrific struggle over whether modern England was to be symbolized by a red rose or a white one, the former absorbed the latter. The Jews also are heralds of civilization; that was why England expelled them at the beginning of her cultural development, allowing them to return after the final victory of money and city over land. Karl Marx is a splash of red. Spinoza, another Jew, is pure orange (hence his romantic rehabilitation), the yellow Baroque reason and the red materialism of today being caught up and statically blended as two aspects of the same thing. Orange is the color that most nearly represents gold, which is not a color (orange = aurum). Magian art has a gold background. It is for a deeper reason than merely a bad pun that Irish Protestants are orange men. Yeah. [margin: “leave”] And I think that if there were a prime symbol of the twentieth century it would be phallic. That is why Freud is so deep an incarnation. Sexual intercourse is now the consummation of life. With the Industrial Revolution life settled down to the distaff side, and the supreme moment in a bourgeois’ life is his wedding night. This era was heralded by a number of sons of Priapus—Goethe, Byron, Burns—and late post‑romantic standing for a certain rugged masculinity went insane—Schumann, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, MacDowell, and, for practical purposes, Strindberg. After a nervous era of prudishness, women finally bared their bodies in triumph, and the male costume, no longer a sign of vitality and creativeness, dropped into a uniform. The whole organization of life today is feminine and erotic. [margin: “possible but trite”] March 13 It is one of the most pernicious tendencies of slipshod criticism to praise one art by referring to it in terms of another. It is no more a compliment to a Shakespeare drama to say it is “like a symphony” or to a Chopin Prelude to say it is “like an exquisite cameo” than for a gormandizer to say of a painting that it is like a potato salad. [margin: “S.G.”]

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13

All qualitative distinctions of kind are organic and concrete; all quantitative distinctions of degree are inorganic and abstract. I am different in kind from you because I am a different living organism and therefore am unique: any attempt to establish superiority and inferiority has to be referred back to an abstract standard. Thus the distinction between red and yellow is inorganically quantitative (number of vibrations per second) and organically qualitative. It begs the question to say that one can be “reduced” to the other: neither gives the least hint of the other, and they are parallel from the start. Moreover, differences of degree can always be defined: differences in kind cannot be defined, but have to be pointed out in experience. No sense experience can give any idea of the vibration of color, and no definition will work for the color [?] than bringing up a tomato and a buttercup and saying, “Here, this is red; this is yellow.” [margin: “Blake?”] On my mission field a parishioner said: “Moses wrote the Book of Genesis, didn’t he?” “O, no.” “But it says right here, ‘First Book of Moses.’ ” “Well, that means a book about Moses: ‘The Book of Kings’ means about the kings, not that all the kings took turns writing it.” “But there’s nothing about Moses in the Book of Genesis.” “No, no: it just means they associated it with Moses. When you say ‘Wars of the Roses,’ you don’t mean that the Roses did the fighting, but just that they were associated with it.” March 14 I hate Henry James. I hate him. I hate his sniggering smirking puppets and his discreet nervous cough and his supercilious butler air and his Olympian snobbery and Buddhist lack of social conscience and his eternal bows and scrapes and posturing and afternoon teas and lah‑de‑dah and his endless ingratiating rhythm. And yet he seems to have a faculty for making things come all right, clearing cobwebs out of your brain, straightening up your ideas and putting you straight generally. He’s an ugly, prudish old nurse, but I have to have him when I’m sick, as I often am. [margin: “S.G.”] March 15 I suppose the reason why Johnson (I mean the character of Boswell’s novels, not the critic and poet) is lovable and appealing is that he makes essentially the same appeal as Don Quixote, on the plane of a bourgeois Tory. Quixote’s ideal world is mystic and chivalric; Johnson’s is consolidated and assured, but not the less unreal, with its obsolete dogmas in morality and politics. It is because Johnson is impatiently and pathetically wrong about everything—about Berkeley, about Tristram Shandy, about the Established Church—that I love him. Without a fero-

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cious wall‑butting (or rather stone‑licking) epigram, he is stupid, as in the Gray essay. The Chesterfield episode13 even has an undercurrent of quixotism of the frustrated idealist, though in this case so much a loser to Quixote. March 17 Jane Harrison’s Themis: God, but I wish she weren’t so definitely one of those gasping fluttering females who want to be Dionysians.14 Life is energy incorporated in form, and women always try to shirk the form. [margin: “S.G.”] I am sorry that Lady Chatterley is banned. I don’t mind Ulysses because that’s so much the greatest work of the century that to have it alone banned would be so complete an epitome of the 20th c as to be worth preserving indefinitely, even at extra expense and trouble in procuring that book. But Lady Chatterley’s being bracketed with Ulysses gives it thereby a lustre it does not deserve, and spoils the object lesson.15 Judging from “After Strange Gods,” Eliot has got to where the souls of the devout burn invisible and dim.16 I don’t object to his spiritual world being invisible, but I do object to its being dim. March 18 A. The close of Othello is completely spoiled for me by the threat to torture Iago. It is impossible for a human being to commit a crime punishable morally with death by torture. It may be vengeance, but it is hypocrisy to call it justice. Moreover, a tragedy should harmonize at the close. If the villain is to die, let him die before the tragedy is over, so as to sustain a note of resolution: not this leering and vicious suspension of action which postpones the torture until after the end of the play, and which, notice, does not simply dismiss Iago but insists gloatingly on the expectation of his agonies. This is not squeamishness: even Nashe’s atrocious wallowings in torture are preferable because the narrative comes to a full close after them and not before them. [margin: “S.G.”] B. True, and yet there may be an artistic reason for it after all. Othello is a domestic tragedy: one might associate it with All’s Well or Measure for Measure, but it is a complete digression from the magnificently symbolic tragedies of Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and the Roman plays. Now in domestic tragedy a heavier emphasis is thrown on the moral implications of the catastrophe. This implies a greater insistence on retribution, and, besides, the moralist’s point about tragedy is not religious but temporal: he sees sin going on forever, spreading and

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15

begetting evil. That is hell: the evil side of existence isolated. The fall of Antony is a ritual sacrifice: the fall of Othello a treacherous murder. Hence the additional horror of introducing the sinister note of continued vendetta cruelty at the close. C. Very true. Where Lear and Macbeth are active intelligent agents, Othello is passive and a dupe: where they are tragic, Othello is primarily a figure of pathos. And as pathos makes a much more direct and obvious appeal to our emotions than tragedy, which is cold and impersonal, like all the greatest art. Othello is almost unbearably horrible: being moral, the tragedy is an unnecessary waste, not inevitable like Macbeth’s. The unbearable, emotional threat to torture Iago, also the result of baffled and frustrated activity, is the complement of this. March 19 A young artist’s model named Rose Refused to take off all her clothes. The artist said, “Model, Get this in your noodle, I simply won’t draw you in those.”

[margin: “possible”]

Chorus of American public to Sinclair Lewis on the publication of “Elmer Gantry.” “We asked you for something worthy of Molière, but all you have given us is a Paine!” [margin: “possible”] One of the more frequent literary superstitions is the unlettered (dating from primitivism) yet profoundly wise apophthegmatic (?)17 philosopher to be found whittling. I have never believed in his existence. [margin: “trite”] I have finally understood why Chesterton’s antiphonal chant irritates me: it’s basically Oscar Wilde’s sniggering epigram, incarnated into a fleshly guffaw. [margin: “S.G.”] In Macbeth the element of pathos disappears: in Lear it survives in the “foolish fond old man” [4.7.60]; in Hamlet in the “sweet prince” [5.2.370]. It is this that accounts for the baffling elusiveness and subtlety of Lear & Hamlet as compared with the other two. We can understand Macbeth: we can even more clearly understand Othello, but Lear and Hamlet are like the nicer mysteries of religion: they cannot be understood: they have to be lived and experienced. Thus the interpretation of Hamlet is merely a reflection of the critic’s attitude to life, just as is his interpretation of Christianity—

16

1932 Notebook March 20

So I always tend to think of Hamlet as the person qualitatively superior to the herd, respecting his superiority and yet admiring the herd’s strength and assurance. A terrible clarity of intellectual perception in Hamlet conflicts with an overmastering desire to do something in the social rhythm of overt activity. The tragedy arises through the spiteful malice & Philistinism of the herd directed at Hamlet, and the poisoning, corroding influence Hamlet exerts on them. Just as I respect the quality of my thinking and yet would get far more pleasure out of rescuing people from a burning building—if I could. The thinker is bound to be influenced by the social feeling that he isn’t doing anything and can’t do anything: that he is a social parasite and a sissy. This is inadequate Hamlet criticism, of course: but it is one factor—my factor. [margin: “S.G.”] Ophelia, of course, is the complete tragedy of virginity, Oedipus complex and terrific sex inhibitions included. The dialogue with Hamlet at the Mouse‑Trap is not an attempt on the part of Hamlet to insult Ophelia, but to hammer away at her congenital virginity and not [let] her grow up. Hence the remarks about the nunnery [3.1.122, 131–2, 157] and warnings that walking in the sun [2.2.184–5] might break her icy reserve. Hence the reference to Jephthah’s daughter as a sacrifice of a girl who “bewailed her virginity” [Judges 11:38] by a fool of a father [2.2.422–31]. It’s hard to get over the idea that Hamlet is a melodrama, with hero, villain, heroine, and clown all complete. It is basically that, but the supreme irony lies in the treatment of these stock figures. I had to read Wilson Knight to realize the intensely evil side of Hamlet and the Ghost. Incidentally, it is hardly possible that the senior Hamlet was Hyperion to a satyr [1.2.142], compared to Claudius. His long speech in I, v, is as garrulous and pompous and conceited and circumlocutory as anything of Polonius, who, I think, is related to him in somewhat the same way that Gloucester is related to Lear. Cf. “My custom always in the afternoon” [1.5.60]—pure Polonius. Cf. the long priggish speech of Hamlet to his friends, which parodies Laertes’ remarks to Ophelia. Polonius is Shakespeare’s subtlest treatment of the clown. What about the repetition of “form and pressure” by Hamlet, I, v, and III, ii [1.5.96; 3.2.26]. March 23 All the great epochs of English literature have had violent ends. The first great

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17

period ended with the beheading of Surrey, the second, with the jailing of Bunyan, the third, with the killing of Byron, the fourth, with the trial of Wilde. There is a caesura in each period marked when More, Donne, Defoe, and Leigh Hunt went to jail. Whenever anyone goes to jail because of his beliefs in literature, another full close has been reached. That is true of Bertrand Russell. But Wilde’s is the most profoundly significant event, marking as it does the final collapse of eccentricity in the grand manner. I do not approve of buggers, but that really had little to do with the matter. It is almost a pity that no romanticist went to jail for revolutionary sympathies. Blake came the nearest, and Blake certainly felt all the significance there was, and a good deal more, in the Scofield affair.18 The Whistler‑Ruskin libel suit was the obverse of the trial of Wilde, almost a protest against it.19 March 28 My one theory about Shakespeare the man is that his wife was unfaithful to him around 1600. Hamlet, Troilus & Cressida & Othello were all written at once and all have an air of despondent horror and nausea about them no other plays have. Wilson Knight calls them plays of hell. In Lear & Macbeth the suffering is purgatorial; and while both Troilus & Timon are satires, there is no real horror in Timon, because Shakespeare does not enlist our sympathies in favour of Timon or anyone else. We get the horror of Macbeth through stage effects: murder, sleep‑walking [and] so on: we appreciate the horror of Hamlet’s situation cumulatively, by a process of reflection which abstracts itself from the performance. Now each play is a subtle variation (or is it a sublimation?) of its untouchable theme of cuckolding. In Hamlet the twist is diabolically clever: the mother, not the wife. Othello has a melodramatic variation—the wife, but the wife innocent. Troilus, worst of all, has the pathetic variation—the [?] [?] youngsters separated. The cuckold wasn’t funny to Shakespeare. Unto his contemporaries: the obscene mockery of the opening of The White Devil isn’t there because Webster thought it was funny, but because he thought it was horrible. Kitely20 is funny only because he is jealous, while A Woman Killed with Kindness brings out the simple, honest action of the situation in its natural dramatic setting. In the Restoration drama something else was funny—set down two points marked cuckold and whore, draw an ellipse around them, and this is your play‑formula. Yet even Wycherley and contemporaries realized something of the ghastly skull‑grin artfully revealed under The Country Wife. Even Sir John Brute21 has a pathetic side to him. But there is a difference. In the first place, thrusting of the women into theatre on stage brought a nervous giggling atmosphere—an attempt to shock the ladies; besides, their increased patronage made it advisable to make a cuckold funny rather than pathetic, a whore a gay lady rather than a sinner. And, of course, the society it pandered to was breaking up.

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1932 Notebook April 1

A man’s search for friendship with women, conditioned as it is by love, is intensive; he looks for his feminine counterparts and antitheses, supplements and complements, and tries to find them in as few women as possible. But his friendship for other men is extensive; here variety is above all desirable, and even the casual acquaintance has a place. The starving of the latter element in me until so late has led to a mushroom growth in recent years, making me almost a spiritual homosexual. Hence a long succession of hopeless, lost struggles between me and the women who want my friends. Such women realize the influence I exert and develop a deep respect for my intelligence, thus placing me as an abstract, cold, selfish entity without warmth of affection. They tell me in front of their men that they stand in awe of me, an attitude that never fails to develop the masculine protectiveness of the latter. Last night a woman was working on one of my few remaining friends in my presence. Four times—he is a particularly devoted friend—I saw her sullen, unconscious hatred flash out against me, smiling perforce and encouraging even. Yet she would have taken me instead of him with sufficient opportunity. Life is like that, of course, and it seems natural and right that it should be like that. But what is natural and right is also often insensate and repulsive. [margin: “leave”] I have often wondered whether Sullivan set the “Lost Chord” to music in order to make money or to commemorate a similar experience of his own. If the latter, it was probably a diminished seventh. [margin: “OK”] —And all the dew22 From God’s green dishes disarrayed.

[margin: “bad”]

The Old Testament belongs to a creative period. The Law, The Poems, The Prophets, The Histories are all organic. But the New belongs to criticism. The Gospels, The Letters, the Apocalypses, are personal messages. Blake—Apocrypha. [margin: “leave”] April 2 An Ur‑Hamlet would be interesting, ending up with “Who’s there?” Hamlet senior, a vicious parody of Polonius, bullying his wife interminably as his son does later. Gertrude, trying to be dutiful but finding no sexual satisfaction in him, turns to Claudius, to the insane jealousy of Hamlet junior, which neither Claudius nor Gertrude suspect. Claudius in desperation is driven to murder Hamlet senior. [margin: “S.G.”]

1932 Notebook

19 April 10

No one is more ready than I to recognize the immense and potent influence for good that intoxicating drink has had upon Europe, yet I do not regard myself as inconsistent because I am an ardent Prohibitionist over here. Every nation makes what use it can of alcohol, and drinks the drink inevitable to it. Without English ale, French wine, German beer, European culture would have been hopelessly emasculated and impotent; therefore they drank those biguns in stupendous quantities. But drinking in America is a swinish and sodden business because the whole psychological attitude is different. Living as we do in a sex age, the idea of drinking is inseparably bound up with the idea of sex, and the swilling of whisky and gin over here is fundamentally an aphrodisiac pursuit. Youngsters in this country and in the U.S.A. talk about drinking with exactly the same air of lascivious grinning secrecy that they talk about the sex act itself. The whole idea of drinking is focussed directly on intoxication rather than relaxation. Drinking is done not for stimulation but as pure suicide. The common sense of America saw that in its soberest and sanest moment—after the war—and their shuddering recoil was expressed in Prohibition. There are those who continue the old European tradition, of course, but they are in a hopeless minority and are in any case mainly European exotics. The revolt against the Puritans was, as usual, a romantic one, based on a belief that a sympathy with liquor might re‑incarnate the creator of Falstaff. American culture, however, has nothing of the natural and essential association with alcohol. Their great names—Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson—are essentially water‑figures, and the exception—Poe—is more striking than an instance of the rule. I have no doubt that a collateral movement is going on in Europe, of course. The dead tissues of our civilization are held together far too shakily and parlously to permit of disruption by a powerful organic force like alcohol. China expressed the death of its culture in opium, which is suicidal. Whisky is homicidal, and a fomenter of endless unmeaning annihilating destruction. [margin: “better leave”] April 13 The Etude Music Magazine23 is one of the silliest periodicals I have ever seen. I have read four or five times the gravely repeated story that when Lizst was a ten‑year old prodigy he played before Beethoven, who, though he very properly disliked prodigies, wept over Lizst, telling him that someday he would interpret Beethoven to the world. Franz Liszt was born in 1811. At ten it would be 1821, and of course Beethoven was deaf as a tree long before that time. [margin: “leave”]

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An Irishman’s heart is like one of those medieval coins with a cross on it—it breaks according to the value of the thing its owner is after.24 [margin: “OK”] April 17 Scattered notes and observations like Logan Pearsall‑Smith’s “Trivia” leave me cold. They may be good as leading points of reflection, but then they are perilous. They may be striking at odd moments, but to be of any permanent value they should be worked into a systematic outlook impressed in a definite form. The Trivia are brilliant thoughts (sometimes) abstracted from a context which cries out to be there. They are valuable in so far as the unity of author’s attitude is revealed as that context. What should we think of a painter’s claim to fame who contented himself with isolated color‑combinations or arrangements of lines, or a musician’s who published a notebook full of harmonic progressions, rhythmic patterns, and snatches of melodies? Art is communication in form. The publication, say, of this diary would be a lazy man’s job. [margin: “leave”] A great deal of contemporary literature is trash because of a bad form. The statement of an idea is an epigram, the statement of its contexts and implications, an essay. But to write a “book” about anything, “book” here meaning that form of literature which is to the essay as the novel to the short story, is different; there a texture of ideas is essential. There are too many “books” written around one idea. Everything permitting of embodiment in writing (there ought to be one word for it) carries with it its inevitable form; failure to grasp this form carries with it therefore failure really to grasp the idea itself. A book of aphorisms or jokes is an abomination, but a book about an aphorism is little better. [margin: “OK”] All thinking is the expression of prejudices, which are essential to clarity. The “original bias of mind,” from which all thinkers start, is incarnated in them. [margin: “leave”] April 18 I heard a minister (T.R. Glover)25 a little while ago tell a story in which a camel was obviously intended to be the symbol of a highbrow intellectual. Now it is quite true that camels bite and kick savagely even without provocation, that they have a perpetual hump and sneer, that they are frowzy, dirty, sullen beasts, that they shuffle along in slow processions tied to each other’s necks. What he did not

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say was that if you want to get across a vast desert space with a very heavy load you have to use camels: the ponies he preferred, with all their cheerfulness and frisking, won’t go very far. [margin: “S.G.] Stained glass windows with panes in them that can be tipped sideways strike me as a bit of an anachronism. In ventilating the church one might incidentally ventilate Jesus. April 20 Simile: as complete a sinecure as the double bass in a jazz orchestra. [margin: “possible”] Imperialism is a kind of Socialism that has succeeded in defining its form. [margin: “leave”] April 22 English poetry—the best of it—falls naturally into pentameters, trends into Alexandrines. That is why our verse is so strongly accented compared to the Gallic. The mental strain of remembering to hit one’s thumb an extra crack on the table at every line must be enormous, and, besides, it leads to callouses. So the French wisely decided to forget about the beat entirely and count syllables instead. [margin: “OK”] If a man does not own an automobile and is in the least dependent on others who do for his transportation, he would do well to go in debt and buy one for himself. If there is any petty tyranny or arrogance in a nature, the possession of a car will bring it out as nothing else will. This has been noticed in questions of speeding, road‑hogging and so forth, but the mere passive fact of ownership sets the same psychological trend in evidence. No poet ever waited on a patron, no flunkey on a master, no poor relation on a rich one, more than a pedestrian on a friend who is “going to call on him in his car.” [margin: “OK”] April 26 The local library is getting pressed for room. To gain space it might be advisable to take all the junk off the shelves and put it in a separate place. Thus those sets of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Eliot, and so on could go in a case by themselves labelled: “Danger. Classics. Hands Off.” [margin: “OK”]

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I have found that a romantic attitude, a devotion to Shelley and Keats and a hatred of Tennyson, or an admiration for Beethoven and Schumann and a contempt for Tschaikovsky, goes hand in hand with the liberalism which is liberal from timidity, and under pressure would swing right. [margin: “possible”] “So you are trying to be a liberal?” “You imply that it is a helpless or hopeless attitude. Well, if forced into a self‑consistent attitude, I should take the right wing.” “Unfortunately that’s the wrong one.” “Well, of course, there are two opinions.” “My only argument, curiously enough, is that of dogmatic conservation. It always has been the wrong one.” [margin: “better leave”] The twentieth‑century liberal will be a stock figure of twenty‑first century comedy. [margin: “OK”] May 2 Is there any possibility of a new development in music through jazz? Those who think not have been regarding it too exclusively, I think, as a cheap urban commercial product. There is that element at its base, certainly (insofar as it has a bass [sic]), but there are other and more promising ones. There seems to be in jazz a sick, nostalgic longing of an uprooted soul; the back to nature romanticism crushed by the reckless forced gaiety of the town. Who does not hear in jazz the intense yearning to exchange the life of a clerk for that of a peasant? Is it a coincidence that the two most popular jazz instruments—saxophone and tuba— reproduce the sounds of the horse and the pig respectively? Who’s so deaf not to hear the ineffable pathos of the poor lost calf or the sick little lamb in the crooner? Nay, even the humble ass is worthily represented by the contralto colorations of the chorus girls. Surely there is room here for a folk song revival more basic and far‑reaching than any yet attempted. We talk too of “classical economy,” but what form of art is more economical than jazz? With one sweeping gesture it discards melody, harmony, counterpoint, syncopation, form, and the relevancy of the libretto, retaining only the two fundamental beats on which the rhythmic basis of our music lies with the sixteen‑measure period which forms its testa. Here is none of the rococo decorativeness of the gavotte or minuet beat, but a quiet steady insistence on the vital principle of music—and this just when modern composers are drifting into a nebulous and languorous haze. In the same way the rigorously rhymed lyrics may revitalize poetry by their return to the pristine concordances of the language. “Poetry is played out,” sigh our ultra‑sophisticated ears—artists, I mean of course. “Yes, but ‘you’ still rhymes with ‘blue,’ ” say the

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jazz lyricists doggedly. On that simple fact rests their whole case. This is not atavism but a control of evolution. [margin: “better leave,” and below that, “outgrown”] May 4 (From a harangue). Use your radio intelligently. The one principle is never to let a radio make a noise you are not listening intently to. Tripe only survives through being unheeded. If you fall in love with a cleverly painted whore, you may think her attractive in the dark, at a distance—anywhere you are not really looking at her. Take her ears in your hands and stare at her. It will not be long before her indignant protests subside to whimpering, when tears will run down and start gouging out channels, melting down mountains of red, washing away powder and cream and carrying down a heavy sediment to her foreground chin. The same thing happens to radios. If you like dishwater, drink it till you gag. If you like bad radio programmes—there is nothing anywhere worse,—listen with all your might, and get it out of your system. It will take an effort to excrete decaying matter that has been rotting in your brain for perhaps years, but it is worth it. There is more than one method of getting your katharsis. [margin: “better leave”] May 6 “The Revolt against Puritanism” is a catchword that affects me with a deep‑seated pain. Some writers—such as Michaud26—seem to think that the entire literary activity of the United States can be expressed in terms of this formula, positively or negatively. Only a sentimental Frenchman could have such an idea, one who could say, “Great art is always pessimistic.” Romance is pessimistic, I suppose, and diatribe optimistic, but great art is not conditioned by a theory—it is an essential expression and a law unto itself. It is a pretty elastic theory anyway that ascribes to the whole of the United States the Puritanism of New England, even without taking account of the immigrants. The average American suffers from about as much of a Puritan neurosis as an Afghan mountaineer—less so, in fact, as he can always get a drink if he wants one, while the Afghan, if he is a good Mohammedan, has to deny himself. The revolt against Puritanism is really a romantic idealist’s revolt against Philistinism. Besides, in the interest of historical accuracy, I think the proper distinction between Puritan and Presbyterian should be kept. A Puritan is an individualist and a Protestant armed with Calvinism and logic in full revolt against Catholicism. A Presbyterian is a sectarian armed with a solidified Calvinist creed which transforms the Protestant spirit which gave it birth into a Catholic one. The latter is thoroughly democratic and the commu-

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nity forms the criterion of heresy. Then when the religion proper is replaced by morality and devotion by orthodoxy, the responses to the catechism are metamorphosed into emotional and instructive attitudes toward ethical questions. A congealed sect like Methodism, the Baptists and so on thus possesses the vices of both Catholic and Protestant and the virtues of neither. What has Comstock’s prurience to do with the invective of Knox or Milton?27 [margin: “leave” / “outgrown”] May 10 I think the vital part of contemporary literature chiefly satiric and humorous. One thing is that humor consists largely as “pat allusions to a known story,”28 and we have so immense a tradition of literature behind us which we are too advanced to treat with awestruck and superstitious reverence. [margin: “useless”] In Suckling’s most famous poem we have: Will, when looking well won’t move her, Looking ill prevail?  [Why so Pale and Wan, Fond Lover? ll. 3–4]

An excellent example of the typically poetic thought. It is synthetic, ambiguous, connotes rather than denotes, co‑ordinates, brings two relative unconnected (logically, that is) standards and makes an absolute standard out of them. All speculative thought works in precisely the opposite way, and to establish such an absolute standard in philosophy or theology would be a pernicious fallacy, getting a certain plausibility as a poetic conceit masquerading as an induction from experience. I suppose however that this conceit of Suckling’s, which is only a confusion or term‑juggling in philosophy, has wrought irreparable damage. Medieval thinking—the kind we call typically scholastic—must be a tissue of such allegorical connections. Notice, incidentally, the position of “will” in the quotation; it looks like a sort of synthesis of “well” and “ill.” [margin: “S.G.”] May 11 Osbert Sitwell’s “Man Who Lost Himself” is good in parts but too much the fretful, nagging, whining, complaining, irritable, peevish, petulant, sulky, whimpering, hypochondriacal highbrow. [margin: “S.G.”] I see where yet another female has defecated all over Lawrence. These books

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about Lawrence by his bitches are the most grimly pitiless epitaphs on Lawrence himself. Compare a paragraph from a short story, “Glad Ghosts,” one of the Women Who Rode Away series: “If I were dead, would I be honoured if a great, steamy wet crowd came after me with soppy chrysanthemums and prickly laurustinus? Ugh! I’d run to the nethermost ends of Hades. Lord, how I’d run from them!” Of course, the reason why Lawrence had to pound his gut and roar about his testicles was that he spent too much time with women and so developed an abnormal sense of sex. He was a Cock who never escaped from the hens. Hence his propensity to darkness and dirt—he had to scramble upon a dung‑hill to express himself. Women aren’t as important as Lawrence thought they were. May 13 Good music is apt to be ethereal rather than atmospheric. [margin: “not bad”] I have heard that when Queen Victoria read “Alice in Wonderland” she wrote to the author asking for a copy of his next book and received an elementary treatise on determinants. I find it difficult to believe that Lewis Carroll could have been such an ass, but the story seems well authenticated. Carroll was a master of humor. One has only to compare his “Three Voices” with “Princess Ida”29 to realize the difference between an artist and an artisan of parody, and such a piece of stupid literalism seems out of his reach. [margin: “possible”] May 14 At a symphony concert Ravel’s Bolero followed by Mozart’s concerto for harp and flute. Rather brutal, a distinctly pessimistic programme. As I have set forth in my essay on Browning the pre‑romantic drama may be symbolized by the sphere, post‑romantic by the ring.30 Now the late nineteenth century saw a rise of eclecticism, which was the cause–effect of a distrust in the optimism of the earlier period. Hence strict criticism reverted to critical productions of creative forms, and in every country there came a great revival of music and the drama. Now the experimentally produced sphere has no fixed or inevitable size, like a soap‑bubble or a toy balloon, and it would give a terrific cataclysmic effect to blow it up till it burst—it would be the whole expression of pessimism in the age. The most awful short‑story I know in modern times is Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, and here that technique is used. Preserving all the unities, never increasing in speed, it increases its horror and terror to an

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unbearable extent, and then—breaks. Precisely the same thing is found in the most soul‑shaking music of the age—the Bolero. No change in rhythm, melody, or harmony, no idea of relief; it merely increases in dynamic to an incredible pitch, and then,—vanishes. Now in art what is there, which almost by a formal design, can hold the gazer riveted by the sheer glare of its color and then vanish when it becomes overpowering? I don’t know, but it is the concept underlying the advertisement. Now the advertisement is in turn a symbol of our whole civilization—in a period of prosperity advertisement is piled on advertisement until it becomes past endurance, and then—nothingness. Marx has shown how the whole capitalistic system is one bursting soap‑bubble after another—in fact, the bubble is frequently used as a popular symbol. The Bolero has been justifiably called an orgasm, too,—sex is red, and we live in a red age. [margin: “OK”] May 15 And so the symbolism becomes more deeply ingrained. The town is masculine, the country feminine. The constant copulation of agriculture with industry makes for fertility. But masculinity is cut off by the root upon the advent of the metropolis, and the fertilizing male disappears. Hence our contemporary economic system. It consists of hysterical and uncontrolled energy, saving time without saving it for anything, saving money like a miser and spending it like a nabob, of wild Utopian dreams about eternal prosperity, and, arriving at the breaking point, comes collapse, a point of exhaustion and disillusionment. In other words, it is the purest masturbation. Our wars are conducted on exactly the same organic principle, and are hence very difficult to shake off. Pacifists, like the better nature of an auto‑eroticist, are listened to with respect in peace times and silenced furiously in war. This sex suicide manifests itself in many other fields as well, and this phallic vision of modern war is probably the reason for its rhythmic fifty‑year recurrence. [margin: “OK”] May 16 Most critics, and all bad critics, are preoccupied with biography. It doesn’t matter a damn what kind of man an author is: why that kind of man should have appeared in such an age and connected with such an art is what matters. It is the purest waste of time, in discussing the ferocity of Gulliver’s Travels, the shuddering ecstasy of delight in the grotesque and repellent, to talk about Swift’s liver or his disappointment at missing a bishopric. It is the purest waste of time, in discussing the snobbish, tired, prudish, super‑subtlety of James, to talk about his nostalgic deracination. The point is that the satiric anatomy demands a terrific speed, concentration and vigor: hence it produced Swift as its greatest exponent.

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A bilious or sulky Swift could hardly have been capable of setting his teeth and going places. Similarly, the novel demands endless careful analysis, sifting of motives, rigorous selection of detail—hence James. Primarily Swift and James were serious artists trying to live up to the respective demands of the very different and almost opposed art‑forms they chose. Ferocity & subtlety, etc. are only inferences from that. We do not read these things, we only infer them: we read the book, and the book is an art‑form. [margin: “S.G.”] May 18 The Hammerclavier Sonata is a romantic’s view of culture—first the immense primeval energy, second, the childlike bliss of early civilization, third, the profound head‑aching and perplexities of a more mature one, fourth, the birth, in sorrow and darkness, of a scientific, atomistic, determined and synthetic conquest. [margin: “leave”] May 19 Re the Puritan opposition to drama: cf. Preface to Samson Agonistes—drama for reading, not performance. Masque a step in conventionalizing drama. By the time of Puff’s “I’ll print it every word,”31 the romantic drama to be read comes into prominence. Survival of romantic theory in Middleton Murry type of assumption that drama is impure form because of intermediate agents (anti-musical theory). Pure forms those completely controlled by artist. Miserly & commercial 18th c.’s hatred of music—Barry, the bestiality of the Buggered Opera, feeling that music, with no tangible results, was a waste of time—Chesterfield & the fiddle.32 Age of Pewter or Varnish—gilt is unfair. 18th c.: Age of Varnish. 19th c.: Age of Gilt. 20th c.: Age of Patina. May 20 Every fad of its time probably has a symbolic significance, thus only a tissue of great eclecticism, superficial interest in everything, attempt to gain an ordered semblance of knowledge and unbounded self‑satisfaction and optimism could have produced the cross‑word puzzle, while those busied with the problem of building up a synthetic unity out of chaos become hypnotized by jig‑saw puzzles. But to call these things symbolic in the high sense is a vile prostitution of a noble word. They represent the negative side of the Zeitgeist; the refusal to co‑operate, the refusal to live. There is thus an element of pure suicide in them. People absorbed in them do not waste time; they kill time. But time is life, —as the Mad Hatter said, it is not wasting it, but him.33 This nervous and feverish

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energy in pursuit of something dead is part of race suicide. The amount of skill, ingenuity, wisdom and sheer genius sapped and sucked up by bridge would have brought about a Utopia, properly used, long ago. Oh, well, why be an efficiency expert? Now, let’s see, this piece ought to fit in here . . . . Incidentally, the connection between the cross‑word puzzles and the great number of “Outlines” which became popular in the ’twenties and then vanished, should not be overlooked. [margin: “possible”] The sentimental prudish, scented stationery, heart’s outpourings female as a homosensualist? [margin: “SS”] The carpe diem of the [?] in his agony.

[margin: “√”]

The inductive approach aphoristic—Bacon & Pareto. Spinoza! May 23 The morals of fools, like the fashions of women, are very transient affairs, and, again like them, are dictated by unseen, mysterious forces their supporters (this is not a pun) know nothing of. [margin: “possible”] This play of “Sunshine Susie” (a movie which has attained unprecedented popularity here)34 seems to me dimly to point the way to sound and healthy popular art. I went to see it prejudiced by the title, and said to myself: “Pollyanna, arranged for depression audiences as a prolonged solo on an English horn.” (The picture was an Elstree product.)35 I found it a rather pretty comedy, with just enough music in it to give the whole thing a sort of rhythmic lilt. The farce was (or looked like) spontaneous fooling, not dreary variations on the general theme of a rhinoceros charging a tree. Now the current depression has unmistakably dragged public intelligence up to the point where entertainment has to be bright and stimulating to cheer it, not sloppy and syrupy in order to stupefy it. As a result the cinema has advanced from its unspeakable fatuousness of ’29 and back, to a point of pseudo‑sophistication. These are relapses, but the gain is there. Now why not consolidate this on a basis of technical facility and work through the comedy to a point where melodrama would perish, “religion” (as exemplified in the “Ten Commandments”) disappear, and the waxen marionettes and lantern‑jawed Pierrots be replaced by actors and actresses? We have reached an attitude now of being able to laugh at ourselves—that is, intelligent laughter. We need music to help us—light, clever, rhythmic, tuneful, harmonized by competent musicians. Wanted, a twentieth‑century Gilbert and Sullivan—Gilbert without his Procrustean “plots”—or plot—his misdirected attacks on “aesthetes,” or the bestial cad-

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dishness of his Katishes and Lady Janes,36 and Sullivan without a Mendelssohn complex. Somebody will fill the bill. Possibly I might. [margin: “leave”] May 24 I think most critics of literature would do well to remember that it is always the second‑rate man who sums up his age. The first‑rate man struggles with or transcends it. There is little advantage in treating Shakespeare as primarily an Elizabethan product, or a Renaissance figure. If Shakespeare were merely the inevitable result of the Armada, the Burbage Theatre, the Six Articles and the slave trade of Hawkins, there would be little more to him than to the minor dramatists who were. And nothing more would be left of him than of Lewis Carroll’s horseman. Three drops of blood, two teeth, and a stirrup.37 There is no causal connection running from history to literature. [margin: “bad”] June 1 César Franck: An Epigram At an organ in St. Clothilde Sits a genial and mild‑mannered man, Talking quietly to half‑a‑dozen students Absorbing him like sunshine. Alone, he picks out phrases, drums a bit Then he takes something to the public, And the public yawns and looks at the critics, The critics looking the other way. So he goes back to St. Clothilde And smiles through his beard at the organ.38

[margin: “phoney”]



We float down through corridors of time And find a student cramming history. “Well, not much more to cover. Thank the Lord!” “Nineteenth century . . . . M—m! . . . .Not much here.” “This is César Frank’s time, isn’t it? . . . .” “ . . . Yeah. Well, I got him cold, of course.” “Chap called Napollyon or something . . . .” “Oh, yes, here. ‘Napoleon legend.’ To hell with that.” “Twentieth century . . . . . .” [margin: “possible”]

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Remark of professor recently, “Give me the history of drums and trumpets, not the history of bums and strumpets.” [margin: “√”] June 4 Carl Sandburg might add another definition of poetry to his collection for his own private use: Poetry is the synthesis of a commonplace book. [margin: “leave”] I was reading a book the other day in which the author informed me that if he were marooned on the proverbial island with the proverbial half‑dozen masterpieces he would hesitate a long time between Plato and Emerson. But what is there to hesitate about? After all, most of the things Emerson said were Plato– tudes. [margin: “OK”] June 9 The change signified by the French Revolution occurred far earlier in England. That is why in the nineteenth century we still find survivals of eighteenth‑century thought, such as Macaulay and John Stuart Mill. [margin: useless”] The critical approach to creation is that of understatement and suggestion. [margin: “possible”] June 11 The greatest North‑West Passage fallacy in literature is the attempt to get at Shakespeare’s mind. Hamlet’s address to the players. Classical theory of tragedy, argument in favour of restraint, highbrow: point in a play’s favour that it is “caviar to the general” [2.2.457], despising of groundlings. Hamlet the university wit who likes the university, classical Senecan play. Theory of imitation, moral persuasion, reflection of age, all Renaissance classicism. Everything consistent with Hamlet’s character, but not Shakespeare’s—not necessarily Shakespeare’s.39 Passage about clown (deleted) may have been ordered by company—we don’t know—was certainly relaxation of dramatic integrity, but not necessarily or even obviously Shakespeare’s. In Ivy Day Joyce writes a patriotic poem—not his but his character’s. Reconstructs with incredible skill the kind of poem such a man would write—doggerel redeemed by sincerity. Shakespeare’s play inside Hamlet a previously similar feat. One of the supreme virtuoso triumphs of dramatic art. Shakespeare never drops the mask the Bavarians say is over his face in the Droeshout engraving.40

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31 June 13

I have just been reading Crosland’s “Unspeakable Scot.” Enlightened and tolerant though I try to be, I have never been able entirely to rid myself of a prejudice against that race, and so I perused his book with a good deal of applause, especially at the roasting he gave Burns. But he left out a very important chapter: “The Scot as Theologian.” I do not think it desirable for a Protestant minister to pose as a necessary intercessor to salvation, but I do think his education and strength of character should be sufficiently above that of his parishioners for him to be a liberalizing and cultural influence in the community, and that he should know enough of the traditions of the church to maintain its dignity. In questions of ethics, philosophy, and theology he should be an expert. But the Scotchman loves to lay down his theological laws, and so wherever he penetrates, which is all over the place, he originates a solid body of befogged worshippers who insist on putting themselves on the level of the minister in every way. Anyone who agrees with them on all points holds the keys to Paradise. Therefore an intellectually honest minister cannot work with them, and so the Nonconformist minister—the Anglican, of course, is ipso facto hopeless—is usually a mediocrity or a moral coward, and socially a parasite. I do not see why one who refuses to examine his beliefs should not derive them from one who knows what he is talking about. But the organization of the Scottish Kirk, which is a product of the fatal democratizing tendency of the Scotchman, has to answer in large measure for the degradation of ecclesiastical Christianity today. The Scotchman started the custom of making an instinctive response to any religious proposition and on arguing with the minister on terms of easy familiarity. The effect is pernicious. [margin: “outgrown”] June 14 My chief objection to materialists is that their point of view is inductive, which makes their books too long. Darwin’s Origin of Species is an enormous and wearisome enumeration of instances. So is Marx’ Das Kapital. I think this outlook of the Communist is also responsible for the enormous length of Dreiser. A communist is in any case exasperatingly voluble. [margin: “trite”] English philosophy is inductive, of course, though not necessarily materialistic. Marx lived in England during his most productive years. Bacon, even Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, all formulate an inductive school ending in skepticism. Mill follows to give us the [course?] of induction, and ethics, the inductive side of philosophy, settles in England. Even Bertrand Russell falls in line. And Wy­ clif, Bartholomew, Roger Bacon are anticipations. A language in which adjectives

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precede the noun is inductive. French reverses this. Hence our literature depends on contrast and variety. Shakespeare’s plays are inductive: they make unity by a contrasted group of characters. Dickens get his unity in a different but essentially similar way. The French, being deductive, need absolute unity of tone—hence Racine & Molière. [margin: “OK but trite”] “Arc” makes an excellent verb, e.g., “His instincts arc from the fine arts to the language, through philosophy and literature.” [margin: “√”] June 15 But James was not going back to his home town to live any longer than he could help. “It’s like this,” he explained to his cold, gray‑eyed, poised fiancée, “You’re an artist, and will understand. You’ve had to make all kinds of sketches, daubs, blots, every kind of drawing to get out of your system and throw away. You have enough of those scribbles to paper your room with. But would you want to?” “Want to paper my room with them, do you mean?” inquired the girl. “Of course not.” “Well, I got my schooling in Middleton, and my life there was just as tentative, experimental, blundering and ridiculous as your sketches. I suppose one who amounts to anything, as I hope I am, goes through an ugly duckling stage in which he makes a far bigger fool of himself than the ordinary bumpkin whose development stops at thirteen. Anyway, I did. And going back there would mean all my adolescent struggles brought back to grin at me. That’s why people need a change of environment. [margin: “OK”] June 17 If there is any passage in history where the economic misinterpretation of history might plausibly be applied it is surely the American Revolution, yet in spite of this fact—or more probably because of it—the issue has been so befogged by the clouds of sulphurous rant (or cant) which passed for Ciceronian oratory in the eighteenth century that the English themselves quailed before the task of ploughing through the wilderness of jingoistic sepia and took the liberty‑or‑death attitude at its face value. This fustian was inevitable at the time because it was part of the Romantic movement, the whole tendency of which was to make a cult of youth and rebirth of the menopause which preceded our civilization, or, to use the orthodox Spengler metaphor, to make a new spring out of the Indian summer preceding our winter. It was, of course, greatly prolonged by their defeat of 1812 and in the fin de siècle era of blackguardism found an admirable expression in Roosevelt. The necessity for this has gone, but the long cultural subordination

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to England, as shown by the English criticism of all the best American literature from Washington Irving to Henry James, the contempt, silenced and expressed, or at most condescending patronage, of English men of letters such as Carlyle and Dickens and the casual English way of indicating Whitman, Poe, Melville and Mark Twain to the American critics who acclaimed Longfellow and Bryant, has provoked a precisely similar revolt beginning about 1912. This may, indeed, be taken as the date of the Second American Revolution. As before, they promptly sought French help; they have their traitors (Pound), their martyred heroes who have gone to perdition and whose putrescent carcasses lie rotting on the plains (Cabell and Anderson) and their apologists (Lindsay and Mencken). [margin: “outgrown”] June 21 I am not one of those who hold with the familiar essay. Give me a Biblical text and I will expatiate, give me a great theme, and I will rise as high to it as my level will permit, give me something to attack, and I will grow indignant, give me a great poet to write about, and I am off in the clouds. But when it comes to spring cleaning, detective stories, collar studs, bathroom accessories and similar trifles out of which an occasional contemporary makes his living, I grow impatient and uncomfortable. I am not one of those arm‑chair egoists who consider that any subject is enough if they are pleasantly entertaining about it. I have not that kind of a Midas touch. Nor have I the Chestertonian flair for exacting the cosmic from the comic. [margin: “outgrown”] Protestant prose is rhythmic. Typically Catholic prose is sub‑rhythmic, like Catholic music. Atheistic and agnostic prose is rhythmless. If written by a stupid person, it is planed off to one level of dullness; if by a more clever egoist, it merely gabbles. Pater is mechanical, like an atheist, Wilde stagnant, like an agnostic. The long swing of Shaw is Protestant; the inward vitality of Malory Catholic. The antiphonal chant noted before41 in Chesterton is romantic Catholic. [margin: “outgrown”] June 24 The Egoist: A Cinquain Rhymed You go Surely too slow Death, with the tomb below. Are you afraid without me? No? I’ll go.42

[margin: “leave”]

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1932 Notebook June 26

As long as the language of poetry is natural and essential it is sacrosanct. When creativeness is exhausted, it breaks down into prose. That is what vers libre signifies, but the technical informalization of Whitman is far less significant than the spiritual informalization of Browning. Poetry is understanding formalized and orchestrated; prose is subservient to the concept: it is propagandic. The great religious mystics, like Blake and Bunyan, write in a vers libre form because art is subordinate to religion with them. Vers libre means equating the line with the idea; modern prose equates the sentence with the idea and the two forms approach. The best vers libre written today is the “prose” of Bernard Shaw, whose long sentences are rhetorical, to be spoken in a breath, like a line of Whitman’s. Similarly the antiphonal chant of Chesterton’s prose is vers libre. The attempts of Wilde and Pater to pull prose over into poetry are a romantic back‑looking perversion of this tendency. The two movements are seldom carefully distinguished. Opponents of vers libre say it means the degradation of poetry into prose. In both prose and poetry, however, a steadily increasing colloquialism is obvious with which will merge the two provinces into the diatribe. [margin: “leave” / “outgrown”] Every man of my acquaintance who has a particular “girlfriend” has been attracted to the woman that looks more like his sister, if he possesses one, than anyone else. Not the mother, the sister. I do not enunciate this as a general principle; I merely record what I have seen. [margin: “√”] A friend of mine, speaking of a French impressionistic tone‑poem, said: “She fiddled around with the chromatic scale a bit, which sort of gave you the general idea that there was water present.” [margin: “√”] June 27 A cup of cold water, as understood by a charity organization, is a cup of lukewarm water with a clump of ice in it—chilled water, like that of an American hotel. [margin: “√”] The word “exotic” seems to be changing its meaning. “An exotic plant” forms the most usual context for it. And as most exotic plants come from a warm climate, they are usually ranker and lusher than the indigenous. Hence “exotic” is used— improperly, of course, as yet—in a unique and almost indefinable sense which will be valuable later on—a sort of recondite, romantic glowing splendour seems to be the general idea. I do not disapprove of this in the least. Movie producers

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and perfume advertisers are the worst offenders. In this sense it seems to be a sort of telescoping of “erotic” and “exquisite.” “Foreign” or “extraneous” would do as well for its present meaning. Another word which is changing is “hectic” and I am glad of this change, as it brings a euphoniously affective word from technical compartments to ordinary use, albeit with a radically different significance. But although Anglo‑Saxon monosyllables are every one onomatopoeic poems, there is one exception, a flat and dismal failure, the word “smell.” I don’t blame the nineteenth century spinsters for saying “scent”—that is, as a verb. [margin: “S.G.” / “OK”] One thing a universal language ought to do is give us a separate personal pronoun of common gender to use for words like student, author, member, person, etc. where we now have to say “he or she,” or, insultingly, “he.” [margin: “OK”] Some are born fools, others become fools, others have fools thrust upon them. [margin: “OK”] July 4 The paper says that as a result of the fourth of July celebrations in the United States about two hundred and fifty lost their lives—an unusually low figure. To think that out of a population of a hundred and twenty millions only two hundred or so could be found that were willing to give their lives for their country! [margin: “possible”] July 5 I feel sometimes rather dishonest about Marxism. I find their dialectic thesis extremely useful, yet I don’t accept Marxism. Still, I have that right. But it is interesting how completely all capitalistic thought is dominated by indefinite expansion, onward and upward progress, endless exploitation of the potential, endless improvement, through competition. Not definitely consolidated until after Darwin’s work, but Rousseau to Herbert Spencer is a perfectly consistent wave of belief in human perfectibility, in liberty for its own sake, in self‑assertion, etc. This is true romanticism: in politics it tries to identify racial & national units, and then expand from there. Goethe & Blake are pre‑romantic: their traditions are continued by the hyperbolic thinkers like Bergson & Spengler. The capitalist philosophers thought of three stages in history: Comte, Hegel, Frazer, Fichte, Kant revolving around (in various forms of course) savagery, pre‑capitalist civilization, & civilization. [margin: “S.G.”]

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1932 Notebook July 7

I think that I have acted as father confessor to more young people of both sexes,— most of them a few years older than I—than any other adolescent that I know. This is peculiar, even ridiculous perhaps, but I’ll be damned if I’ll think it proves me a prig. The reasons advanced for this situation by the confessors themselves are that I am sympathetic and understanding. Now to understand people is to know them, and I think I have an instinctive knowledge of people, hence my tendency to novel‑writing. Sympathy, with me, is merely interest, but with a confessor it represents a willingness to mold my conception of him as closely as possible to his conception of himself. The confession is an organized attempt to do this for me. Thus, it does not open the heart, but closes it, deflecting the searching, analytic understanding mind into channels that will awaken a romantic interest, pity, or even increased respect in the confidant. It does not arise from affection except as an answer to the sympathy, but from an inferiority complex striving to protect its own weaknesses or disarm criticism by admitting them. My pose of caustic cynicism has forced many (mostly women) to long laments over their own inherent stupidity. Their motto is: “woodman, spare this tree.” It may be objected here that while the mere presence of this quality does not prove me a prig, my explanation of it certainly does. But this is a self‑confession, and confessions are, as implied above, essentially priggish. [margin: “outgrown”] A detective story whose solution is not fairly obvious by page 100 is not worth reading. [margin: “trite”] We live in a hideous and terrible world, with the Dark Ages very close at hand. [margin: “trite”] July 10 Triolet



My lady makes me think of blue, No other color seems to suit her, She never wears it: still, it’s true. My lady makes me think of blue, That cool and clear and mystic hue Beloved by poets male and neuter My lady makes me think of blue, No other color seems to suit her. [margin: “better leave”]

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It is easier to believe that Bacon originally wrote Shakespeare when one sees how the latter was re‑written, revised by so many hams. [margin: “√”] I wish Shakespeare had written the tragedy of Abelard & Heloise. It’s the world’s greatest example of the intellectual love tragedy, and Antony & Cleopatra is that of the sensual love tragedy. July 13 The novel should have developed historically as an organization of the discursive essay. By discursive essay I mean the ordering survey of a consciousness. (The novel is essentially an epic form rather than a dramatic one, I think.) It was developing logically toward this in the 17th c. The Anatomy of Melancholy is the clearest example of the sort of writing I mean; Pepys Diary is another; Burnet’s History another; Fuller’s Works another. Rabelais, Cervantes, Erasmus, Montaigne all support the tradition; so did Browne: even the character studies, like Earle’s Microcosmography had this epic or discursive basis. The bourgeois deflected this into a study of character & made it objective. Even novelists who knew enough to be discursive: Fielding, Thackeray, etc. [took a] crack at it. Sterne, and Swift to a lesser extent, kept clear of the stultifying tendencies of Richardson, but Jane Austen finished the derailing that Defoe began (though Robinson Crusoe is at least alone). When Tom Jones crossed the picaresque tradition with the comedy of intrigue, a mixed but not synthesized art arose. Jane Austen is one exquisite artist, but in the second rank. Congreve is in the first rank: Sterne also. Jane tried to sit on both stools, to avoid the extreme of sense in The Way of the World and the extreme of sensibility in Tristram Shandy. [margin: “This is important / Early form of the anatomy theory / What about Browne?] July 17 The more I read Hardy the more I didn’t like him. I remember when I thought Tess was a well‑constructed tragedy instead of a series of preposterous accidents and unconvincing coincidences. I can remember when Tess’ being captured on the stone of sacrifice seemed to me thrillingly symbolic instead of a snuffy and sentimental piece of faked melodrama. But that time is over. [margin: “S.G.”] It is no use making Keats’ confusion: beauty is beauty and truth is truth: one is subjective and emotional, the other impersonal and intellectual. The fact that it cost me a dollar and fifteen cents to get my laundry out this morning is true, but it is not beautiful; the politician’s statement that he will wipe out poverty and

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unemployment in three months if elected is beautiful, but not true. Symbolism is the field of interpenetration, working a beautiful conceit into an intellectual conception and infusing philosophy with the connection of beauty. (Bad sentences, of course, but the idea’s there.) July 18 I suppose a diary should be a self‑confession. It is good, of course, to know oneself, and to realize the expression of your personality in one’s views of others. But I can’t bring myself entirely to confess in ink. There is something morbid about excessive introspection but also something caddish about congealing and transmitting the result. One’s own soul is as sacred or as dirty as one’s body, and while I would not mind exposing my body in an athletic contest or my mind in a work of art, I would not record my daily condition of bowels, eyes, feet or lungs. It is the same in literature. Rousseau of the Social Contract, the New Heloise, the Emile is a serious artist, the Rousseau of the Confessions is a humbug and a liar. I can never forgive Burns for [reminding?] [?] about his whores and bastards when he left us only one Tam o’ Shanter and one Jolly Beggars. Nor Sterne for letting his cheap sentiment override his wonderful but objective humor. John Donne and John Bunyan command my highest respect as artists, but their soul‑sufferings make me feel distressed and nervous. The diaries we prize—Pepys and Evelyn—are not the confessing kind. Letters are equally revealing, but a letter is a message to someone else and submerges the conscious personality in an ultimate unconscious revelation. I would give my ears for some of Shakespeare’s letters, as I think I know what letters he would write for his epilogues to Henry IV and As You Like It, but I should have only a perfunctory interest for his autobiography—though if he could have written one he would not have been Shakespeare. It is only the second‑rate artist who is deliberately self‑revelatory. Of course, I am not exactly a first‑rate artist, but I find it more interesting to let my thoughts cohere on a definite subject rather than set down events and emotions arising therefrom in a wilderness of italics and exclamation points, like a schoolgirl. [margin: “outgrown”] For if Pan had his pipes distended and brought into our churches, what connection is there? [margin: “√”] July 22 In a magazine recently I saw an advertisement the chief feature of which was a

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woman’s face. Her mouth was open to a preposterous extent—she seemed bent on displaying every tooth in her upper jaw—in what was evidently intended to be a disarming smile. Each feature was unnaturally regular and the general effect was that of a cleverly painted skull. Underneath was the caption that she was a famous actress, of whom I had not heard before. The important thing was, however, that though she was a mature woman of well over thirty, she flattered herself that she had succeeded, thanks to the diligent use of the product advertised—I think it was soap—in making herself look as much like a half‑grown girl of eighteen or so as possible. I could not repress a shudder of disgust when I saw that, and I thought that if I belonged to her sex I should be ashamed of the ubiquitous prostitution which compels so many women to paint out the light of intelligence from their faces and substitute a reassuringly stupid death‑mask prettiness. [margin: “OK”] How seldom does a man of small talent give a square deal to a man of genius! [margin: “trite”] The true Irish patriot is he who works hard for Ireland and thoroughly despises the Irish. [margin: “trite”] A materialist is apt to pride himself on seizing substance while others are quarrelling about shadows, but what he does is simply to grasp the cloak while the body makes a clean getaway. [margin: “trite”] While the very early works of Beethoven are intensely Mozartian in character, [margin: “leave”] opus 1343 sounds like a return to the standards of Haydn. July 23 I read in a book on the limerick the other day by some supercilious ass who talked about Edward Lear as a pioneer but a childish and inane primitive because his first and last lines ended with the same word, venturing to “improve” some by rewriting their final lines. This latter method is all right for silly‑ cleverness or obscenity,—or anything which makes the limerick do slave‑labor for some non‑literary purpose,—but the gentle echolalic of Lear, the last line as a reflective comment, establishes the limerick as art, modern smartness ruining its delicacy by rushing the meter and clinching and compressing the theme. Lear is the unchallenged and supreme master of the limerick, and almost the only one who brought it definitely within the pale of literature. This person is an ass, as I said before. [margin: “OK”]

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Incident embarrassing A related by B. A denies it and turns table by circumstantial evidence on B. B, smarting, persuades himself that A is very wicked to lie, and taxes him, full of horror. A asks him why he told the story in the first place, & then says: “It isn’t a case of my being a liar: it’s a case of you being a fool.” [margin: “OK”] “And then there was no more sea” [Revelation 21:1] seems a strange desideratum for heaven, but hardly for a man stranded on an island with nothing but sea to look at. [margin: “OK”] Chaotic explosive emptive nature of Jewish culture—Isaiah to the Bloch quartet.44 Prophecy the central art form. No plastic ideal. Result of no security or balance in Jewish development. [margin: “OK”] July 25 I went into a restaurant recently with a friend who addressed a casual remark to a waitress with whom he had established a slight acquaintance. The girl, thoroughly tired out and obviously half‑sick, broke out into a long recital of long hours, low wages, unjust treatment, inconsiderate customers, misunderstandings, and, of course, hinted dark things of suicide. My friend, sympathetic but extremely gratified by her confidence, grew quite paternal and when she had left said to me: “I always thought she was superior to the common run of waitresses.” [margin: “OK”] In this University the Christian lies naked, basking in the sun. Along come little elves and gnomes, tickling him with feathers labelled “Social Problems,” “Communism,” “Unemployment,” “Russia,” and so on. He scratches his titillations placidly, murmuring, “We must do something,” and smiling, basks in the sun. [margin: “possible”] August 2 Winter’s Tale: (a) Colin Still has proved The Tempest a symbolic mystery,45 and I propose to prove that A Winter’s Tale is symbolic of the fertility myths of Adonis, Balder and the rest. (b) Adonis is the most famous fertility god. Shakespeare had written a long poem on Adonis. Hermione is close to Mt. Hermon in Syria. Leontes is a river in Syria. (c) Shakespeare’s favourite images are garden ones, & his dominant image is

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the comparison of human life to plant life, culminating in the allegorical passages in Richard II.46 See Spengler.47 (d) Throughout Shakespeare’s plays one can trace a growing element of folklore. MV [The Merchant of Venice], the problem comedies (Lawrence),48 the mother‑kin conflict in Hamlet, etc. August 7 I have made another attempt at “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur”49 and have found it more mystifying than ever. One would expect, from the title, a parody of the “Idylls of the King” or something similar that might promise fun. But hardly has the author started when he is simultaneously gripped by two powerful and overmastering emotions; one the pious reforming goal of the thrifty Yankee beholding the wasteful and gloomy pageant of history, the other the nervous resentment of the thorough Philistine against an age of culture and faith. The book is mainly a satire on knight‑errantry and the romances of chivalry. Parts of it are effective enough, but why a man who had been a Mississippi river pilot and a Nevada miner should want to produce a twenty‑fifth‑rate imitation of Don Quixote is beyond me. Interlarded with this is some spinsterish squeamishness about the morality of the Canterbury Tales and some pathetic bleating about the plausibility of those of Malory. There is a vicious attack on an economic system which appears to be that of pre‑Revolutionary France. The Yankee meets Canterbury Pilgrims travelling six hundred years before the murder of Becket and a long procession of slaves—color not given. He constructs a telephone system, organizes a printing press, makes revolvers, does a thousand similar things, yet is expressly stated to be an ordinary representative of nineteenth‑century America. I should not mind such a hodge‑podge if it were deliberately nonsensical. But nonsense that survives is usually a perfectly logical structure on an impossible foundation, rather than vice versa, and in any case must be funny enough to disarm criticism. And this book is not intentionally humorous except in spots, and there the humor is very intentional, very intentional. There are a few flashes of real brilliance, but a writer who attempts to lavish satire and propaganda on something that is dead and gone is as much at a disadvantage as an artist who selects a hunting scene for his picture or a composer who arranges “The Battle of Prague” for string trio. I simply cannot see why anyone who could write “Huckleberry Finn” would write such a mess of pot‑boiling buffooneries as the travelogues and romance. Huck Finn’s opinions are so far superior to those of Mark Twain that it ought to have been obvious to the latter that it was an advantage to talk about things he understood and not vent his reaction to Titian’s “Venus” and “Lohengrin”50 upon a rabble of fools and prurients. [margin: “OK”]

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1932 Notebook August 8

My regard for the New Yorker is conditioned by the same reaction that makes me love Sterne. The gentle, whimsical humor of the bulk of the writing, touched up by a broad caricature here and there, is interspersed by realistic little vignettes, sometimes farcical, sometimes sentimental and pathetic. [margin: “S.G.”] If Lenin succeeded in Russia, it was not because he was a Communist, but because he was a genius; and if the Communists folded up in Germany it was not because their Marxism was not orthodox, but because they were fools. Lenin was not essentially a revolutionist any more than Julius Caesar, whom he resembles in many respects. He was an exceptionally penetrating and realistic political genius who could handle society in larger units than most leaders. The leader who, like Hitler, is a product of social activity, is passive: he deals with conditions, and has to simplify his nation into a pattern. The leader like Lenin who is a source of social activity, is dynamic: he deals with movements, and has to organize his nation into a rhythmic unit.



Has some vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry? [Thomas Hardy, Nature’s Questioning, ll. 13–16]

I don’t know why I find these lines so uproariously funny—I greatly prefer them to Gilbert’s tune to the Terrestrial Globe—but I do. I suppose it’s the absurdity of defying the Supreme Architect with those wallpaper‑and‑thumbtack rhymes. August 12 Apparently even Wyndham Lewis subscribes in some measure to the race silliness, talking about the cold blood of the Nordics. I suppose the longer tradition in Italy made them consolidate in Dantes and Giottos when the Germans were fizzing away with their sagas and eddas. Now the Germans have got old & sluggish, & the Italians [are] trying to react against their “premature beatitude.” Our vague theories about wild‑eyed dagoes and grumpy scandalous [fians?] is a stereotype two or three centuries old, perhaps. We point to D’Annunzio as the wild wop and more or less associate him with Vesuvius. A great belch and a foul smell, and D’Annunzio produces another book. By contrast Ibsen, sluggish Northerner, winding & sticky & turgid, like spilled molasses, or congealed lava. But Iceland has its geysers too, and its Eddas; Italy its Mantegnas.

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43 August 19

Sometimes I think that if I had to select what in my opinion was the most audacious poem in English it would be the “Bridge of Sighs.” Our poetry kicks like a steer when it is ridden by dactyls and when that metre is combined with a short line it is well‑nigh impossible to do anything with it in serious poetry—it travels too fast for decorum. The only other attempt of this nature I recall is Drayton’s “Ballad of Agincourt” and there it fared better because the galloping rhythm was subjoined to a thrilling flight carrying an intense patriotic appeal. But here the theme is so sentimentally and pathetically sweet that if it is to come off at all it requires beyond everything else a subdued hush. Hood uses, besides, double and even triple rhymes—another feature which is notoriously the property of light verse. It would be a colossal technical feat should such a work be entirely successful, which it is regrettably not. While Blake and Whitman were ignoring the conventions of poetry, Hood and Browning were wilfully trying to reduce them to absurdities. It seems like that, at any rate. [margin: “leave”] A friend of mine remarked recently, “Judging from the ballyhoo [shot?] by so many writers about the Fathers of Confederation it would appear that that event was the only instance of an Immaculate Conception carried out on a national scale. Closer investigation, however, particularly in connection with New Brunswick and the Macdonald–Tilley correspondence,51 would seem to indicate an extensive use of financial forceps.” [margin: “leave”] August 20 If a writer concerned to deny the existence of Homer or Shakespeare or Jesus or Buddha is also inclined to deny that of any of the other three, the possibility, for a reader, of his being convinced by truth is lessened by an obvious habit or bias of mind, a will to disbelieve, which one is inclined to discount accordingly. August 21 Heard at church “Lascia ch’io Piange”52—if that’s it—cramped into the corset of a penitential psalm. This and the extraordinary distortion of the soft and slow waltz lullaby of the largo into a bellowing funeral March. Poor Handel!—the English love of Puritanic edification and sententiousness ruined him. [margin: “leave”]

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1932 Notebook August 23

I wish that when critics speak of “musical verse” they would define their terms. There are two literary and totally wrong theories about music in verse. The cruder states that a vowel is musical and a consonant is not. Thus Italian is “musical” because it is full of vowels, German harsh because it is full of consonants,53 though the Germans have produced greater word artists than the Italians, and more of them. A more intelligent consideration recognizes the value of the consonants, and the musical poet then becomes the one who arranges a superb pattern of sound, like Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge or Keats. But that is not music— that is more like painting. The feeling given is that of a static art, to be viewed as a whole—the question of speed does not enter. Burns and Browning are our poets who think as musicians. It is significant that Shakespeare has been called the “Swan of Avon.” The swan is a beautiful and exquisite bird, but sing it cannot, and Shakespeare, sympathetic musical amateur as he was, did not conceive his plays musically, except in one instance—Macbeth—though Coriolanus, in diction perhaps the harshest of all, is a close approach—and as Macbeth was unfortunately not his last play, the swan analogy does not altogether hold good. The interlocking plots are not musical, or contrapuntal, they are dramatic, or repetitive blocks of contrast. This is, it is true, a very shadowy region of metaphors, but it is well to avoid the facile but irrelevant coincidence that poetry and music are addressed to the same sense. [margin: “outgrown” / [very?] [end?] [a form?] of music theory” / “phoney”] Every contemporary thinker with a catholic outlook will eventually find himself, if he treads the right path, to the opposition of God and the Devil, just as any previous one, but the incarnations for us are Oswald Spengler and Karl Marx. [margin: “bad”] August 28 Open letter to David Dubinsky On his having given a recital at Hart House Sir: In a recent issue of the Varsity the critical review of your performance stated that you played the “Moonlight Sonata” with great expression and excellent technique which was especially evident in the “Andante” movement. If the worthy critic means the Adagio, I can only say that I do not agree with him. Had your execution of this movement been marked by a total lack of imagination merely, I might perhaps have borne it, but when thereto was added an exhibition of broken legato and thumped accompaniment such as has seldom dis-

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graced a public performance even of this hackneyed work, I thought it time to register a protest. Your wavering crustedness of rhythm and total disregard of dynamic indications, might have passed off under the guise of poetic feeling, but the number of notes you missed or ignored was inexcusable in a technically straightforward thing of this kind. The percentage you got right might be accurately described as a batting average, inasmuch as your natural touch appears to be a kind of barking staccato which in the Chopin Nocturne and Scherzo was metamorphosed into a production of a glutinous mass of notes failing to yield a single coherent phrase. The rest of the programme, not being music of very high calibre, passed off fairly well, however. Sir, Rubenstein once remarked after a recital that he might have given another with the notes he omitted, and, as you left out practically all of the rest of the factors which are considered essential to a good performance as well, I think you might have given several such recitals— but I should not have attended them. Yours, etc. [margin: “mostly outgrown”] September 2 It is curious how wars are immortalized by the women they bring into prominence. I suppose that men who fight in wars cannot help being a little ashamed of them, and they seize eagerly at whatever has seemed pure and holy by way of justification. The Hundred Years’ War is as extinct as the dodo to all but a few pedants, but Joan of Arc lives on. The Crimean War, in spite of the Charge of the Light Brigade, has disappeared from contemporary consciousness, but Florence Nightingale has not. The War of 1812, brought on by a howling mob of savages on the western frontier of the United States through a time‑serving politician who wanted their votes, has been forgotten by Canadians except for the legend of Laura Secord. So it seems fairly reasonable to infer that in the world of tomorrow Edith Cavell will be the only coherent memory of the “Great” war. [margin: “better leave”] That naked white cenotaph to dead soldiers in front of the City Hall can only be [margin: “√”] described as an incandescent flame of ugliness.54 The specialist with his facts produces encyclopaedic reverberations in my ear, and that is all. I know he is there, but I wish he weren’t. [margin: “bad”] September 6 I think a case could be made out on purely theoretical grounds to prove the atonal tendency in music anachronistic. Our music is based on one interval,—the

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octave—arbitrarily and compromisingly divided into twelve semitones. Therefore the harmonic basis of the art is the harmonic scale. Now a work of art being the incarnation of an idea, is a form, and one essential characteristic of a form is the possession of a beginning and an end. In the case of a dynamic art the latter means a point of repose. Out of the chromatic scale music has found two and only two such points satisfactory: the major and the minor concords. Besides, the question of key relationship is as much a part of form as anything else—form in depth as a sonata or rondo is form laterally. To alter this we should have to alter our whole concept of harmony and scrap the piano‑forte on which it is based and which is based on it. In my opinion such a change could not be made without an infusion of melodic material which only a young culture,—Russia, for example— will be able to supply. These are tentative ideas; I may have cause to regret them later. [margin: “possible”] September 8 Applause after a concert seems to me to be a purely Neolithic impulse which has disregarded all evolution. Whenever I hear it (I seldom join in) I (think of and) see before me the picture of a squatting ring of Stone Age savages circling a group of dancers, beating out the rhythms with their hands. The difference is that in the cruder entertainment the audience takes a part, while in the later they are precluded from anything except passive recipience. Consequently the rhythm beating is support, applause is revenge. [margin: “possible”] September 13 There is really no such thing as a wrong critical attitude. Take any of the big names at random, say, Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley. Critic A, for instance, is an individualist and hero‑worshipper who admires the strength and independence of Milton and Shelley, and resents the lack of a strong personality in Shakespeare. Critic B is a tricky sprite who soars off into the blue with Shakespeare and Shelley and talks about the leaden feet and crabbed Puritanism of Milton. Critic C is a classicist and a bit of a pedant with a strong sense of form who feels safe with Shakespeare and Milton and regards Shelley as a precariously balanced epiphyle. Critic D says the English have no feeling for poetry and have never produced any poet, except, by some miracle, Shakespeare. (Usually a German commentator who has never read anything in English literature except Hamlet and King Lear in translation.) Critic E considers Shakespeare and Shelley as pagans, not to be mentioned with the lofty and austere Milton. Critic F has a linear theory of poetry which makes Shakespeare and Milton hopelessly antiquated, no poetry written before the development of modern ideas of which

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Shelley may be taken as the starting point being readable. Critic G views the contemporary field with alarm and advises a return to the standards of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley. Critic H is sure that only by breaking completely away from the traditions which can only hinder and cripple us, can we do anything new or original in poetry—we must forget about Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley and trust the pleasant future. These, you say, all cancel out and give nothing. By no means. They give you the definite impression that there must be something very extraordinary about Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley. And not being a critic, but a lover of poetry, you investigate and find that your suspicions are correct.55 [margin: “possible”] Unfortunately, it also leaves you with the impression that it would have been better to have read Shakespeare, Milton & Shelley in the first place. But it is possible for an eloquent critic to arouse more pleasure & enthusiasm for culture than the great critics he is dealing with would in the original, if the reader is inexperienced and has no perspective of culture. [margin: “OK”] September 14 and 15 I have never read a more preposterous piece of bad arguing than the paragraph on “Americanisms” in the book on the King’s English by the Fowler twins [Fowler and Fowler]: if they are twins, as their desire to have the English language castrated and pole-axed would seem to indicate. This sort of Oxford snuffle is bad enough even in England. For no language is self‑sufficient. English has been rescued from extinction time and again by French, Latin, Italian and German. So why not another rhythm of English, particularly when English is as dried‑up as pea‑seeds, all the 20th c. poetry of any importance apart from Lawrence or perhaps Hardy having been written by Irishmen and Americans. Even minor writers like Kipling and Mansfield have been strongly influenced by American tendencies. How imbecile this insularity is even there! but there is some excuse for it in countries who feel they have to live up to an antithesis. The strained self‑conscious muscularity of Whitman, Sandburg & Lindsay, or the exaggerated refinement of the Squirearchy bleaters56 are regrettable but historically inevitable. It is the fortune of Canada to be critical of each. We cannot very well issue declarations of independence like Sinclair Lewis, nor should writers give way to the petty snobbery of educationalists and the “King’s” Highway people. The result might be a split man like Ezra Pound with his constipationist poetry and his barbarous Yankee prose. But really this silly antagonism of American English tradition is as strained and unreal as the couchant animals rampant in heraldry. Incidentally, it is too bad that we use “rampant” as connoting motion or life. But it is what our Tweedledum and Tweedledee would call Slipshod Extension

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with sarcastically stressed capitals57 according to the best traditions of Worn‑Out Humor. It comes from a technical art, and, in spite of the number of technical words the language has derived from astrology, alchemy, & primitive medicine, the Gold Dust theories object to taking in any more. Medicine stole “venereal” & degraded it, the whole process being a silly piece of euphemism. No one wants the degradation of “mad” to angry, leaving us with the colorless “insane,” nor “awful” to a vulgarism, nor the implications of the German dumm, which leaves a person really dumb indescribable, nor the spluttering female use of such words as “devastating” or “intriguing.” But a language makes mistakes in its development. “Antagonize,” which we are getting, is all right; “mob” may be all wrong, but we have got it, just the same. American? So are “potatoes” & “tobacco,” and one would hardly object to those unless he despised the Americans and everything that conveyed an impression of them to his mind. But as no one but a pathological crank could feel that way, there seems nothing in the way of “placate” or “antagonize” except an automatic hostile reaction to a stimulus counting form and action, such as would be more consistent with the attitude of a mule rather than an educated human being. (Frightfully bad writing but it’s only a diary.) Besides, in an earlier period of a language it was easier to take in words and Anglicize them, but with the rise of cosmopolitan snobbery it has become very difficult to naturalize a word. “Rendezvous” and “naïveté” are spoken evidences of our Stratford‑at‑Bow affectation. Hence it becomes all the more essential to take in living, organic words from colonial English, and we have at least as much right to take “antagonize” from the Americans as “tea” from the Chinese or “checkmate” from the Persians. The Fowler fools want to keep the Yankee out because they know their damned language is moribund and they’d sooner see it die than cross‑fertilize. Fortunately, common sense will ignore them. The 21st c. will no doubt wonder what all the fuss was about over “caveman,” etc. [margin: “S.G.” / “better leave” / “some will do”] Perhaps English depends on continuous fucking of French & German rhythms. The American one is Germanic. September 23 I have been reading at Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It makes me lose my temper, not because it was difficult, but because it prided itself on its difficulty. John Lily in the sixteenth century, John Cleveland in the seventeenth, Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth, Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth, and Virginia Woolf in the twentieth. Oh, you elegant writers! Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Cécile Chaminade, Rosa Bonheur, Marie Corelli, and now Virginia Woolf. Oh, you elegant females. [margin: “bad”]

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The above remarks are of an unqualified asininity, but I am out of temper tonight. I have just been to see a movie where an actress with a face as flawless and as devoid of expression as the surface of the Great Pyramid wept tears of pure glycerine all the time, for no reason that I could see. Oh, the deep symbolic significance of that glycerine! [margin: “possible”] September 24 It annoys me to hear people talking of critics as though a poet were something solitary and magnificent, with an unconditional reputation. The poet in some important respects does not exist apart from his critics—approaching him is and must be a process of imitation. All intelligent reading is of course criticism: and intelligence depends on truth, and truth, in literature, on a tradition. The critic, in bringing out the poet’s implications, does not simply appreciate him, but reconstructs him: makes him religious and communal. September 25 I shall watch Spain with interest. And yet I am not sure—Italy’s rise is economic and political and Spain’s may be similar. Besides, Spain may be like Japan—no soul of her own—Barcelona in particular is said to be thoroughly American. And yet there seems to be something African and anti‑European about Spain.58 They seem to have expelled the Moriscos59 when they had no further use for them. There is something tropical about the Falla and Spanish rhythms generally. If Spengler is right, that Mohammedanism is the Puritanism of Magian civilization, then Spain in its Puritan period seems to have taken on a fatalistic, stagnant, iron‑bound Mohammedanism for its Puritan period. The work which is so thoroughly sane and popular, Don Quixote, is called by its author a translation from an Arabian romance, and it certainly played havoc with those typical products of Christianity, the errant romances. [margin: “possible”] There is something so negatively Puritanic about the country that produced the duenna and the grille, such a powerful repressing force on sex, such hysterical finesse of sex etiquette clashing with a notorious potency immortalized in Don Juan, that the slaughtering of bulls becomes as inevitable as profound a symbol of the nation’s inward feeling. [margin: “possible”] October 1 Carnivorous lovers. Metaphoric strata of society.

[margin: “√”]

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Anti‑evolutionists, book censors, and continuing Presbyterians. Nagging around with a mop. The groundswells of the theatre. —With her kisses still ringing in his ears. Rectilineal obedience of Jesus. Saints with downthrust curves. Dishwater realism

[margin: “√”] [margin: “√”]

October 3 It is a common and amateurish error to classify humanity as (a) superstitious (b) enlightened. All people, no matter how enlightened, cherish a pet superstition somewhere! Some may cheerfully smash up mirrors, or commence a thesis on Friday and yet shiver at a black cat. And even those who no longer believe humanity [is] in the clutches of a steel‑clad and electrically generated monster called progress may be found cherishing a secret leaning toward Anglo‑Israelitism or surreptitiously searching for Francis Bacon acrostics in the pages of Coriolanus and Cymbeline. Your scoffer who laughs at Jonah and ridicules the [friggling?] of Biblical enthusiasts with Apocalyptic prophecies was likely as not to consult a crystal gazer or an astrologist with regard to his business investments. [margin: “leave” / “outgrown”] October 7 The word “and,” commonest in the language, has two diametrically opposed meanings. In “bread and butter” it is additive, “one and one make two” being a typical example. It makes a quantitative synthesis. In “red and white” it discriminates or analyzes. In the first case, it means bread plus butter; & in the second red minus white “and” white minus red. Or does it simply depend on whether the mind interpreting the phrase is synthetic or analytic? [margin: “S.G.”] October 9 I suppose the reason for the popularity of [Rachmaninoff’s] the Prelude in C# minor is that its first three notes make such a hell of a noise that the listener is startled into attention, and, hearing those repeated, listens all the way through. He has not done this before, and he finds the sensation agreeable. But in truth, it is infernal music; a cheap exploitation of romantic music’s most gorgeous key, a complete defeat of counterpoint, subtlety and vitality. It moves by mechanical propulsion, and its clanging open harmonies trample on the unresistant body of living music with a fiendish collocation of howls and bellows. It is music of the

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machine age, strident, vulgar, powerful and dead. To call it the “Bells of Moscow” is the same grotesque error, resulting in identifying the cheap proletarian agitations of our big city slums, living off the Jewish‑ghetto philosophy elaborated by Marx and Engels, with the awakening soul of Russia. [margin: “OK”] Communism, as we know it, being so obviously a sublimation of the hatred of Jew for Christian. [margin: “trite”] The Communistic attack on gentility being therefore directed, not against gentlemen, but against Gentiles. [margin: “possible”] Déraciné. The only Aryan Communist I know was brought up in an orphanage. [margin “√”] Did anyone ever see a six‑foot Communist?

[margin: “possible”]

October 11 I shall not attempt to solve the difficult problem of classical education in the public schools. But why not give Latin and Greek a fair trial, if willing to grant that they are magnificent languages. “All the Latin I construe is amo, I love,” says Lippo Lippi [Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi, ll. 111–12]. Well, I too started with amo, a very good verb, I thought obviously only a decoy. The next one I learned was neco, I kill, and all the time I spent on Latin grammar from that time forth was spent in laboriously acquiring a language which talked about nothing else in the world but fighting. Every sentence I wrote in Latin or translated, concerned war, and every word I learned had some military context. It does not take a very fanatical pacifist to see that this method deliberately aims at encouraging the idea that Latin is a very dead language, there being few things deader about a language than those words which deal with violent death. If Latin really was a dead language, therefore, it would be of no use.60 The excuse is, of course, that we read Caesar first in Latin, Xenophon in Greek, but the excuse is a pitifully inadequate one. The method is obviously that of a crabbed pedant bent on killing the language and stamping on the corpse. Catullus and Horace are eternal. Caesar is not only dead but always was, falling stillborn upon publication like any other journal. The next step is Livy, Cicero, Thucydides. Like learning English by starting with the Duke of Marlborough’s memoirs, if he wrote any, and proceeding through Pater or Burke or Gibbon. We do not make such an approach to any modern language. We do not start German by learning all about their weapons, their armies, the histories of their wars, even if we still think of them as a race of barbarian Huns, intent on conquering the world by force of arms. If

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I could read German fluently,61 which I regret to say I cannot, I should regard it as one of my primary accomplishments, but I should see the entire Teutonic race in hell before, etc. I would wade through a barrage of military terminology in order to read the war correspondence of Blücher, Moltke, Gneisenau, or von Kluck. There is a good deal of truth in the famous remark that Caesar was a very inferior writer who wrote for the public schools. [margin: “OK”] October 12 In Bernard Shaw’s essay on Bunyan he sets a passage from the Pilgrim’s Progress beside one from Macbeth and shows how Shakespeare rants and rhymes and swears and Bunyan is calm and perfectly poised [“Better” 140–5]. Christian, it may be observed, says nothing. Bunyan’s courage is always quiet: there are no gamecocks in his book, no crowing or clucking or making defiant gestures to muster up courage. I can never see that the courage of a Hotspur is anything more than Dutch courage, though he swallows atmosphere rather than alcohol. I cannot see that Bunyan’s heroes with their sighs and groans are anything but perfect examples of immense strength, tenderness and courtesy. Apollyon roars and howls in the best Shakespearean tradition, but Christian notices it so little that Bunyan almost apologizes for recording the fact in a footnote. Bravery in one physically strong and secure is merely meeting a situation to which one is well adapted: it is not a virtue, it is only self‑expression. But the fight of weak men in Bunyan is inspiring: it has the thrill and ecstasy of Blake’s “mental fight.” Because the physical battle is the most adequate metaphor, people confuse the mental ecstasy of conflict with the mere visual titillation of trumpets and uniforms, just as we think God a solemn old man because “father” is the best metaphor to express his relationship to us. Take the magnificent passage where Christian puts his fingers in his ears and rushes toward the light. Christian is a cringing coward, and Browning, for example, in his religious poems such as Prospice, is heroic and dignified and noble. But we see the self‑conscious swagger in the banana peeling under Browning’s posture when we read such poems as Death in the Desert or The Epistle. Browning’s fingers are not in his ears. Anyone comparing his poetry to Bunyan’s will understand that his ears are less sensitive. But he dares not look at the light. [margin: “S.G.” / “OK in spots”] October 13 The artist is the only man who makes organic patterns, and the only man whose life shows an organic pattern superimposed on his life. Hence if Beethoven went deaf and Milton blind it was because they had to. “The things that happen to people are the things that are like them,” says Spandrell62—if it varies in truth

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directly as the man is an artist. No accident or digression was therefore possible to Jesus, and only a little to Shakespeare. [margin: “S.G.] October 16 Epitaph on a Humorist “Don’t you understand yet? The man is dead, and what you mistake for cheerfulness is the grinning of the skull. [margin: “OK”] October 22 One falls in love with a person, not with an assemblage of virtues. It is just the same in literature: in Elizabethan drama, for instance, all Massinger’s virtues will not persuade us to like him, nor all Marston’s faults succeed in making me dislike him. The theory of tactile responses to painting comes from the 18th c. Burke—Sublime & Beautiful. Rococo decadent fussiness, when everyone went around in a vague state of priapism gazing at Boucher. The great painter of nudes was the painter who also made you want to lay that nude. October 31 Realism in philosophy and theology means frozen music like the plain chant: it means allegory rather than symbolism: it means more obviously heraldry. Spenser’s animals are heraldic. Blake’s tiger is alive. Couchant and rampant; ideal forms, yet in some mysterious way more truly real than existence. [margin: “S.G.”] November 5 It is difficult to say anything about Ulysses: it is so universal a book, tackles so many problems, and is buttressed on so many sides that it is like a universal philosophy, like Christianity or communism, which we must either criticize exhaustively and sympathetically or make inane remarks and later flapping gestures. Certainly it restored a rhythm to the novel which had not been in it since Tristram Shandy: it summed up and finished the analysis of character & started prose fiction toward the interpretation of symbolism and cohering of consciousness. Prose should have developed through the Anatomy of Melancholy and the great 17th c. writers and not been deflected by Bunyan and Defoe as poetry was deflected by Milton. The Bible is the archetype of the kind of writing I mean.

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But Ulysses seems to me to be too self‑conscious an attack. It is paralyzed by a self‑conscious intellect, and I’m not sure that the entire book “comes off” rhythmically as a whole. It is this consistent linear rhythm that makes Rabelais immortal. Joyce’s medium I think is a shorter one: the separate units of Dubliners or the simpler linear scheme of the Portrait give a clearer effect; and while there is no finer writing in literature than the brothel scene or Marion Bloom’s monologue there seems no sense of integration into a larger unit. The Odyssey has a climax. Ulysses wanders interminably and the crisis comes when he comes home. This crisis is marked by a terrific impact: the slaughter of the suitors. But there is no such crisis in Joyce’s Ulysses as a whole: the brothel scene is a little off‑centre and the monologue is a coda. Again, some of the symbols like the Hely’s walking sign and so on are arbitrarily chosen and I feel like that a symbol should respond to an inherent requirement in the whole design. The metamorphosis symbol is better chosen but doesn’t quite come off—I may be making a fool of myself of course. [margin: “OK”] November 10 I have occasionally wondered how much we would know of literature if English poetry were as completely in the hands of elocutionists as piano music is in that of recitalists. About like this: For what we get of Bach, the soliloquies in Hamlet, the lyrics from the Tempest, and the Seven Ages of Man from As You Like It For Mozart, a very infrequent Canterbury Tale. For the Beethoven Sonata, a book from a Miltonic epic. For the Romanticist group, about thirty stock pieces from Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. For the odd Schubert piece, four or five songs of Burns. For Brahms, half a dozen hackneyed Browning monologues, hackneyed [sic]. For the Liszt piece, Swinburne or Poe (who, like Liszt, would spring into undue prominence should such a situation arise). The variations from the above would be negligible. Of modern poetry one poem we would know would be Vachel Lindsay’s Congo, which would correspond to the Prelude in C# minor. Who the literary analogue would be to the crocodile who twisted Dvorak’s little humoresque into a sentimental love‑song, I cannot imagine, but he would crop up somewhere. And if the poetry of the Bible corresponds to Händel, as it probably would, one can imagine the snuffle that the counterparts of our Largo and Dead March players would put into the Penitential Psalms! Bach–Liszt and Bach–Taussig; Shakespeare–Dryden and Shakespeare–

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Cibber. As for Gounod’s Ave Maria—but this has gone far enough. About, my brain!63 [margin: “adapt”] The Bible of the Pass Course64—Ripley’s Believe It or Not column. [margin: “leave”] Aw, it ain’t a man’s world. November 15 An ensemble performance belongs to organic growth. The ballad and the Gothic cathedral alike are fundamentally communal art, as were the Elizabethan madrigals. When the solo performer who must have an audience comes into fashion, a more critical note is sounded. Romantic music brought with it the virtuoso and the popular approval. Modern dramas consist of characters fighting with each other, this antagonism being in fact what holds the drama together. But the real popular attitude is exemplified in the football game, where an ensemble performance is given for the sole purpose of destroying another. The audience watches and gloats on the suicide. [margin: “possible”] November 18 The Canadian National Railways is at last, I hope, definitely heading for bankruptcy. It is criminal to tie up so much capital in such a hopelessly antiquated affair as a steam railway. The Age of Steam is dead and gone—it flourished when Dickens wrote Hard Times and passed with the nineteenth century. Nobody wants to go back to the life depicted in that novel and it is a shameful humiliation to be compelled to ride on a vehicle which symbolizes, or rather incarnates, the whole Gradgrind–Bounderby65 spirit. The Middle Ages hated machines, except those of torture, and they invented the dragon to represent their hatred. The locomotive is the actualization of that dragon. Everything shows it—its ungainly form lurching and banging along, noisy and jangling, on a remorseless and unyielding steel track, its venomous outpouring of choking smoke and steam the residue of which fills its shabby upholstery with dust and spreads layer on layer of greasy filth over its passengers, its stuffy unendurable breath of incredibly stale tobacco and oranges, its exorbitant tributes levied on its victims, its habit of laying waste all the surrounding landscape in country or city. Everywhere it goes, if not actually on the spot, it invariably leaves a grim reminder of its existence in the long rotting rows of hideous and rickety red skeletons, which are even more of an eyesore, because more constant, than its puffing and clanking actuality. I can never believe in a hell that one gets by paying two pence for a ferry. If the luckless soul were instead to give a hundred

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dollars to a snippy station agent and go by train, the thing might be more convincing. [margin: “possible if revised”] November 19 The fate of Sir Thomas Browne, sandwiched between medieval fable and the revolutionary Royal Society, is that of all liberals. Like modern Christology. There is a theoretical conservative limit of literal truth in all four gospels and a scientific limit which reduces every word in them to myth and symbol. Between these are the liberals, trying to show that Mark is “more historical” than John, working on the will to believe historical truth, yet with a scientific or quasi‑scientific attitude which, being dependent on that basis, is cautiously controlled. That is Browne’s relation to the Royal Society—really interested in science only for its literary or symbolic value; like the medieval bestiaries he adopts a quasi‑scientific attitude of enquiry and adoption of reputable authority. It is not his attitude but his interest, or subject matter, that is unscientific. Thus while the medieval scholars were interested in crocodile tears because they were an allegory of hypocrisy, Browne reads much the same set of authorities to see whether a crocodile has ever been known to cough, his real interest being that coughing symbolizes some difference between human and animal natures. The attitude is quasi‑scientific, the interest away from science. November 21 I wonder if the civilization of ants and bees could plausibly be called two‑dimensional as opposed to ours? Two‑dimensional elements in our own, such as Russian communism and the general Slav denial of height66 seem to approximate the general insect scheme. In our own the approximation to the insect state goes along with the post‑Romantic cutting off of height. [margin: “leave”] November 29 The Varsity rugby team is in the cellar, and I don’t give a damn. The Victoria rugby team has lost the final and I am broken‑hearted. I am not of Toronto but of Victoria in my partisanships. I know the Vic men and would be glad to wipe their faces for them as they come off the field. When Don Amos67 goes charging through Trinity I have a personal interest in Don; I want to see him do well and later on in the shower he will tell me in detail what it was like and how he felt. And when a Trinity man comes through with only John Stinson68 to stop him, I have a personal interest in him too and pray that John will succeed in breaking his dirty damned Trinity neck. So Don and John go into battle with my heartfelt

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blessings breathed behind them. My attitude is that of the lady at the tournament of knights, as the specialization in sport has reduced me to the rôle, if not of a lady, at least of the be‑witched and raucous‑voiced but essentially effeminate, admiring, sissy spectator. Trinity, I know, feels the same way and I glow with contemptuous sympathy for Trinity. But an intercollegiate game I watch like a spectator at a horse race with no bets up. The only player I know is Jack Witzel69 and after observing with horror at the outset that he is not playing, I relapse into sullen silence. Seeing Varsity at length being thoroughly beaten and not knowing very clearly what I can or should do about it, I remark to my neighbour, who looks like an Engineer, that if Varsity would get wise to itself and put a couple of big guys like Witzel in the front line we might get somewhere. Then during the rest of the game, this not having registered, I howl at intervals that “We (that is, I) want Witzel!!” The team does not know I exist and does not care; how then can they (sic) represent my athletic development which must in this environment find a purely vicarious expression? [margin: “outgrown”] December 4 The average sketch of English literature is like a fat man running a race. Beginning with a careful and sympathetic account of the miracle plays, Chaucer, and Langland, it proceeds to a rapid review of the Elizabethans, glances over the seventeenth century and notices Milton, says a few platitudes about the age of reason, gets perceptibly broken‑winded around the Romantic Revival, mumbles over the big names of the nineteenth century like a sulky monk at his rosary, gets with a desperate effort to Matthew Arnold, then gasps out “Kipling, Masefield, Hardy” and falls in a dead faint. Oh, they’re not all like that—one I glanced over recently was moderately good—though when there are so many better proportioned manuals on the market there is hardly sufficient justification for producing another one actually to produce it. But if one is going to talk about all English literature one should do it properly, that is, ponderously. One may chat gracefully and wittily only about a forgotten poet or a scandal in connection with a bigger name. [margin: “leave”] Perhaps I should mention that the specific book is Broadus’ History of English Literature.70 I don’t know why I talked about average sketches. December 7 Under the pressure of cheap immigrant Latin, Celt, and Slav, the Nordics are retreating to their mountain fortresses. Hence the rise of Scandinavia, particularly in America. Sandburg, for instance, and in another sphere Lindbergh. The Amer-

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ican ideal of beauty is Greta Garbo, strident, angular, and Swedish. All other actresses strive to make themselves look like her and become beautiful insofar as they succeed. I certainly think the welcome given Lindbergh was not altogether on account of his having flown across the Atlantic, which had been done before often enough. The point was that he was an idol as well as a hero; a statuesque figure. [margin: “OK” / “adapt”] December 15 Unfinished Triolet



She walks on frosty mornings clear Ice‑bright with the sun’s sharp ray. Gazing over the white land drear She walks on frosty mornings clear (Now what the hell can I put here? I’m stuck, for fair. Well, anyway) She walks on frosty mornings clear Ice‑bright with the sun’s sharp ray! [margin: “all my doggerel is bad”]

I was talking today to a girl about five years older than I. We got arguing, and she, being a very dogmatic and positive sort of female, but not knowing much about the subject, appealed from me to a future general council, telling me I was just going through a certain silly stage of adolescence, and later on I would change my views. I have often felt that way in talking to others, but I should regard my feelings as personal opinion merely and my pride would not allow me to resort to the miserable expedient of using it in place of an argument. As a matter of fact, I think she is wrong. As nearly as I can analyse myself, I have gone through my last “stage.” My conceptions of things are slowly beginning to take definite and permanent form, and in another year I think I shall be intellectually an adult and socially at least an imbecile, perhaps even a low‑grade moron. We can only work hard and hope for the best. [margin: “phoney”] To imply that it is dulcet and decorous to die for one’s country is, I think, to trans[margin: “possible”] late Horace a bit too literally.71 December 16 The most pernicious example of censorship I know is the edition of Spenser that cuts out the penultimate stanza of the Epithalamion. The complete poem is so

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delicate, graceful, sensitively tactful: then remove that story and substitute a line of dots and it is suddenly transformed into a grotesquely leering obscenity. Butler’s Erewhon contains a spirited satire on a religion which is apparently Orphism: cf. the world of the unborn, the rights of animals,72 etc. It is not Christianity. December 17 HOLY BIBLE 1611

MILTON PARADISE LOST Outline History of English Culture

HÄNDEL MESSIAH [margin: “S.G.”]

December 19 I glanced through a female magazine article today on bringing up children. Don’t spank them, said the authoress—a child is all right at bottom, and it gives more lasting results to appeal to his better nature. This logic seems to me to be shaky. If a youngster is all right at bottom, why not make your appeal there? [margin: “possible”] December 23 Music is the epitome of life; accented continuity of movement in time. It never stops, never falters, never hesitates. Yet the movement is uniform but by no means unvarying; in history a great man gives accent, emphasis and consequently ordered formulation to an epoch. Similarly the great periods appear as sudden accentuations—the creative jumps in evolution and history alike have the characteristics of rhythmic emphasis. Hence there are three approaches to history as there are to music,—Catholic, Protestant and negative. The last one is of two kinds which merge into the same thing—the first kind say[s] that Nature never jumps, the second that nature never does anything else, the latter being the fortissimo formulation of the former, both denying accent. To say that an age produces a great man, or conversely, the man his age, is an identical error, the recognition of accent carrying with it the conception of action and reaction.

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Materialistic evolution of strict Darwinism belongs here, setting off a purely catastrophic theory on the other side. Catholic views of history, like Catholic views of music before Byrd, deny the push and drive of an immanent force—everything is subordinated to a static and harmonious whole, alike in Palestrina and in Thomas Aquinas. Protestant music is incarnated in the great evolutionary forms of the fugue and the sonata, and evolution with a creative factor is the most purely Protestant of conceptions. [margin: “leave” / “outgrown”] December 31 DRAMA:

GROTESQUE COMEDY THE CHRIST

EARLY MIDDLE

NOVEL:

LIBERAL TRAGICOMEDY ANTICLIMAX RENCONTRE MIRAGE PARADOX IGNORAMUS TWILIGHT

EARLY‑MIDDLE MIDDLE MIDDLE MIDDLE MIDDLE MIDDLE‑LATE LATE LATE

ESSAY:

ENGLISH LITERATURE MUSIC SUMMA

EARLY EARLY LATE

[margin: “outgrown but the [tree?] of the novels still holds”]

2 Intoxicated with Words: The Colours of Rhetoric (1940s)

This essay comes from a fourteen‑page holograph manuscript in Frye’s Notebook 39, which is ar‑ chived in the Northrop Frye Fonds at the Victoria University Library, University of Toronto (1991 accession, box 26). Most of the notebook is devoted to Frye’s preparation for teaching two first‑term courses, one in the English literature of the sixteenth century; the other, of the seventeenth. He outlines a “tentative syllabus” for both. The present paper is found at the end of the notes for the sixteenth century, and it is preceded by seven pages of notes devoted mostly to aureate diction and serving, it appears, as groundwork for writing the paper. Whether the paper is complete is impos‑ sible to know with certainty, but the fact that the notes that precede it end with Skelton, which is where the paper concludes, suggests that the essay does end rather than simply stop. The date of the paper is uncertain. My guess is that the notebook is from the 1940s. I have transcribed the manu‑ script as Frye wrote it, editing it with only a light touch: I have expanded most of his abbreviations, spelled out ordinal and cardinal numbers, italicized his underlinings, given the paper a title, and added a few notes. The first part of the paper has numbered divisions. Although Frye abandons this practice about halfway through, I have retained the numbers that he used to mark the sections. While I have been squinting at Frye’s hieroglyphic scrawl for almost twenty years, his orthography occasionally continues to confound. There are two or three places in the manuscript where I have failed to decipher his words. These have been marked with question marks within square brackets. All other material in square brackets is an editorial addition. “Intoxicated with Words” first appeared in the University of Toronto Quarterly 81, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 95–110. Copyright © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2012. Reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (www.utpjournals.com).

1 In English literature there has never been a time without a fashionable poetic diction, at any rate since the death of Chaucer. To trace the steps whereby the fif‑ teenth‑century aureate diction grows into the inkhorn terms of the Elizabethans and the archaizing of Spenser is our present task, but the subject could be ex‑

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tended to the Baroque conceit, to the grand style of Browne and Milton, to the an‑ tithetic diction of Dryden and Pope, the rise of the eighteenth‑century “kenning” with Thompson and Gray, the evocative phrase of the Romantics, the mot juste fetish of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, and the surrealist psychological conceit of today. It would be possible to show that every such po‑ etic diction grew out of the earlier one by the simple process of revolting against it. Such scope is necessarily beyond us. But so long a reign implies that poetic diction has very deep roots in English culture, and to find those roots we should have to go back at least to the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages. At that time an intense and rather naïve verbalizing was in full swing. This, again, developed out of silver Latin, and so back to the Homeric epic, which is as far as we can go in demonstrating that there is nothing new under the sun. But the great migration did bring about a far‑reaching change in Latin literature. Latin had, at least since Tertullian’s time, been doing some very un‑Ciceronian and un‑Virgilian things, but it wasn’t until Goths and Lombards and Franks and Anglo‑Saxons finally took charge of Europe that the direction of its development finally became obvious. The arts now acquired a quality described by the French as barbarique, which may be translated “something we can’t be bothered trying to understand.” At the court of Theodoric in Ravenna there were four men who may be taken as symbols of this new cultural development. One was Theodoric himself, hero of Teutonic sagas and mentioned as a matter of course in Widsith, or the first vernacular poem. Another was Boethius, with his great dreams of trans‑ lating the whole of Plato and Aristotle, for popularizing Ptolemy, Euclid, and Py‑ thagoras, who transmitted to posterity not quite this, but a kind of epitome of the Classical attitude to life. The third was the unknown mosaic artist who designed the Mausoleum of Gallo Placidia, and who, like Boethius, shows us the culture of the Classical world purified of its decadence by Christianity. The fourth was the Goth Cassiodorus, of great importance in the history of education and one of the men who made it possible for the monasteries to preserve learning. Cassio‑ dorus it was who invented the “High style, as whan that men to kynges write” [Chaucer, “Prologue to The Clerk’s Tale,” l. 18]. I wish I had more time for him: he was a musician, and had the same feeling for the infinite mystery which we (that is, I) have found so often in English: in Davies’ Orchestra, Cowley’s Dav‑ ideis, Browning’s Saul, Milton’s At a Solemn Music. And because of that not only is he ready on any occasion1 to talk about the music of the spheres and univer‑ sal harmony and rhythm, showing the capacity for expanding allegory, which is so precious a heritage of medieval poetry, but he becomes intoxicated with words as pure sound, making them echo and call and respond through his turgid sentences: Hinc etiam appellatam aestimamus chordam, quod facile corda moveat: ubi tanta

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vocum collecta est sub diversitate concordia, ut vicina chorda pulsata alteram faciat sponte contremiscere, quam nullum contigit attigisse. [Cassiodorus 90]. [Consequently, we also value the so-called chord, inasmuch as it moves the heart easily: when a harmony of notes has been combined, in such a way that a nearby chord, once touched, may make another one, which did not happen to have been touched at all, tremble by itself.]

2 Echoing of sound means, in poetry, rhyme and alliteration; in prose, euphuism in its broadest sense, for the ancestry of euphuism comes down from Cassiodorus without a break. But such echoing is meaningless without accented rhythm, which begins to dominate European poetry from Iceland to Greece within a few centuries. And with this birth of movement and sound comes verbalism, the feel‑ ing that words do not define meaning or clarify images so much as pronounce incantations and evoke mysteries. The notorious obscurantism of Pope Gregory the Great can perhaps be read as in part a healthy reaction against the high style of Cassiodorus, but the three atrocious puns which prelude the Christianizing of England do not promise much for that country in the way of classic simplic‑ ity. Nor was Gregory that sort of man. Shall I go or stay? he asks himself at a crisis in his career. Locusta: stay where you are: what could be plainer?2 A word is not a counter: it is a numen, a rune; it brings us to the threshold of an un‑ known but logically constructed other world. And this is what Old English writ‑ ers feel, whether they write in Latin or the vernacular. Aldhelm of Malmesbury constructs a poem in the form of a double acrostic, initial letters, reading down, making an extra hexameter, final letters, reading up, another.3 Or he will write a sentence of sixteen words of which fifteen begin with “p.” When he’s finished, what has he, a puzzle? Not at all. He has an abraxas, a talisman or charm, and its twisting, grotesque, involved lines imprison a mysterious power. So do the tangled lines and mangled words of the Lindisfarne Gospels.4 3 All this has nothing to do with barbarism. We must not forget the third man of Ravenna, the anonymous artist. His art we call Byzantine, and Anglo‑Saxon literature is, like Anglo‑Saxon art, the most precocious advanced Byzantine and the most precocious Romanesque art in Europe. When it is conventional, as in Cynewulf, it is purely Byzantine; when original or else experimental, as in Be‑ owulf, it approaches the Romanesque. This means that its conquest over work is fairly complete.5 In The Wanderer we can see alliteration reinforced by a sensitive

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feeling for assonance. The author knows as well as Milton how to produce an effect of gloomy terror by alliterating on “w,” and he knows how to organize a sound pattern. And, of course, not only the best lyrical Old English poetry, the riddles, but the lyrical feature of Old English poetic diction, the kenning, consist in describing some essential things about Old English life in terms of its function, avoiding its name and suggesting by its avoidance that the name is a numen, something charged with unknown potency. 4 The comparatively classical and restrained vocabulary of the best medieval po‑ etry is due largely to the fact that it is either southern and has rhyme without much alliteration, or northern and has alliteration without rhyme. Both traditions retain the musical tradition stemming from Cassiodorus, but it is only when allit‑ eration and rhyme come together, as in the Pearl, that the sheer effort of hunting for words produces the evocative effect of poetic diction. “To þenke hir color so clad in clot” [Pearl, l. 22] is an example. Chaucer and Gower, on the other hand, are remarkably free from poetic diction, but like all who have achieved this free‑ dom, their work shows an autumnal ripeness, an inimitable maturity. In Gower’s story of how a serpent and an ape could feel a gratitude toward Bardus that the human being Adrian did not feel, the sense of the rightness of instinct and the wrongness of intelligence, which weighs like an incubus on a more melancholy poet like Vaughan and leads him to think that Nature is nearer God than man, is given a humorous, paradoxical twist by the delicate ambiguity of the word “unkind,” which means both wrathful and unnatural, applied to Adrian.6 Chau‑ cer knew all about poetic diction, but the Franklin declines to use it [“Franklin’s Prologue,” ll. 17–18], and the Clerk is warned that he must not use it [“Clerk’s Prologue,” ll. 15–20]. Chaucer is essentially a poet of occupatio, of a refusal to describe things positively, in terms of movement and sound. The Knight’s Tale rises to its tremendous climax, the funeral rites of Arcite, on a series of negatives. And similarly the feeling for horror and grotesquerie, which takes an evocative poetic diction to describe, is not Chaucer’s. The most horrible episode in Chau‑ cer, January’s wooing of May in the work of the great coming‑of‑spring passage in the Song of Songs [The Merchant’s Tale, ll. 2029 ff.] is a refined and intellectual horror, not in the sound of the verse. There is little mystery and little feeling for an unknown in Chaucer: his terror of the infinite is certainly French and is almost Greek. His world is one controlled by easily understood and predictable laws. “Deores wiþ huere derne rounes” [Animals with their secret cries]––that simple line, by a contemporary lyric poet [Brook 44], brings us into a whole new dimension of experience, and does so by its careful and sensitive adjusting of

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vowels and consonants and its deliberately vague language––in short, by its use of musical poetic diction. 5 Even before Chaucer’s death a number of events conspired to make any direct imitation of him impossible. A contemporary, Thomas Usk, was even driven to experiment with prose. Most of these events are connected with the changes in the language. Inflections were disappearing, which meant chiefly that the final “e” dropped out. In Chaucer’s line “But trewely to tellen atte laste” [General Pro‑ logue, l. 707] four of the eleven syllables would not be available to a later writer. The exact connection between the vowel shift which took place at this time and the dropping of inflections is difficult to determine, there being at present no psychology of phonetics, but they did coexist, and as vowels were frequently lengthened when the “e” was dropped, the tendency was tone and resonance, and the total effect was to give the line of English poetry a weight and solidity, which has no doubt made it more powerful, and poets of Chaucer’s eminence in some respects less restricted, while it destroyed the Middle English lightness of touch. The lightness of Chaucer, of Sir Orfeo, of The Owl and the Nightingale, has disappeared from the language forever with the levelled inflection, which made these poems possible. A remarkable syntactic development, too, the rise of in‑ creased use of relative pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions, the emergence of auxiliary verbs, the distinguishing of a progressive tense, was at the same time giving the language its present analytic form. In poetry any syntactic develop‑ ment means that the rhythm of the poet’s meaning will come more and more to syncopate with the rhythm of his metre. Chaucer’s followers, then, had a heavier line to handle, which they would have to flog along with sharp linear accentua‑ tion to make move, and they were coming more and more to think in a way in which the order of words was everything and the inflections subordinate to it. Two other phenomena are connected with this. One is the rise of a conception of standard English, according to which one dialect comes to be spoken and writ‑ ten by educated people all over the country while others come to be restricted to the peasantry and rural population. The word “rural” itself is a coinage of Lydgate’s. Now as a dialect expands to standard speech, it becomes increasingly eclectic in its choice of forms. Thus, the eclectic tendency in writing a language, though at the opposite extreme from a dialectic one, is a logical development from it. Chaucer was a dialectic writer, Spenser the most eclectic in the language, yet Spenser considered himself a disciple of Chaucer, and between the two po‑ ets are the two centuries of continuous expansion of East Midland over Eng‑ land. During those two centuries, however, another process had been at work,

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the vernacularizing of culture. With the increasing use of English for works on science, philosophy, and religion comes the necessity for incorporating bodily the terms which up to that time existed only in Latin. This is marked even in Chaucer. Chaucer tries hard to make his Boethius and Astrolabe as simple as his poetry, even dedicating the latter to a child in order to force himself to write simply. But even so, he cannot help introducing technical terms like attention, duration, fraction, diffusion, and position to the language. And the fact that he could do so indicates a development in the analytic consciousness of the English mind. 6 In short, it must have been fun to make these new words. The contemporary books on rhetoric recommend ficcio (coining words), transumptio (using words with different meanings), and introductio (borrowing). The new words must have been accompanied by a feeling of increased mental power. Take an analogy from our own time. Until the rise of psychology there were no words for the men‑ tal phenomena that subject deals with, or, if there were, there were only timid words like “hunch” or “quirk.” But when “psychopathic complex,” “traumatic neurosis,” and the like came rumbling in, everyone rushed to play with the new toys, so that psychologists now will have nothing to do with “soul,” “will,” or “instinct,” even when it is impossible to see what else they can mean by the pol‑ ysyllabic cacophonies they do use. Similarly, when Mr. T.S. Eliot writes, “The young are red and pustular / Clutching piaculative pence” [Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service, ll.19–20], we nod sagely and think how suitable the precise use of the technical terminology of medicine and theology is to this age of advancing science. The imagery, we feel, is concrete, the emotion carefully controlled. We should be wrong, of course: Mr. Eliot’s language here is as “aureate” as anything in Hawes. But it’s grand fun. It must have been exciting for the fifteenth century too, surely. The lists of words added to the language by Lydgate are practically all essential today, which implies that his feeling for words was a perfectly genuine one. The words be‑ ginning with “a” attributed him to him are: “abuse,” “adjacent,” “adolescence,” “aggregate,” “amote,” “arable,” “attempt,” “auburn,” “avale,” “avaricious.” Two only have gone out of use. The paint has worn off the rest: they are faded and dull, and a Times leader would be better for them than poetry: a newspaper would be a better foil for them than a book of poems. But at the time, they were new, and helped to imp the wings of English literature. The one word constantly associated with them is “colour.” It was as natural for them to speak of “colours of rhetoric” as for us to speak of “shades of meaning.” Here is a very revealing passage from Lydgate’s Troy Book. He is speaking of Chaucer.

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Whan we wolde his stile counterfet, We may al day oure colour grynde & bete, Tempre our azour and vermyloun: But al I holde but presumpcioun— It folweþ nat, þerfore I lette be.  [Bk. 2, ll. 4715–19]

Every time Lydgate uses a learned work he thinks of it as a splash of colour, a bit of bright red or blue. And his poetry is intended, like a Cézanne water‑colour, to evoke the feeling of outline by means of these spots of brightness. This does not mean, of course that his poetry is joyous. Whatever one’s attitude to words, a writer like Lydgate, who is particularly fond of heavy and resonant words, whose vocabulary in consequence is usually Latin, and whose use of language is hieratic rather than colloquial, is usually a writer with a deeply serious vision of life. Milton and Browne are later examples. The aureate is par excellence a contem‑ plative style. Lydgate certainly had that: two of his three epics are translations of works which employ the archetypal tragic formulae of the wheel of fortune, the danse macabre, and the psychomachia. What “colour” really is, in poetry, is sound, which brings up the question of rhythm, and this connects Lydgate with the tra‑ dition of musical or accented poetry. 7 We have said that successors of Chaucer, because of the changes in the language, willy‑nilly had to abandon his already conservative line and adopt one with heavier sound and ictus. That was one of the problems in front of Lydgate: how to break up the Chaucerian line. One critic has listed four variants from the nor‑ mal iambic line (at the moment we shall speak only of iambic pentameter) used so often by Lydgate as to become frequent license forever after in English poetry. One is the extra short beat at the caesura that is called “epic caesura.” We should not go very far without meeting that in English poetry. It occurs in the first line of Paradise Lost. Another is the beheaded line or trochaic first foot, used for quick‑ ening the pace, or sometimes, as in Chaucer’s “Whilom” or “Whan that Aprill,” for starting a long poem with a downbeat, as it were. Another is the anapaestic first foot, used for the same purpose of greater speed. The fourth is the so‑called broken‑backed or Lydgatian line, which from Old English times (when it was type C of Sievers’ five metrical patterns) to our own day has produced some of the most powerful effects in English poetry. Milton’s “Which tasted works knowl‑ edge of good and evil” [Paradise Lost, bk. 7, l. 543] is an example. Now if Professor Schick is right in his analysis, Lydgate, in introducing to English iambic pentam‑ eter its four most frequent and effective variants, must have had as sure an ear for rhythm as for language. That would make him a poet. Of course he had many

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other variants, and often his poetry is obviously doggerel. The nearness of its approach to the complete identification of rhythm and sense, which is one ideal of prosody, is a question impossible to solve without more reading of Lydgate than I have done. Besides, a large margin of error will always remain; we know much less about his prosody than Chaucer’s: his metrical principles are infinitely more difficult to get at than Chaucer’s, and in consequence it is perhaps safe to say that unless an autograph turns up we shall never have a text of his work we can feel confident about. Again, the sheer volume of his work implies acres of doggerel, and the fact that so much of it was hack work implies haste and the lack of genuine creative pleasure, in spite of the new words. If we had of Milton only things of the Eikonoklastes or Defensio Prima level, we should find it impossible to say whether an authentic genius was imprisoned in them or not. Besides, he was practically a poet laureate. Lydgate’s Testament looks like genuine poetry, but his personal work is marred by his excessively artificial forms, such as last‑line links between stanzas, which do not suit him as they suit the Pearl poet. On the other hand, the prevalence of beheaded and broken‑backed lines in Lydgate does imply, as Miss Hammond points out, that he thinks in terms of half‑lines or, at any rate, in terms of a very decisive caesura. As this is also true of Old English poetry, one wonders if two principles of Old English metre also hold good for Lydgate. One is that an extra short syllable or two does not disturb the prevailing metrical pattern: thus Type A, two trochees, would still be Type A if it were two dactyls. If so, perhaps the absence of a reliable text is, though certainly a nuisance, less fatal to appreciating Lydgate than we might at first have thought. The other is that the two halves of the line can be constructed on different metri‑ cal principles, which provides a subordinate contrast to the variants from iambic pentameter in the line itself. The result is that when we come to Lydgate from Chaucer or Gower, we have to apply to him the words the minstrel applies to Death in the Danse Macabre: This new daunce / is to me so strange   ♪♪│♪│♫♫│♪ Wonder dyuerse / and parsyngli contrarie  ♪♫│♪♪│♫♫│♫r│ The dredful fotyng / doth so oft chaunge   ♪│♪♪│♪♪│♫♫│♪. . And the mesures / so ofte sithes varie  ♪♫│♪♫│♫♫│♫r│or ♪♪│♫♫│

The caesura is so marked in the Early English Texts Society edition.7 And yet when we look at these lines with their subtle unobtrusive alliteration, we can surely see a deliberate contrast between the strong assured rhymes “strange” and “chaunge,” with their gloomy vowel sounds, and the wavering uncertain feminine ones. And the rhythm, with its alternation of slow creepy spondees like “The dredful fotyng” (˘ – – , – –) and the almost jazzy syncopation of the second line (– ˘ , ˘ – , ˘ , – ˘ ˘ , ˘ – ˘) (I think is the way to divide it), suggestive of a

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grisly Holbeinish scene of leaping skeletons, is certainly the rhythm of genuine poetry. This example is singularly free from aureate diction. But aureate diction is es‑ sential to Lydgate’s manner nevertheless. Take this stanza: Problemys of old likenese and figures, Whiche proved been fructuous of sentence, And hath auctorité grownded in scriptures, By resemblaunces of nobille apparence, Withe moralités concluding of prudence, Like as the Bibylle rehersithe by writing, How trees sometyme chase himself a kyng.

This is the opening of The Chorle and the Bird, and the sonorous language is in‑ tended to be an impressive prelude, scored for brass, to arrest the ear before the story begins. It has another purpose too. All fables point [to] a moral, and to a medieval mind like Lydgate’s that means that fables indicate the divine and moral laws which forever all human beings experience. That sounds rather pompous expressed in this way, but it is not necessarily so; the discovery of the immensely significant in the trivial is Wordsworth’s procedure as much as Lydgate’s. The difference is that Lydgate’s subtle alliteration (we have noted that twice now) and his arrangement of the deep rune of solemn vowels is in‑ tended, by its sound, to suggest the oracular ambiguity inherent in fables gen‑ erally. The intentionally vague language, too, indicates that region of thought where ideas give out and symbols begin. And the method of unaccented rhym‑ ing is taken over from him by such subtle and expert technicians as Wyatt, who is not afraid of such rhymes as “harbour–banner” [The Lover for Shamefastness Hideth His Desire within His Faithful Heart, ll. 1, 4] and from Wyatt to Southwell in one or two poems, after which it disappears until our own day. I suspect Lydgate of being a poet, is all I can say at present. What he mainly lacked, to make him the Beethoven to Chaucer’s Mozart, was the self‑conscious egoism supplied by [Thomas] Hoccleve. Aureate language, like every other form of poetic diction, is bad with bad po‑ ets. Lydgate’s use of it is, I think, strained but original. Anyone who doubts this has only to compare him, at his worst, with such specimens as the prologue to Ripley’s Compend of Alchemy. We are concerned at the moment only with good poets, however, and must pass on to the Scottish Chaucerians. The first thing to be said about them is that they have an equal right to be called Scottish Lydga‑ tians. Their line has the Lydgatian stressed accent, the Lydgatian heavy vow‑ els and dropped inflections, the Lydgatian long rolling vocabulary, and a more than Lydgatian use of alliteration. The terrific energy of Dunbar subordinates the

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most complicated rhyming and inter‑rhyming schemes, the most incessant allit‑ eration, to a hammering, pounding accent, and many of his slower poems have to be pulled up by a refrain. Such poems as The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo or The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy:



Forflittin, countbittin, beschittin, barkit hyd, Clym ledder, fyle tedder, foule edder, I defy thee! [The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, ll. 239–40]

It is not possible to find any poetry in English literature more unlike Chaucer than that, but it is a fairly logical development from Lydgate’s revolutionizing of the Chaucerian line. Hence we should expect to find that Dunbar’s use of aureate diction would be Lydgatian also. Dunbar is, however, the greatest musician that British poetry had up till then produced, and his great sensitivity to rhythm and sound bring out very clearly the essential musical quality of aureate language as a form of poetic diction. True, all Dunbar’s language reflects his sense of musical sensitivity, and he is keenly aware of the peculiar effectiveness of the Scottish dialect for some effects: Mony sweir, bumbard-belly huddroun, Mony slute daw and slepy duddroun  [The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, ll. 70–1]

is the right sort of noise for sloth (“Sweirness”), and Sir Gilbert Hay endit has he  [Lament for the Makers, l. 67]

shows his easy mastery of the broken‑backed line in a less dialectical poem. But it is his use of aureate language that we are concerned with here, and this is so skil‑ ful as fully to justify the convention, even if it be denied that Lydgate had already done so. Two qualities of Dunbar’s aureate language are especially important: its capacity for building up an impressive sound pattern and its capacity for ex‑ pressing the artificial, using that word in its old‑fashioned laudatory sense. The former is, of course, simply a development of the less sensitive inter‑rhymings of the vituperative poems: Hale, sterne superne, hale in eterne,  In Godis sicht to schyne! Lucerne in derne for to discerne  Be glory and grace devyne; Hodiern, modern, sempitern,

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 Angelicall regyne! Our tern inferne for to dispern, Helpe, rialest rosyne.     Ave Maria, gracia plena!  Haile, fresche floure femynyne! Yerne us guberne, virgin matern,  Of reuth baith rute and ryne.  [A Ballad of Our Lady, ll. 1–12]8

There is nothing quite like that in English poetry: the boldly adapted, altered, transformed, and coined words make the language further removed from ordi‑ nary speech than any poetry has been since. Dunbar is writing two languages at once: Latin and English run along in counterpoint, the Latin words producing more of the “ern” sounds, which echo like the clanging of bells, and the English providing most of the alliteration. Parts of it are bad, like the last line, where the forced and far‑fetched conceit, added to the intoxication of sound, pushes the strangeness beyond reasonable limits. But it deserves to survive as experiment. Aureate language is of course highbrow and fitted only for religious allegori‑ cal poems. But by Dunbar’s time the May morning vision and the Court of Love allegory were beginning to grow rather old‑fashioned, consciously literary, and quaint. Hence when Dunbar uses aureate diction in The Goldyn Targe or The This‑ tle and the Rose, he does so because he is deliberately trying to give the effect of curious, elaborate artifice. The world of The Goldyn Targe is not a real world but an “anamalit” [enamelled] one [l. 13]. The air is crystal, the heavens sapphire, the summer ruby, and so on: The birdis sang upon the tender croppis With curiouse note, as Venus chapell clerkis.  [ll. 20–1]

Aureate language therefore falls into its place: Up sprang the goldyn candill matutyne With clere depurit bemes cristallyne  [ll. 4–5]

And in The Thistle and the Rose, where the subject is admittedly not only allegori‑ cal but heraldic, aureate diction is even more restrained and delicate, only touch‑ ing up an image or two with a suggestion of remote strangeness: A coistly croun with clarefeid stonis brycht  [l. 155]

The same principle is roughly true of Gavin Douglas, but his sense of the au‑

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reate is somewhat less naïve than Dunbar’s, and his language gives an effect of far greater unity. It is in Douglas that we first find a favourite effect of Milton, Marlowe, and Sir Thomas Browne, sniffily described by Mr. Eliot as Q9 Forst steirs the stern Mnestheus on ane.

Aureate diction at the present time is out of style in some respects. The man who carefully memorizes the longest words in the dictionary to impress his friends with does not now impress them. Their use is permitted only in face‑ tious writing, and the kind of humor shown in calling a “lie” a “terminological inexactitude” gets more ponderous and unbearable with each new practitioner of it. In literary criticism this means, as we have already seen, an unsympathetic approach to poets who we think have been deceived by the [?] [?] of long words. No poet, not even Lydgate, has suffered from this more than Hawes. Hawes marks the climax of the aureate tradition, for what had been experi‑ ment and discovery to his predecessors was a dogma and a theory to him. It is noteworthy that neither Hawes nor any other poet of his time I know of regards aureate terms as exact, carefully shaded, and distinguished meanings of subtle and abstract ideas. His approach to a conception of poetry is altogether different. To him, there is no use in poetry which merely treats of things: any sane man can see with his own eyes. That is photography, not creative imagination. The really penetrating artistic mind is that which probes beyond the phenomenal world in the mystery of the world behind it. Hawes does not know what kind of a world that is. For that reason it is to be reached by suggestion and symbol. The content of poetry, therefore, is certain to be allegorical, and the meaning of that allegory vague. If we try to pin it down to too definite a meaning, it dissolves into a cloud of words. Poetic diction, therefore, must be completely hieratic and artificial. No one can really understand it, for it conveys not meaning but suggestion, yet it is addressed to sensitive minds who use it as a stimulus to contemplation. The direction of contemplation is given by the form of the complete poetic argument: that is why Hawes puts so much emphasis on order and arrangement. When he says of poetic diction that The barbary tongue it doth ferre exclude Electynge wordes whiche are expedyent In latyn or in englysshe after the entent Encensynge out the aromatyke fume Our langage rude to exyle and consume  [The Pastime of Pleasure, pt. XI, ll. 17–21]

he does not mean, we see, that English poetry should be versified Latin: he is not choosing between languages but between kinds of words. “Our langage rude”

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is not necessarily English but the kind of language we use in describing wash‑ tubs and neckties and carrots. Poetic language is mystical (Hawes is far more a poetic mystic than Vaughan or Blake) and evocative. The line “Encensynge out the aromatyke fume” proves that his conception of poetry is a decadent one, and proves too that aureate diction has reached with him the limit of one phase of its development. But to read him sympathetically is to read him with the New Eng‑ lish Dictionary at one’s elbow. In such a [?] we must remember that Hawes was, according to the NED, the first to use “elect” as meaning a deliberate choice in preference to everything else: the election of a word to a place in Hawes poetry is not to be made too unconsciously. “Expedyent,” again, has with him not only the meaning of suitable, appropriate to the form, but the obsolete sense of nimble or skillful, and probably as well the etymological one of freed from bondage. This sounds rather niggling, but Hawes seems to want this kind of reading from us. As we have said, Hawes is the climax of the fifteenth‑century kind of aureate diction: after him, nothing was possible but reaction, ridicule, and the creation of a new kind. We have so far tried to avoid defining the word “aureate,” but it seems fair by now to describe it as a habitual use of terms which to those us‑ ing them seemed “wonder nyce and straunge” [Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 2, l. 24]. We say to those using them, for Lydgate and Hawes had a very much underestimated power of creating or popularizing essential words, and because their innovations were successful, we now regard them as faded. But it is approximately true to say that any writer whose work contains many words imperfectly digested by the English language, whatever their origin, is an aure‑ ate writer. Now by Hawes’ time the feeling of the barbaric quality of English as compared with Latin or French persisted in some quarters while it waned in oth‑ ers. In the former the borrowing of aureate terms went steadily on, reinforced by more genuine if often more pedantic Classical learning; in the latter an awaken‑ ing interest in the possibilities of English combined with a rejection of the old hi‑ eratic conception of poetry. This gave two new features to the vocabulary of the latter: one, the increased use of old‑fashioned, dialectical, or Chaucerian words from the vernacular itself; the other, the less affected use of terms formerly aure‑ ate, which made possible the progress of their assimilation into the language. In other words, these writers were more simple, downright, and vigorous than their predecessors, though they reaped the benefits of the latter’s ingenu‑ ity. As we have seen, they included Dunbar and Douglas, whose alleged use of Chaucerian language is reinforced by the most conservative of English dialects. They also included Rabelais, who ridiculed aureate terms more than once. But the most notable English poet of the group was of course Skelton. This amaz‑ ing master of words was, as all students of him know, greatly influenced by the medieval Latin lyric, and scraps of Latin float in like the words of the requiem in Philip Sparrow, sometimes used as various Mother‑Goose syllables. But this

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bilingual, wholesale incorporation of Latin means that he is a far more English poet than Hawes, the boundary lines between the two languages being more clearly marked. The Hawes conception of poetry, being medieval, would lead most naturally to a kind of cosmopolitan poetic diction based on Latin, like the language of science today, the technical part of which is equally based on Latin and Greek. It makes scientific works in English comparatively easy for an Ital‑ ian. But Skelton’s really aureate terms are most successful when humorous, their swelling rotundity punctuated by vulgar words and ideas, their dignity mocked by impudence: A phoenix it is This hearse that must bless With aromatic gums That cost great sums, The way of thurification To make fumigation, Sweet of reflare, And redolent of air, This corse for to cense With great reverence, As Patriarch or Pope In a black cope. While he censeth the hearse, He shall sing the verse, Libera me, In de, la, sol, re.  [The Requiem Mass, ll. 133–48]

3 Review of Books by Rosemond Tuve and Douglas Bush (1953)

This review appeared in Renaissance News 6, nos. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1953): 46–8. Reprinted by permission. Rosemond Tuve. A Reading of George Herbert, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, 216 p., 17 pl. $5. Douglas Bush. Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature. (Martin Classical Lectures, Vol. XIII) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (for Oberlin College), 1952. 60 p. $1.50.

Miss Tuve’s reading of George Herbert is concerned largely with the scriptural typology in his poetry. She shows that Herbert is unintelligible without some understanding of the tradition of allegorizing Scripture which had become incorporated in the liturgy and which can be found almost anywhere one looks in Herbert’s period: in sermons, in hymns, in the books of hours, in stained-glass windows, in patristic writings, breviaries, glosses, and commentaries. She has laid particular stress on pictorial analogues, and the book is handsomely illustrated in conse­quence. She is not out for source-hunting: her primary aim is to explain the grammar of the language that Herbert spoke. The assumption that the Bible is one book, rigidly unified in its sym­bolism, is primary in the typological tradition, and so is the Augustinian principle that the Old Testament is revealed in the New and the New concealed in the Old. It follows that every significant event in the Old Testament typifies the Incarnation, notably the Exodus, the deliverance of God’s people from bondage, which is the keystone of Old Testament symbolism. Miss Tuve shows how such an approach to the Bible clears up Herbert’s use of such images as the Jordan, Joseph’s coat, Naaman, Melchizedek, and the like, and how the use of a Biblical image echoes all the Biblical uses of that image. Thus the vine carried out of the Promised Land

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typifies Christ the true vine; the cross links with the forbidden tree of Eden and the brazen serpent of the wilderness, the winepress of Isaiah with the blood of Christ, and so on. The first half of the book deals with the poem “The Sacrifice,” and takes as its starting point the relation of the poem to the liturgy of the Improperia, the “Reproaches” of Good Friday. It is also concerned with Empson’s analysis of the poem in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and illustrates the deficiencies of a criticism which deals only with the linguistic surface of a poem, without knowing its real language, the language that is rooted in convention and cultural tradition. A good deal of Empson’s criticism, especially his remarks about “jokes” and the like, springs from the clichés about the metaphysical style that we have inherited from Johnson’s Life of Cowley. The notion that Herbert is a metaphysical poet of this type was not Johnson’s, and is not Miss Tuve’s: she shows that in many respects Herbert belongs solidly to the allegorical school. The book is of great value for the study of Herbert, and of even greater value if taken as an introduction to the study of Scriptural typology. One would like to see her do a companion study on Vaughan, whose imagery, for all the nonsense talked about his hermetism, is also Biblical, though less liturgical than Herbert’s. In a way it is rather a reflection on the comprehension of the humanities by the humanists that such a study should have to be written at all. “What kind of readers do we make,” Miss Tuve asks, “whom circumstances have intervened to make ignorant of what every literate man once knew?” The elementary principles of typology are data that no humanist has any excuse for not knowing. If other scholars can be prodded into learning them in order to understand Miss Tuve’s demonstration of the inadequacy of Empson’s critique of Herbert, perhaps we have stumbled on a real function of the new criticism. Mr. Bush’s two lectures form an excellent introduction to the spirit of Renaissance culture. Generalization and illustration alike are made with a sense of perspective that can only come from great scholarly authority. He knows better, of course, than to distort his subject by taking it too literally. There certainly were Classical influences on Renaissance literature, but it is not possible to distinguish the new influences from the older ones transmitted from the Middle Ages. No one in English criticism has done more to show this than Mr. Bush himself. The genuinely new features—a growing secularization of learning, more knowledge of Greek, better and printed texts, a sharper historical sense, and a number of distinctive developments such as the Senecan Stoicism of Chapman—are lightly but clearly touched. Again, it is not possible to contrast Classical with Christian influences, thereby treating Erasmus and Montaigne as though they accepted the kind of antithesis between Christian superstition and non-Christian enlightenment that one may find later in Gibbon or Shelley. The medieval conception of pagan wisdom as a natural theology contained by the Christian revelation is

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substantially that of nearly all Renaissance humanists. Hence if one says, for instance, that one Classical influence on Renaissance literature was a sense of form, a good deal of this sense turns out to be simply the medieval sense of cosmological order persisting unchanged. These and other considerations indicate that Mr. Bush’s lucid summary of his subject is not as easy as it looks.

4 Neoclassical Agony: On Wyndham Lewis (1957)

This is a review of Geoffrey Wagner’s Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1957). It appeared in The Hudson Review 10, no. 4 (Winter 1957–58): 592–8. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

Mr. Wagner’s book is an excellent study of one of the “men of 1914,” as Wyndham Lewis styled the group of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and himself. The approach is critical rather than biographical, although one important biographical detail does emerge: Lewis was born in the same year as Joyce, a fact which he seems to have concealed, but which must have been known to Joyce when he made Lewis the basis of his Shaun figure. Much has still to be done on Lewis’s biography: Mr. Wagner could not have done it without writing a different kind of book, but he clearly feels that the key to the contradictions in Lewis’s character and thought is biographical rather than critical. The book is divided into four parts. The first, “Politics,” obviously put first in order to get that out of the way, deals with such things as the Hitler book and its recantation; the second, “Art,” with Lewis’s critical journalism; the third, “Time,” with his larger cultural reflections; and the fourth, with his work as a satirist. Lewis is studied throughout as a literary figure, and it is his opinions about art rather than his practice as a painter that Mr. Wagner stresses. The disadvantage of such an approach is that it deprives Mr. Wagner of a centre of gravity. Lewis’s painting usually makes sense; much of his writing does not, partly because writing with Lewis was a hobby, as painting was with D.H. Lawrence, though a hobby which he cultivated with such energy that it came to overshadow the main art. Many features of his writing are those of the amateur. He never mastered—never tried to master—the art of expository prose, and the insincerity in his journalism is mainly due to the fact that he does not have the technical equipment to be sincere. He cannot make words express a precise meaning: he showers his reader with a verbal offensive, with what the accurate

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schoolboy phrase calls shooting a line. A passage quoted by Mr. Wagner reminds us how much of Lewis’s prose is couched in the huff-snuff rhetoric which is a non-occult form of automatic writing: Ours has been in the West a generation of hypocrites . . . a generation that has shown less care for men in the mass than any for a great many centuries, combining this de­monstrable indifference to the welfare of the generality with never-ceasing hosannas to the Common Man: a generation of power-addicts who put on a red tie with a smirk, climb upon the back of the Working Class and propose to ride it to a new type of double-faced dominion . . . . [Rude 142]

In reading even the best of expository works, one feels in contact with an acute, witty, and erudite mind, yet these books are unusually difficult to finish. There are two reasons, I think, for this. One is their inconclusiveness: they never seem to make a memorable or rounded point except when they are attacking some other writer. The other is their lack of rhythm: one bores one’s way along a deafening, unac­cented clatter of words until one can stand the noise no longer. Such a style, though largely useless for exposition, has its points as a style for satire, founded as it is on invective and parody, and Lewis’s theory of writing is chiefly a rationalization of his satiric style. The theory is that his approach is external and spatialized, in contrast to that of Joyce (whom he considers only as a stream-of-consciousness writer) and, more particularly, Gertrude Stein, who writes “like a confused, stammering, rather ‘soft’ (bloated, acromegalic, squinting, and spectacled, one can figure it as) child” [Enemy, 71], and who is “just the german musical soul leering at itself in a mirror, and sticking out at itself a stuttering welt of swollen tongue” [Time, 194]. The difference in kind from his own style implied by such remarks does not, of course, exist: his is simply another highly mannered rhetoric, and it would be easy to think up similar epithets for it. Lewis maintains that his own approach is consistently concerned with the outsides of people, paying attention only to the visible “ossatures,” in contrast to the emotional and temporal fumblings for a dark and soft in­terior. His definitions of his own aims, however, in the flat, antithetical form in which they are presented in Men With­out Art, are sheer idiocies: space is better than time; the outside is better than the inside; painting is better than music, and so on, and so on. Besides, the human body not being crustacean, its ossature is inside anyway. Even Lewis, however, can hardly be unaware of the badness of his metaphors: he adopts them because they give a general idea of his tradition. This is the line of intellectual satire represented by Petronius (one of the nearest to him technically), Rabelais, certain aspects of Dickens, and the Flaubert of Bouvard et Pecuchet, which he imitates to some extent in The Human Age. Satire is based on a moral attitude—there is a half-hearted effort in Men Without Art to argue that

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satire need not be moral, but it soon breaks down—and the basis of this attitude is frequently an assumed contrast between a moral norm that is pragmatically free and flexible, and behaviour that appears grotesque because it is obsessed, or bound to a single repeated pattern of action, like Jonson’s “humour.” The obvious metaphor for the latter is the machine or puppet, and Lewis’s characterization deliberately reduces his characters to mechanisms. Mr. Wagner has an interesting table of the number of mechanical and crus­tacean images Lewis uses for his characters: there are certainly more than enough to make the point. In the light of this, the image of the external ossature makes more sense: a machine does have such a thing, and, in studying a machine, only its external behaviour need be examined; it has no inner essence or soul stuff. Lewis, in contrast to Lawrence, associ­ates mechanical behaviour with the primitive, the “wild body” which cannot attain the disciplined freedom of civilized man. When we compare Lewis with other satirists in his tradition we notice that his metaphor has in one respect led him astray. One element in writing is the rhythm of narrative, the inner pulsation and continuity in the style that keeps one turning the pages. Lewis’s theory would doubtless oblige him to condemn this as an internal or temporal quality in writing, but unfortunately for the theory, structural rhythm is the real skeleton or inner ossature of writing. His neglect of it brings the defects of his expository style into his satires. If we look at The Apes of God, we see a use of catalogues and set repetitive passages, like the split‑man’s litany, that remind us of similar things in Rabelais. But in Rabelais there is a sweeping rhythmical power that carries them off, and Lewis has no power of rhythm. Words merely cover and congeal one scene after another; his writing is the opposite of his painting, a kind of literary pointillism. For this reason, even his best satires seem to me books more likely to be admired than read. Anybody can see that they are remarkable, even astonishing books; but they give a not wholly unjustified impression of being themselves the kind of clever mechanical imitation that they present as grotesque. The exuberance of Rabelais (and Swift and Joyce) results from a rigorous discipline which is also a professional competence in their art. Lewis has this discipline as a painter, but writing he has approached externally; and when his theory extends from a technique of satiric presentation to a technique of writing satire, carica­ture becomes self-caricature, and the book as a whole resembles a Cartesian ghost caught in its own machine, trying to break out of a closed circle of parody. Lewis speaks of D.H. Lawrence’s painting as incompetent Gauguin: partisans of Lawrence might retort that much of Lewis’s writing reads like delirious Dickens. For one is often reminded of the way in which Dickens allows his facility in caricature to take over the style of writing and produce the prodigies of unplausible melodrama that mark his lapses. The same contradiction exists in Lewis’s personal publicity. Lewis appears to think of the role of the artist in terms of an anti-Communist redefinition of a

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proletariat, anti-Commu­nism being one of the few attitudes that Lewis has consistently maintained. The genuinely declassed person, for Lewis, is the detached or withdrawn observer. Such an observer has a continuity in his attitude that most people, stampeded as they are by the pressures of news and propaganda, lack; he is more radical than the crowd, yet he is deeply conservative too, for the crowd, being plunged into the time-spirit, is restless for constant change, this being what Lewis calls the attitude of the “revolutionary simpleton” in the arts. The crowd wants the kind of art that reflects itself: art which glorifies the primitive, the child, or the ordinary or inarticulate common man, as in the Chaplin films and in Hemingway’s “dumb ox” characters; art which follows the endless associative burble of the inner consciousness, as in the interior monologues of Joyce and Stein; art which tends to approximate, in one way or another, the communal dance, the art which encourages a sense of participation by the untrained, or of what Lewis calls the “dithyrambic spectator.” All this is in contrast to the detached contemplation necessary for the Egyptian and Chinese art that Lewis (like Gauguin) prefers to the modern West, where we realize that art is not self-expression but the expression of something disinterested, a “not-self.” Such views are common to an antiromantic or “neoclassical” group of artists, both English and French, whose precepts and personnel Mr. Wagner ably outlines. The true artist thus becomes the “enemy” of society, for he must either declare war on it or be crushed by its hostility. We seem to be close here, Mr. Wagner suggests, to a theory of a creative elite. Lewis says he holds no such view, and Mr. Wagner has got to the point of feeling that this is fairly good evidence that he does. Still, Lewis’s denial points to some uncertainty in his mind. The real meaning of elite is “people like me,” and nearly everyone believes in an elite, in the sense that nearly everyone with any social function at all will tend to think of that function ideally, as something on which society as a whole depends. For artists, the conception of an elite normally begins in the establishing of schools and trends and manifestoes aimed at waking society up to the importance of their art. But with the artist, the conception of “people like me” changes, as he becomes less fond of rival artists and more attached to the people who buy and appre­ciate his work, into the political question of what kind of public would make his art elite. The change for Lewis is accelerated by his insistence that most people have no right to participate in the arts and by his increasing jealousy of almost every widely acclaimed contemporary. Finally, the conception “people like me” modulates into “people who like me,” a society recreated in one’s own image, which at least has the advantage of permitting a more authentic form of creative life. All three phases are clearly marked in Lewis. The first phase is the period of “vorticism” and the Blast manifestoes. Lewis was clearly fascinated by Marinetti’s use of the new techniques of advertising and publicity stunts in an art move-

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ment. He sent a copy of Blast to a friend, with a letter, quoted by Mr. Wagner, apologizing for its noise but asserting that the artist cannot exist at all without such things—a statement one may beg leave to doubt. The second phase compels Mr. Wagner to deal with the shoddy story of the flirtation with fascism by British and French intellectuals. The “neoclassical” group favoured a type of relatively unpopular art, and such art could win its place only through some kind of established authority, hence their speculations were largely concerned with what kind of authoritarian govern­ment would be most useful to them. The result was a series of self-contradictions (matched, of course, by similar ones in the Communist camp) unparalleled in the history of the arts, and Lewis’s writings afford an excellent area for observing them. In Lewis, as in others of the neoclassical group, antiromanticism seems to be a late romanticism fouling its own nest. The romantic decadence glanced at in Lewis’s Diabolical Principle seems merely to expand into a more political form of experimenting in sadomasochism. The genuine statements in neoclassical theory are mainly of romantic origin. Mr. Wagner shows that Lewis’s theory of satire is lifted almost bodily from Bergson’s Le Rire—an excellent place to go for a theory of satire, except that Bergson is one of the two philosophers most violently attacked in Time and Western Man. In any case, the contrast between organism and mechanism is a romantic commonplace, going back to Goethe and Coleridge. The other target of Time and Western Man is Spengler, and the framework of Lewis’s pronounce­ments on contemporary culture comes straight out of Spengler. Lewis’s polemical writings are in a relatively modern genre—Spengler calls it the diatribe—which was largely created by Victorian romanticism, though Milton and Swift had practised the form earlier. It was romanticism that brought in Lewis’s notion of a special type of creative man, superior to others not simply in his particular expertise, but in general, in his whole attitude to life. This conception of the superior person is expounded particularly in Carlyle, whose Teufelsdröckh is a professor of things in general. Our own age has inherited from this the conception of the “intellectual,” who produces, in the line of duty, the “calling-for” book, the pseudopolitical treatise that “calls for” various shifts of attitude in society and is the modern form of Spengler’s diatribe. It is based on the romantic assumption that if one’s expertise is in, say, poetry or fiction, one’s reaction to the morning paper will show an infinitely more searching insight than the reaction of one whose expertise is in greasing cars or curling women’s hair. I imagine that this assumption has still to be substantiated: in any case, Lewis’s political writings provide little evidence in its favour. Of the four men of 1914, Joyce, after his adolescence, remained almost entirely aloof from this kind of intellectualized journalism; Pound fell for it hard, which is one reason why he reads so like a late Victorian. Eliot has also yielded to the temptation to write the odd diatribe, but has had the literary tact

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to keep the musings of After Strange Gods and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture at least overtly out of his poetry and drama. But even in this addled century, there are few phenomena more strange than Lewis’s fanatic addiction to the diatribe. Mr. Wagner speaks of the influence on Lewis of Benda’s Trahison des Clercs, yet his diatribes are a flagrant example of what Benda means, an artist deliberately vulgarizing critical and philosophical ideas, deliberately deserting the field of his expert knowledge for a field where nobody knows anything because there are no facts. Lewis condemns the “dithyrambic spectator” in art only to become one himself in society. Lewis thinks of art as aloof, unpopular, exact, and difficult: his diatribes are slovenly, cliché-ridden, confused, and embarrassingly personal. Lewis is anti-Communist, yet if we ask what is wrong with Communism, one of the most decisive answers is that it adopts Lewis’s technique of communication. Lewis speaks of continuity as the feature that makes for dignity in life: his polemics shift ground so often that it becomes almost uncharitable to remember what he said last Tuesday. The assumption in most of the political writings is that the one form of society which makes such writing possible—a tolerant bourgeois democracy—is the most con­temptible of all social structures. But when we find Lewis urging in 1936 that Germany be allowed to rearm (and urging the opposite in 1942, Mr. Wagner notes), we feel less grateful for the tolerance that allows him to write than for the indifference that makes him relatively harmless. Again, as a satirist, one would expect Lewis to lampoon the popular ideals of the English, their devotion to sport and fair play, their pride in having a sense of humour, and so on. The villain of The Human Age is a cliché expert known as the Bailiff, whose appearance, recorded on Michael Ayrton’s jacket design, recalls Punch. Yet this attitude exists beside another which is its direct opposite, apparently motivated by some feeling of guilt at being declassed by art, and which at every stage has followed a Colonel Blimp line.1 Tarr reflects the popular antiGermanism of the First World War; in the twenties Lewis is explaining that Stein, Joyce, and transition are really “shams,” that there are too many homosexuals in modern art, and that cubism is largely humbug; as the political situation darkens, he becomes pro-fascist and ridi­cules the colour cult which is part of the reaction against white supremacy; in 1939 he abruptly takes a democratic line on Nazis and Jews; in 1941 he completes the circle by writing Anglosaxony: A League that Works. Even in religion, on which he says little, we still find him sucking his own blood, like the Ancient Mariner. He believes in Something Upstairs, rejects Catholicism with some respect, and treats Protestant­ism with great contempt, as was usual in diatribes of his generation. But the dead end of Protestantism is not capital­istic exploitation or bourgeois prudery or any of the things that intellectuals’ lay sermons say it is; the dead end of Protestantism is the intellectual’s lay sermon.

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If these diatribes formed, as Lewis is not unwilling to suggest, a deliberate masquerade, behind which the serious writing of the “Not-Self” takes place, or if the diatribes could in any other way be separated from the serious writing, their inconsistencies would not matter. They cannot—The Childermass, in particular, is a diatribe in fictional form—and the inconsistencies of the one become a kind of split creative personality in the other. The masquerade theory ascribes an impossible degree of subtlety, in any case, to a most unsubtle writer. Lewis ridicules the archetypal approach to fiction, yet his most memorable characters are culture-myths, some of them, like Kreisler in Tarr, largely of newspaper origin. He nags at homosexuals, yet shows a curious distaste for the normal relation, and his women resemble Asiatic mother-goddesses as they might have been described by the prophet Elijah. One would expect his “external” approach to have some affinity with realism, as in Flaubert; but anything like a setting in a Lewis satire becomes a fantasy of Grand Guignol proportions. The Parisian left bank in Tarr, the Bloomsbury-Chelsea London of The Apes of God, the Toronto of Self Condemned (if the reader will accept the opinion of a reviewer who lives there) are all as far out of this world as the limbo of The Human Age. What is one to make of a writer who hates everything, with the unvarying querulousness of a neurotic, that his own writing represents? The easy way out is to decide that Lewis must be some kind of phony. Even Mr. Wagner has twinges of wondering whether his subject has really been worth his pains, and speaks of Lewis’s “constant, almost paranoid, lust for destruction.” Certainly one cannot study Lewis in detail without exasperation, but that is true of many writers, and though he has uniformly substituted cleverness for wisdom, still no one can read The Human Age carefully and feel that its author has no real place in literature. The better solution is to take all Lewis’s theories as projections, realizing that he is an almost solipsistic writer, whose hatreds are a part of him because he understands nothing of what goes on outside his own mind. As Stephen Spender pointed out in a hostile but shrewd critique of Lewis, that is what his external approach really amounts to. No one better manifests Yeats’s dictum that we make rhetoric out of the quarrel with others, poetry (read satire) out of the quarrel with ourselves [Per Amica, 29]. Lewis’s temporary admiration for Hitler thus becomes intelligible: here was someone else lost in a dream, yet with a medium’s power of animating and imposing his dream. We come back to our figure of the Cartesian ghost caught in its own machine, which I have partly borrowed from Mr. Wagner. Lewis is the satirist of an age whose drama is a flickering optical illusion in a darkened room, whose politics is an attempt to make clichés into axioms of automatic conduct, whose spiritual discipline is a subjective exploring of the infantile and the perverted. Such books as The Apes of God or The Human Age can hardly be written without a personal descent into the hell they portray, and Lewis has made that descent, and taken the consequences of making it, with a perverse but unflinching courage.

5 Review of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1958)

The following review appeared under the “Turning New Leaves” column of the Canadian Forum 38 (December 1958): 206–7. Frye reviews the 1958 translation of Boris Pasternak’s novel by Max Hayward and Mania Harari (London: Collins and Harvill Press).

Reading this book is quite an experience; reviewing it, for one who knows no Russian, is an exercise in frustration. It is abundantly clear that it is more of an epic poem than a novel. The two main attributes of the conven­tional novel, vitality of character drawing and logicality of plot, are hardly present at all. The story is a series of detached episodes connected by the most preposterous coincidences. Characters wander in and out, or die and come back to life under other names. Only the incidental char­acters are described with much vividness, while the main figures loom up as cloudily as the heroes of Ossian. But all the time we are aware that some different principle of unity is holding the book together, a principle based, as in most poetry, on the imagery, and on the symbolic values attached to that imagery. It is not the picture of the revolution and civil war that organizes the narrative; it is the meaning that the author gives to such figures as the caryatids on a building, to iced rowanberries and lilacs, to the weeping face of the heroine Lara, to a waterfall that is associated with the dragon of a knighterrant romance, to the Siberian forest and its wolves, to the incessant references to the festivals of the Church, especially Christmas and Easter. The author himself says that his hero was a poet interested in the tech­niques of symbolisme, because it is based on the principle “that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.” A series of poems at the end, supposedly by Zhivago, provide the symbolic keys to the story. But nobody can unravel this kind of writing except in the original language. The translators do their best, but candidly admit that their translation has been done in a hurry and that it makes no attempt to give much more than the general sense. What follows is consequently very tentative, and is designed only to encourage others to read the book for themselves.

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Review of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

The story itself is simple enough. Yury Zhivago, whose father’s suicide starts the book off, is brought up in Czarist Russia and studies medicine. He is also a poet, but does not regard poetry as a profession. Drafted as a medical officer in the First World War, he sees the revolution bring unparalleled social chaos to Moscow, where he lives, and sets out with his wife and family to a village in the Urals. There he manages, through the charity of an old friend, to live on the land for a while, though his emotional life is complicated by the reappearance of a girl he had known from childhood, Lara, now married to a non-party revolu­tionary whose new name is Strelnikov. In the civil war Zhivago is kidnapped by the Reds because of his medical knowledge, and spends some years with the partisans in incredible hardship and misery, while his family make their way back to Moscow, whence they are exiled from the country. Released at last, Zhivago goes back to the Ural village and has a brief and beleaguered affair with Lara, until it becomes obvious that Lara and her husband are next on the shooting list. A middle-aged roué named Komarovsky, who had debauched Lara in her youth and who is one of those greased eels that can wriggle through any society, communist or bourgeois, takes Lara off to the “Far Eastern Republic” in East Siberia, while Strelnikov shoots himself and Zhivago goes back to Moscow, a broken man. Zhivago dies of a heart attack in a Moscow street car, and Lara, back from the Far East, disappears into “one of the in­numerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.” An epilogue, dated during the Second World War, says that “a presage of freedom was in the air throughout these post-war years, and it was their only historical meaning.” Thus the book ends in a mood of serenity and hope. We, of course, know that it has a second epilogue. Doctor Zhivago is not by any means an anti-Red polemic, and it is only the terrified Soviet bureaucrats who have made it one. In this country, where it is assumed that it is part of the job of a serious novelist to make serious criticisms of his society; it would hardly have raised a ripple or real controversy. Zhivago was, like Pasternak himself, a grown man when the revolution began, and hence feels detached from the struggle to the extent of not accepting the official version of it as a crude melodrama of heroes and villains. “It’s only in bad novels,” the author remarks, “that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up.” But he makes it clear that however brutal and savage the Reds were, the Whites were far worse, as, like all Fascists, they added sexual sadism to ordinary brutality. Pasternak merely says what the communists themselves would say, in other and more carefully controlled contexts, that the real revolution, the bringing of freedom and equality to man, has not yet begun. Also, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky before him, though in a way quite different from either, he is comparing the Russian society of his time with the vision of life set out in the Christian Gospel. The conception which animates the whole book is outlined by an unfrocked priest at the beginning and repeated by other characters, including Zhivago him-

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self, at intervals. Up to the time of Christ, says the ex-priest, we have peoples with their gods, or man in a state of nature, where the individual is of little value in himself, and tyranny is the natural order of things, there being no suspicion that “any man who enslaves others is inevitably second-rate.” Christ abolished both gods and peoples by putting the individual life in the centre of reality, and making love of one’s neighbour, free personality, and the sacrificial life primary facts. As this recreated the true form of society as well as of the individual, it brought man from a state of nature into a state of history, for history really starts with Christ. Judaism, with its emphasis on a people and its god, rejects this principle, and the Russian Revolution has so far followed Judaism rather than Christianity. The revolution began with a breathless moment like that of the Incarnation itself. “Only real greatness,” says the hero of the revolution, “can be so misplaced and so untimely.” But it soon becomes clear that the professionals who organized the revolution can only function in a state of revolution. Revolution is the opiate of the bureaucrat, and it soon enters the “second stage” in which “the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.” There must be constant purges and massacres, constant setting up of imaginary enemies, and falsehood becomes a way of life. With a few deft touches Pasternak indicates the development of a new pseudo-morality. When Zhivago, as a partisan conscript, reproaches his captain, who has become a dope addict, with embezzling his medical supply of cocaine, the captain instantly retorts with: “You cut the study circle again last night. You have an atrophied social sense, just like an illiterate peasant woman or an inveterate bourgeois.” Zhivago is sickened by having his brainwashed friends tell him how much better they feel, and sees that men who are not free “always idealize their bondage.” And he himself, when he realizes he has heart disease, notes that heart disease is often caused by the mental strain of living with so much lying. Christianity as Pasternak conceives it is not just a creed or an institution: religion, like revolution, also has a “second stage,” which emphasizes the least important things. One can believe that history begins with Christ and still be an atheist, for the more abundant life that Christ brought can be conceived in purely secular terms, as a service to society that continues to live after death. Marxism is a betrayal of Christ’s view of man, not because it is atheistic, but because it has forsaken the concrete for the abstract. The really material things, food, shelter, love, art, and society, have been replaced by an abstract parody of them. “In those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become an abstract notion, and food and firewood were replaced by problems of alimentation and fuel supply.” The gods may have gone, but the myths of power which were the real forms of those gods still remain. “Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn their backs on truth.” Zhivago being a poet as well as a doctor, he sees how revolutionaries turn to

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the kind of rhetorical jargon which is diseased language, a sort of verbal cancer, and is an infallible sign of a diseased society. “Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy, artificial, forced, crept into our conversation.” The novel begins with the suicide of Zhivago’s father, who was apparently what the Russians call an obyvatel, a detached observer of society, driven to despair by the sense of his own sterility. Zhivago’s own death was not a suicide, but it helped to establish the fact that there is still a proletariat in Russia, in the Marxist sense of a group excluded from the benefits of society, and that this new proletariat is the group of those who can think and observe independently. But although Christ delivered man from the state of nature, a genuinely free and creative human existence does not repudiate nature, but recovers its real relation to it. This is the point at which Pasternak’s symbolism takes over, and at which the non-Russian reader feels his deficiencies sharply. Evidently Pasternak thinks of man and nature as forming a common organism, in which the immortality of man is one with the death and rebirth of nature. A good deal is made of Zhivago’s interest in camouflage, or the way an organism absorbs itself into its environment. The farfetched coincidences in the plot, and the way in which so many of the characters disappear and return to life, are deliberately adopted as part of the book’s convention, and seem to suggest that the human and historical counterpart of evolution is a kind of invisible providence, a larger design of which the individual is largely unconscious. The containing form of this providence, and of the whole novel, is the ancient myth of the virgin-eating dragon killed by a hero who, in the original form of the myth, also dies. The poem which deals with this myth is translated twice at the end of the book, and the myth itself is given in a realistic form in the epilogue, in the story of Zhivago’s daughter. This daughter, along with Zhivago’s mysterious half-Mongol brother Yevgraf, who seems to be invulnerable to purges and takes her under his protection at the end of the book, represents the continuing power of renewed life which will succeed the mutual sleep of the hero, his bride, and the dragon of chaos and terror. Doctor Zhivago is a deeply impressive and moving novel in translation, and it may well be a very great one. A novel derives its social significance only from the resistance it happens to meet, and the fact that this book is banned in Russia and vociferously denounced by officials who have presumably not read it has given it an extraneous and topical importance. Its fate is typical, not exceptional, for the Soviet record in literature is a miserable one, with so many of their really firstrate writers having disappeared in purges or been driven to suicide or exile. The functionaries of the Soviet Union could get the sputniks into the air, but cannot endure to be told that they are not meeting the ethical standards of the New Testament. It is possible that their failure in the latter area may turn out to be more important, even historically, than their success in the former one.

6 On T.S. Eliot and Other Observations: From Notebook 13 (1960s)

The following entries come from a transcription of Frye’s Notebook 13, a holograph notebook in the Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library, 1991 accession, box 24. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University. Some of the material on Shakespeare from this notebook was included in Michael Dolzani’s edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 2004.

1. [T.S. Eliot] [1] Laforgue’s influence marked in: a) the lunar imagery b) the Laforgue person‑ ality as recorded in Symons, which has affinities with Prufrock and Eliot c) the Hamlet conception. Prufrock is not Hamlet; Hamlet itself is a failure. Prufrock’s the modern ironic Hamlet; Gerontion the modern ironic Satan or lost soul.1 [2] I imagine that Bradley was partly for Eliot the genuine Arnold, the stylist who didn’t have the genteel litterateur’s dis­ease of reducing all technical language to the jargon of elegance. His main philosophical interest, like Eliot’s, was ethical, and he provided Eliot with a natural theology. He attacked William James & I think Bertrand Russell, with both of whom Eliot was out of sympathy. [3] As I understand it, natural theology is this: the world of appearance is split between subject & object: it’s the world where the shadow falls in time. Above (the relation is poten­tially sacramental) is the world of immediate experience where subject & object are one, the reality we can’t bear much of.2 Objectivity of poetry, the primacy of experience, the dissocia­tion of sensibility,3 all spread out from here. But Bradley’s shape is one with analogies in oriental philosophy. May Sin­clair.4 [4] Two spiritual quests take shape: the way up from Dante, with the focus on Purgatorio 26, and the ascent of Mt. Carmel, symbolically a desert, from St. John of the Cross—plentitude & vacancy.

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[5] Laforgue contributed the lunar symbolism of the early poems & the Hamlet theme which Prufrock isn’t. If Yeats had known as much French! [6] Eliot seems almost to have resented the lack of original sin in Shakespeare, hence his emphasis on the aesthetic element in Othello & in heroism generally. Prufrock is something of an ironic Hamlet, just as Albert in The Waste Land is an ironic Ulysses. Possible link here with the anti‑Stoic attitude (acceptance vs. renunciation; pride vs. humility; pessimism vs. waiting). [7] Pseudo‑nature of a lot of the polemical views (Milton’s Satan & Byronism). Coarse conformity: Kipling, Dryden, the illiterate audience for drama. But did he ever incorporate a philosophy as he says Dante does? He owes less to Dryden than Keats does. [8] Because experience is essentially discontinuous human institutions are neces‑ sary, as they’re continuous. Hence too a poetry of epiphanic moments depends on continuous tradition. [9] Steady opposition to (?) logolatry (?) lexicolatry in Eliot: his “eyewash” com‑ ment on Valery5 & his reservations about Mallarmé. Words are part of the bloody flux. It’s a part of the deification of fact he resists. [10] Influence of Anabase on The Rock. [11] Arnold link: the deliberate vulgarity of the gashouse imagery vs. Arnold’s creeping Saxon & Wragg is in custody.6 Arnold fell back on the Celts; Joyce on the heroes: Eliot’s gen­uine contrasts are not heroic but spiritual aspirations, like the Byzantine mosaic at Ravenna. [12] Bibliography: Axel’s Castle, Leavis’ Mod. Poetry & the Tradition7 & I.A. Rich‑ ards are all quite early pioneering studies. I have Matthiessen (good), one of Wil‑ liamson’s two books (I guess they’re different men), Helen Gardner’s book (shit, apparently), & must get Unger & Kenner. W. Lewis’ goddamn Men Without Art. Philip Wheelwright links him to his symbolic theory, & the Quartet chapter in MacCallum’s book. Two new books, one on the plays, one by an R.C. Herbert Howarth on the Criterion & maybe Milton, Roy Daniells on Hulme & Blissett on Pater, the PMLA on the empty men, Anne Bolgan’s thesis. Elizabeth Drew.8 [13] Eliot’s dramas always turn on the isolation of the central figure, usually be‑ cause he’s seen demons—this is true even of Sweeney in SA [Sweeney Agonistes]. [14] Echo lines—cross & cross across the brain [Rhapsody on a Windy Night, l. 61], words after speech reach [Burnt Norton, pt. 5, l. 3], the Ash Wednesday passage.9 Eliot has a lot to tell me about high style in my sense (or what’s getting to be my sense) of something that slides into the mind with the air of having always been there.

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[15] Wonder if this isolation theme, which I originally thought was a re‑ versed‑Hamlet one, is the reason why Coriolanus is so damn important? The furies Coriolanus sees are the vulgarities of the present. The Coriolan poems are (at least Triumphal March) about the spiritual heroism, the AC dial kind,10 at the least of the wrong kind. Similarly with that Prelude. Triumphal March isn’t a Fascist poem, but it would be interpreted as one if things had worked out that way: Eliot never came closer to making the fool of himself that Pound did. The same theme in a purely ironic context, in the world of appearance only, is at the end of “Le Directeur.” But as it stands, the hero of that poem has more to do with Arjuna,11 or even Christ riding into Jerusalem, than any political mountebank. [16] First chapter: Eliot at Harvard & the sense of New England as having had it. Gospel of individualism had become one of hustle, & the hustler had hustled elsewhere. Emerson & his “self‑reliance,” & the institution as the lengthened shadow of a man. (Misquoted as “history” by a poet who defines history as a pattern of timeless moments). (The quatrain in question is not a glib sneer at ei‑ ther Emerson or apeneck Sweeney: the poet means just what he says).12 Sense of contrast between discontinuous experience & continuity of institution. [17] Oh, the hell with it: it’s a mistake to try to incorporate the biography with the Man of Letters chapter. Make it a sepa­rate prelude, as in the Matthiessen book, & the bibliography of course a separate epilogue. That sets you free. [18] Man of Letters, then. First, dynastic family & raised estate of New England. Cult of individualism & self‑reliance in Emerson leading to a perverted view of institutions. For Eliot these complement experience, which is discontinuous. Hence the point he has Baudelaire endorse: it’s not necessarily a conserva­tive or authoritarian view, though it tends to become one. Rein­forced by Hulme & the shock to Teutonic & liberal‑Protestant‑Romantic complexes. Then the Great Western Butterslide & its “Waste Land” popularization. Eliot’s version of this as the reunited Anglo‑American community before the Milton‑New England Puri‑ tan schism, Catholic & so attracted to the European one. The enemy as Roman‑ tic (Shelley), as liberal (various), as Stoic (Rus­sell & the humility business). The Fascist lean in the thirties: recovery of balance in Quartets. Perhaps a postlude. Poets’ social views are very important, not just because they also write poetry, but because they’re prophetic & apocalyptic, though utterly screwy in applica‑ tion. The tendency to write such treatises is Romantic & Arnoldian, just as a lot of Eliot’s poetry is spilt religion.13 Wisdom is an illusion: the partial insights of a craft are the best we can do (East Coker). [19] “Chicago Semite Viennese” [Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, l. 16]: everybody resents the slur on Semite; nobody resents the slur on Chicago. [20] *There is much that is pitiful & wretched in Eliot’s poetry, & much of the

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pathetic muddle of the human ego, but nothing really evil, except whatever it is that is going on in Sweeney Among the Nightingales. [21] *Ezra Pound, who was accustomed to editing the work of other poets with the greatest confidence, is said to have cut The Waste Land in about half. Prob‑ ably most readers would prefer to have the original version & make up their own minds, but there it is. It is possible that the cutting has improved the poem, & highly probable that it has made it more enigmatic. [22] *Heavy‑handed irony about not going to church: the Cyril bit from T.M. [Triumphal March] [23] *I can still remember the sense of outrage & betrayal when, as a young stu‑ dent facing the world of the depression & of Hitler & the great Stalin [neuroses?] & looking to the writers I most admired for guidance, I picked up After Strange Gods. I had to learn the hard way that all leaders are lost leaders, like Moses in the wilderness. Even the guide who undertakes to take the reader to his leader may be suspect, like Sam Wauchope14 whom the Americans boast to be a “real live Britisher” to show them around London, but who is nothing but a lousy Canadian.15 [24] *Re this last & Eliot’s sense of mongrelism (“Chicago Semite Viennese,” the cosmopolite “Mélange Adultère de Tout,” the Lithuanian German in the WL [Waste Land]. Said in NDC [Notes towards a Definition of Culture], or ICS [The Idea of a Christian Society], that most people shouldn’t go away from home.16 [25] *The dramas, at least MC, FR, and CP [Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party], begin with a central character who creates a dia‑ lectic by seeing demons where others just see ordinary life.



[Here Frye draws a circle, like the face of a clock, the twelve sections being an early version of his representation of the total action of Paradise Lost in The Return of Eden, 18–21. The twelve points are designated here as follows:]17 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Presence of God Begetting of Son Revolt of Satan Creation of World Creation of Eden, Adam, Eve Plot of Satan Fall of Man Fall of World

On T.S. Eliot and Other Observations 8 9 10 11

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Flood Giving of Law (Promised Land) Incarnation–Temptation Second Coming 2. [The Imagination and Other Observations]

[1] Spenser’s conception of “Phantastes” illustrates the Renaissance sense of the pathology of the imagination. It’s the judgement that creates poetry as well as philosophy. Cf. Hobbes & his movement from memory through judgement & fancy.18 [2] Now when we turn to Fletcher’s Purple Island we find that, although he ap‑ pears to be following Spenser closely, he’s actually made a very significant change. Phantastes in him is the originator of the creative power, hence George Macdonald’s Phantastes comes from him & not from Spenser. Cf. Dryden on wit & madness. [3] The general literary view is that the imagination is the basis of mental health, not the reason. The emphasis is thus on work rather than enlightenment‑creation. [4] My Dickens‑Kipps point—Dickens is bigger than Wells because he would write badly & see the character from the charac­ter’s own point of view, which is not necessarily unreal.19 Wells, like a modern, is afraid not to be objective. But the real art­ists’ criterion being the created & not the moral, he’s involved in a creation‑hallucination dialectic which is sharper & subtler than a “reality” (e.g. creation handed to you as a datum)‑neurosis one. You need the theory of humors in comedy for this too. [5] The state of mind that we call belief is neither ancient ­nor universal. It’s one of those unconscious assumptions we seldom examine that everyone believes. The attitude of the ancient Greek was, obviously, not: “I believe in Zeus the father Al‑ mighty . . . and in Dionysos his Son our Lord.” It was rather: “Some say that Dio‑ nysos was born from the thigh of Zeus; others that he was nursed by Amalthea,” etc. And today Christianity would go bankrupt overnight if it were supported only by the people who believe. People accept it, realize it’s there, respect it, even turn to it for help, but don’t necessarily believe or disbelieve it. [6] I suppose the slow conviction that the just shall live by faith took shape in Judaism, with its conception, very rare in any religions except those that have derived from it, of “false gods.” As soon as you begin thinking of truth & false‑ hood in relation to gods you’ve gone about halfway to monotheism: I don’t quite know why at the moment: it just seems obvious that if you believe in a god he starts to become the god.

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[7] I don’t know either why the revolution in self-­consciousness was also a revo‑ lution from the Mother‑Goddess to the Father‑God. But, again, that seems the inevitable symbol of the revolution itself: the mind emerging from nature & turn‑ ing around to look at what it had emerged from. In the Mother‑Goddess period man had a unity with nature he’s since lost, but it was a unity providing insuf‑ ficient consciousness for the next step he had to take. [8] One blurs the issue by talking about social attitudes here. It’s natural to as‑ sume that when the Mother is worshipped society is matriarchal (which may or may not be true) and that women are highly respected, which doesn’t seem to me to follow at all. Faceless creatures like the Venus of Willendorf, all bum‑belly­ -teats & gaping vulva, are just sexual machines, not human beings. In such a society women might be shut up in the dark during menstruation, & harassed & bedevilled & tormented in every way that superstitious ingenuity could devise, but not necessarily respected. Nor could such a society ever evolve to the point of producing a Joan of Arc or a Queen Elizabeth or an Emily Dickinson.20 All it has is a Queen Bee. [9] We tend to think in threes, & have always felt that there was a Third‑Age just on the way. If there is, it would be an Age in which faith was subordinate, not to action as in the age of the Mother Goddess, but to vision. Vision is love, of course; not love as emotion but charity. Christianity has always really talked of faith in these terms, but we keep missing it. [10] The condemnation of idolatry in the Bible seems so unreasonable: surely ev‑ erybody knew that idols were human artefacts. It becomes intelligible only when we think of it as part of an imaginative revolution. Lived with, the idol represents a power; looked at, it’s dead. [11] The “totalitarian” attitude is the last stage of justifi­cation by faith, and its inner spiritual death realized. It would also be the first & lowest stage of justifica‑ tion by vision. [12] Something of this will have to get into the Romanticism paper, & not only be‑ cause it’s central in Blake. The whole Frankenstein myth, which arises then, has to do with the antago­nism of self‑consciousness & nature.21 It’s our “Druidism,” as the frenzy of the Aztecs was the “Druidism” of the Mother Goddess. [13] One of the functions of culture, including mythology, is to act as a kind of reservoir for belief. Any belief not reflected in behavior is mere acceptance, like acceptance of something taught in a science one trusts but doesn’t know. An intense conservatism in religion ensures that expressions of belief take the same verbal form even when they’ve gone back into the reservoir & returned with a completely new content.

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[14] Romanticism itself is a kind of retreat into the reservoir. In speaking of Ar‑ nold’s culture recently I connected his argument with Shelley’s. His culture is the invisible community of love manifested in the arts—the community of which poets are the hid­den (“unacknowledged”) legislators.22 [15] Polytheism, as I’ve said, develops science because it’s forced into the accep‑ tance of natural law. It also develops the imaginative reservoir. The “false gods” direction develops the dialectic in the Word, and, eventually, the social telos of science. [16] The difference between criticism & direct experience is that the former is an incessant practice repetition directed toward possession. The latter avoids rep‑ etition: as an experi­ence, one doesn’t want two performances of King Lear in the same day: granted a superlative performance, hardly two in the same year. Criticism purges experience of associative elements––here’s where my “golden rain” story goes.23 The “toneless tone” represents the frisson of experience in a semi-­purified state: [recreating?] experience in the sense of life (poetry as a criti‑ cism of life) rather than strictly the rest of literature. I never did get the final twist on my third Virginia lecture,24 nor the sublime‑Arnold‑continuous and intensify‑ ing‑Poe-discontinuous antithesis. Preface to 1853 Poems speaks of struc­ture with implicit texture; the fragmented Waste Land technique has texture with implicit structure. [17] Glance back: what’s unique in Judaism isn’t monotheism or moral fervor or anything positive: what’s unique is its insistence that all gods except Yahweh are false—in other words it contributed to mankind through its least amiable character­istic. Human nature is a bit like that, I’m afraid. 3. Poe’s Mental Landscape I’m attracted to this subject because Poe sets down the elements of the imagina‑ tion, in its introverted or projected dream form, so nakedly. This, as I explain in AC [Anatomy of Criticism],25 is why he has so immediate an influence on our own time as compared with a more displaced writer like Hawthorne. As for the Germans (except Novalis and possibly Jean Paul), the less said about them the better. Most of them don’t know what the hell they’re doing––I’m not saying Poe did either, but something in him did.

7 On Finnegans Wake (1961)

For the thirtieth‑anniversary issue of the American Scholar, its editors asked a number of dis‑ tinguished scholars, writers, and critics to select what were for them the outstanding books of the past thirty years (1931–61)––books notable for originality or enduring significance or for changes in thoughts and attitudes. What follows is Frye’s reply. From The American Scholar, 30, 4 (Au‑ tumn 1961), 606. Copyright © 1961 by The Phi Beta Kappa Society. Reprinted with permission.

Thirty years would include the publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939. This is the only twentieth‑century book that I find myself living with, in the way that I live with Tristram Shandy, Burton’s Anatomy, Dickens, and the greater poets. It is an inexhaustible word‑hoard of humour, wit, erudition, and symbol‑ ism; it never, for me, degenerates into a mere puzzle, but always has on every page something to astonish and delight.

8 Notes on the Massey Lectures, Yeats, and Other Topics: From Notebook 9 (1962)

Notebook 9, which dates from 1962, contains material that was not included in the Collected Works. This notebook is in the Northrop Frye Fonds of the Victoria University Library, 1991 accession, box 22. The bulk of the transcription of these notes was done by my friend and co‑editor Michael Dolzani. The holograph text was a particularly challenging one to decipher, and Dolzani’s labours represent a considerable effort of concentrated attention. I have edited his transcription and filled in a number of words he found to be indecipherable. Still, more than two‑dozen words and phrases remain untranscribed, Frye’s scrawl defeating my best efforts to decode it. These words and phrases are noted by a question mark in square brackets. When I have guessed at what Frye wrote, those guesses are also in square brackets followed by a question mark. Everything else in square brackets is an editorial insertion. Frye’s own square brackets have been replaced by braces: {}. The numbers 1 through 6 that appear at the end of many of the entries of the notes for the Massey Lectures, which became The Educated Imagination, represent the number of the lecture in which Frye, at this stage, proposed to use the material in the entry. I have excised one entry on Shakespeare that occurs in the Massey Lectures notes, a list of abbreviations for Shakespeare’s plays. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

[1] Original idea: 1—(“Centre & Expanse”). Environment & home; atomistic world of poet. 2—(“Singing School”). Autonomy of lit.; derivation from itself. 3—(“One Story Only”). Lit. [literature] as filling in of myth. 4—(“Motive for Metaphor”). Informing of thought by imgn. [imagination] through metaphor. 5—(“Verticals of Adam”) Vocation of Eloquence. Myth in social & political life. 6—(“Heart of Light”) Keys to Dreamland. Human universe, time & space; here & now; sense of infinity. [2] For 1: The constructed world vs. the seen world.

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Notes on the Massey Lectures, Yeats, and Other Topics In latter beauty & truth separate; in former they combine. Participation & not separation of performer & audience. Theory & practice of literature. The critic who is teacher. 1962

[3] 1. Introduction to Design for Learning.1 2. Inglis Lecture at Harvard.2 3. Speech at Nebraska.3 4. Speech at Rochester.4 5. Address at Psychiatrists’ Conference.5 6. English Institute Paper.6 7–12. Massey Lectures.7 [4] Plus: Arts Conference at Vic R.C.I.8 Mt. Allison.9 Queens.10 U.C. Alumni [5] 1. Talk at the R. Col. [Ryerson Collegiate Institute] on The Two Worlds of Art & Science. (Not published).11 February. Done. 2. The Inglis Lecture. (Harvard, on secondary education. (Published). April. 3. Address to the Psychiatrists’ Convention.12 No plans for publication, but should read the paper. May. 4. Speech at Nebraska.13 To be published, but perhaps not just then. April. 5. Paper on Romanticism for the English Institute.14 Must be a read paper, whether published or not. September. 6–11. The Massey Lectures. Fall of 1962. 12. Introduction to the Board of Education Reports.15 Anytime. Done. [6] Besides this, of course, the main structure––the nave, so to speak––of my present thinking and writing, is the sequel to the Anatomy.16 This is to be a work of practical criticism, and will of course expand the third essay of the Anatomy. The transepts will be the Massey Lectures, which will provide whatever theoretical basis is necessary for new theories. (The second Anatomy essay area). The chancel, the fourth essay area, is the relation of criticism to education generally, the theme of 2 & 12 above, & to some extent 3. Only 5 above really deals with the first essay material, & even it will be part of the sequel argument. I ought to have a name for this book. [7] Of the above, 1, a good deal of 2, 12 and the first Massey will deal with the

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question of the educated imagination. In fact 1 is just a trial run for the first Massey, and 2 will use whatever I learn in 12. 4 I think of as a personal statement about where I am as a critic, and 3 I think of as a kind of retrospective paper, reflections on the mental processes recorded in English fiction. [8] The Thomas More lecture17 provides me with a number of jumping off points for the Massey Lectures. The first lecture, I’ve thought all along, should be about the world we create vs. the world we contemplate. The archaic, atavistic nature of the poet’s world. From there I expand to consider the role of literature & of the imaginative arts generally in relation to thought, psychology, & politics. That should be about four. [9] The last two will be centripetal, returning to the central place of literature itself, & ending with paradoxes about time & space. [10]  The environment & the home: the world we see around us & study & the world we see within us & build. 118 [11]  The atavistic & archaic shape of the poet’s world. Peacock. 1 [12]  Analogy & identity. 1 The basis of all life the conviction of a continuum of identity. 6 if I use it at all.19 [13]  Discovery & recognition: the created vs. the recreated. 3 [in bottom margin: “Masseys”] Massey Lectures [14]  The simplicity & crudity of vision (desire to fly)20 vs. the enormous technological complexities. 1 [15]  How we can be a spectator of life: vision of life as real faith. Reconstructing faith by observing behavior. 3 [16]  Creation is not out of nothing: wife & shop window. Role of tradition in shaping form.21 1 [17]  The metaphors of orientation: lift up your hearts; “sub”-conscious, on the other hand.22 Metonymy of nations as individuals. In ordinary life we are all bad poets.23 3–4 [18]  Half-truths of war: theory of games in the imagination.24 The relation of work to play.25 4–5 [19]  {5 will turn mainly on the shift from the old to the new four levels. It will be

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of the general type of the sensibility paper,26 I suppose, but bigger in range. The question of why e.g. Scott is Romantic & Jane Austen not is one of the first things. Also the Byron point about the shift in world-views—well, I have that. Quotations would deal with the element of evocation & magic behind the surface.} [20]  What we see as distinct from the containing form in which we see it. The grammatical nature of reality. Subjects & predicates. 3 [21]  Censorship & its folly: there is no such thing as a bad book, except in its own categories of badness.27 6 [22]  Present Massey plan: (1) The two worlds & anthropocentric one of art, (2) The descent of literary forms from literature, (3) The mythical structure of literature, (4) The informing of thought by metaphor, (5) The informing of social life by myth, (6) The here & the now; art & time & place. [23]  {I don’t know if I know enough to tackle a paper called “Preface to My Collection of Ghost Stories.” But some of its ideas (if I have any ideas) might go in the psychiatry paper}. [24]  Art, love & religion are areas in which reality is achieved or created rather than recognized. Religious people are often suspicious of the arts, because they’re afraid the arts create a specialized form of idolatry, a group of what is to be recognized as super-realities. But when we realize that art is designed to transfer a power of vision, & belongs in education, the either-or deadlock disappears. 6? [25]  Dialectic of popular-primitive art with its cycle & official art. Latter begins in luxury goods for aristocracy & priesthood (Beowulf’s wondrously wrought; the demonic smith & the Greek Cyclops & Dactyls & Telchines; Blake’s Los) distinguished by elaborateness––look at all the work in that (survives in Fabergé). It then develops toward society’s (or at least its ruling class) creating an idealized picture of itself. Hence the deadlock faced by Morris and, more neurotically, by Tolstoy. Social “Realism” not scientific but a social myth. (Rochester)28 Miami? [26]  The relation of imgn. [imagination] to “sense.” In the arts themselves this [relieves?] the distinction often expressed as Rc. [Romantic]-Classical. In childhood sense & memory take the lead over imgn., because the child’s imgn. is fanciful. In adolescence imgn. consolidates with the conservative or Coleridgean force; in the university it ought to consolidate with the radical one. The extraordinary conservatism of students today indicates a fairly secure adolescence.

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[27]  The secondary stage of studying myth in literature takes one into the question of the informing of social thought (pastoral myths, etc.).29 3–4 [28]  The Massey Lectures ought to be, I now think, gentle, even humble, but intolerably lucid lectures on how to read literature, especially poetry. Start with, say, the problem represented by Hazard Adams’ story about the Sick Rose.30 Blake isn’t talking about plant disease; yet one feels that allegorizing the poem isn’t quite good enough. The metaphor can only expand into a myth, ending in Dante’s paradisal rose & Satan as worm. That TV program I was on with Milton Wilson may be the right lead after all. 3 [29]  Popular & official art: Tolstoy: Carlyle on the symbol. [30]  Partisanship & the free play of ideas: dialectic half-truths. 5 (4) [31]  Modern art partly a critical activity: the arts course in a university supplies the scholarly background necessary for the arts proper, or practical. 4 or 5 [32]  Science begins in “sense” but ends as a construct: the world as it looks to human beings (scientia). Many things not really seen till seen aesthetically; hence seeing “beauty in” things is a function of art, if it expands beyond the conventionalizing of beauty. If art is conventional new art remakes old, & so is also an act of criticism. You cannot distinguish art from science by the mental processes involved, but only by the containing form of the subject. 1 [33]  Sketch as vision in process: trompe l’oeil realism leads to hallucination, handwriting of subconscious in Klee & Miro: writing & drawing & experiment (the cantori & Balla’s dog).31 Art & magic: work & play. Impressionism vs. wit of abstraction (these are random notes from my Institute lecture:32 don’t know if they’re any use). Rochester insert in 2 [34]  Cliche: difficulty or chaos of art is because it reflects difficulty or chaos of our time. Balls. It reflects 20th c. conventions. 2–3 [35]  The moral-aesthetic judgements we make on words, & the strong & inseparable moral element in rhetoric. 4 [36]  Three levels of quid credas (speculative or theatrical knowledge), quid agas (moral & participating knowledge), and quo tendas (archetypal framework). 1 [37]  The thing is that the Massey Lectures ought to say very simply & plainly the central point in my argument that I’ve been jumping over, such as (a) the dialectical separation of the apocalyptic & the ironic. 2 (b) the difference between allegory & archetypal framework. 3

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[38]  Vision of aeroplane not the desire to fly but an imgve. [imaginative] revolt against the tyranny of space & time. 6. Sakuntala: 1.33 [39]  One thing that isn’t in your draft is the relation of theory to the chronological problem of teaching & training the imgn [imagination]. [40]  Peacock in 1;34 the atomistic universe; no improvement in arts. [41]  Something in 6 about Wordsworth’s huge & mighty forms as myths,35 which in Gk. [Greek] religion wander around, however in Xy [Christianity] enter history & [?] up & inform human life (as they do in Gk. lit., though not in Gk. religion). [42]  5 should have culture as the levelling influence in democracy, as in my Harvard speech. I don’t need to stick too closely to the theory of csm. [criticism]. I can use the series to show how my ideas all hang together. [43]  3 should have the point about the myth as the stylizing element (halo of saint in picture, etc.). Even lipstick is a desire to conventionalize the face.36 [44]  1 outlines the three levels of the mind, sense, work & vision, & the role of the arts in defining vision. Then the difference between art & science, the Peacock paradox, & the atomistic universe of poetry. Then the job for 2 is clearly headed in the direction of just how lit. does not isolate vision. I think it has to start with the double Aristotle diagram, outlining poetry as licensed lying & its relation to rational thought. Seems to me at the moment the next step is poetry as fulfilling a mythology: in that case the autonomy of poetry & the permanence of its conventions & genres would come in 3. In that case 4 deals with literature in its aspect of rhetoric & as one of the humanities. [45]  Criticism moves in v.-j’s [value judgments] dialectically too: not perhaps in the old 18th c. “beauties” & “faults” dialectic but towards a separating of central & peripheral. Something here involved with the creative dialectic—I don’t know just what at the moment. [46]  Rest of 1: the arts as articulating vision: design in non-obj. ptg. [non‑objective painting]; applied arts & sciences (architecture) in middle. End of 1 is probably the relation of creative to critical activity: the arts course & the arts {no, I think 6}. Not an end in admiration: literature is for the benefit of the consumer, & its end is participation. Its use relates to the student. Heroism of the artist, e.g. Lawrence or Joyce spending years writing a book that’s ignored or ridiculed or called obscene. 6 [47]  2 begins, I think, with the difference between imitation & copying, & the form of art & content of nature. I’m beginning to think 2 & 3 may reverse, & 2

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will be structure & 3 autonomy. 4 is the rhetoric one. Private possession of lit. expands into a shared communal one, which involves rhetorical appeal. [48]  Nothing is in action; everything is in the poetic statement. Topos of modesty & Lincoln at Gettysburg.37 Achilles survives not just because he had Homer to write about him, but because Homer treated him poetically—i.e., nearly everything he said about him is utterly preposterous. Probably 3. [49]  Residual rcsm. [romanticism]: things have a grandeur in retrospect (Gibbon on the Capitol Hill)38 things in passing were preoccupied, cheap, even squalid. Part of the religious emotion in withdrawing from time—Aristotle’s universal action. 3. Insert into [historic?] dialectic. [50]  2 or 3: structure of metaphor founded on natural cycle: analogy & identity. Thick autumnal leaves—literary identification of roses & worms.39 What this suggests might be a 6 point. [51]  The relevant question about what poetry says (e.g. Housman) is not is it true but is it imgvely. [imaginatively] conceivable. If you don’t think it is, there may be some value for you in stretching your imgn. [imagination] into a previously unexplored area. I suppose end of 3. The moral-aesthetic nature of rhetorical judgements is certainly 4, & whatever points of this jargon stuff I use. [52]  Truth of observation or insight: that Deloney passage: if not too laborious to explain in its context, coordinating feeling, uniting billions of possible experiences. 2 or 3. [53]  Chesterton’s donkey: the role of allusion.40 3 [54]  One of the functions of the critic is to civilize the poet indirectly by explaining to society the diff. bet. facts of life & lit. conventions, that there are many forms of expression. The poet may be naive or anti-intellectual, in the grip of the conventions he knows; & he’s usually reductive in tendency. The critic is that judge drawing his authority from knowledge. 4 [55]  Expand on end of P.B.’s [possible beliefs?] in 5: Utopia as informing principle which turns out to be culture. 5 or 6. [56]  Lawrence: the critic’s function is to take the work away from the artist. Cf. Jastrow on the chimpanzee.41 4 [Frye has drawn an arrow from this note to a phrase written at the top of the ms. page: “the diff. bet. facts of life & lit. conventions,” even though that phrase also has an arrow inserting it into the note two entries above]. [57]  Examples of pastoral myth: Western story, Sat. Eve. Post, Alger, etc. The

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conventional hell—Jews & Italians in Elizabethan fiction (Richardson); decaying Old South now. 2 or 3. Some pastoral myth likely 4. [58]  My association of creative & academic rubbed a lot of fixations [in the raw?] (Layton & others), & should be developed in 5, which in many respects is the stretto of the whole series. The body of imgve. pbs. [imaginative probabilities?], the area of free discussion or symposium, the source of spiritual authority as far as the “humanities” are concerned, the republic of letters, is the real academy, where things are probable impossibilities. I’m talking to consumers & not producers. Some account may be of the diff. bet. academy & lyceum: the academic vision of possibilities (or probable impossibilities) is what literature presents to the consumer, this academic vision of life being a—well, Golgonooza. Diff. of imgn. & belief in 3; two levels of the academic in 5.42 [59]  A good deal of what got squeezed out of the (watch metaphors) end of the 3rd P.B. [possible belief?] I can use here, notably the anti-Babel business. Our life at present looks like Babel, a heaven-storming enterprise that gets no nearer heaven but only further from the earth, that looks cooperative but is really a deadlock of rivalries, which has every attribute of impressiveness except genuine human dignity. A world so obviously hysterical that none of us could keep sane if it were the only world that exists. 6. 5 [60]  Also something about Utopia & Plato’s Republic, along with their parodies (1984) as specific applications of the vision of the matrix of all Utopias, which is culture. 4 [61]  Rhetoric: what’s true is what’s right for that occasion: funeral eulogy, wedding speeches—we all have to wear clothes.43 Two kinds of truth: you feel a moral as well as an aesthetic obligation to say what’s right. Poetry’s the same, except that the occasion, say, of Macbeth or the Tempest, is much less important. Most of the rightness is in the context. 5 Talking to women: saying reflects meaning or emotional state. [62]  Sheep May Safely Graze:44 regarded as religious music, the sheep being Christians. It easily could be, though actually this is from a secular cantata in honour of some count, & the sheep are the count’s taxpayers. These are allegories. 3. You never get just the sheep that nibble the grass: they have to be poetic sheep, with some poetic reason for being there. Symbols, in short.45 [63]  The next thing to do is to get 2 & 3 unscrambled. [64]  Way we can foul ourselves with diagrams. Left & right in politics. If I said conservatives are more fascist than liberals, & liberals closer to communism, you’d realize I was talking nonsense; but lots of people can’t think their way out of the framework. 5

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[65]  I’m now beginning to see the importance of this distinction: quo tendas— constructive imgn.: literature: displaced myth quid agas‑fancy or rearrangement: verbal technology: insistence on [centre?]. Former as utopia informing latter. [66]  I now think that 4 is on education & not a flight into the time-&-space stratosphere. It’ll try to do what I promised to try to do. More [?]. [67]  Titles: (1) The Motive for Metaphor (2) The Singing School (3) Giants in Time (4) Heart of Light (5) The Strange Angels (6) The Keys to Dreamland. Each poem should be mentioned and (when a poem) quoted from.46 [68]  So 4 should be a retake of the highs, declaring solidarity with the students & teachers who’ll be most of my audience. That way more themes’ll get properly interwoven & strettoed. I think a lot of my patterns are beginning to fall together anyway—maybe I’m getting into my tertiary period without having really had a secondary one. [69]  As soon as work ceases to become automatic & rest is a [?] we’ve moved from the level of the mental or [social?] slave into a world of mental freedom. The first sense of that world, the moment of leisure, gives you a sharp desire for more education. 4, I suppose, although it’s really 6. [70]  The relation of the [active?] rite [?] got squeezed out of 1. 2 or 3, maybe. [71]  4: Puritanism as explaining a fear of sleeping with one’s wife: jargon. The Messiah myth (or 5). [72]  There is such a thing as inspiration in poetry, but the only inspiration worth having is the one that crystallizes as a form. Hence a writer does well to be receptive to his reading. Belongs in the argument of 2, but I think I should use it somewhere else. [73]  The title “Heart of Light” is for 6, I think: if so, I don’t have one for 4. Strange Angels I think is out if I [?] reference to the poem.47 Verticals of Adam doesn’t fit & I don’t want to refer to that poem. Look elsewhere in Thomas. [74]  Stuff on competing worthy causes & existential obligations is in 5: I started off on it by mistake in 4. I think fear of Csm [Communism] is 4, but 4 & 5 are so closely intertwined I’m not sure. [75]  There are two levels of the fight of the imgn. [imagination]: against illusion (4) & against excessive demands on a limited amount of time & energy (5). [76]  “Then there are the competing rel. dems. [religious demands], the diff. [?] to belong to, the worthy causes & welfare agencies to support. All of these can appeal to your sense of duty, but you can’t support them all; you have to choose

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your obligations, and, as the ex. people say, they’re obligations only because you choose them. (Not rational or emotional). The imgn. [imagination] has a fight on two levels (one vs. mob). It has to fight to protect your limited time & energy from the variety of demands made on it.” Excreted from 4: I suppose maybe 5. [77]  I’m beginning to wonder if the 2nd half isn’t this: [78]  4. Mythology leading to lit.: hence the theory (Bible, Classical myth, myth starting with romance & comedy, & the contribution of poetry & prose to speech[)]. Still later, the informing of social studies by metaphor: I’ve not yet seen where the hell to put that. Mostly the present 6, with either the Joyce or the Dylan Thomas title: either would do.48 [79]  5. The present 4, with the Perse title. [80]  6. The present 5, with a good deal of consolidation & the Heart of Light title, the original one for the conclusion. [81]  Prose is no more the language of ordinary speech than your best Sunday suit is a bathing suit. 4. [82]  Reason why poets are often silly people is that they can’t always distinguish the conventions of lit. they use from the facts of their lives. Six: The Keys to Dreamland [83]  Reprise & summing up: ordinary perspective makes poet peripheral. Fundamental is the useful, lit. a luxury product, ought to amuse. General dim-wittedness of lit. conventions: Swan of Avon.49 We’ve been trying to reverse the perspective. Actual society changes rapidly. Continuity is in one’s habitual responses. These turn out to be metaphors, & bad poetry. The poet rearranges the constructive principles of thought. Hence can be allied with religion. Shift from other-directed to self-directed imgn. [imagination] in Rc. [Romantic] period. The total dream of man. The world of imgn. as bigger than the world of action. The arts course as the study of real society. [10 pages of cancelled draft of The Educated Imagination occur at this point].

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Yeats [84]  Dialectic & cyclical rhythms: soul & self. In The Shadowy Waters it’s the soul quest that wins out. [85]  28 from Blake: Spectre Around Me & 28 loves; 28 churches; 4 Zoas & 24 Elders; 4 phases of Mental Traveller; medieval 7 planets & 4 humors—29th [loiterer?] in Chaucer, made in the DC [Divine Comedy]* into a kind of Olympian Zodiac of human types. P. 52 of Vision.   *cf. p. 107 Vision. [86] lunar50 solar discord concord Leda & Swan Virgin & dove 2000-0 0-2000 antithetical primary freedom necessity tragic comic fiction truth Oedipus Christ evil good son kills father son appeases father art science son screws mother son redeems mother kindred mechanism master-morality slave-morality particularity abstraction aristocratic democratic war peace (yang) (yin) character personality   (Orc)   (Urizen) [87]  Cf. Eliade on the anarchy preceding the beginning of a new cycle. [88]  One should show that Yeats’ construct is that of post-Romantic poetry, if possible, & illustrate its affinities to Graves’ white goddess, Eliot’s double gyre in Little Gidding & the Heraclitus topoi, etc. Its antithetical side is female, & the primary male, a submerged Beulah. What puzzles me is the omission of the female principle getting younger as the male gets older & vice versa, that he could have found in the MT [Mental Traveller]. [89]  What I’d like to prove is the shape of my third Massey: the dialectic-primary quest, pre-Romantic in statement, containing the cyclical-antithetical one. The drunken boat is the Luvah boat; the solar one isn’t ever that close to water. So the Romantic, & therefore post-Rc., construct is the white-goddess & black bride cycle. Naturally this idea is as full of bugs as a slum tenement, but if I crack it the Bampton lectures51 will be a piece of cake. I’m not sure what holds these metaphors together. “Dialogue” with oneself is a risky business. [90]  Opening sentence: For most readers the only justification for studying A Vision is the fact that Yeats, in his own words, was fool enough to write a number of poems that are unintelligible without it.52

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[91]  The phases would be a lot clearer as an encyclopedia of ethical criticism: if they’d all been literary character archetypes like The Idiot or at most real people conforming to literary archetypes like Whitman it would clear up. Actual people lack this kind of uniform consistency, & have to be dealt with as being often atypical or “out of phase.”53 Well, I needn’t insist on this, but there’s a true existential projection about it. The real horror of Dante’s Inferno similarly comes from the e.p. [existential projection] of a number of literary archetypes. [92]  Besides, we have only the cycle of will: we ought to have at least the creative mind cycle, & perhaps the other two, to understand the bloody thing at all. [93]  Possible procedure: extract the structure of imagery directly from Yeats’ poetry, exactly as though that silly boy were right, then compare it with a) Blake’s lunar cycle b) the Vision itself. [94]  Dialectic: 5 to 3; the decisive imagery of The Shadowy Waters; a passage at the end of the first Rosa Alchemica Story; the 13th cone in the Vision. The lunar cycle is in Blake as well as Graves; the historical cycle is in all the Third Reich nonsense, & tying it up to Helen of Troy ties it more totally to Spenser’s 3rd Troy. (The 2nd Troy is also R.C.). [95]  Scant [?] in Tables of Law explains how Axël epigram fits Yeats.54 I think I need a distinction between the Freudian & the mythopoeic subconscious anima mundi. This latter produces “moods”; the moods produce the inner esoteric society of creators; they in their turn produce antithetical & primary [feeling‑classes?] (cf. King’s Threshold). Agent of rebirth is a proletariat (Mythologies, 3 (2)). [96]  Something I haven’t quite got about the relation between elements of thought, or the imgve. [imaginative] identity, & elements of existence, individual human beings. In Blake the birth, development, death & reincarnation of imgve. units is described in such a way as to suggest that Blake is talking about actual human life, both during & after its earthly existence. Perhaps he intends this overtone, as the role of Milton in Milton suggests. But Yeats, it seems to me, completely confuses the two, & projects the immortality of imagery (Byzantium) into actual existence. If I could solve this problem, of course, I could do anything. Certainly I could write my third book easily enough. [97]  The lower cycle of the faculties:

The table [?] of the progressive [?] (M & W shape). The original [?] of the [?] The hero-cult in fascism. Resemblance to Graves’ white goddess. The dance of Salome.

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The stare & the glance. Note that it has two gates, south & north. Third Reich notion of a neo-paganism.

[98] A. The primary & antithetical contrast. (Originally lunar-solar). B. The (largely Xn) real world & the land of heart’s desire the dumbbell cosmos & the antithetical fairy world looking glass of reversed time. C. This eventually becomes the world of rebirth vs. the soul’s quest. return to rag & bone shop. [99]  Character means the entering of the subject into a giant form, a state or a god: expressed in literature by convention. [100]  These states or moods are what exist, & the subject-object split doesn’t exist for them. Hence the artist doesn’t “live.” [101] The greater cycle of the principles:









Antithetical Christ & God as Plotinian archetype of Daimon Staring virgin & Byzantium (find source of this) Haroun al‑Raschid & Charlemagne as portents The land of heart’s desire Determination to associate purgatory & reincarnation The Alice in looking glass of outer consciousness: dreaming back. The sphere vs. the cone. The great year. Vision of Los, I think The hour-glass in the early play: note Babylon & the fool. Blavatsky: dumb-bell cosmos.55 Phase 1 of the Principles assimilates the social mob to the spiritualistic fragment––doodle & babble; Phase 15 assimilates the Christ or Oedipus (as in the Colonus play) figure with the Daimon. Phases 2–7 are primitive; phases 23–25 decadent. At phase 1 is the water of birth-death, & on the other side are the worlds of fairie, & the dead (spiritualism), the land-under-wave. Note that the lunar-ant. [antithetical] & solar-primary stuff is balls: we should go back to something deeper in Yeats ([Ex?] 24) & get lunar-historical cycle & solar-principle perspective. The principles are the perspective of the terrible rectilinear lines cutting through serpentine nature, the [?] ornament of Phidias & Michelangelo, the arrow shooting upward. Virgil & Er (“Man of Ur”)

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[102] The mountain under the moon & the dialogues of self & soul. Origin of the Ben Bulben complex in Yeats’ childhood. Tragic-heroic cycle of the dying god—heart’s purple. Acceptance of cycle: cf. Zarathustra in Nietzsche. Platonic perspective of the principles here. What happens to the happy island or land of heart’s desire? [103] KL [King Lear] > Cy [Cymbeline]: king of Britain; blindness of self-abdication; evil & good Queen. O [Othello] > WT [Winter’s Tale]: jealousy theme. [104] The dialectic completion. Attacks Rcs. [Romantics] for having no sense of evil; but has Yeats got any? The final answer is that the cycle is hell. Hence the ambiguity of Herakles at the end of A Vision.56 The opposite & the Other: the 13th cone. Opposite of the 13th cone is beginning over: Circus Animals’ Desertion. Two trees & the glass of outer consciousness. The true or mythical ascent: total mind as the human imgn. [imagination] in The Tower & S to B [Sailing to Byzantium]. The creative artist as designated “not to live” but to create. The structure of society vs. the creation of a myth (King’s Threshold). The secret society or symposium (Courtier, Plato, & [?] [?]). The Shadowy Waters. Yeats knew enough to complete his pattern, but his instructors did not.

9 Introduction to Fables of Identity (1963)

“Introduction” from Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology by Northrop Frye. Copyright ©1963 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and renewed 1991 by Jane Widdicombe. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

This book is a selection of my critical essays, all but two of which were written after the completion of the Anatomy of Criticism (1957). That very theoretical book stated in its preface that a work of practical criticism was needed to complement it, and though this book is hardly the sequel that I then had in mind, there is a good deal of more specific criticism in it. The first four essays outline the theoretical assumptions on which the others are based. The first, “The Archetypes of Literature,” was one of a series published in the Kenyon Review by various critics under the general title of “My Credo.”1 I do not associate criticism with belief in quite the way that such a title implies, but the article is earlier than the Anatomy of Criticism, and is to some extent a summarized statement of the critical program worked out in that book. The next three papers are later than the Anatomy, are con­sistent with it, but can be read independently of it, and do not employ its elaborate apparatus. “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement”2 states my central principle about “myth criticism”: that myth is a structural element in literature because literature as a whole is a “displaced” mythology. “Nature and Homer”3 explains how revo­lutions in the history of literature are invariably revolutions in literary form, and therefore a reshaping of literary conventions. “New Directions from Old”4 introduces the conception of the his­tory of imagery, and the general outline of the medieval and Renaissance world-picture. This world-picture was elaborated by the Ptolemaic universe and the chain of being, but for literary criticism it is essentially a framework for images, and I expound it as such. The rest of the book discusses various works and authors in the central tradition of mythopoeic poetry, as outlined in the essay on Blake: a tradition in which

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the major and prevailing tendencies are Romantic, revolutionary, and Protestant. For the most part the critical method is the one indicated in the title of the Spenser paper5 which begins the series: an attempt to domesticate oneself in a poetic world by presenting its imagery as a structure, as the consistent and coherent environment, or imaginative home, that we enter as we begin to read. It is the method followed by Yeats in his early essay on “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry,” though I call imagery what he there calls philosophy. The courteous reader is requested to keep in mind the fact that most of the essays in this book were originally papers read to specific audiences on specific occasions, and that the occasion some­times forms part of the argument of the paper. The variations in their length usually go back to a chairman’s allowance of twenty, thirty, or forty minutes. “Literature as Context”6 was given at the second congress of the International Comparative Literature Asso­ciation at North Carolina in 1958, and so assumes an audience interested in the theory of comparative literature. “Towards De­fining an Age of Sensibility”7 was read at an MLA conference in a group organized by Professor Earl Wasserman of Johns Hopkins, with the object of considering, as he put it in a note attached to the paper when it was printed in ELH, “the question of whether the literature of the later eighteenth century is merely transitional or whether it justifies and calls for a distinct kind of esthetic analysis.” “Blake after Two Centuries,”8 as the title implies, was written for the bicentenary year of Blake’s birth, 1957. “The Imaginative and the Imaginary”9 was the “Fellowship Lecture” delivered at the meeting of the American Association of Psychia­trists in Toronto in 1962, as the second sentence indicates,10 and the interests of this audience have conditioned both the direction of the argument and the choice of quotations. The essays on Byron11 and Emily Dickinson12 were introductions to selections from these poets prepared for the anthologies Major British Writers (1959) and Major Writers of America (1962), published by Harcourt, Brace & World. As general introductions aimed mainly at under­graduate readers, they include biographical sketches which can claim no originality or first‑hand research. The earliest essay in the book is the Yeats paper,13 which was written immediately after Fearful Symmetry was published in 1947. It was thus written before most of the major scholarly interpretations of Yeats had appeared, and though I repudiate nothing in it, I should write it very differently now. The essay on the Shakespeare sonnets14 was contributed to a book which also printed the sonnets, to the great relief of the conscientious reader: I am sorry that it is hardly practicable to reprint here all the sonnets I re­fer to by number. Similarly, the Stevens essay15 is so close to the text of the Collected Poems and The Necessary Angel (not the Opus Posthumous, which appeared later than the essay) that it is hardly independent of them, though I think it should be a rewarding essay if read as it is intended to be read.

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I am pleased to find that, in spite of the variety of occasions and audiences, the present collection makes a unified book that can be read through from beginning to end, if the reader so desires. There is some repetition, but most of it connects the theoretical and the practical parts of the book, so is too functional to be removed. The hinge of the total argument, I suppose, is my conception of Romanticism. The Romantic movement in English literature seems to me now to be a small part of one of the most decisive changes in the history of culture, so decisive as to make everything that has been written since post-Romantic, including, of course, everything that is regarded by its producers as anti-Romantic. One feature of this change that particularly interests me is the way in which the forms of human civilization come to be regarded as man-made rather than as God-made. Some comments on this may be found in the “Imaginative and the Imaginary” paper, which I place where it is because its centre of gravity falls in the Romantic period. This aspect of the change gives a peculiar significance to two poets of that period, Blake and Byron. Blake raises most insistently the question of the reality of the poetic vision, a reality which is neither subjective nor objective, but is brought into being through crea­tion itself. Byron raises most insistently the tragic situation of the artist that results when he moves into the centre of civilization, the centre being always the most isolated place. Of the four modern authors dealt with here, two, Stevens and Emily Dickinson, repre­sent particularly the Blakean preoccupation with the reality of what is created. The other two, Joyce and Yeats, are more in the Byronic tradition, more concerned with the problem of the poete maudit and with what Finnegans Wake might well have called, and doubtless does call somewhere, the curse of ham. I deal with both largely in connection with Blake, but the difference in their more rhetorical centre of gravity is clear enough even so. Finally, the book is dedicated to E.J. Pratt, not merely for a great number of personal reasons, but as a contemporary poet who belongs centrally to the tradition dealt with here, and whose poetry helps, in a peculiarly vivid and immediate way, to make it more intelligible. My title comes from two phrases in his poem Towards the Last Spike (ll. 7, 38).16

10 Response to the Macpherson Report (1967)

The typescript of this brief is in United Church of Canada/Victoria University Archives, President’s Office Files (87.130 V/Box 78/File 7). The brief is dated 25 January 1967. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

Victoria University A Brief Submitted to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Studies The Victoria College Council decided not to submit a brief as a Council to the President’s Committee, though individual members of the Council have done so. I can understand, however, that the Committee might appreciate some statement that was in some specific way a statement from Victoria. What follows is a statement from a person who has worked many years in Victoria, has held several responsible positions in it, and has some notion of what his colleagues think. At the same time it is a personal statement and expresses only my own views. Perhaps it may even reflect something of the irresponsibility of one who is soon to be dropping out of his administrative posts.1 It seems to me that there are particularly three areas in which comments would be appropriate. One is the area of the teaching of the humanities, the only department of learning with which Victoria is directly concerned as a teaching institution. A second is the area of university federation, and a third is the area of the relation of Victoria to The United Church of Canada. teaching in the humanities At present undergraduate teaching at Toronto takes two forms: a four-year Honour course and a three-year General course. The latter resembles the system of

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“majoring” common in American universities, and I should like to see it developed along lines which would make it more of a genuine “major” course, like those offered in Ivy League colleges, and less of a second-class Toronto B.A. Even in its present form the General course attracts many students of the highest quality, and it would be a great mistake to try to confine the undergraduate teaching at the so-called St. George campus to Honour course work, as I imagine most people realize by now. The Honour course represents a unique contribution to undergraduate teaching on the continent, and at its best it affords as good an undergraduate training as can be got anywhere. It has its disadvantages, such as the organizing of all undergraduate work at Toronto on a year instead of a semester basis. I suppose it is one of the tasks of this Committee to determine which disadvantages are removable and which we must simply learn to live with if we are to preserve it. I should urge that the assumption that it is worth preserving should be taken very seriously. I get the impression from some press reports of the work of this Committee that many briefs have started off from the premise “What’s wrong with our teaching?”, a premise that tends to conventionalize the resulting discussion, with an assumption that what we are familiar with may be inferior to whatever is unfamiliar. I think another assumption should be considered, one which is not so much “What’s right with our teaching?” as “How far is what we are doing now a reasonable and practical compromise among all the things we might be doing, many of which are inconsistent with one another?” My guess is that a built-in disadvantage of the Honour course is a dependence on a Grade XIII matriculation. But I feel that its advantages are enormously greater, and quite great enough to justify keeping Grade XIII. There are current proposals to abolish Grade XIII, proposals which assume that courses can simply be repacked, like crates on a truck, and which ignore the great differences that a single year can make in adolescence, especially among boys. I think that these proposals, if carried out, would either destroy the Honour course programme at Toronto or replace it with a “majoring” course like those mentioned above.2 In the modern languages, including English, it is possible to start students off on university work at a more advanced level than a Grade XII matriculation could do, and so make the courses in Modern Languages (and similarly in the Classics) more genuinely courses in literature (and so, later, in History and Philosophy) than they could be in universities where students are still involved, at the beginning, with the mechanical processes of translation and grammar. It is also considerably easier to recruit good staff in these departments when it is possible to promise them less soul-destroying work than they can get, at least at the beginning of their careers, in universities forced to introduce compulsory “rhetoric” or “survey” courses into the first year. I am not saying that secondary school teachers ought to do all the soul-destroying work: such courses, when taught in

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the secondary schools, are not an anachronism there: they are not “make-up” or remedial courses, as they are in the university curriculum. The disastrous blunder of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Toronto in changing its admission requirements from nine to seven credits struck a heavy blow at the humanities in Toronto and in Ontario generally. Victoria has fought this lunatic and suicidal course from the beginning, and I need not repeat our all too obvious arguments here, except for the conclusion, that if it is persisted in Toronto will soon drop from a privileged to a depressed position in the teaching of the humanities. A Federated College, in the university structure, naturally stands for the principle of decentralization: it tries to make more and smaller units of teaching and social life available. Victoria’s policy has been to limit its student body only to the extent that the University of Toronto as a whole does, and this means that it is now a college of over 2,400 students—by no means small, as such things go. Victoria is not and never can be a tutorial college. But in my opinion it would be unfortunate in emphasizing the virtues of seminars, tutorials, and discussion groups to infer that the lecture is a second-rate or outmoded form of teaching. Many essential teaching activities, particularly those which require expositions or historical survey, can only be done by lectures, and the informal lecture which breaks into question and discussion but carries on as a lecture if no occasion for discussion arises, is not easily replaceable as an all-round teaching method. What students want out of their college course is naturally of primary importance. But one has to distinguish between what students can be prodded into saying they want, at a meeting especially called for that purpose, and what their whole behaviour and attitudes over a period of four years show that they want. Their behaviour and attitudes indicate clearly that what they want, rightly or wrongly, is much more guidance than participation. Most Honour courses in the humanities, including notably the English one, cover a broad historical field and envisage extensive rather than intensive reading. In my opinion this makes sense. Nobody can expect a complete educational programme from the four years of his first degree: undergraduate training is only one concentrated area of a life’s educational development. Intensive study has its natural centre in graduate or professional work, when a broad enough basis has been laid down to make it possible. In general, undergraduates benefit more, I think, from an extensive programme of reading. They often say that they would prefer to read less and in greater depth, but I suspect that when they say this they are unconsciously projecting themselves into a more mature stage, as though they were taking the course for the second time. victoria as a federated college According to the Federation agreement, six departments, exclusive of Religious

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Knowledge, are “college subjects,” which means that, for English, Classics, French, German, Ethics and Near Eastern Studies, Victoria has a separate and autonomous department, with its own chairman, which meets along with other college departments for all university business. However indefensible on paper, or however repugnant to the centralizing clichés of administration, this arrangement works remarkably well in practice. In a large department it helps to divide up the chairman’s work and helps to provide, in the Graduate School, for an unusually wide and varied range of offerings and scholarly interests. By dividing up the work of the Dean of Arts, it has helped to prevent the splitting up of that Faculty into two or three divisions. It does not create pressure groups or “Balkanize” a department: in the twenty-five years that I have spent in the college Department of English I have never yet seen a vote in the combined departments split along college lines. However, a division of academic subjects which was appropriate to 1884 is not necessarily appropriate to the current scholarly scene, and it is now being widely proposed to diversify the range of college offerings by cross-appointments in the university departments. This can be done in two ways: by Victoria’s appointing a man in, say, history or Spanish, by arrangement with the university chairman, who would then be cross-appointed to the university department, or by Victoria’s cross-appointing a man to Victoria who was already on the university staff. This scheme ran into a certain amount of prejudice when it was first mooted, but is now established in principle, as, of course, it had to be when the suburban and west campus colleges were planned. Hence I need only make one or two random comments. Cross-appointment to a college seems to be completely practicable only in the humanities and some of the social sciences. Where laboratory work is involved, a cross-appointment to a college without laboratories may sometimes be more irksome than beneficial. In the early stages of his appointment, at least, the cross-appointed member would be concerned mainly with college students, at least if his primary appointment were from that college. But this would be likely to confine him to elementary work, and, as he grows to seniority, the college has to set him free to become a full-fledged member of his department. This means in effect that while he retains a social connection with the college, its students and its Senior Common Room, and remains a member of the college’s Council and Senate, he is academically a contribution to the university chairman’s departmental budget. Victoria has no objection to this arrangement, assuming that the man wants it and the department is agreeable to it, as long as it is made financially possible by the Province. But cross-appointments already constitute a considerable portion of our budgetary deficit, and could not be extended without financial assistance.

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Colleges who need a large group of people in one department and who have a logistic problem (e.g., departments of English or French in Scarborough or Erindale) might tend to develop autonomous college departments in the same way that the Federated Colleges have developed them historically. If this were to happen, the experience of the Federated Colleges has proved that it would not be a disaster. relation to the united church of canada On this I need make only a few remarks purely for the record. Victoria does not “teach religion.” It has courses in Religious Knowledge, which means that religion is taught as an academic subject without reference to any church commitment, just as Political Science is taught elsewhere without reference to making students into Conservatives or Liberals. There is no course in Religious Knowledge at Victoria that could not be taken by, say, a Marxist, a Hindu, a Rosicrucian or a tree-worshipper without the least violation of his conscience. The notion that the teaching of other subjects at Victoria is given some kind of Nonconformist colouring would be too silly to mention if I had not occasionally run into it. No religious tests have ever been applied, officially or unofficially, to Victoria’s staff or students at any time in its history, and, at the present time, both staff and students cover the whole spectrum of religious belief, including none at all. Historically, of course, the freedom from religious tests was the issue on which Victoria was originally founded. Victoria is not supported by The United Church of Canada, beyond a grant which covers a very small part of its budget. What then is the point of having a church connection? It seems to me that there are two answers to this question. One has to do with that intangible term “ethos,” which is hard to define but nevertheless exists. The other and more important has to do with academic freedom. An ethos is a social rather than religious conception, but purely social ethos tends to be an exclusive or restrictive one. A college whose students came entirely from one class group, whether professional or working-class or middle-class, would have an ethos, but hardly one worth having in an academic community. Victoria attracts a good many students, both from the United Church and from other communions, who feel that its church connection indicates a certain respect for religion and who, so to speak, respect that respect. This is, I am quite sure, connected with the fact that Victoria’s student body comes, not merely from a wide variety of religious communions, but from a wide variety of social and ethnical groups as well. There is a natural tendency in all colleges for students from professional or upper-middle-class families to take the lead in student activities,

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and to give a public impression, however unconsciously, that such classes have a monopoly of the student body. But there is quite clearly no correlation at Victoria between the religious interests and the class origins of our students, and the church connection plays an important part in helping to democratize and broaden the base of student life both academic and extra-curricular. As for the question of academic freedom, it is obvious that all universities are in some danger of being controlled beyond the limits of academic freedom by the main source of their financial support, whether that source is a church, the state or private benefactors. In an era when all universities without exception must have state support or go out of business, it is important to remember that the state is not the keeper of the academic conscience, and a connection with another element in society which has different and wider loyalties helps us to remember this. When the college itself is committed to respecting other loyalties than those of the state, it can afford a certain measure of protection even to those members of its staff who want no part of its specific religious connection. Perhaps it could even extend this support to the University of Toronto itself: it has certainly done so in the past. HNF 25/1/67

11 Communication and the Arts: A Humanist Looks at Science and Technology (1969)

A talk Frye gave at the Philips Series of Science Lectures at the Ontario Science Centre, Don Mills, Ontario, 12 December 1969. He was introduced by Ted Rogers, founder and CEO of Rogers Communications. Transcribed by Robert D. Denham from a tape produced by the Media Centre, University of Toronto. This tape is now in the Robert D. Denham Collection of Frye materials at the Moncton, New Brunswick, Public Library.

Thank you very much, Mr. Rogers. The reason why I am here is that I got a letter from the director of the Science Centre, Mr. [Douglas N.] Omand, saying that while most of the people in this series were scientists and technologists, he would like to include a humanist. This of course is a familiar procedure, which is known in other circles as tokenism. He went on to say that what he wanted was not a talk on humanism but a talk on science and technology from a humanistic frame of reference. This seemed to be a very reasonable and sensible proposal, except that I cannot quite manage the separation between the two things. I’m not sure that I can talk about the sciences from a humanistic frame of reference without explaining what humanism is and what, if any, its importance in society may be. Perhaps we have to go back all the way to the Middle Ages when the original and oldest universities of our culture were established––Oxford, the Sor‑ bonne, and the great Italian and Spanish universities. In those universities there was of course the training of the professional faculties––theology and law and medicine––and there was also liberal education based on the conception of seven liberal arts. The principle behind this conception of seven liberal arts was that there are two great tools that man has evolved in his mastery of his environment, those two tools being words and numbers. So the seven liberal arts were divided into two groups. There was a group of three, called the trivium, which were concerned with the arts of words, and they were called grammar and rhetoric and logic. Rhetoric was extremely important, because the two key professions, theology and the law, were both rhetorical ones. Grammar meant, of course, the

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study of the inflected language of Latin, and the word “gramarye” acquired the meaning of magic or something mysterious. After mastering the three arts of words, the student went on to the quadriv‑ ium, the four arts of numbers, and those in the Middle Ages were geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. We can see how that has left its legacy in the culture of our own world. The sciences have developed very largely in the order of their closeness to mathematics. The most deductive, the most amenable to mathematical treatment evolved first. Astronomy in the sixteenth century with Copernicus, and later Galileo and Kepler; physics in the seventeenth century; chemistry, with Lavoisier, in the later eighteenth; the biological and geological sciences in the nineteenth; the social sciences in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century. In all this it became gradually clear that mathematics was the central informing language of the sciences, particularly, of course, of the physical sciences, but in some degree of all the sciences. Mathematics itself is not so much a science as a study of the possibilities of scientific formulation. The arts of words, in the meantime, developed very differently. With the Re‑ naissance, with Copernicus and Galileo developing the new astronomy, the hu‑ manists took shape as a group of people who were studying the languages which related to man as distinct from theology, which related to God, and the sciences, which related to nature. The humanists were concerned mainly with reviving the Greek and Latin texts. The printing press had just been invented, and it provided a means of producing accurate and mechanical copies of Greek and Latin au‑ thors. Unlike the sciences, which were founded on experiment and observation, the humanists were concerned very largely with a cult of authority. They trav‑ elled around Europe digging the manuscripts of Greek and Latin literature out of the monasteries, where they had often lain abandoned for centuries, and they wrote formal epistles to each other in Latin, reinforcing each other and keeping their spirits up in the course of visiting such barbaric countries as England and shivering in the cold climate for the sake of discovering whatever manuscripts might turn up. Their general social influence was to regard the Greek and Latin writers as having produced the definitive statements on practically everything. The great classical poets––Homer and Virgil––were the models of poetry and would be forever. The great orators––Demosthenes and Cicero––were still the schools to which one should go for oratory, and the same cult of authority extended even into architecture and into the sciences themselves. Along with this went an at‑ tack on technical language of all kinds, especially the language of philosophy. There had been a considerable development of philosophy in the Middle Ages, but the humanists said that a technical language of philosophy was not the way that people ordinarily talked. In other words, the humanists were concerned to defend the social importance of the use of words. Their ideals revolved around

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the idea of the gifted amateur or more specifically the orator. The technical phi‑ losophers were ridiculed and attacked as people who talked a kind of jargon which nobody could understand. Of course, the great philosopher of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, still held some of his authority, but his great critic, the nominalist philosopher John Duns, called Duns Scotus, who taught at Oxford, became a synonym for the old obsolete way of thinking and writing, the old jargon way. And the people who held by him were called the “duns men” or the “dunces,” and so the name of one of the greatest critical intellects in the history of thought became a byword for stupidity. At the same time, while there was much that was reactionary in humanism, there was also something that had an intense social concern for the proper use of words. Roger Ascham, who was an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, said, “You know not what hurt you do to learning when you separate words from matter” (The Schoolmaster, 140). For if you look at the history of all nations, you shall find that social manners began to decline as soon as the use of words became vague and imprecise. Almost exactly the same words were being used in our own day by the American poet Ezra Pound, who claims to have derived them from a Chinese origin. So this sense of the social importance of the precise, ac‑ curate, and powerful use of words was the mainspring which was the impetus of the humanist movement. It has left on our day and our modern universities the term “humanities,” which means the subjects of the literatures and philoso‑ phy and history. In general, it is a term favoured by university administrators to designate the low‑budget departments. All through the nineteenth century the courses which the serious student took were courses in the two essential tools of knowledge, that is, words and numbers, which until about 1900 were inter‑ preted as a course in the classics and a course in mathematics. In my own college, Victoria College, when it began in the nineteenth century in Cobourg, there was the course for intellectuals, which consisted of the classics and mathematics, and another course for the people who made money and endowed the college, which was called the English course and was essentially a business training. It was not until the turn of the century, when the classics began to be replaced by the mod‑ ern languages, that the same general set‑up and formulation of university cur‑ ricula still was retained. So we still have in our universities, then, a group of subjects which are con‑ cerned very largely with the use of words. In such a subject as history it is dif‑ ficult to see how history can ever become a science in the narrow sense of being informed by mathematics or depending on repeatable experiments or leading to any kind of prediction. At the same time, in history there is obviously a scien‑ tific element in the historian’s treatment of evidence, and it is what distinguishes genuine history from legend or from folklore and which prevents, for example, a historian of Great Britain from including King Lear and King Arthur and Merlin

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and the story of Atlantis in his survey––all of which, of course, have had very conspicuous roles in the more legendary part of British history. There is a general principle, then, that every subject must be as scientific as its subject matter will allow it to be, or else it must abandon all claim to be taken seriously. At the same time, there remains the fact that words also have to be used with the same kind of precision and power that mathematical equations do. True, there are many aspects of humanism which are now out of date. Hu‑ manism, as I tried to indicate, had a great deal to do with the amateur, with producing the social type of a gentleman, with dramatizing and setting forth in front of other people certain social standards––standards of clarity and lucidity in speech, standards of an informed interest in the arts, standards which would enable the gentleman to be an adviser to those in power. This was still true in the nineteenth century, and that aspect of humanism has, of course, vanished with the social situation and the social system which produced it. But the same interest is still very much alive in the arts of our day which are concerned with words, and that therefore means that the humanist in the twentieth century has to be particularly concerned with the art and the science and the technology of communication. This distinction between words and numbers, between the subjects like his‑ tory and philosophy, which are informed by words, and the sciences, which are increasingly informed by mathematics, points to the fact that there are in human civilization two worlds, two areas of truth and of reality. The first thing that man does is to form a society, and the first thing that he tries to do is to make his soci‑ ety hold together. His chief interest in words is to hold his society together so far as words can enable him to do that. Later on, the drive to hold society together relaxes somewhat, and man becomes aware of himself as an individual, and as soon as he becomes an individual he thinks of himself as confronting an objec‑ tive order of nature which surrounds him. And so another kind of truth and of reality developed––a kind of truth which is presented by the objective world, by the order of nature, a truth which is studied and which has to depend on logic, on reason, on evidence, on experiment––on all the operations which we associate not only with science but with any kind of systematic study. In the meantime, however, there is another kind of truth and reality altogether. This is the kind that does not exist at all to begin with but is brought into being through a certain kind of human creative power. This is the truth and the reality which we find in religion, which we find in political theory, and which we find in literature and the arts––a truth and reality produced by creativity and held ac‑ cording to belief. For religion, what is true is not what can be demonstrated, what can be proved, what can be founded on evidence or experiment. In religion what is true is what is believed, and what is believed is what is accepted by society on a basis of authority derived from revelation. The truth of the painter’s vision of

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his landscape is not there to begin with. It is manifested by the picture that he paints and does not exist until that picture appears. These two kinds of truth and of reality––the kinds which are created by human civilization and the kinds which are studied from an objective nature––are, in their turn, derived from the still larger and more fundamental fact that man lives in two worlds, the world which is around him, his environment, or what we call nature, and the world that he wants to live in, the world which his culture and civilization try to produce. One affords us a truth and a reality of evidence and experience. The other is con‑ cerned with the fundamental questions about man’s nature and his destiny, his whence and his whither, why he is in the world, what he is trying to do in it, what he is trying to make out of it. The patterns of religion, of political theory, of social ritual, of the arts, are the patterns that we call myths. We find these myths, these fundamental axioms of belief, which are usually expressed in stories or in some kind of large concep‑ tions, in a great variety of subjects. They make up in their totality a society’s mythology, that is, the number of things which a society believes, accepts on suf‑ ficient authority, and holds to as a part of its social vision. The really great think‑ ers who have changed our whole pattern of existence––such people as Rousseau or Freud or Marx or Darwin or Einstein––are people who have changed our my‑ thology. I suggest that these mythological patterns are found in our deepest con‑ victions about our relations to God or our relations to our own society or to other men, and they have many parallels among themselves. In the Christian religion, for example, we begin with the alienation myth of the fall of man: that one time God placed man in a paradise but man fell out of it into the world which he now inhabits. But he is to be restored to his original world on the last day when he enters the city of God and gets his paradise back. These religious myths have their exact counterpart in our political myths, according to which there is a social contract, which defines the state of society in which we have found ourselves. But there is also an ideal vision of society, expressed in Utopias and other types of ideal social formulations, which represents what we are moving to and what we’ll eventually be restored to. In this situation I suggest that literature has a relation to these mythological subjects corresponding to the relation of mathematics to the sciences. That is, lit‑ erature studies these essential imaginative patterns which man uses in trying to articulate his feelings about his own destiny and his own place in the world. Lit‑ erature expounds the essential imaginative and mythical relationships of man‑ kind, just as mathematics investigates the possibilities of numerical relationships and a scientific formulation. Some time ago we had a famous lecture by Sir Charles Snow on the two cul‑ tures in which he said that the humanities and the sciences were growing un‑ intelligible to each other and that they really ought to get together, they ought

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to make gestures of mutual amity.1 That is, the scientist ought to be compelled to memorize a speech from Macbeth and the humanist ought to be compelled to memorize the second law of thermodynamics. Now, of course, the situation to which this points is an utterly inescapable one. There are not two cultures in scholarship: there are at least a hundred and two. Every scholar is completely unintelligible, even to his next-door neighbour. I myself would hardly find a solid‑state physicist less intelligible than a specialist in medieval Portuguese. There is no way out of that. Scholarship is going to become more specialized in the future, and not less so. The thing that unites all scholars, as well as everybody else in the community, is a common sense of social concern. That is the point at which people meet together, and no mutual concessions among scholars are go‑ ing to accomplish this. So there is, therefore, a contrast in perspective between the general scholar and the scholar who is pushing back the frontiers of knowledge in an extremely spe‑ cialized way, which only a handful of people can follow. At the same time, there is the fact that he is a citizen of his own society, and because he is a citizen, he is linked with all other citizens of that society in a common social interest. I call them the centrifugal and centripetal aspects of knowledge, one going out to the frontiers where one is a lonely explorer; the other coming back into the general community. One thing that Sir Charles Snow says about humanists, while it’s very annoy‑ ing to humanists, is at the same time I think, very largely true. He says that science evolves and improves and progresses as it goes on, that every scientist can stand on the shoulders of his predecessors, that the body of science keeps on increas‑ ing and growing from age to age, whereas the arts never improve. They produce their classics, and they revolve around them forever, just as religion keeps re‑ volving around its sacred books or its authentic revelation. Therefore, says Snow, humanists are really what he calls Luddites. The Luddites were the people in the eighteenth century who broke up machines because they were afraid that they would be put out of work by them. And he regards the humanists as having a similar attitude to machinery. I think that may be true of individual humanists. Certainly whenever I pick up anything in the nature of a machine, it immediately comes apart in my hands, and I suspect that my professional temperament has something to do with that. At the same time, this connects with the thing which I mentioned earlier that humanism as it developed in the Renaissance was a cult of authority, that it tended to revolve around the great classics which it accepted from the Greek and the Latin world. It tended to think of the production of litera‑ ture as something that on the whole did not improve or progress as it went on. What we are faced with in our own time, I think––this world of the 1960s––is a kind of social protest, which is often called a radical one, because all protests are usually thought of as radical, but which is actually a deeply conservative protest

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and which has very many points in common with this humanist attitude. This is the protest against the tendency in mankind expressed by the romance writ‑ ten by Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley, when she was a girl of eighteen, the famous romance of Frankenstein, which indicates how man has a tendency to enslave himself to what he creates. That is, man invents the wheel and he uses the wheel to spin garments and propel vehicles, but before long he is talking about a wheel of fate or a wheel of fortune, in other words, making one of his own inventions a symbol for something alienating, something he regards as dominating his life. This tendency on the part of scientific development to become, as it were, auton‑ omous, to run away from the human will and start developing by itself, has pro‑ duced in popular fiction the stereotype of a mad scientist. Of course, it is true that the human use of a science is a matter of very considerable importance. Science has to be studied in detachment, but there is a point at which the detachment becomes indifference, as when the sense of human value disappears from it. Psy‑ chology, for example, is a science, and it has to be studied with detachment. But it is surely not a matter of indifference whether psychology is used as a healing art or for motivational research designed to force people to buy what they neither want nor need, or for propaganda in a police state. Perhaps, after all, there is such a thing as mad science. We went through the nightmare of the late forties and fifties in which we suspected that nuclear physics might exterminate the human race. Then we went through the DNA molecule and the development of genetics in which we are faced with an even worse prospect that science might try to im‑ prove it. The general feeling, on the whole, is that this is a fate worse than death. It’s better to be dead than lead is something that enters into the mood of our time very strongly. So we get rather foolish statements, like a cry for a moratorium on science: we should stop science until we catch up with it. Science in this context, of course, always means technology. When the first landing on the moon was made, there were many people who said that if they’d spent that money in end‑ ing poverty they would have shown a greater sense of human priorities. Now this last remark opens up, I think, some rather interesting questions. The first question is the fact that the most complicated technological problem is still a lot easier than the simplest human problem. If you try to wage a war on poverty, what you do is to stir up the various social pressure groups that are interested in the subject, and if you wage your war to the tune of thirty or forty billion dollars, you will wind up with a civil war on your hands, and the poor just as poor and just as numerous. You might just as well land on the moon. That, at any rate, you can do. Then when we look into this question of poverty, we find that it is not a question that can be treated in a scientific way. You may, for example, try to define it quantitatively. You may pick a figure out of a hat and say that the poor are those who make less than $2,000 a year. But the one thing that is absolutely certain is that whatever you do, those who make just over $2,000 a year are going

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to get a very raw deal. Further, we can understand what disease is, we can give a definition of disease, we know that health is the opposite of disease and that it is a good thing and disease a bad thing. But what is the opposite of poverty? It is obviously not riches. We cannot say that that is a good thing against which poverty is bad. We go into the underdeveloped areas of the world in Asia and Africa or South America, and we find a great deal of poverty there. It is wrong to be complacent about it, to feel that this is what these people want or are used to. And yet at the same time that we see the poverty, we also see many beautiful people there, and we see people with the kind of serenity and wisdom which we do not see in our supermarkets. So we come back to our own society and we wonder about the overtones of this word “poverty.” We approach the outskirts of a large city, the ribbon development with its hot‑dog stands and used‑car lots. We look at the bleak hideousness of this, and we wonder if there is not perhaps another type of poverty, a poverty of imagination, a poverty of creativity, and whether by those standards our own civilization is not a miserably squalid civi‑ lization. In other words, as soon as we look into the question of poverty, we are raising the question of the use and meaning of words, and we are coming very close to the principle that the real meaning of important words, like “poverty,” is really rooted in our vision of society. Let me remind you of the structure of most towns in Europe and in fact in our own world down to the mid‑nineteenth century: The town has a market square at its centre and a church in the middle of that market square, or if it’s a large town, a cathedral. People come to do their shopping in that market square, they talk and gossip with each other, and they drop into the church and out again. Here in this kind of town we see three things going on, which have very similar names and which are interrelated ideas. Those three things are communication, community, and communion. First of all, communication is of course normally by way of words or, later, im‑ ages, and in simple societies communication is a two‑way street. It means A talk‑ ing to B and B listening to A just long enough so that he can get his own speech in as soon as A finishes. But as communication becomes more mechanical, we tend to think of it more as a one‑way street. We think of it as a message from a mouth A to an ear B––from an active to a passive end. A very good friend of mine, Marshall McLuhan, who is also a literary critic who has become interested in the theory of communication, tells us that the medium is the message. But we are faced with the fact that in our society, or in fact in any society, whether it’s North American capitalism or Russian socialism, all the media present pretty well the same message, and therefore if this axiom is true they must all be pretty well the same medium. It would be simpler, I think, to assume that the real media of com‑ munications are not the electronic gadgets, whether television or radio or news‑ reel cameras, but that the real media of communications are words and images,

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and that the differences among the gadgets, between the high‑ and low‑defini‑ tion media, are of relatively trivial importance. In any case, all our media seem to be building up economically towards an active distribution to a passive listener. One of the most conspicuous features of our time is a growing resistance to being on the passive end of communication. The sponsor whose advertising helps to maintain a television program is of course delighted when he finds that a great many black families in the United States have television sets. He feels that this is the American way of life and that this extends the market that he can reach. He forgets, however, that a TV set is also the viewer’s way of looking at the spon‑ sor, and that a TV set in a black home is the black family’s way of looking at a white society gorging itself on privilege and luxury products. So we are apt to become bewildered when their reaction to television becomes so catastrophically violent. But this is natural enough if you remember that this kind of communica‑ tion, mechanical as it is, is still a one‑way street. It has often been observed that during student demonstrations many hundreds of students suddenly discovered that they had political convictions as soon as the CBS cameras arrived. In other words, they assert their aggressiveness by getting on the other side of the tube. We have then in our society a natural economic development towards greater and greater centralization, in which everything seems to be distributed from certain centres. Everything in local stations in Canada would soon start coming out of Toronto and Montreal, and Toronto and Montreal in their turn would become distributing centres for New York and Hollywood. While this is not the whole story by any means, still it is conspicuous enough for people to become ex‑ tremely resistant to the uniformity of the kind of media and the kind of messages that they are getting. I think perhaps that we don’t understand the significance of the drug cults as a way that people take of getting for themselves a unique form of perception which the communications media have cheated them out of. In any case, of course, there is a growing movement––it began in radio and is spread‑ ing to television––to making this kind of communication increasingly a two‑way street. And yet the situation at the moment is one of a pattern of social resistance, building up to a tendency to make it a mechanical distribution. The classical form of this is the two‑tiered level, where you have on the upper level the educational programs saying to the viewer, “This is what you ought to want,” and under them the commercial programs saying, “This is what you really do want.” In Great Britain, for example, we have a light program and we have a third pro‑ gram, where “third” is a euphemism for heavy. In this structure, of course, the entertaining is by definition the opposite of the boring. This situation, of course, is meeting increasing social resistance. In a society in which the entertaining is increasingly becoming the boring, other things have to be done. Because broadcasters are on the whole honest men who want to be pub‑ lic servants and not parasites, they are finding means for making the communica‑

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tions media more flexible. At the same time, they have a certain difficulty which they share in common with political leaders. Political leaders begin at election times with great promises of creation and innovating, but as soon as they get into office, they realize, if they have not realized it before, that what they do is inherit a situation left them by their predecessors that 99 per cent of what they can do is already prescribed for them and that their powers for creating and innovating are almost non-existent. If their position is an immensely powerful one, like that of the president of the United States, they have a great power of destruction, but their power of innovation remains practically at the vanishing point. This is true of almost any business which inherits as it goes on an increasing amount of real estate and hardware and finds that it is increasingly bound up with the activity of administering the real estate and hardware which it has acquired. What I am saying is that the nature of communication depends really on the nature of the community. In a free society what happens is that one economic tendency sets up an opposition tendency, and the two tendencies fight each other to a standstill and there is a compromise between them. This is why protest groups in society can exert the most immense leverage even when they are the smallest and most insignificant of minorities. The third element I mentioned in this small medieval town––the church at the centre and the conception of communion––is the profoundest form of commu‑ nication where we are in touch with the sources of our own social loyalties, with the things that hold us together and give us some kind of coherence as a society. In the church, in a Catholic church there is the re-creation in substance of the body and blood of God, which says that God is man and that we are all members of one body. In a Protestant church the link between God and man is the Word of God and the recreation of the Word in the church service performs the same function. In Judaism there is the contract between God and Israel, and so on. It does not have to be a religious ritual, of course, but it does have to be something which speaks very deeply to the sense of social cohesion. As long as people be‑ lieve in this act of communion in the church they will keep going to church. If they cease to believe in it, they will stop going and no power on earth can bring them back. We have secular forms of the same thing. Wherever Queen Elizabeth II turns up, crowds will follow her to look at her, and what they are really looking at, of course, is their own unity as a society as represented in her. We have similar things at a more vulgar level. We have the most facile kind of communion, which is sexual communion, represented either by the female strip‑teaser with the bald‑ headed row, or the male rock‑and‑roll singer with the crowd of screaming little female accompanists. This kind of communion can also express a kind of social cohesion and coherence in its own way. We have, I think, perhaps not grasped the full significance of the fact that the unrest of our time is a middle‑class unrest, rather than the kind of thing which

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was presented to us in the 1930s as the revolt of a different kind of social class. But we find that the resistance to an increasingly mechanical and passive recep‑ tion of communication is what produces the encounter groups, the folk singers, the sense of comradeship attained in demonstrations––though the sense of com‑ radeship there is produced more by the sense of the enemy outside than of the comrades inside. In many respects, society is throwing up a number of symbols and representations of social communion, some of which are obviously religious in their feeling and attitude and others are not. But they are all part of the same social development and growth. In this situation the television set becomes increasingly like the telescope: it looks out on the world, but it makes what it sees increasingly cold and dead and remote. We’re often told, of course, that with the development in the effi‑ ciency of communications we shall be able to get the whole world into our living room, and won’t it be nice? At the same time, there is the reaction to this, which is founded on the principle that communities enrich themselves by what they include, but they define themselves by what they exclude. In other words, there is also the strong feeling that we don’t want all these people in our living room, and that we want to get together with the people who share our prejudices and our general attitudes and that while it might be fun to have a minority of our own to kick around, that is the only use we have for any kind of a different social group. I think that separatism in many respects is a squalid and neurotic social philosophy, but we have to recognize the fact that it is the strongest social force that has yet been thrown up in the age of television. There is a poem of Robert Frost which turns on the theme of two farmers, of which one insists on building a fence, which the other regards as unnecessary, because, as he says, “Good fences make good neighbours.” Now whether or not good fences make good neigh‑ bours, the fence certainly creates the neighbour. The rise of demand to participate in all forms of communication, therefore, is to me one of the central and most important facts of our own time. Along with this goes the gradual decay of the spectacular, the thing that is presented to us to admire. The first moon landing was an unforgettable experience. The eighty‑fifth moon landing will be much less so. In the last century the most exhilarating form of entertainment was the time when the circus came to town. It transfigured the whole life of the town as long as it was there. But the circus is dead now, because nothing can come to anywhere else now: it is already there. Such things as hockey games or football games, again, are not strictly speak‑ ing spectator sports. Anybody who watches a hockey game or a football game is likely to know how the game is played, and therefore he is really in the posi‑ tion of the person who sees more of what is going on than the player does. And consequently his role is essentially a participating one. This seems really the only answer in society, and in certain societies, like those of Mao’s China, it may de‑

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stroy a good deal of what we think of as liberty, but there’s no question of the extent to which it involves people and wakes them up and makes them articulate and makes them feel they are a genuine part of their community. In a world like ours a certain paradox begins to make itself felt. The easier travelling becomes, the more travelling in one sense disappears, as every airport in the world resem‑ bles every other airport in the world, and one Hilton hotel is much like another, whether it is in Istanbul or Kathmandu. Similarly, when communication forms a total environment, nothing is being communicated. There is a mass of echoes and a number of prefabricated responses. This new need for participation and the need for immediacy of contact have brought in a social development which interests me a good deal as a literary critic. In primitive societies before writing develops, culture is of course depen‑ dent on memory and on the oral tradition. In such a society the poet is bound to be the teacher, because verse is the simplest way of conventionalizing verbal utterance. When writing develops and science and history and philosophy take shape, the poet becomes increasingly bewildered about his social function. He usually comes to terms with it by becoming a kind of secondary ornament of a leisured class. In our own time––in the last ten years or so––there has been a quite sudden and dramatic revival of oral culture. Poetry is once again something to be recited to a listening audience, usually with a musical background, and dealing with topical, even ephemeral themes. This, I think, indicates the very intimate way that literature and the study of literature, which is criticism, are involved in what I have called the conservative protest of our time. The growing efficiency of communication goes along with, of course, the growing efficiency of infor‑ mation, which is another example of the A to B conception: information can be retrieved, and it comes out of a source A and it comes into the mind of the recipi‑ ent B. But in my own field of literary criticism, I am aware of the limitations of this. My own first job as a literary critic was to try to figure out some of the long, difficult, and symbolic poems of William Blake. And at that time when I began to work there were several dozen books on Blake and several hundred articles about the prophecies, all of them pure junk. There was one good book, and that was it. In other words, the flow of information was really a flow of misinforma‑ tion, and the trick was to get rid of it and not to absorb it. To the extent that my ef‑ forts were original, I think they demonstrated the general principle that any form of originality consists of arresting this kind of flow of information. The original person, whether he is an original poet or an original scientist, is bound to wander by himself, to make sure that he thinks up his own ideas and is not bedevilled with the growing efficiency of information. So I come then to the original point with which I began. I was asked to look at the world of science and technology from a humanistic frame of reference. I end really with very obvious statements. Science, like everything else in civilization,

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is a social product. There is no such thing as pure science. The direction and de‑ velopment of every science depends on one’s social vision. In the study of that social vision, the study of the myths of religion and political theory and philoso‑ phy and psychology and anthropology have a place. The study of literature is in the centre of these subjects as the essential mythological patterns which the hu‑ man imagination has developed, and therefore criticism, the study of literature, also has its place in the whole social complex. This does not mean that any area of knowledge is more central or more important than any other, because every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge. But there is a point at which all the specialists in knowledge as well as all men of goodwill, wherever they are, have to sit down at the same table.

12 Preface to The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (1969)

Frye’s preface mentions each of the sixteen essays in The Stubborn Structure, but the information he provides is often quite minimal. Full bibliographic data for each piece can be found in the endnotes. Originally published in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970; London: Methuen, 1970), vii–x. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books.

This book is a collection of essays and lectures, composed at intervals between 1962 and 1968. I have arranged them not chronologically but thematically, starting with a theoretical group, dealing mainly with the contexts of literary criticism, and following them with more specific studies in English literature, in roughly historical sequence. I hope, and think, that the reader will be able to read them as chapters in a continuous argument, forming a book with a unity of its own. The local allusions are mainly American, because the United States was the milieu of most of the writing. The papers were also written, for the most part, before the rise of what is called student unrest, and while I have also written and spoken a good deal about the latter, I am dealing here with the permanent issues which have been ruffled but not altered by it. Ever since Cicero it has been assumed that the humanist should also be a professional rhetorician, ready to make speeches on a great variety of occasions and subjects. Of the essays which follow, not one was written purely from my own initiative: every one was suggested to me by someone organizing a conference or program or book, and the great majority of them were at first delivered orally. Of course, the writing of themes on assigned topics has also been traditionally a part of a humanist’s training. But a time when every university has projects and programs for visiting lecturers, and when the universities themselves are connected by jet planes, puts the humanist under something of a strain. The strain is not in the visit but in producing the manuscript: at that point he is in much the position of the old-style comedians who used to be able to tour the country with one act,

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until the coming of television exhausted their life’s stock of routines in a night or two. What makes publication difficult is precisely what makes oral delivery practicable. In oral delivery there must be a great deal of repetition, because each audience needs its own set of clues: an audience in Chicago has not heard the lecture in Texas which a week previously made some of the same points. When the lectures are published, even separately, such self-cribbing has to be removed: a process at once unrewarding, tedious, and in an irrational way somewhat embarrassing. I have tried to mini­mize all repetition, and hope that what remains will be more helpful than distracting. Sometimes, of course, repetition can be a sign not so much of lack of ideas as of conviction, even of some consistency about one’s convictions. Each essay, then, was written for a specific occasion: I have not attempted to remove all the marks of those occasions, and I disagree profoundly with the convention which says that I should. Here again I appeal to the humanist tradition: Cicero would have been an idiot to revise his defence of Archias into an essay on the place of the poet in society. Still, a word or two about what the occasions were may be helpful to the reader. The first three essays were contributed to conferences organized by different universities, usually in connection with anniversary celebra­tions, on general themes. The universities were, respectively, Chicago, Cornell, and Kentucky, and the questions to be dealt with were, res­pectively: what knowledge is most worth having? what kind of morality is relevant to scholarship? and, what do the humanities provide that is not provided by the sciences? These questions are referred to in the opening sentences of each paper.1 All three are concerned to ask the question lucidly rather than to answer it magisterially, and they attempt to be clear enough for the reader to see the gaps in their arguments. The discussion of the informing power of words in “Speculation and Con­cern” is particularly tentative, partly because I have not seen the issue raised elsewhere. The essay on design in the arts2 changes the main con­text from other verbal structures to other arts: except for this change of context, the argument is not especially new. An earlier version of it was given at a festival on the arts at the University of Rochester: the present version appeared in a Festschrift for my friend Philip Wheel­wright,3 as a tribute to his versatility of interests. The next three papers deal with the theory of criticism chiefly in the context of teaching. The attack in the “Polemical Introduction” of my Anatomy of Criticism on the notion that criticism is primarily the evalua­tion of literature seems to have been a hard pill to swallow. “On Value-Judgments,” a paper given at an MLA conference in Chicago, is one of many efforts I have made to explain my position on this. The most fre­quent question asked me is: “But aren’t you assuming a value-judgment when you spend more time writing about Shakespeare or Milton than about other poets?” This question was answered in the Anatomy of

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Criti­cism itself, but I was recently asked it six times in succession by a group of students at a college I was visiting. “On Value-Judgments”4 tries to answer it again, and tries also to show that at a certain point the pseudo-question of evaluation passes into the genuine question of the values of literary study itself. “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” suggests what those values are: this was an address given at Trinity College, Hartford, the occasion a conference on my own critical methods, organized by the late Professor Frederick Gwynne.5 The final paper in this first section6 was a speech at another MLA meeting, addressed to an audience interested in the sequence and interconnection in the teaching of English from kindergarten to graduate school. Of the essays in the second group, the one on Utopias formed part of a special issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, devoted to that theme.7 I confined myself to the literary aspect of Utopias because the political, philosophical, and other aspects were being taken care of more competently by other contribu­tors. I place it first in the second section as a counterpart to the opening essay, with which it has much in common. The Milton essay,8 given at a tercentenary conference on Paradise Lost at the University of Western Ontario, is a kind of distillation of some earlier lectures of mine on Milton also given on that campus, published as The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (I give the subtitle because for some reason this is the only title of the British edition). The two Blake essays differ widely in their interests: the first one,9 given at the University of Nebraska, tries to outline some of the connections between my own theory of criticism and the study of Blake in which it began; the second10 is intended simply as an introductory guide to the symbolism of the Prophecies, and hence, perhaps, as an epitome of the long and difficult Fearful Symmetry. The Romanticism paper11 was the opening one of a series of four “reconsiderations” of Romanticism given to the English Institute in 1962; the view of Romanticism taken in it I have since developed in a later book, A Study of English Romanticism, where it is applied to Beddoes, Shelley, and Keats. Of the two Victorian papers, the one on Dickens12 was also given at the English Institute, in 1967: it is based on a conception of New Comedy which I had outlined elsewhere,13 but had never applied to Dickens in detail. The other paper,14 given at Rice University, was reprinted in a Festschrift for my late colleague Professor A.S.P. Woodhouse: the academic field it covers was one of particular interest to him. The Yeats paper,15 delivered at the Sligo conference on Yeats in 1968, is my third effort, which by folk-tale convention ought to be the most successful one, to reconcile Yeats’s imagery as a whole with the scheme of A Vision. It and the Milton paper are preliminary studies for what I am afraid will become a long and intricate book on patterns of imagery in literature.16 The Literary History of Canada was a co-operative project, under the general editorship of Professor Carl Klinck of Western Ontario, and embracing about

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thirty-five contributors. I was asked to write a con­clusion17 trying to sum up what the book as a whole was saying about the poetic imagination as it operated in Canada. I have edited the text, for the comfort of the reader who wants to read it independently of its context, and have eliminated my specific references to my colleagues; but anyone who looks up the original essay can see for himself how much I owe to them, not only in facts and ideas, but in phrasing. I hope that the reader unfamiliar with Canadian literature will read it, not as a quaint and provincial appendix to the present book, but as a glimpse of a new imaginative landscape which is still relevant to his own. The title is from a passage in Blake’s Jerusalem (Plate 36 or 40, depending on which copy is used as the basis of the edition), which has always meant a great deal to me, and which looms up with a peculiar power and resonance even in that tremendous setting: I call them by their English names: English, the rough basement. Los built the stubborn structure of the Language, acting against Albion’s melancholy, who must else have been a Dumb despair.

And, as some of those who write about me are still asserting that I ignore the social reference of literary criticism, the subtitle calls the attention of those who read me to the fact that I have written about practically nothing else.

13 Notes on Romance (56b) (1974)

Contents   1. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe   2. Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesiaca   3. Moses Hadas’s “Introduction” to Three Greek Romances   4. Thomas Lodge, Rosalind   5. Robert Greene, Pandosto   6. Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale   7. Heliodorus of Emesa, An Aethiopian History   8. Apollonius of Tyre   9. Parthenius of Nicaea, Love Romances 10. Clementine Recognitions 11. Chariton of Aphrodisias, Chaereas and Callirhoe 12. Barlaam and Ioasaph 13. Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture 14. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone 15. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White 16. The Harlequin, Goldoni, and Gozzi 17. Indian Drama 18. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley 19. Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering 20. Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary 21. Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet 22. Sidney, Arcadia 23. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe 24. Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate 25. Sir Walter Scott, Anne of Geierstein 26. The Volsunga Saga 27. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha

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Notes on Romance (56b) 28. William Morris, The Wood beyond the World 29. William Morris, The Well at the World’s End 30. William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain 31. William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains 32. William Morris, The Sundering Flood 33. George MacDonald, Phantastes 34. George MacDonald, Essay on the Imagination 35. George MacDonald, Lilith 36. George MacDonald, The Portent 37. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 38. Thomas De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach 39. Achilles Tatius, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon

The first incarnation of these notes was a fairly neat manuscript typed by Frye himself. The notes were then retyped by his secretary, Jane Widdicombe.1 On the first version Frye pencilled in corrections on his typescript and indicated with a marker where new pages were to begin; he corrected typos on the second version. The second typescript runs to 193 single-spaced pages. The precise date of the notes is uncertain, but they belong to the period following the invitation Frye received in 1973 to deliver the Norton Lectures. Most were doubtless written in 1974 and probably before June of that year, when Frye left for London and Oxford to write his lectures. I have retained the order of the synopses as they were originally found in Frye’s files, though I have combined two sections on Heliodorus into one. Frye’s typescript required very little editing. I have expanded his numerous abbreviations, corrected typos, italicized titles of prose and dramatic texts, and changed his square brackets to braces ({ }). Everything within my own square brackets is an editorial addition. The headnote to each of the sections indicates the copy (often copies) of the texts in Frye’s own library and provides references to the places in Frye’s Collected Works where he mentions the text in question. For the stand-alone volumes in the Collected Works, I have also provided page references to the original editions of Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code, and Words with Power. For some of the passages that Frye quotes he inserted the page numbers from the edition he was using. When those references are missing, I have supplied the page numbers in square brackets. When the edition I cite is different from the one Frye used, or if I have not been able to determine the edition he was reading, I have cited an edition to which I had access. These editions are recorded in the headnotes. Frye’s own page references are either within parentheses or are not enclosed at all. The typescript for these notes is in the Northrop Frye Fonds of the Victoria University Library, 1991 accession, box 28, file 6. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

1.  Longus, Daphnis and Chloe Longus wrote in the second century C.E. Frye’s source: Three Greek Romances: Daphnis

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and Chloe by Longus, An Ephesian Tale by Xenophon, The Hunters of Euboea by Dio Chrysostom. Trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). Page references in square brackets are to this edition. References to Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 190, 197 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 48–9, 66, 69, 381 “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 27: 368

The Prologue says it’s a verbalization of a picture. The following are the main things in the prologue: (a) pirates as the night-world power, turning up as the smugglers and gypsies in Guy Mannering (b) the story is an “offering” to Eros, the Nymphs and Pan. Thus later comedy-romance sets up supplementary mythologies beside the accepted ones, and helps to expand the mythological corpus accordingly. The Cupid and Psyche myth in Apuleius is the outstanding and obvious example. Then (c) the story advertises itself as therapeutic, a remedy for disease and solace for griefs. So the triumph of wish-fulfillment in such stories actualizes what dreams try to do, and I suppose dreams are therapeutic too for some of the same reasons. Then (d) the writer hopes to retain “prudence” when writing of the vicissitudes of others. Both writer and reader achieve sophrosyne by contemplating the cycle of fortune, is the idea. And finally (e) the emphasis on the inspiring picture introduces the ut pictura poesis principle. The story begins with the boy Daphnis suckled by a nanny-goat and the girl Chloe by a ewe. The pastoral hero is nursed by an animal and picked up by a goatherd; similarly the girl by a shepherd: identification with animals outlined at the beginning, symbolizing the state of unfallen nature, or thereabouts. Daphnis has the usual talismans of recognition, a little purple mantle, a golden brooch, and a tiny sword with an ivory hilt. She has swaddling clothes, and a headband of gold, gilt shoes and golden anklets. Note how these talismans get supplied to the Christ-child by the Magi. A goatherd and shepherd become foster-parents, natch, and the names Daphnis and Chloe are said to be explicitly pastoral names—I don’t yet know why there are special pastoral names. Chloe is found in a grotto of the Nymphs, with statues of the nymphs in it, and the shepherd follows the nursing ewe and “wished to chastise her and reduce her to her former good behavior” [5], not realizing what she’s doing—faint trace of the calumniated mother. Nurturing animals teach lesson of love to humans. Children grow rapidly—sixteen years passes in a sentence, as in the Winter’s Tale. They “revealed a beauty more exquisite than became rustics” [6]—the usual mystical snobbery about birth in romance. The Hymn of the Soul2 and its original lost birth-right may actually be the source of the whole aristocratic set-up in so-

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ciety. Well, the kids grow up—maybe this kind of thing is the origin of the word kids. Local goatherds and shepherds are bothered by a wolf and dig pits to catch it—they don’t catch the wolf but they do catch Daphnis, who’s pulled out by Chloe’s “band” (sash, I suppose). Combination of Joseph-in-pit and Rapunzel themes. They manage to fall in love, largely as the result of Daphnis’ continually taking baths in front of Chloe, and proceed to fall sick of love, with appropriate laments. I suppose the lovesickness is there to supply a kind of ritual death element in Court of Love stories—anyway, the approximation of it to death is as emphatic and explicit here as in the Renaissance, on the other side of Provence. So far we’re in phase two, the brother-sister locus-amoenus one. The beginning of experience comes first with a rival, one Dorcon, who woos Chloe by disparaging Daphnis’ appearance and (assumed animal) parentage. Irony in latter is (a) that Chloe has the same origin (b) that later Dorcon assumed a wolf-skin with views of raping Chloe, but gets torn by dogs instead. Anyway, the love-debate between Dorcon and Daphnis goes back generically to the shepherd-farmer rivalry in Sumerian that comes into the Cain-Abel story. Dorcon boasts: “I am as white as milk, and my hair is red like grain ready for the harvest” [10]. Daphnis’ rejoinders include exempla: “I was suckled by a goat; so was Zeus” [10]. So they continue their love-meditations—note the set rhetorical piece starting so early. “Can it be,” says Daphnis, “that Chloe tasted some poison when she was going to kiss me?” [11]. Overtones of this go a long way into romantic literature. The next symbol of experience is pirates, who kill Dorcon (sacrificial victim implied in above self-description) and try to carry off Daphnis. Chloe saves him by piping to the cows: the cows rush to one side of the ship, overbalancing it, and jump in the water, setting up a tidal wave that sinks it. Improbable story, but the Gadarene swine archetype may be connected. Anyway, the piratical failure indicates the supremacy of the phase two theme, where Orpheus can still command animals, and by extension the sea. The victory over the pirates also suggests something of the Ovidian story of Bacchus transforming the ship into vines (Metamorphoses bk. 3). This theme develops later, when a gang of youths comes along, get their ship’s rope stolen, and tie up their ship by a vine, which the goats eat. They eat it because they’re driven down to the shore by the youths’ dogs—they’ve come to hunt. Rows follow. Well: the story follows the seasons closely, and gets to the vintage and the festival of Dionysus. An old man called Philetas tells Daphnis and Chloe a story about having met the little boy Eros in his garden who tells him he’s “shepherding Daphnis and Chloe” [21]. Previously he’s appeared to the foster parents in a dream and told them to bring Daphnis and Chloe up as shepherds (and goatherds). The youths beat up Daphnis and carry off Chloe: Daphnis, who is a pretty feeble specimen of a romantic hero, goes to the cave of the nymphs and complains—reproach theme, as in the Lycidas passage. They (the statues) turn

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into real nymphs in a dream and reassure him. Pan now takes charge and causes a “panic” among the youths on their ship. Some of the overtones suggest Ariel’s tricks in The Tempest, especially in the shipwreck. “You have dragged from the altars a maiden of whom Eros wishes to fashion a tale of love” [30]. So they return Chloe, with the beasts forming a chorus. “The ivy on the goats, the wolf howls of the sheep, the pine burgeoning on her head, the fire on the land” [31], etc. are some of the panic elements. So they naturally sacrifice to Pan—the festival of Pan follows on the Dionysus one. Keats.3 Two inset metamorphosis stories, the second the Pan-Syrinx one. The lovers, still innocent––that is, they’re still just fumbling—swear loyalty by their animals—“natural for a girl and for one who thought that goats and sheep were the proper deities for shepherds and goatherds” [35]. A war starts, but doesn’t come to anything—this is a very placid story. The lovers get through the winter somehow, with such rituals as “before she handed him his drink she sipped a little of it and then gave it to him” [38]. Cf. The Moonstone. Well, they see the animals fucking when the spring comes, but it doesn’t give them any ideas. Daphnis is taught what to do by a married woman, who warns him that Chloe is a virgin and will bleed—this terrifies him, so nothing still happens. I suppose bleeding from white flesh may be the red-and-white archetype of Eros, and may account for that curious episode in Parzival where the hero falls into a stupor over drops of blood on the snow. Question of marriage begins: as usual, the lovers haven’t a clue until they’re told in a dream. The ship the youths came in earlier, that had its vine-hawser eaten by goats, drifted off and was smashed against rocks, “but a purse containing three thousand drachmas was spewed up by the waves and lies hidden under seaweed near the cadaver of a dolphin” [48]. The latter stinks—vestigial dragon. Money thrown up from the sea—previously a fishing boat with singing sailors has taught Chloe the principle of the echo, which leads to another metamorphosis inset story where Echo is torn to pieces by animals through Pan’s displeasure. The foster-parents worry about tokens of birth and what they mean, and Chloe’s foster-father muses “Perhaps when he finds his own people {i.e., Daphnis} he will find something of Chloe’s secrets also” [50]. There certainly seems a suggestion in the story that the sexual act between them can’t occur until something else happens. Then Daphnis climbs a high apple tree to get the apple on top of it to give to Chloe. Cherry-tree carol archetype.4 “I could not leave it behind where it would fall to the ground, where a grazing sheep might tread upon it, or a creeping serpent void his slime upon it . . .” [51]. Very strange the way all these shepherd and fisherman pastoral themes wander in and out of the Gospels. Long description of Daphnis’ foster-father’s beautiful garden––Alcinous archetype.5 A jealous cowherd named Lampis tramples all the flowers “like a boar” [54], putting the foster-father’s life in danger because his “master” is coming to

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inspect. Well, that gets put right too. The master arrives—his name is Dionysophantes, which sounds like epiphany of Dionysos. Naturally he turns out to be Daphnis’ father—archetype of the master turning into the father. Meanwhile Daphnis gets tempted to buggery by a pederast in the train of his father and older brother. Foster-father says “the time has come to reveal what I have hidden” [60], and so he produces the talismans. This separates Daphnis momentarily from Chloe, who’s abducted again by the man who trampled the flowers, and who seems a displaced storm or boar archetype. Talismans were designed “not as tokens for recognition but as burial ornaments” [62]. Cf. the gifts of the Magi, myrrh especially. The last abduction of Chloe, which of course doesn’t last very long, reminds me of Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book 6. Anyway, the parents of Chloe duly appear: “Both have we exposed, both have we found; both have been cared for by Pan, the Nymphs, and Eros” [67]. It’s Apollo in The Winter’s Tale. Daphnis and Chloe continue to live a pastoral life; the story ends with their first sexual act together, with the bridal company outside: “when they came near the door they sang out in shrill and harsh tones, as if they were breaking ground with three-pronged forks” [68]. Anyway, Daphnis’ three-pronged fork goes to work, for once: evidently the sex act can’t take place until it’s clear that they’re not actually brother and sister—one of the nasty little habits of recognition scenes. Such beautiful (and helpless) children can’t be the children of such old people as their foster-father’s, it’s said––Sarah archetype repeated in the Gospels (John the Baptist and the traditionally aged Joseph).

2.  Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesiaca (An Ephesian Tale) Ephesiaca is generally dated from the first half of the second century C.E. Frye’s source: Three Greek Romances: Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, An Ephesian Tale by Xenophon, The Hunters of Euboea by Dio Chrysostom. Trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). The page numbers in square brackets are to this edition. References to Xenophon’s Ephesiaca in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 190, 227 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 75

Starts out with Habrocomes as a youth so handsome he gets boastful and says he’s more beautiful than Eros, or that Eros doesn’t exist, or something. Anyway, Eros gets sore. Euphues type of alazon-hero, and curiously similar in situation to a little-known story of George MacDonald, The Wise Woman, about two girls, one a princess and the other a shepherdess. I’ll summarize this later.6 Well, of course there’s an equally beautiful girl, Anthia, hailed by the crowd as either a

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goddess or a replica fashioned by her (Artemis: it’s at a festival of Artemis). So they fall in love, get lovesick and nearly die; the oracle of Apollo is consulted and it summarizes the plot of the story. They marry, then are sent off on a ship to mitigate the threatened woes, but of course the ship is captured by pirates. “The sailors were idle and took to drink; then came drunkenness and the beginning of the oracle’s fulfillment” [81]. Amnesia archetype. Habrocomes has a dream, or vision, of an immense woman in a scarlet robe setting the ship on fire—cf. the life in death of the Ancient Mariner. Pirates do capture the ship when the sailors are drunk, carry off Habrocomes and Anthia and others, and set the ship afire. Cf. the opening of The Tempest. Habrocomes’s tutor is drowned. At least more happens. The pirate chief naturally wants to bugger Habrocomes and his next in command wants to fuck Anthia. However, they have a boss, Apsyrtos, who talks them out of that. The lamentations of hero and heroine (they can’t do much except lament, as usual in these stories) introduce the theme of fatal beauty, i.e., everybody gets an erection from looking at them. So Habrocomes is loved by Manto, daughter of Apsyrtos, who burns with love until she can’t stand it any more: her two forms of relief are (a) to tell somebody else (b) to write a letter to Habrocomes. Habrocomes says no, so Manto accuses him on the Potiphar’s wife principle, and he’s flogged and imprisoned. In prison he has another vision, of his own father, clothed in black, wandering and finally arriving at the prison, freeing him. “Himself he saw then transformed to a horse and galloping over much territory in pursuit of another who was a mare; finally he found the mare and recovered his human shape” [89–90]. The Apuleius scheme goes by in a cloud of dust. Meanwhile Anthia, separated from Habrocomes, incurs the jealousy of, I guess, Manto, who wants to marry her to “the vilest sort, a rustic goatherd” [90], named Lampo. She begs off and Lampo lets her go—theme of invulnerable chastity, I suppose. Apsyrtos learns the truth of the situation with Habrocomes and Manto, lets him out of jail and makes him his steward, which would be fine only Habrocomes thinks of nothing but Anthia. Joseph was less cluttered. Manto has a husband Moeris, who naturally heads straight for Anthia’s genitalia, but Manto orders Lampo to kill Anthia. This of course he can’t do, though the detail about showing her animal’s blood is skipped. Another shipwreck and they land in Cilicia (i.e., Anthia and Lampo), where they’re captured by a band of robbers. These robbers have a pleasant custom of hanging a sacrificial victim from a tree and throwing javelins at it, hitting it being a mark of divine (Ares in this case) favour. So Anthia is strung up as the victim, but rescued by a law-and-order army, whose leader—well, it’s no surprise. Meanwhile Habrocomes falls in with the robber band chieftain, who wants to recruit a new band––Two Gentlemen of Verona archetype. The robber band chieftain is named Hippothoos, and he tells an inset tale about homosexual love: his love however died. “  ‘You, Habrocomes, will see

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your beloved, and someday will recover her; but I can never see Hyperanthes again’ ” [97]. Too bad, but that’s the way inset tales go, in the opposite direction from the main story. Anyway, Anthia, weary of having every man in her presence sniffing her, asks an Ephesian physician to give her a drug that will kill her. Naturally he gives her a drug that only puts her to sleep. So she “dies” on the day of her wedding to—I think it’s Perilaos. Much Ado theme of the mock death of the heroine at a wedding, of course. “There he deposited her in a funerary chamber, having immolated many victims and consumed many garments and other attire in flame” [101]. Well, of course robbers come to the tomb and find her alive: she says “I am consecrated to two deities, Love and Death” [101–2], but they take her to Egypt and sell her there. Habrocomes hears about this and goes to Egypt too. Another Potiphar’s wife theme; this time the wife kills the husband: Habrocomes gets blamed for it and is tied to a cross (they don’t nail in that country). He prays to the river Nile, who sends a wind that knocks over the cross and sends him floating down the river: he’s picked up and sentenced to be burned on a pyre; the Nile floods it over, and the governor inquires what the hell. Note, first, that these devices of miraculous rescue are the stock in trade of saints’ lives which are based on the formulas of such romances as this; second, that the Acts of the Apostles contains the same structure of wanderings around the eastern Mediterranean and a shipwreck. In this story it’s hardly possible to get on a ship that doesn’t get wrecked. Well, Anthia kills another cunt-sniffer, so she’s sentenced to be crucified, which is commuted to being shut up in a pit with two huge mastiffs. The guard who, guess what, wants her, feeds the mastiffs so they don’t hurt her. Daniel in the lion’s den, with the additional point that the Daniel and Joseph stories are structurally closely connected. Lamentation says “if you are alive these woes are nothing” [110]—cf. Pericles. So Habrocomes was carried to Sicily “by a gale” [110] and falls in with an old Spartan who ran away from Sparta with his lady love and was condemned to death in absentia because his parents had other ideas—Midsummer Night’s Dream theme. His lady love had recently died and he’s embalmed her in the Egyptian fashion and continues to live with her corpse. Same device turns up in Rider Haggard’s She. Epiphany of Thanatos-Eros, I suppose. Anthia gets collected by a few more men who want her, though now the pitch is that they’ll leave her alone and just look at her. However this doesn’t satisfy the wife of one of them, who orders a slave to sell Anthia to a brothel keeper. She gets out of that by pretending epilepsy, and then accidentally meets Hippothoos, the robber chieftain who’d originally sentenced her to the mastiff death. In spite of being a most unpleasant character, Hippothoos is the closest friend of the hero, and as soon as he hears that she’s his (Habrocomes’) he renounces his claim, or whatever it is. Two Gentlemen of Verona theme of the supremacy of friendship over love. Earlier in the story two married servants of Habrocomes and Anthia, named

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Leucon and Rhode, have escaped to Rhodes, where they’re living quietly. They set up a pillar inscribed to Habrocomes and Anthia, with their names as donors, and Habrocomes sees it (I forget how he gets from Sicily to Rhodes, probably by a shipwreck, the normal means of transportation). Hippothoos determines to take Anthia to Ephesus, but gets sidetracked in Rhodes, where she cuts off her hair as an offering to the sun-god. Symbolic whatsit. Then a great recognition scene of Habrocomes and Anthia, of the two servants, eventually of Hippothoos. Note the Comedy of Errors theme of leads plus servants—also Rhodes is displaced from Ephesus, which is the real home. The final thanks are to Isis, again as in Apuleius. When Habrocomes and Anthia finally get to bed, they inquire about each other’s sexual fidelity, “and easily did they persuade one another, for such was their desire” [126]. They build a tomb for their parents “who, as it happened, had died by reason of old age and despair” [126], and Hippothoos lives with them with an adopted son. Curious how many Shakespearean themes get into this silly story—Spenserian ones too, such as the Serena sacrifice theme and the unfucked Florimell. Sounds almost as though there were a monomyth after all. Daphnis and Chloe is an upper-hemisphere story: phase 1 with the exposure by noble parents; phase 2 with the innocent brother-sister pastoral love; phase 3 with distant threats of rivals, pirates, and such, returning to phase 1 with the recognition scene. Xenophon at least tries to explore more phases.7

3.  Introduction by Moses Hadas to Three Greek Romances: Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, An Ephesian Tale by Xenophon, The Hunters of Euboea by Dio Chrysostom. Trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). Daphnis and Chloe dates from the second century C.E.; The Hunters of Euboea from the first century C.E. These notes conclude with a brief analysis of Barnabe Riche’s Apolonius and Silla, one of the tales in his Farewell to the Military Profession (1581) which is the source of the plot of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Why these notes are tacked onto the Hadas material is uncertain. Frye owned and annotated an edition of Riche’s Apolonius and Scilla in Elizabethan Love Stories, ed. T.J.B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), but the edition he quotes from below is from Elizabethan Tales, ed. E.J.H. O’Brien (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1937), 125–53. The page numbers in square brackets in paragraph 3 below are to this latter edition. For the single reference to Riche’s tale in Frye’s published work, see “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 52.

Moses Hadas’ introduction speaks of the derivation of love story, intrigue, recognition, and bourgeois atmosphere from New Comedy, of idyllic atmosphere

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from Theocritus (the apple on the top of the tree he says explicates some lines of Sappho), of dilemma situations from the rhetoric books, which stretch from the elder Seneca to Erasmus’ Colloquies and are really romance plots finding their way into the Gesta Romanorum and elsewhere. The implausible plot is intended as showing the caprice of fortune, and the inexorable recognition scene shows the working of providence. He says also that Isis and Diana of the Ephesians were identified and that Xenophon’s tale is propaganda for this goddess, like Apuleius. Cf. Acts again,8 and note that Dio Chrysostom’s dates are 40–120. Hadas naturally doesn’t mention the New Testament parallels, but does mention the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena and the Gospel of Nicodemus. The fact that both Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius were said to be bishops has various explanations, but points to the similarity between these romances and saints’ lives, only with Isis or the Nile as the rescuing deities instead of God. Hadas distinguishes the romance-comedy tradition from the epic-tragedy one by saying that the hero isn’t, as such, in love or happily married, though he may be incidentally; the heroes of romance are motivated entirely by love, and medieval romance descends from this convention. He also notes the Odyssey parallel in the plot. Dio Chrysostom’s Hunters of Euboea is part of an oration, and is based on the ingenu archetype: simple rustic comes to the city and shows how good his life is. Pastoral Utopianism; Dio Chrysostom was, evidently, a Cynic who believed in the simple life. Barnaby Riche’s story of Apolonius and Silla, one of a series of tales in a book called Farewell to the Military Profession (i.e., I’m going to tell stories now: the latent contrast between epic and romance, realism and love tales). Silla, daughter of governor of Cyprus, falls in love with Apolonius who’s visiting there, but he doesn’t give her a tumble. So she gets on a ship and chases him: the captain goes through the fuck-or-else routine: heroine prays, a storm busts the ship, her faithful servant is drowned, but she floats to shore on a chest of the captain’s full of money and clothes. Money from sea theme. She dresses up as a man, calls herself Silvio, the name of her brother who looks just like her, enters into Apolonius’ service, becomes his emissary to a certain Lady Julina; latter falls in love with her; brother wanders by, screws her and gets her pregnant—they never miss, these romance heroes—Lady Julina turns down Apolonius’ suit saying she’s Another’s, and he says “I must then content myself, although against my will, having the law in your own hands, to like of whom you list and to make choice where it pleaseth you” [140]. He’s talking of her social position, but the old mother-right white-goddess business is in the background. So he walks off in high dudgeon and sticks Silla in jail—note how this gets detailed onto Malvolio in Twelfth Night. A long colloquy between Apolonius, Lady Julina and Silla, where Silla’s repeated denials get her into steadily hotter water—trace of calumniated wife in Lady Julina and of ritual death of heroine for both, considering the jail. So, finally, Silla

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exhibits her “breasts and pretty teats” [150] to Lady Julina; eventually the real Silvio turns up, and finis with a double wedding. If I could figure out the interconnection of amnesia and identical twin themes I’d have this tied up. Incidentally, the story begins with the usual moral harrumph, where he says the ground of reasonable love is “desert.”9 Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost calls this a heresy (4.1.21–35), and insists that grace is as important in the religion of Eros as in its Christian counterpart. Note that Shakespeare takes the same Silvius in As You Like It for Lodge’s Montanus.10 Naturally you can’t exhibit pretty teats on the stage, especially when the part is taken by a boy who hasn’t got any. Structure of the clinch-tease: Daphnis and Chloe makes one impatient, because of all the childish fumbling and masturbatory exercises—bathing and the like— but the structure is important. Phase One is the loss of the true parents and the acquiring of the foster ones. Phase Two is the pre-sexual brother-sister locus amoenus transitional one, and Phase Three is the phase of experience, including sexual experience. The point is that we can’t get to Phase Three until Phases One and Two come into alignment: the true parents have to be recognized before the sexual act can really take place.11 Otherwise the hero might actually be screwing his sister. The fear of incest, in other words, is a real structural principle, even if negatively, in romance—hence its importance in the Apolonius story. What’s true of this brief romance is true of the nine hundred odd pages of Tom Jones: Tom can’t get Sophia into his arms until he’s discovered the truth about his origin; heroines in Terence can’t marry the hero until they’ve discovered that they were stolen by pirates in infancy, and so on. Closely connected, in fact part of the same thing, is the theme of anxiety of continuity: hero and heroine can’t get together until the parents consent, or, if the parent is a humor, gets circumvented.

4.  Thomas Lodge, Rosalind or, Euphues’ Golden Legacy Rosalind was written in 1588 and published in 1590. The edition Frye read is unknown. The page numbers in square brackets below are to the edition prepared by Edward Chauncey Baldwin, Rosalynde, or Euphues’ Golden Legacy (BiblioBazaar, 2007). References to Lodge’s Rosalind in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 231, 313 The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 280

Thought of as a kind of sequel to Euphues, with much euphuism in the style: note the similarity to the rhyming prose of the Arabian Nights. Of course a good many interspersed poems, providing a Menippean wash to the structure. In Lodge the usurping Duke (in Lodge the King of France) isn’t converted, but is chased off

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his throne by a revolution of the “twelve peers,” who shift their loyalty to Gerismond, the equivalent of Duke Senior (the other’s called Torrismond, a name that turns up in Beddoes). There seems some Charlemagne reference: there are “twelve peers,” which I suppose suggested Shakespeare’s names of Orlando and Oliver (and the wrestler Charles). The second brother, Fernandyne, also turns up at the end like Jaques de Boys, but is described as a student in Paris—pushing him out of the way is the germ of the Tempest theme.12 Besides the poems, there are set meditations on love, harangues like the old man’s (father of the three sons) at death, and other rhetorical insets. Lodge is very repetitive in his imagery, and he keeps using a labyrinth image combined with hair as net (cf. Rosalind with Rosamond),13 which seems connected with the wandering in forest theme. Also a careful cyclical imagery: usurping king banishes Rosalind “lest her perfection might be the beginning of his prejudice and the hope of his fruit end in the beginning of her blossoms” [59]. David–Jonathan set-up with the two girls; in Shakespeare Celia just sneaks off with Rosalind, whereas in Lodge that’s only a suggested possibility and the king actually banishes both. Shakespeare always plays down the generation clash. Celia says “be patient, Rosalind, for first by thine exile thou goest to thy father” [63]. The equivalent of Colin is Corydon,14 who’s also bound to the cycle: “The next year may mend all with a fresh increase” [76]. Next year country. Town and country mouse topos. The Montanus (Silvius in Shakespeare, reinforcing the woods imagery)— Phoebe strand is very well done in Lodge—that is, he realizes that Phoebe is a narcist female who can’t love anybody outside because she’s already in love with somebody inside, and consequently falls in love with a disguised woman who epiphanizes that. Lodge also has a most interesting sequence of images about shadow and substance, where the disguised Rosalind is the shadow for Rosader (Orlando), and which Shakespeare doesn’t seem to pick up, although his forest of Arden is just as much a dream-world that characters keep falling into. With Phoebe he emphasizes the association of Narcissus and shadow themes. In Lodge Rosader is tied to a post by his elder brother and kept without food, and through “Adam Spencer, an Englishman” [54], he fights his way through his brother’s guests. They escape “knowing full well the secret ways that led through the vineyards” [84]. A lot said about fortune, also “despair is a merciless sin” [86]. Prodigal son structure with the true father still in exile and hidden. A remark of the disguised Rosalind, “if boys might put on their {women’s} garments perhaps they would prove as comely” [96] sounds like a dramatist. Another remark I could use for the Bible book. “Thou speakest by experience, and therefore we hold all thy words for axioms” [104]. Rosader says “the sun and our stomachs are shepherds’ dials” [107], the source of all the time business in Shakespeare. Rosader’s shadow-wooing of Rosalind is also compared to Ixion embracing a cloud, birds pecking Zeuxis’ grapes, etc. Well, as in Shakespeare, there’s a

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mock marriage between Rosader and Rosalind disguised as Ganymede. (In neither writer is the highly unchaperoned arrangement of Celia-Alinda living alone with a male page noticed.) The mock marriage ties up the shadow-substance theme, in an archetype very similar to the Twelfth Night and Riche story one. The cycle of fortune is said to turn for the hero when he comes across the repentant elder brother (Saladyne) asleep beside a lion who’s waiting to see if he’s alive before chewing him up, as lions don’t like carcass meat. Dumb sort of lion. Brothers are reconciled after Rosader rescues Saladyne, with a great deal of concord and “philosophical harmony” [118] imagery. Saladyne says “I go thus pilgrim-like to seek out my brother” [119] and proposes to go on to the Holy Land. Attack of robbers, omitted by Shakespeare, but turning up in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, book 6. Phoebe says there’s nothing personal in turning down Montanus: “I count it as great honor to triumph over fancy as over fortune” [136]. Ganymede warns her that she may “shape yourself to your own shadow, and so with Narcissus prove passionate and yet unpitied” [137]. The moral is don’t neglect your father’s precepts, however boring. The obvious difference is that there’s no Touchstone or Jaques in Lodge—not the slightest hint of them. Perhaps the studious nature of the middle brother accounts for Shakespeare’s giving the name Jaques also to his middle brother. Obviously Touchstone and Jaques are focal points, one in [Duke] Frederick and the other in the [Duke] Senior world. They’re both jesters within those worlds, and both deliver a set speech with seven parts in it, Jaques on the ages of man and Touchstone on degrees of the lie (As You Like It, 2.7.139–66, and 5.4.94–108). Touchstone operates as an outsider from the court: he tries to convict Colin of sin in not knowing court life. But, being really out of his element in Arden, he tries to adapt, seizes a woman more or less at random from another man and marries her. Jaques says it won’t last, and then he walks out: he’s a penseroso figure in an allegro world, of course; Touchstone is evidently the reverse of this, beginning his conversation with a ridicule of a knight who has no honour, and remaining faithful to Rosalind like a greater Fool. He’s a tedious figure in many ways, and yet so are so many of Shakespeare’s jesters, who, if not old and past their fashion in jokes like Feste and Lavache, are in some other way out of touch with the life around them. Touchstone, as his name implies, indicates that in a court like Duke Frederick’s the funniest joke is the simple truth, that a knight has no honour and that duelling codes are constructions of idleness, which is a form of cowardice.

5.  Robert Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time Pandosto was published in 1588. The edition Frye read is uncertain, but a likely possibility is Greene’s text in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Merritt Lawlis (New York:

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Odyssey Press, 1967), a copy of which Frye owned and annotated. The page references in square brackets below and in the notes are to P.G. Thomas’s edition (New York: Duffield and Co., 1907). References to Greene’s Pandosto in Frye’s published work: “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale,” and “Something Rich and Strange,” in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature, CW 20: 188, 223 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 12 Anatomy of Criticism, 214; CW 22: 199 Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, CW 6: 490, 507 The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 280

We think of a fable as having a moral attached at the end, but the tradition is more that of beginning with a general moral reflection, which makes the story itself an exemplum. My statement that the first half of The Winter’s Tale follows Pandosto closely and the second half doesn’t follow it at all15 may have to be modified a little, but is essentially true, I think. There’s no trace of Autolycus; the incest theme is introduced at the end, because Greene’s Pandosto (Leontes) doesn’t really get redeemed: he’s a hideous jerk from start to finish, imprisons Dorastus (Florizel) because he wants Fawnia (Perdita) for himself, and of course she turns out to be his daughter. Whereupon, “to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem, he slew himself” [85]. Both this story and Rosalind end with the phrase “comical event” (Rosalind, 168; Pandosto, 85). Curious how insistent this incest-fear is. Incidentally, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is supposed to be about the paradoxes of reality and fiction. But “reality” in this case is a preposterous melodrama in which a man finds a girl in a brothel who is—guess what—his own daughter. The play is really about the irresistible impact of literary archetypes on a dramatist. Well, Fawnia’s sent off “to surge in the ghastful seas” [21], with a chain around her neck. The shipmen hate their job “and, with a few green boughs, made a homely cabin to shroud it” [22], i.e., the infant. Manger of rejection, slight trace of Bacchus in Ovid, and of course the bower or arbor of the female. The Delphic oracle has the same role here as in Shakespeare. Historically it’s of course impossible that this story could be a plug for the Delphic oracle, but it has exactly the same structure as though it were, and it certainly would have been if it had been written in late Hellenic times. So what it means is the assimilation of other themes originating in folktale to the central imaginative mythical structure. Pandosto “repents,” up to a point, when the oracle pronounces against him: he doesn’t resist it as Leontes does. “I have committed such a bloody fact as, repent I may, but recall I cannot” [30]. That is, discovery of (irrevocable) guilt and of (irreversible) time are part of the same process: the story is subtitled, of course, “The Triumph of Time.” He tries to kill himself, “offer my guilty blood a sacrifice” [31], but is restrained.

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The inevitable shepherd finds the infant and a purse of gold—money from sea again. His wife becomes jealous in a contrapuntal movement to Pandosto’s jealousy which Shakespeare doesn’t bother with. Incidentally a remark by Bellaria (Hermione)—no, it’s only about her—that she’s the daughter of the emperor of Russia is echoed in The Winter’s Tale—I suppose that has something to do with the unfreezing of the statue theme—cf. the Russian masque in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.158 ff.). Egistus (Polixenes) wants his son to marry the daughter of the King of Denmark, and says “Thou seest my white hairs are blossoms for the grave, and thy fresh color fruit for time and fortune” [39]. Cyclical image. Reference to a meeting of farmers’ daughters and Fawnia as “mistress of the feast” [42], the sole basis for the tremendous scene in The Winter’s Tale. Love scenes of Dorastus and Fawnia: Dorastus says “Fawnia shall be my fortune, in spite of fortune” [46], and later “Cupid is a child and Venus, though old, is painted with fresh colors” [52]. Painting image picked up in The Winter’s Tale. So Dorastus disguises himself as a shepherd and “she began half to forget Dorastus and to favor the pretty shepherd whom she thought she might both love and obtain” [56]. Curious how the device of disguise suggests the inner psychological mechanisms of projection. Anyway she recognizes him in the next sentence. Inevitable reference to Zeuxis and his god-damned grapes, which I suppose underlies the use of Romano in The Winter’s Tale. “Beauty’s shadows are tricked up with time’s colors, which being set to dry in the sun are stained with the sun” [57], etc. Suggests not only the painting imagery applied to Hermione but the “no more than were I painted” speech of Perdita (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.101). Another reason, a more obvious one, for the delay of the final clinch in romance is the necessity, if there’s an unequal pairing socially, to provide equivalent social status for the lower one, who is nearly always the female. In other words social continuity has to be arranged for first, simply because there’s nothing more defenceless than a fucked female—this is the realistic basis for Pamela. Resonance in the remark: “then to transport themselves and their treasure into Italy, where they should lead a contented life until such time as either he could be reconciled to his father or else, by succession, come to the kingdom” [59]. Final scene of the father-daughter set-up: here it’s the silly father with daughter a sacrificial object that turns up in Uncle Silas and elsewhere. The frightening of the harmless old shepherd, which seems so vicious and silly in Shakespeare, comes partly from such threats as “thou shall have thine eyes put out and continually, while thou diest, grind in a mill like a brute beast” [82–3]. Don’t know why the Samson archetype is used here, unless Samson has foster-father overtones. That is, the sex act in a society where class distinctions are of primary importance, is tragic, or at least pathetic when the partners to it are socially unequal. To get a comic ending there must be an ancestry-gimmick for the socially inferior partner. Note too that the conventions of most of the literature we know

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are male-dominated: there’s a dialogue in Pamela between Mr. B and a woman who says would you want me to marry your groom? Mr. B says that when the male is socially superior, he raises the woman to his level; when the female is, she’s dragged down to the man’s level.16 Curious the fanaticism of the reaction against the “white goddess” set-up where the woman chooses her lover: of course a woman may choose among suitors, but in most literature there’s a sharp distinction between courting and marriage. In the former the older stereotypes may be recreated or echoed; the latter is “real life,” which in literature always means another archetype. Strindberg’s Miss Julie for the tragedy of unlicensed sex—in fact sexual prudery itself may be really a desire to retain the structured class society. Note that Greene’s phrase about Pandosto’s suicide indicates that he understands his comedy is enclosing a tragedy,17 though he encloses it less skillfully than Shakespeare does, naturally.

6.  Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale The edition of Chaucer Frye used was quite likely the one he owned and annotated: The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Student’s Cambridge edition, ed. F.N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). The Canterbury Tales dates from the end of the fourteenth century. References to The Man of Law’s Tale in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 187, 188, 197 “The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 75 The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 123, 302, 340 Anatomy of Criticism, 49, 199, CW 22: 46, 185 Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism,” CW 23: 32

The story of Constance comes from the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Nicholas Trivet, and is also taken from there by Gower for Confessio Amantis, Book 2. There’s some hostile crack against Gower in the Prologue I don’t get;18 Chaucer evidently doesn’t like, or pretends not to like, the Apollonius story because of its incest overtones. But the tale of Constance is very like the Apollonius story in reverse: in the latter Pericles, to use Shakespeare’s version, is reunited with his wife and daughter; Constance is reunited with her husband and father. Constance sent to the east and the west. The Sultan of Syria falls in love with her by telepathy, from hearing her described, and is willing to turn Christian to get her. Curious technique of interspersed chorus comments throughout this tale, the first complaining that the Roman Emperor, whose daughter Constance is, didn’t consult the stars before sending her off on this mission. Partly a law-

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yer’s story: if you know the law of the heavens you’ll be all right. Anyway, she goes off drizzling, and there’s the passage about the primum mobile buggering everything up [ll. 295–315]. Chaucer himself seems to understand the archetypal aspect of the story: he makes the reversing movement of the primum mobile practically a symbol of life in the fallen world, and the wicked mother of the Sultan, who plots to murder everybody in sight because of the Christian business, is compared to Satan as temptress of Eve. Most of these archetypal parallels are from the Bible, and most of them are Chaucer’s additions to his source. Well, the sultan’s mother does her stuff [ll. 323 ff.], and Constance is sent out to sea in an open boat. Why wasn’t she killed? Well, who kept Daniel from the lions? [l. 473]. Why wasn’t she drowned? Well, who didn’t drown Jonah? [l. 486]. Where’d she get fed? Well, who fed Mary of Egypt? [l. 500]. These are Chaucer’s additions. I think he has Revelation 12 in mind. “The white Lamb, that hurt was with a spere” [l. 459]. There’s a lot of red-and-white imagery, and a lot of deadly pale faces in the imagery. Anyway, the ship runs aground in Northumberland, where the king is heathen, though the wife of the constable who rescues her is Christian. King’s name is Alla. Well, another wicked stepmother (mother-inlaw) turns up, who steals letters from a messenger and rewrites them. One says Constance’s child (she’s married to Alla) is a monster; the other, purportedly from Alla, says get rid of the bitch. The perverting of the word or message is important—cf. again the Hymn of the Soul. Before this Constance is accused of murdering the constable’s wife (Hermengild), but she gets out of that when her accuser is struck dead by a God who wants to get on with the story. Anyway, Constance goes to sea again, with her child this time, whose name is Maurice and who isn’t a monster but looks just like her. The wind steers her again through the straits of Gibraltar, and she meets her father the Roman Emperor coming back in triumph from Syria, where he’s been buggering the heathen. He recognizes her in Maurice, but not her, evidently. Meanwhile Alla comes to Rome to be made a Christian, and the inevitable recognition scene follows. Husband and father, as I said. Husband soon dies, presumably of the overpowering odour of Constance’s chastity. “There is no man koude brynge hire to that prikke” [l. 1029]. Evidently this story is closely related to a folktale called The Maiden without Hands. She’s married by the king despite her mutilation, and usually gets her hands back. Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles was following the same formula in my youth.19 The change of letter announcing birth to say it’s the birth of a monster is a feature. Look up Emaré.20 A related folktale is Our Lady’s Child, where a girl is struck dumb by the Virgin (or by a wicked witch stepmother) for denying that she has looked into a forbidden room, which she has. Clue here to the silent girl in Peveril of the Peak that’s puzzled me. She gets her children stolen, and returned when she confesses her guilt. Casting off mother and child in open boat

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and leaving a bloody knife in the heroine’s bed, both in Chaucer, are frequent motifs. All this from Stith Thompson (121–3). A blind man receives his sight in the story: this repeats the Sultan’s love of Constance from report, both suggesting a vision beyond vision. Gower is said to be closer to Trivet,21 though still quite free: Chaucer rejects one detail, of the child Maurice being sent to the Emperor instead of Alla’s going himself, which may be either Gower or Trivet. The point is that medieval poets telling the same story seem to have an ideal structure of the story in their minds, to which the version they’re giving seems to them to conform most closely. Here the analogy with, e.g., sonata forms breaks down—not that it really is an analogy. The Roman Emperor in the story was Eastern Emperor only, but in his reign the Christian mission under Augustine was sent to England, hence probably Northumberland. In Chaucer there are a lot of lovely lines about the sea—almost every reference to the sea is resonant. Incidentally, Ben Jonson is the link between Renaissance fiction and Shakespearean romantic comedy on the one hand, and nineteenth-century sentimental romance on the other. His late plays are not “dotages,” but they’re too elaborate to go down well on the stage, and they are really sketches for novels of the more highly structured nineteenth‑century type. Hence Jonson’s close affinity for print, as in publishing the 1616 Folio: his conception of “nature,” too, indicates a later view of it than a successful dramatist like Shakespeare could afford to have.

7.  Heliodorus of Emesa, An Aethiopian History An Aethiopian History dates from the third century C.E. Frye owned two copies of Heliodorus’s romance, both annotated: An Aethiopian History, trans. Thomas Underdowne (London: Chapman & Dodd, 1924) and Ethiopian Story, trans. Walter Lamb (London: Dent, 1961). Frye quotes from the Underdowne translation in The Secular Scripture. In the present notes he quotes Underdowne for book 1. The remainder of the quotations are from Lamb’s translation. The page numbers in square brackets from Lamb are preceded by an “L.” Quotations not cited in square brackets are Frye’s own from an unknown source. References to Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian History in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 183, 187, 197, 198, 224 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 48–9, 55, 75, 76,    82, 94–5, 381 “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 27: 368

The first book starts off with an extraordinarily vigorous in-the-middle scene of

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pirates coming upon a battle on the beach, whereby everybody except Theagenes and Chariclea are dead. In the fifth book we learn that Theagenes and Chariclea got two bands to fight, and Theagenes attacked the second in command while Chariclea sniped with arrows and killed most of them. Anyway, the pirates find Theagenes and Chariclea in a Pieta position, and decide that although Chariclea is beautiful enough to be a goddess, she ain’t one, because no goddess would “with so much affection kiss a dying body” [3]. The pirates carry both off, Chariclea insists on Theagenes’ going and naturally emits ow-oos about getting fucked when she won’t even let Theagenes do it. They run across a fellow-captive named Cnemon, who tells an inset tale about himself which follows the Phaedria archetype—in fact Hippolytus and Phaedria are referred to as the archetypes. His father’s second wife loves him, then accuses him, and the mob (i.e., democratic justice in Athens is the same as a revolutionary tribunal) howls for him to be exiled. When he’s away, the wife’s vagina gets so itchy she can’t stand it, so Thisbe, her slave, who’s already set up one badger game, sets up another, a variant of the old bed trick, and the husband catches her at it (she’s promised Cnemon, but naturally doesn’t get him). So she dies, and the father wants the son recalled. Chariclea pretends that she’s Theagenes’ sister to the pirate captain, Thyamis, Abraham’s old trick in Egypt, though with a different purpose. It’s one of a long series of lies and deceptions she goes through to keep her cunt covered. The pirates hide in a cave, very elaborately described, and Chariclea is hidden there too, “burying her in a manner alive, and consigning the brightest of human forms to darkness and obscurity” [27]. This is because the pirates are attacked by law-and-order types. Barbarians, “when they despair of their own safety, they are accustomed to destroy those who are most dear to them; either wildly imagining that they shall enjoy their company after death; or thinking that by so doing they shall deliver them from the injuries and insults of the enemy” [28]. The pirates live in some kind of kitchen-midden place in the delta of the Nile, and the book ends by setting the island on fire. When Chariclea is lying she says she and Theagenes were devoted to the service of Diana and Apollo respectively: sun and moon theme, important later. Also she’s at first mistaken for Diana-Isis. I think it’s in this book that Thisbe gets killed in the dark in the cave (which is described in a way to connect it with Egyptian tombs and tomb-robbers).22 Theagenes is descended from Achilles, but Ulysses turns up later in a dream as one of the oracular forces, and illustrates how the Odyssey is really Ulysses’ response to the magical charms of Penelope’s web, eventually drawing him home while she lies and stalls to the suitors. I can’t figure out how Thisbe gets into the act, nor does it matter, but she does, and is confused with the heroine in a way that suggests the polarization of females we get so much of later. I’ll have to get a better summary of the goddam story than I have here.23 I think the first five books go round in a circle, ending

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where the first one begins, but I’m not sure that even that gets the whole number of complications. It would be interesting though if the total structure were binary, there being ten books. Very lively in medias res opening, battle just ended, Chariclea bending tenderly over Theagenes in a pieta pose. She looks like a goddess, and awes everybody with her chastity, but the Egyptian brigands say “how could a deity kiss a corpse with such fervid passion?” [L3]. A second group of brigands, commanded by Thyamis (as Esau figure, son of a prophet, done out of inheritance by younger brother). Theagenes and Chariclea are put in charge of Cnemon, who tells an inset tale on the Hippolytus model (explicitly mentioned as archetype; the Biblical one of course is Potiphar’s wife, and it’s said the Testament of Joseph version of the story owes something to Hippolytus, which incidentally was a story Euripides invented). Thisbe, a little tart who specializes in setting up badger games, tells Cnemon he’ll see his mother-in-law’s paramour in there, so he goes and it’s his father, so he gets banished from the city (Athens; the popular assembly acts like a revolutionary tribunal in the Terror). Then Cnemon is told the rest of the story: Thisbe sets up another badger game, husband catches faithless wife getting laid by somebody she thought would be Cnemon—the old friend the bed trick. In intervals Chariclea ow-oos and threatens suicide––a latent sense threatening or bargaining with the gods or fortune. Wonder drug heals wounds—herb, actually; extraordinary how the wonder herb runs through romance down to Zanoni. The inset tale has something of the function of the Antiochus theme in the Apollonius story. Thyamis then says he’s going to marry Chariclea; Chariclea goes along with a long lie about herself and her “brother” Theagenes and manages to stand up his cock: “her his assent.” Another band of bandits attacks this bunch and Chariclea is imprisoned in a cavern with their treasure: modulation of grave robber decoys (this is Egypt). “Consigned Chariclea, brightest of human beauties, to night and darkness” [L28]. Thyamis’ bunch are defeated and their village or whatever set on fire, so he decides to kill Chariclea. “It is hard to withhold the barbarian temperament from any course on which it has set out: when it despairs of its own survival, it is wont first to destroy all beloved beings, either fondly believing that it will rejoin them after death, or wishing to rescue them from the danger of outrage at the enemy’s hands” [L29–30]. This is the passage referred to in Twelfth Night (5.1.121). So he buggers off and sticks her, only it’s Thisbe, and he’s captured. Extraordinary number of topoi in this first book. Book II: Theagenes comes to the cave, sees Thisbe’s body lying on its face, gives out with ow-oo about his luckless and fuckless Chariclea. Being a hero in a romance, he waits till he’s through yowling before he turns the dame over. Cnemon recognizes her—the fact that she must resemble Chariclea, at least from behind, implies an undisplaced pattern where they’re closely related, Thisbe a demonic twin. Cnemon is sent off to look for Thyamis—don’t ask me why—and

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finds Calasiris, the guardian of Theagenes and Chariclea. Calasiris tells Cnemon a long story about how he got to be the guardian, half of it relayed second-hand from Charicles (confusing damn name), priest of Apollo at Delphi. Charicles tells him how he discovered the exposed Chariclea and took her off to Greece—wait a minute, he didn’t discover her, that’d be too straight—he talks to a man who did, and hands over the usual talismans of recognition. Book III is all about the rites of Neoptolemus at Delphi and how Theagenes comes and falls in love with Chariclea and vice versa. Interesting that all the Courtly Love mechanism about love at first sight is all here––what the troubadours added, I guess, was the lady as lord, a static figure the lover revolves around. Note that love has to be a real sickness in romance so that we can get themes of death-and-rebirth and doctors and such into the archetypes. Long descriptions, showing the affinity of this form with ekphrasis and detailed accounts of pictures and processions and such—note that an engraved stone on Chariclea’s girdle becomes a part of her beauty. In Book II there’s an oracle summarizing the rest of the plot––these oracles and prophecies are important as, in a sense, stabilizing the design, the dianoia or mythos as a simultaneous form. Well, in Book IV Chariclea falls in love with Theagenes, who isn’t the man her guardian Charicles designs for her, so there’s twenty pages of tee-hee about love-sickness to displace the mother-right setup that Chariclea is bloody well gonna have who she likes. It’s in this book that the beginning of the total action is indicated: mother an Ethiopian who concentrates on a picture of Andromeda at the moment of orgasm and so (it appears to be so: men will believe anything whatever about childbirth, breast feeding and menstruation) she gives birth to a white baby. (Chariclea’s tendency to lie so much that nobody comes to believe anything she says may be inherited from her mother.) Calumniated mother theme then enters: nobody’s gonna believe it, so the child is exposed, with the talismans including an Ethiopian script about her. It’s also in Book IV where she says what I quote in the second lecture.24 Book V takes us to the point at which the action began in Book I, and we learn that most of the brigands on both sides got picked off by Chariclea sniping with bow and arrows. Cnemon and Calasiris, respectively listening to and telling this story, then discover Chariclea in the house––Cnemon thinks it’s Thisbe, so there really is a connexion between them being insisted on. “This recognition scene, enacted as though in a drama” [L118]. Calasiris has a dream (he’s going on with his story which got rudely interrupted, I think), where Ulysses appears to him and says he’s annoyed because Calasiris sailed past Ithaca without getting anything. Interesting and significant that the Odyssey archetype gets so explicitly introduced––there are several of these recalls, like the Hippolytus one. The action leads at the end of Book V to the point at which it began in Book I, just halfway through. The total action, incidentally, runs from the mother’s (first? probably)

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orgasm to the daughter’s. I should have underlined total, not action. “No lapse of time could avail to erase from their souls the marks of identity made by love” [L114]. Check identity in the Greek. The fight the story opens with is over Chariclea, of course, who always has a Briseis role with the wrong guys. Fatal beauty theme, often referred to by her in her ow-oos. One of these latter, in Book VI, includes “You have drawn out my drama to such an inordinate length that its story transcends all that are told on any stages in the world” [L149]. In other words prose romance busts through drama and creates a bigger form. Most of this book is the sorceress story, whose son, animated by her, speaks of Chariclea (who’s listening and wants to turn the situation to her own advantage) as “wandering the world over, one may say, in search of her beloved” [L158]. (Above in Book VI, Cnemon thinks Chariclea is Thisbe because he hears her voice.) Book VII resolves the conflict over the prophet’s job between the two sons of Calasiris, the rightful heir being Thyamis. This takes the scene to Memphis, where the wife of the Persian governor (the story’s laid in the days of the Persian empire) goes into a she-who-must-be-obeyed act, falls in love with Thyamis, flogs him and ill-treats him, has a wicked confidante, and so on. Her name’s Arsace. “At this point either some divine Power or Fortune in control of human affairs appended a new scene to this tragic performance by introducing as a counter-interest, the opening of another drama” [L165]. This is the death of Calasiris. He and Chariclea are disguised as beggars, so that stupid bugger Thyamis doesn’t recognize her and gives her a whack when she comes near him—this theme recurs in Shakespearean romance. Chariclea wriggles and twists as usual, though in the resulting complications there are suggestions that her policy of always lying is a bit short-sighted. Book VIII starts a war between Hydaspes, King of Ethiopia and actual father of Chariclea, and the Persian governor of Egypt. The wicked confidante, or somebody, drinks poison intended for Chariclea, Chariclea is accused of putting out the poison and is sentenced to be burnt alive, but the flames can’t touch her. “Always careful to carry secretly on her person the necklaces that were exposed with her, she then fastened them within her clothing about her loins, so as to have them upon her, in a sort, as her burial ornaments” [L204]. “Her beauty shone forth in the bright glare of the blaze, so that she seemed like a bride in a nuptial chamber of fire” [L205]. Oracle (previously given) about her ending up in Ethiopia is interpreted as meaning Hades—interesting identification of archetypes, and there are several associations with Ethiopia and a shadow-world. Cf. Homer’s innocent Ethiopians, and the Paradise tradition that runs through Ariosto and Rasselas. Well, Arsace hangs herself, there’s a literal quotation from Hippolytus again. “Troglodytes” fight on the Ethiopian side. The battle goes on and Hydaspes wins, treating the losers with great generos-

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ity, but capturing Theagenes and Chariclea and reserving them for human sacrifice. “The Ethiopians are accustomed to employ gold for all purposes which with other peoples are served by iron” [L219]. Cf. Utopia. Egyptians holding festival of the Nile, which is a god they worship. “To the initiated authority pronounces that the earth is Isis and the Nile Osiris, bestowing these names on material things. Thus the goddess longs for the god in his absence, and rejoices in his union with her; when he disappears she weeps again and detests Typhon {here whirlwinds and dust storms} as a hostile power” [L227]. Hints of deeper mysteries he won’t tell. Letters of Nile, as numbers, make 365. Hydaspes says “But all these proud distinctions belong not to Egypt but to Ethiopia; for in fact this river, or god according to you, and all the river monsters {crocodile turns up earlier in the story}, are sent along here by Ethiopia, and to her you should rightly give your worship, as being to you the mother of the gods” [L238]. Counterpoint with the action of the story, moving up the Nile from the Delta where it begins. (Foreground action, that is.) Theagenes says to Chariclea that Hydaspes is obviously her real father, so maybe she might try telling the truth for once, but Chariclea demurs. “A plot, whose beginnings have been laid out by the deity with many complications, must needs be brought to its conclusion through detours of some length” [L240]. This gives her wriggling an architectus quality. “Tokens of identity.” King of course thinks he might have had a daughter like that. Cf. Leontes and Perdita. “This dream-born daughter of mine” [L242]. Book X. The Gymnosophists are idealized: they say that human sacrifice is nonsense, but the king is dazed by superstition. Persinna (the actual mother of Chariclea) has a dream of the our-Perdita-is-found type. A gymnosophist, Sisimithres, appears at the end of the story as a Jaques-de-Boys figure, resolving the final recognition. He says to the queen “A limb of your body, or a link in the monarchy, has been lost; but Destiny intends to restore at that moment the missing part” [L246]. The king is the high priest of the sun, the queen the high priestess of the moon; Theagenes is to be sacrificed to the sun and Chariclea to the moon. Various comments on the futility of Chariclea’s keeping herself unfucked all this while only to get sacrificed. Cf. the Diana-votary business in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Images of the semidivine Memnon, Perseus and Andromeda, whom the sovereigns of Ethiopia regard as the founders of their line” [L247]. The way Chariclea got born suggests that she’s a repeating Andromeda archetype, Andromeda being also a sacrificial victim. There’s a third sacrifice of animals, to be made to Dionysus. Horses for the sun, oxen for the moon. Theagenes and Chariclea are “first fruits of the war.” They put Theagenes and Chariclea on one of those virgindetecting gadgets that romances are so full of, and natch they’re pure, although Chariclea, who’s approaching the apex of her gyre of lies, insists that he’s had her. Well, the recognition scene approaches. “Look carefully, and see if Andromeda is not unmistakably manifest in the girl as in the picture.” Cf. Portia and Hesione

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in The Merchant of Venice. Chariclea has a black ring around her arm. Persinna is satisfied, but of course there’s this little matter of the sacrifice. “Whether it is in truth the pleasure of the gods that she should be given to me and at the same time taken away—a blow which I suffered once before at her birth, and which I suffer now on her discovery––this I cannot tell” [L258]. Closed circle would be the tragic version of the story, and the tragic version would be a truncation of the comedy. Well, Chariclea gets off by popular demand. “Quietly she crept on in pursuit of her purpose” [L260], i.e., Theagenes has still to be got off. Theagenes captures a runaway bull (slight Cretan echo) and wrestles with and defeats an Ethiopian giant: cf. As You Like It. At this point Charicles appears (don’t ask me how he got there) and denounces Theagenes as the abductor of Chariclea. He establishes one of the main larger elements in the design; she was at Delphi, and “he has profaned your national god, Apollo, who is the same as the Sun, and his temple” [L274]. In other words Theagenes and Chariclea are connected with Apollo and Diana, and this sacrifice is the demonic counterpart of the fact. This brings the recognition to the final point, Sisimithres being its agent: “he was still waiting for the revelation from on high to come full circle” [275]. King still says how about our sacrifice; Sisimithres says the gods don’t want one, as they “have sent up here from the depths of Greece {note map turned upside-down} her foster-father, as though dropped from the sky” [L276]. King gives in and says O.K., let them fuck: “I sanction their union under the ordinance for the begetting of children” [L277]. End of foreground and total action; the latter began, as I say, in the orgasm that produced another Andromeda instead of a black baby. Chariclea has three fathers, one black: the real one, Charicles, and Calasiris. Cf. Perdita in A Winter’s Tale. Father of origin, father of opposite point (the “depths” of Greece and the oracle of Apollo), father of wandering quest. Next come the various suitors, including Thyamis, son of Calasiris and killer of the demonic shadow-figure Thisbe. His relation to Chariclea is a displaced brother and fearof-incest one. Heliodorus was said to be a Christian who preferred acknowledging his book to keeping his bishopric (Montaigne). There’s nothing Christian about him, nor about Achilles Tatius either, who was also said to be a bishop. But the point is they practiced a kind of story which is under the primary conjunction of Dove and Virgin, whether it’s Christian or pagan. Chariclea’s rescue from the pyre set to burn her {it’s given some kind of “natural” explanation, I think, I can’t find now} is the kind of thing that happens in saints’ lives. Also the fact that only marriage (to the man the girl wants only) or virginity are tolerable alternatives. Similarly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the setting is supposed to be Greek-pagan. Note the frequency of the sixteen-year interval, jumping quickly from birth to sexual maturity, used in A Winter’s Tale. Daphnis and Chloe, etc. In the Ninus ro-

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mance Ninus (apparently) has conquered half the world at seventeen and wants his girl; society says girls shouldn’t marry until 15, but hell, they can conceive at 14, can’t they? Romeo and Juliet.

8.  Apollonius of Tyre Popular during the Middle Ages, Apollonius of Tyre may have been translated from an ancient Greek text. ­The earliest reference to the work in Latin is in the sixth century. The edition Frye used is uncertain, but it may have been the one in the Gesta Romanorum. He owned and annotated the translation by Charles Swan and edited by Wynnard Hooper (New York: Dover, 1959). However, the one passage Frye quotes from Apollonius––“the price of my virginity”––does not appear in the Swan translation. It comes rather from the translation of Gerald N. Sandy in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B.P. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 760. References to Apollonius of Tyre in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 184, 188, 197, 204, 215 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 31, 34–6, 37,    47, 75

Apollonius Prince of Tyre is a Latin romance, probably dating from the third century A.D. It may or may not have a Greek origin. The essential theme is so like the Clementine Recognitions that the author was influenced by an earlier form of or source of it. We start with Antiochus of Antioch, who rapes his own daughter: her nurse urges her not to kill herself but go along with it—cf. Ford’s Pity play.25 Gets rid of suitors by proposing a riddle about his incest to them: if they solve it they’re beheaded on the plea that they got it wrong; if they don’t they’re beheaded anyway. Apollonius solves the riddle; Antiochus says he’s wrong but will give him a respite of thirty days; Apollonius naturally gets the hell out of there, back to Tyre. Silly damn story: the only reason for it is the archetypal one: it’s the old mother-right girl choosing her lover by ordeal, usurped by nasty old daddy, and hence the demonic analogy of what it should be. Antiochus’ steward Thaliarchus goes to Tyre, finds Apollonius has scrammed, goes back to tell Antiochus. Antiochus has Apollonius hunted over land, forest, mountain, but doesn’t find him. Helicanus, a good guy from Tyre, meets Apollonius in Tarsus, warns him of his danger and the reason for it (i.e., everybody knows about Antiochus’ incest). Tarsus can’t protect Apollonius because they’re starving with famine: Apollonius brings them 100,000 pecks of grain from Tyre. This makes no sense either except archetypally: Apollonius here is being the young prince of fertility coming from over the sea. Perry, in his book on Classical

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romance,26 thinks this story was originally Latin because there’s such an obvious confusion of sources in it: contaminatio, he says, is Latin and not Greek. O.K., but there are two kinds of narrative movement, the “and then” kind and the “hence” kind. The former is the primitive one; it jumps from motif to motif, so suddenly that you’re sometimes even expected to forget the previous stage, as the end of Gonzalo’s commonwealth forgot the beginning (The Tempest, 2.1.161 ff.). Pericles is a kind of experiment in “and-then” narrative, seeing how far one can go with it on the stage. The Book of Job is an “and-then” folktale, the two halves separated by an enormous “hence” dialogue. The “hence” is in reverse, or what-the-hell; but even so there’s a logic holding it together. The return to the folktale at the end is an “and-then” jump that leaves us blinking, as though we’d wakened up from a dream. Perry also notes that the “respite” is only to shift the victim-figure from the daughter to the suitor and motivate his travels. Apollonius is an Adonis-figure who’s first involved with an incest situation and is then hunted over the world. Antiochus I of Syria actually did fall in love with his stepmother (Lucian, De Dea Syria; Plutarch, Life of Demetrius), and his father Seleucus I surrendered her to him. The hideous death of Antiochus described in Pericles recalls that of Antiochus IV in 2 Maccabees, so that link’s there. Well, Apollonius is shipwrecked (an original touch) at Apollonia (one of the five towns of Pentapolis, but the coincidence of name is curious). Befriended by a fisherman, who gives him half his cloak. Gets in favor with king (Archestrates) by playing ball with him and then massaging him. King’s daughter comes in, plays the lyre; Apollonius says she needs more teaching and plays it himself extraordinarily well, so he becomes her music teacher. (Not named in the original romance; Lucina in Twine).27 Cf. later comedies like The Taming of the Shrew where the hero sneaks in to the heroine disguised as a music teacher. David complex. King meets three suitors of his daughter who say what the hell. Gets them to write out their offers and tells Apollonius to take them in to his daughter, who’s lying in bed and thinks it’s funny he should bust in. She says she wants the man who’s been shipwrecked. As Perry says, the Pentapolis episode follows the Aeneas-Carthage-Dido formula, and the silly business about the letters and such shows derivation from a mime, or perhaps play. I suppose some Nausicaa echoes too, and the fisherman (expanded into three in Pericles) is interesting. Apollonius then hears from a Tyrian that Antiochus is dead and he’s his heir, king of Antioch. This is an utter mystery, as there’s been no hint of this; it indicates a more fucked-up connexion with the daughter of Antiochus than the story itself tells us about. That is, Apollonius must be in some way the son of Antiochus or son-in-law, or in some way too close to him just to get beheaded. So he sets sail for Antioch (presumably) when wife’s nearly popped the pup. Detained by adverse winds; wife delivered of child, dies, to all appearances, body set adrift

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in a chest. Chest drifts ashore at Ephesus near the house of a doctor (lot of money enclosed in it too: treasure from sea theme). Brings her to life, adopts her as his daughter, and makes her a priestess of Diana. Apollonius then changes his mind and goes to Tarsus, where he deposits his (female) infant with his old friends Stranguillio (Cleon in Shakespeare) and wife Dionysias. Calls infant Tarsia, after Tarsus, I suppose. Says he won’t cut hair or nails until she’s married, and buggers off to Egypt, where he stays fourteen years. And all the time he’s supposed to be the heir of Antiochus. Note time gap, along with a lot of other gaps, including a credibility gap. Tarsia is well looked after in childhood, but her old nurse (Lycoris) doesn’t trust her foster-parents and tells her to embrace her father’s statue in Tarsus (they set one up because of the food parcel) and claim their support if anything goes wrong. Dionysias gets jealous because Tarsia is prettier than her daughter, so orders her steward to murder Tarsia: he grabs her at her nurse’s tomb, gives her a moment to say her prayers, chorus of pirates turns up, carry her off; he goes back and says he done it. Tarsia is sold at Mitylene to a pimp who sticks her in a brothel. Series of customers: everyone gets talked out of screwing her, and comes across with a gift instead, which she hands to the pimp as “the price of my virginity.” Pimp tells his steward to screw her; he’s talked out of it too, and she supports him by giving concerts. Protected by a wealthy nobleman named Athenagoras, who was her first alleged customer. In Euripides’ lost play Alcmaeon, summarized in Apollodorus, Alcmaeon has a son and a daughter, gives them to Creon king of Corinth to bring up; Creon’s wife sells girl as slave because she’s too pretty, Alcmaeon buys her own daughter and keeps her as a handmaid. Here’s the incest theme latent in this story also, between Pericles and Marina. The series of customers that retire baffled also looks like a farce scene taken from some mime. The innocent virgin in the brothel is in Xenophon of Ephesus, in Seneca’s Controversiae (vestal virgin there: it’s a stock rhetorical piece) and in several saints’ lives, notably St. Agnes. Pagan-Christian identity again. The story-teller is badly confused about the extent of Stranguillio’s complicity in the attempted murder. Apollonius returns from Egypt to Tarsus, inquires after his daughter, and is told she’s dead. He sails off to Mytilene and hides himself in the depths of the hold, giving orders not to be disturbed. Tells sailors he’d break their legs if they disturb him. Athenagoras goes down to him, with no luck, then sends Tarsia. She sings him a song telling her story, but he doesn’t listen; he tries to get rid of her with money, and when she persists whacks her so the blood gushes out her nose. She laments her ill fortune again, and this time he does listen. Displaced brothel and sublimated rape. She hauls him out of the night-world and marries Athenagoras. (During the scene with him, by the way, she propounds a number of riddles to Apollonius, all of which he promptly solves.)

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Then Apollonius has a dream (doubtless sent by a god who’s getting tired of the story) to go to Ephesus and tell his story to the chief priestess in the temple of Diana there. She being his wife, that fixes that up. Apollonius retires to his fatherin-law’s kingdom of Pentapolis, which latter wills to him and wife when he dies. Apollonius then reigns for 74 years over Antioch and Tyre, after showering gold on everybody in the good-guy category, including the fisherman, and getting the mob to stone the Tarsus couple to death. Most students of folktales try to compare a bunch of “and then” versions to try to find a “hence” version, one that makes logical sense. My method is rather to reduce “hence” stories to their “and then” sequence of archetypes. Note how the teleological plot of New Comedy doesn’t have it all its own way in romance: you have things like this Apollonius story going the other way. Pericles, as I’ve said, is a deliberate experiment in “and-then” technique, or looks like one. And Eliot’s The Waste Land, although the explicit echoes are from The Tempest, is actually a Pericles poem, and that’s one reason why it’s written discontinuously, in a series of “and then” episodes.

9.  Parthenius of Nicaea, Love Romances Parthenius flourished during the first century B.C.E. Frye is using the Loeb Classics edition: Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, trans. George Thornley and J.M. Edmonds; Parthenius, Love Romances, trans. S. Gaselee: Loeb Classical Library, Volume 69 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916). Page numbers in square brackets are to this edition.

I. Lyrcus. Hero who unsuccessfully hunts for Io; marries Hilebia; no pup; asks oracles; is told he’ll get one on first woman he screws; decoyed by friend and screws daughter Hemithea (variation of bed trick); gives belt as talisman; goes home; father-in-law exiles him; war results, evidently Lyrcus wins; yahs and yahs later son turns up and becomes next king. Ho hum. II. Polymela. Daughter of Aeolus, seduced by Ulysses, threatened by father but married off to her brother (Aeolus had six sons and six daughters and married them all to each other). III. Evippe. Seduced by Ulysses after Odyssey story over; son called Euryalus; when grown mother sends him to Ulysses with talisman tokens; Penelope intercepts them, persuades Ulysses to kill his son. From a tragedy of Sophocles. Ulysses is later killed by his son. IV. Oenone. Daughter of the river-god of Troad; loves Paris, who deserts her for Helen; tells him she can cure his wound if he gets one; he does and sends

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for her; she sends back stiff answer saying haw-haw better send for Helen, but leaves herself; message gets there first; Oenone finds he’s given up and died, owoos and suicides. Slight resemblance to the end of Tristram. V. Leicippus. Falls in love with his sister; mother connives at it and everything is rosy till father gets suspicious; he puts a private dick on them, interrupts a jug, stabs girl thinking she’s seducer, is killed by Leicippus, who’s exiled. VI. Pallene. Beautiful girl: father makes ordeal for suitors of wrestling with him; kills everybody who loses; when he gets old changes policy and two suitors turn up, Clitus and Dryas. Girl falls in love with Clitus, her male nurse learns this, bribes someone to undo the pins of Dryas’ chariot; Dryas is killed; father learns this, builds huge pyre for Dryas, proposes to kill Clitus as sacrifice to shade; heaven sends cloudburst; marriage. VII. Hipparinus. Homosexual love affair; tyrant of the city, who’s a rival, gets killed by lover and caught by getting fouled up with sheep with their feet tied. Said to be parallel to the story of Harmodius and Aristogiton. VIII. Herippe. Woman married to Xanthus who was carried off by a Celt during the raid into Ionia (275 B.C.). Xanthus followed her to Marseilles and proposed ransoming her. Her Celt master proves very reasonable but Herippe finds Xanthus has still more money and advises Celt to kill Xanthus, for whom she feels nothing. Celt is horrified, takes Xanthus to frontier with Herippe, proposes a sacrifice, tells Herippe to hold victim, cuts off her head instead, explains why to Xanthus and gives him his money back. IX. Polycrite. Maiden in temple of Artemis in Naxos, which is besieged; Diognetus in the besieging army loves her; she says he has to betray his army to get her; he does; he’s killed in the resulting melee; the Naxians are so eager to do her honour “they pressed on her such a quantity of head-dresses and girdles that she was overcome by the weight and quantity of the offerings, and so was suffocated” [289]. Burned on same pyre as Diognetus. X. Leucone. Woman married to Cyanippus, who hunts all day and is too tired to fuck at night; this gets her down and she decides to sneak off after him to see what he likes to do so much instead; his hounds find her and tear her to pieces. Cyanippus builds pyre, burns her, dogs and himself on it. “She girded up her skirts above the knee” [291], like the statues of Artemis, which implies a less simple-minded origin for the story. XI. Byblis. Brother-sister incest. She’s changed into an owl, or a river, or something. XII. Calchus. Loves Circe, who doesn’t love him and changes him into a swine (drives him mad and into the pig-sties, which is different). XIII. Harpalyce. Daughter of Clymenus, who loves her but allows her suitor Alastor to marry her, then reverts to his obsession, chases them, grabs the girl

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back and lives openly with her. She kills her younger brother, cuts him in pieces and serves him up in a pie to the old boy. Changed into a bird at her own request; Clymenus suicides. XIV. Antheus. Said to be from Aristotle. Youth involved in a Phaedria setup with a woman who throws a partridge, or a gold cup, down a well and makes him go after it, then rolls a big stone on him, then hangs herself. XV. Daphne. Loved by Leucippus, who puts on women’s clothes and joins the gang; they bathe and strip; he gets found out and stabbed to death with their spears. XVI. Laodice. Loves Acamas; king hears of it and puts her to bed with him, telling him she’s one of the royal concubines. XVII. Periander. Good ruler who became a tyrant because his mother loved him and kept getting him into bed with her; he got tired of never seeing or hearing a woman who seemed to fuck pretty well, so he got a light put in; attempt to kill her restrained by a divine apparition, but he went nuts. XVIII. Neaera. Got her husband’s best friend to sport with tangles of her pubic hair. Fled to Naxos and became a suppliant; Naxos wouldn’t give her up to husband so he declared war. XIX. Pancrato. Two male lovers of her fight and kill each other. Several of these Knight’s Tale triangles. XX. Aero. Loved by Orion, who cleared her island of wild beasts; father kept putting off wedding because he doesn’t want to marry her to “such a man” [317]: Orion gets drunk and smashes down her door and proceeds; father puts out his eyes with a burning brand. Suggestion that Orion is a Polyphemus figure. XXI. Pisidice. Loved Achilles and promised to betray Lesbos to him if he’d marry her; he agreed and stoned her instead. XXII. Nanis. Same story with Cyrus. XXIII. Chilonis. Father-son rivalry for same woman. XXIV. Hipparinus. Tyrant of Syracuse, homosexual lover of boy, returns from successful battle and disguises himself saying he’s the killer of Hipparnus; boy strikes him a fatal blow. Silly bugger and pointless story. XXV. Phayllus. Tyrant of Phocis, loves Ariston’s wife; she asks for a necklace that belonged to Eriphyle and inherits Eriphyle’s luck, being burned in a fire set by her son, who’d gone mad. Don’t suppose Blake’s Ariston has any echoes outside of Herodotus. He’s not in this story anyway, except as a name. XXVI. Apriate. Virgin attacked by man later killed by Achilles; is either thrown into or throws herself into the sea. XXVII. Alcinoe. From the Dirae of Moero (Byzantine poetess of 250 B.C.) (series of myths linked to invective against enemy, like Ovid’s Ibis). Married woman deserts husband for lover and drowns herself—love is punishment of Athene for gypping a servant.

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XXVIII. Clite. No archetypal point. XXIX. Daphnis. Loved by nymph who tells him if he loves a mortal woman he’ll go blind. He does and he does. XXX. Celtine. Loved Hercules and stole Geryon’s cattle from him, agreeing to give them up if. He does; the result is Celtus, eponymous ancestor of the Celts. XXXI. Dimoetes. Grisly tale: marries his niece who loves her own brother; he exposes her and she hangs herself; Domoetes then finds a woman’s body thrown up by the sea and “he conceived the most passionate desire for her company”; she, or it, starts to stink, he burns the body, can’t get his cock down, kills himself. This is the result of the hanged girl’s curses. XXXII. Anthippe. Killed by a king in mistake for a leopard while she’s getting fucked by his son; king goes mad and hurls self over cliff. The thicket they fucked in was sacred to somebody. XXXIII. Assaon. Niobe story, only it’s a father-daughter affair again. XXXIV. Corythus. Son of Oenone and Paris, loved Helen, killed by Paris. XXXV. Eulimene. Has an affair; oracle demands sacrifice of virgin; she’s sacrificed in spite of lover’s protests that she ain’t one; he says cut her belly open; she’s found with child; lover murders her father. XXXVI. Rhesus. Rhesus wooed and won his girlfriend, who was a huntress and didn’t care about boys, by pretending to share her tastes. She fell for the line and him.

10.  Clementine Recognitions The Clementine Recognitions, an anonymous philosophical and theological romance, appears to date from the first half of the third century C.E. Frye’s source is unknown, but the most likely candidate is the text as it appears in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, originally published 1868–73 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark) and reissued several times. References to Clementine Recognitions in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 18: 184, 188, 195, 197, 201, 207, 277, 279,    290 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 92–3 The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 287, 340, 345 The Great Code, 205, CW 19: 226

The story skeleton of the Clementine Recognitions has a father and a mother, twin sons, and a still younger son, Clement. Also the father’s brother. The mother, Mattidia, tells the father, Faustus, she’s had a dream that says something awful

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will happen if she doesn’t bugger off, so he sends her away with the twin sons, keeping Clement. All news he tries to get about her through messengers (he sent her to Athens) fails, so he assumes he’s lost her. Actually, she hadn’t had any dream; she’d been made passes at by the brother. After she goes, the brother sets up a Potiphar’s wife situation in reverse. Anyway; she got, of course, shipwrecked, and separated from the twins. Nothing comes of the twinnery: that is, the author must have taken it from some story of the Menaechmus persuasion, but he doesn’t develop it, probably because what he’s really interested in is the demonic parody theme of Peter and Simon Magus, which is what he uses instead. Clement stays home with father until he’s twelve, after which his father buggers off and disappears also. So he attaches himself to Peter, and on their wanderings Peter finds a woman who’s gnawed her hands off and is begging and wants to kill herself: he discovers it’s Mattidia, cures her hands, and unites mother and son. They go to Antioch, where there are two prominent Christians calling themselves Nicetas and Aquila. They turn out to be the twins, and have changed their names from their originals, which were Faustinus and Faustianus, or Faustinianus. No reason particularly; they just didn’t want to leave things simple. They’d been captured by pirates at the time of the shipwreck, were sold to a Jewess named Justa, who was a Christian proselyte. So they’re hitched up. Peter arrives late after a long argument with an old man who’s an astrologer and believes in something called genesis, fate, more or less. His example of fatality proves that he’s Faustus, so they all get hitched up. As I say, I think the general idea is that heaven is one vast recognition scene, the Mediterranean Sea symbolizing life in this world.

11.  Chariton of Aphrodisias, Chaereas and Callirhoe Chaereas and Callirhoe dates from the middle of the first century C.E. The edition Frye used is unknown, but he may have read Warren E. Blake’s edition, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939).

Heroine daughter of Syracusan general named Hermocrates. Awfully beautiful. Chaereas, almost equally so, loves her and they go through the sick formula; public assembly and crowd demands their marriage, which Hermocrates sanctions despite rivalry of fathers. Other suitors assemble and plot against them. First scheme is the Much Ado about Nothing scheme of slandering heroine; hero naturally falls for it; kicks heroine so she faints and seems dead (Nero and Poppaea). After that he discovers it’s All a Lie, so tries to get himself convicted of murder, but Hermocrates, who’d heard about it, gets him off. Callirhoe buried (alive) with great treasure around her; villain named Theron tries to get it, finds

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her alive, takes her off to Miletus to sell her. She’s bought by a man named Dionysius, very decent guy, who marries her: she’s faithful to Chaereas, of course, but her child is about to be born and there’s nothing else she can do. Meanwhile Chaereas goes in search of her, finds Theron’s ship, gets Theron crucified, and discovers Callirhoe is in Miletus. Chaereas’ ship is captured by Persians, who rule the country, Chaereas is sold as a slave to Mithridates, satrap of Caria, who finds out who he is and wants Callirhoe for himself. Advises Chaereas to write a letter to Callirhoe, sending one of his own offering to help her; letters intercepted by Dionysius, who thinks they’re both by Mithridates. Quarrel, reported to Artaxerxes of Persia. They assemble for a big trial scene, done with references to drama. Chaereas, thought dead by Dionysius, turns up in the courtroom. Mithridates is acquitted, trial set between Chaereas and Dionysius but Artaxerxes keeps postponing it, you can guess why. Chaereas hears a (false) rumor Callirhoe has been awarded to Dionysius, so he joins the Egyptian army and fights Persia, taking Tyre and an island called Arados, where Callirhoe and the queen (Statira) had been left for safekeeping. Callirhoe writes affectionate letter to Dionysius saying adieu and Chaereas and Callirhoe return to Syracuse, sending queen back to the king. Home again and recognition scene with father, Chaereas’ sister (not mentioned previously) being married off to his friend (just barely mentioned). Perry thinks the Dionysus bit is founded on some legend about Dionysius I, tyrant of Sicily, and that Chariton was thinking of the chee-yild as the future tyrant. Story better integrated and less dependent on providential salvations than later ones. More genuinely popular literature than Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, hence the latter got more scholarly attention later.

12.  Barlaam and Ioasaph Barlaam and Ioasaph has been attributed to John of Damascus (seventh century C.E.), but it was in fact transcribed by the Georgian monk Euthymios in the eleventh century. Frye is using the Loeb edition, St. John Damascene: Barlaam and Ioasaph, trans. G.R. Woodward and H. Mattingly (New York: Macmillan, 1914). The page numbers in square brackets below are to that edition. References to Barlaam and Ioasaph in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 197, 199, 277, 278 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 10, 71, 93

Said to be a Christian adaptation of the story of Buddha, but, hell, there’s so little story I don’t see why it’s that any more than a lot of other things. Anyway, a heathen king has a son and brings him up in a pleasure-prison. The archetype

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is much closer to Rasselas than anything else I know, and probably it’s an important archetype, maybe even part of the fabulous myth. The silly bugger who wrote it evidently doesn’t know the difference between Ethiopia and India: “the inner land of the Ethiopians whom our tale calleth Indians” [headnote to Introduction, 3]. St. Thomas, of course. Heavy plugs for the ascetic life, men in mortal bodies adopting the spiritual life of angels. Two natures in Christ: without leaving his father’s throne in heaven he entered the virgin’s womb; he suffered on the cross as a man, but not as God. The idolators are characterized throughout by “the smell of bloody human sacrifices” [pt. 2, 15]. Curious remark about Anger and Desire “brought into being by the Creator to be fellow-workers with nature” [pt. 2, 19]. Boy surrounded with nothing but pleasant things, so he gets angst. It’s very Rasselas-like. The ascetic Christian Barlaam sneaks in with a story he’s got a precious pearl or gem or something: naturally it turns out to be an utterly interminable harangue. It’s punctuated with “apologues,” of which the second is a story about two pair of caskets, one full of shit with gold on top, other the reverse. The editor thinks it’s the ultimate origin of the story in The Merchant of Venice, but it’s pretty feeble-minded. “Without Baptism it is impossible to attain to that good hope, even though a man be more pious than piety itself” [pt. 8, 101]. Real meaning of the kingdom of heaven is vision of God. Hairs of head numbered: this means the smallest and slightest phantasy or thought. Reference to what Peter says to a disciple: editor thinks Simon Magus. Divided lordship among gods unthinkable notion. Virtues make a ladder to heaven. Account of Peter getting over his denial: devil flees “howling horribly” [pt. 11, 165]—slight Pilgrim’s Progress Apollyon fight feeling, if Bunyan knew this work. St. Antony is the archetypal hero, referred to as model several times. Another dismal apologue winds up with hero befriended by his own good deeds, Everyman archetype. The sixth apologue has an interesting setting: custom in a country of making a man king for a year: he thinks it’s going to last forever, but in a year “they would rise up against him, strip him bare of his royal robes, lead him in procession up and down the city, and thence dispatch him beyond their borders into a distant great island; there, for lack of food and raiment, in hunger and nakedness he would waste miserably away” [pt. 14, 201]. Various design arguments: man doesn’t make himself, but “when I was broken, {God} re‑created me with a better renewal” [pt. 17, 247]. Barlaam, asked his age, says he’s forty-five, although he’s over seventy. “When I lived to the flesh in the bondage of sin, I was dead in the inner man; and those years of deadness I can never call years of life” [pt. 18, 255]. Barlaam then proposes to leave, taking off a borrowed garment and putting on his own—trace of disguise theme. Usual schizophrenia about hell: “Believe not that there is any true being or kingdom of evil, nor suppose that it is without beginning, or selforiginate, or born of God: out on such an absurdity!” [pt. 19, 279]. But natch it’s going to last forever. Doctrine of Trinity very complicated, but the councils have

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figured it all out, so you gotta believe it all without question. Plug for images: anti-iconoclastic setting: “when we see the drawing in the Image, in our mind’s eye we pass over to the true form of which it is an Image, and devoutly worship the form of him who for our sake was made flesh, not making a god of it, but saluting it as an image of God made flesh” [pt. 19, 281]. Well, Ioasaph is instantly and completely converted, which makes his father the king (Abenner) furious, and he goes through all the regular Herod manoeuvres. Son-father tension, as Barlaam becomes the real or spiritual father. King catches some monks and tortures them (usual IV Maccabees model), asks them why they carry around old bones, and gets a plug for relics. There’s a man named Nachor, who looks exactly like Barlaam but is an idolator, so they get him to speak for Christianity, so weakly (public debate) that the other side will win. What little suspense there is is destroyed by God, who tells Ioasaph what’s really happening in a dream. Some of the anti-idolatry stuff has a flicker of interest: “Those of them that stand have never thought of sitting down; and those that sit have never been seen to rise” [pt. 24, 355]. Curious absence of any sense of dialectic, for all the argument: the king is “convicted by his own conscience” [pt. 26, 385], but remains in the grip of habit—a kind of psychoanalytic resistance, but no sense that another position than the Christian could be anything but neurotic. Anyway, Nachor does the Barlaam act: he speaks very well of Christianity, and the stunt is a failure. Not only Barlaam but the Clementine Recognitions, which also present Simon Magus as a kind of double-opposite of Simon Peter. Nachor’s speech is something called the Apology of Aristides, supposed to have been written for Hadrian around 125. The elements aren’t God because they’re corruptible; nor heaven, earth, sun and moon, nor man himself. Then a run-through of the Greek gods and the Egyptian Isis-Osiris story, as in the Clementine Recognitions. Paradox that gods are represented as breaking {their own?} laws. “If the stories of the gods be myths, then are the gods mere words: but if the stories be natural, then are they that wrought or endured such things, no longer gods: if the stories be allegorical, then are the gods myths and nothing else” [pt. 27, 419]. Nachor’s converted by his own speech, so another champion of the pagans named Theudas arises, and says to king: “Wherefore I am come, that we may celebrate together a feast of thanksgiving, and sacrifice to the immortal gods young men in the bloom of youth and well-favoured damsels, and eke offer them an hecatomb of bullocks . . .” [pt. 29, 443] (it’s the translator who ekes). Suggests some filtering in of the Ethiopica final situation. Anyway, Theudas advises tempting the prince with damsels, and the prince is given a “potion” by an evil spirit [pt. 30, 459], though it doesn’t come to anything. The damsel proposes honorable marriage, and when the prince says “yet to pollute my body through unclean union is grievous for me, and utterly impossible” [pt. 30, 463] she points out that marriage is honorable in Christianity. Yeah, sure, “but not to them that have once

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made promise to Christ to be virgins” [pt. 30, 463]. He’s refreshed by visions of heaven and hell, at least scared by the latter. One striking sentence: “the idol hath no right to be called even dead, for how can that have died which never lived?” [pt. 31, 481]. Idols and gods are images of men’s vices: the fighter creates Ares, the drunk Dionysus. “For, as man, he was crucified; but, as God, he darkened the sun, shook the earth, and raised from their graves many bodies . . . . Again, as man, he died; but as God, after that he had harried hell, he rose again” [pt. 31, 489]. “Fishers of the world, whose nets drew all men from the depths of deceit” [pt. 32, 495]. Theudas gets converted, and—guess what—burns his magic books. King then divides his kingdom with his son, evidently with the design of making him a fool as an incompetent ruler. However, he helps the poor—strong egalitarian sense combined with an equally strong sense of authority as a model for conduct. “He searched the prisons, and sought out the captives in mines, or debtors in the grip of their creditors; and by generous largesses to all he proved a father to all” [pt. 33, 519]. Not a complete answer, but the only thing in the book that isn’t sick. So the king gives up and gets converted too. “The Holy Ghost, by whom the fishermen enclosed the whole world in their nets for Christ” [pt. 34, 527]. When the king’s baptized his son “appearing as the begetter of his own father, and proving the spiritual father to him that begat him in the flesh” [pt. 35, 535] fixes that up. Father dies; Ioasaph abdicates, lots of struggles from his people, but he “promised to be with them still in the spirit though he might no longer abide with them in the body,” preceded by “words of comfort” [pt. 36, 561]. The direct Gospel echo comes a little closer to the Buddha archetype, if there is one. Temptations of beasts, first illusory and then real, like St. Antony: quotation from Psalm 91 suggests a slight link with Paradise Regained. He’s looking for Barlaam, and finally finds him in a strangled recognition scene. Barlaam dies; Ioasaph wants to die with him, is told he has to live out his life; finally he makes it; Barachias (left as king when Ioasaph abdicates; the monk who got Barlaam in at first) finds the bodies incorrupt, which seems funny, as it’s clear they stank to heaven in more than one sense when alive. Ascribed to St. John Damascene: translated into Latin not later than the 12th century; got into the Golden Legend (both Barlaam and Ioasaph got canonized). 1672 English translation. Editor says “Ioasaph’s temptation by the fair damsels and the fair princess is anticipatory of Parsifal, the flower maidens and Kundry” [n. 2, xiv] Well . . .

13.  Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). An e-text of Hadas’s book is available from Internet Archive: http://www.archive .org/stream/hellenisticcultu010847mbp/hellenisticcultu010847mbp_djvu.txt

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Reference to Hadas’s book in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 198

Ubi bene ibi patria [where you feel good, there is your country] was an Epicurean axiom according to Cicero’s Tuscan Disputations 5.37.108. Platonic view of king was nomos empsychos, incarnate law. Greek and Aramaic names in the New Testament: “We may surmise that Mark and Peter and Didymus were called John and Simon and Thomas by their intimates and where religion was involved” [37]. The abomination of desolation was the Syrian Baal Shamayim in Greek dress, and Antiochus thought he was doing the Jews a favor in giving them the statue. IV Maccabees modelled on tragedy. “Rhythmical verse in the west was entirely a Christian possession and was never employed by pagan writers” [51]. So it isn’t based on popular Latin but is Syriac and Semitic in origin. “Greek education was designed to produce gentlemen amateurs, eastern education was designed to perpetuate a guild of professional scribes” [68]. Scribes important in Egypt, but not among Jews until after Ezra’s time. Inspiration of Muse connected with Orphism by Sappho (likely); origin of the epithet doctus for a poet. “Preoccupation with a classic literature of such high authority that it is canonized into a scripture must eventually introduce a scribal form of education” [70]. Judaism; adopted in Christianity. Alexandrine Jews said Musaeus a distorted spelling of Moses. Maccabean rulers owe more to Greek than Hebrew precedent. Wisdom of Solomon Greek: wisdom an emanation of God, wisdom initiates into secrets; God loves humanity (does this mean that all love is of Eros origin?); wisdom personified, halfway between Proverbs and the logos doctrine. Testament of Abraham shows Orphic tendencies. IV Maccabees influenced by Gorgias. Talmudic dialogue the Greek pupil-teacher type, not the prophet-disciple type. “Most of the creative literature of the hellenistic age is expansion and reinterpretation of ancient myth” [80]. (The Argument is that the midrash technique is Greek rather than Hebrew in origin.) Josephus Against Apion says “even {Homer}, they say, did not leave his poems in writing. At first transmitted by memory, the scattered songs were not united until later” [84]. Homeric heroes claimed as founders of Italian cities—hence Aeneas in Virgil; wide practice of claiming affinities (2nd Maccabees of Jews and Spartans). Eupolemus (2nd century B.C.) derives name Jerusalem from hieron Solomonos. Artapanus I should look up: Moses was named Hermes because of his invention (hermeneia) of hieroglyphs. Aristobulus says that seven symbolizes the logos. Zeno the Stoic may have been Semitic: his contemporaries thought of him as a Phoenician. Chrysippus was from Tarsus. Strabo 16.2.29 names four famous Gadarenes: “Philodemus the Epicurean, and Meleager, and Menippus the serious comic (spoudogeloios) and the orator Theodore” [110]. The epithet of Menippus is interesting. Horace’s second book of Satires probably inspired by Varro:

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that every silly man is mad is a Varro thesis. Mingling of prose and poetry is Semitic: Arabs call it maqama or “session.” Meleager is the Anthology poet. “Love has become a religion” [112] in his poems. Early categorizing of history as true (alethes), false (pseudes) and as it may likely have happened (plasma or hos genomena). The last is the same as literature. “That the religious interest should be dominant in III Maccabees is to be expected; but it must be observed that the religious interest is also prominent in the romances, and may well be, as has been maintained, the chief motive for writing them. . . . The actual hero of III Maccabees is patently the whole Jewish community, as in Deutro-Isaiah’s conception of the Suffering Servant” [128]. “Every work in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of Old Testament has expressions from or allusions to tragedy which the reader was obviously expected to recognize” [130]. “The seven brothers {of IV Macc.} are actually called a chorus at several points” [130]. Aeschylus’ insistence on individual responsibility for wrong parallel with prophets. Look up Horace Kallen on Job as a tragedy:28 evidently he defends its integrity as it stands, Elihu and all. Hadas suggests that Prometheus is not Aeschylus but a hellenistic fourth-century production. Zeus despises man and wants to destroy them and bring another race into the world; Prometheus is as a Titan man’s elder brother and enables man to survive. Or so he says, p. 139. I should think about the diatribe as a literary genre: Spengler says something about it, and here it’s treated as a collateral form of the Menippean satire. Invented by Cynic-Stoic preachers, practised by Menippus and Meleager; an active influence in the Pauline epistles; the real genre of Ecclesiastes. Greek parallels to Paul’s speech at Athens, noted in Norden’s Agnostos Theos. Earliest triangle of love stories goes back to a rival trying to get husband’s social status, conferred by woman under mother-right, rather than simply the woman. In ancient Egypt, of course “admission to the queen’s bed symbolized accession to the throne” [148]—he doesn’t mention Esther. “Where these elements would not seem extraordinary in a matriarchy, they would be startling in a society where the woman was never allowed the initiative and where incest was anathema” [148]. Hence a patriarchal society makes these stories tragic. Aegisthus and Bellerophon in Homer; Phoenix in Iliad 9; Reuben and Bilhah in Genesis; Gyges and Candaules’ wife in Herodotus. The Agamemnon illustrates transition from political to erotic motivation. Hippolytus story invented by Euripides (he also wrote an earlier play on the subject); question of succession important in Racine’s Phèdre. Expansion of Potiphar’s wife story in the Testament of Joseph derived from Hippolytus. Secular version of Phaedra story in Apuleius, combined with drugged sleep and premature burial, the tradition surviving in Romeo and Juliet. Ethiopica, of course, and even the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. “Unlike other literary forms, where we can trace development step by step, pastoral was an invention (his italics) of the hellenistic age, and wholly artificial” [160]. Maybe

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a “misunderstanding” of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.29 I doubt this. Hadas thinks Song of Songs comes from this pastoral Greek genre: “The ‘white and ruddy’ lover who is invited to ‘come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits’ is very like Longus’ Eros” [161]. He’s baffled by the Song of Songs, but the red and white lover is clear. Aretalogies, meaning lives of virtuous people, a common form, though the word itself is pejorative in Roman times. Lucian’s True History is criticism of aretalogies: it contains the Jonah theme of descent to a whale’s belly. Life of Apollonius and the Gospels. Stoics interested in martyrs: Plutarch on Agis and Cleomenes and the Gracchi. Martyrdom of Polycarp remarkably reminiscent of IV Maccabees. Acts of the Pagan Martyrs. “In the Greek Romances Karl Kerenyi has observed that certain motifs—premature burials, scourging of the hero, apparent executions from which the victim is providentially delivered, and similar matters—recur in each of our extant examples. They are not then, Kerenyi argues, disparate romances but disparate treatments of a single basic story, and this story he identifies as an aretalogy of the Isis-Osiris cult” [181]. As he says, we don’t need to push the theory so far. Among the Greeks “the chthonic deities lived underground, were usually feminine in nature, and were much concerned with ties of family; they operated directly and according to mechanical rule” [182]. “If the Synoptic Gospels are in the nature of aretalogies, the Fourth is in the nature of a mystery” [192]. “The Qumram brotherhood was in fact very like a Neo-Pythagorean fraternity” [195]. Manual of Discipline and IV Maccabees close to New Testament. “Tobit is, like Judith, a romance, based on the oriental story of Ahikar but influenced in form by hellenistic practice” [206]. Aeneid 6.637 ff. speaks of “yellow sands” [214]: check for The Tempest. Check also the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus, which describes a locus amoenus that oddly reminds me of Yeats’ Delphic Oracle poem. I don’t know what Sappho’s Leucadian Leap is. Daphnis and Chloe: “The shade and the water, the flowers and the music, and in particular the red and white coloring of the extraordinary occupant of the garden are all regular motifs in the descriptions of the Elysian fields and of the Christian paradise which derive from them” [217]. Gardens of Adonis in Spenser. “The satyrs of the Greek vase painters are surely adaptations of popular Egyptian representations of the dancing god Bes” [224]. “The figure of Buddha himself is a product of Greek influence” [230] (by way of Gandhara). Hence a kinship with the Christ figure: “each was an incarnation of a logos and it was therefore natural for Greek artists to represent each by the orator type” [231]. This is quoted from a B. Rowland. “That piece i.e. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, it has aptly and correctly been said, is a blueprint for the Aeneid” [241]. The person who said it was N.W. DeWitt.30 Virgil knew, if not Isaiah, at least the Sibylline Oracles, as did Horace and Tibul-

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lus. Horace’s Epode 16 is Sibylline, and is a rejoinder to the 4th Eclogue, Hadas says. “The doctrine of election as it appears in Augustan Rome is in fact a precise parallel to that in the Old Testament” [252]. He goes on to link the Exodus and Aeneid themes very strongly, and may be right, of course. Problem of getting the dates right by assuming a long intervening period similar in Livy (Alba Longa regime) and the Old Testament. Livy is the sister of the Aeneid. The title “Augustus” definitely “carries a religious connotation” [260]. Roman and Christian view of history so similar that “No compromise was possible, one or the other must give way. And therefore when Christianity prevailed it became Rome” (his italics) [260]. Tacitus says departure of Jerusalem’s god signalized by a whistling sound. Going back to things I missed: “Aretalogus, then, is ‘one who (professionally) speaks the wondrous deeds of a deity,’ and aretalogia is the discourse he delivers” [171]. “The greater Homeric Hymns are in effect themselves aretalogies” [172]. “The utopias were themselves a development of the aretalogy” [173]. “The synoptic Gospels, as both defenders and enemies of Apollonius saw, are aretalogies of virtually the same type” [177]. “Originally the extravagance of the aretalogy was plebeian and despised by the literate; the object of the writers of romance was to give it standing by clothing it in elegant literary form. Actually the Romances are no more like one another than the plays of Plautus or of New Comedy in general” [181]. (This is in answer to the Kerenyi thesis; the pejorative association with the word aretalogy in Juvenal and elsewhere is part of my thesis about the gyre going through a social revolutionary phase.) “If not the details, the general tendency may reflect the influence of the aretalogies. If that is so, then the Romances have had a large role in disseminating aretalogy over all of Europe” [181]. In a later chapter he quotes Isidore Levy’s book on the legend of Pythagoras which says there’s an original life of Pythagoras that included a theme later dropped though it’s left traces in Virgil and Lucian, the descent to the underworld. A legendary life of Moses, used by Artapanus, Philo and Josephus, adapted elements from this “aretalogy” of Pythagoras. For late poets like Luxorius and Tiberianus on the locus amoenus I should probably look at whatisname’s book—Stewart?31 P. 133: “On the basis of various ancient Near Eastern texts Theodor H. Gaster has shown that a primitive kind of drama, analogous, in all probability, to the antecedents of perfected Greek tragedy, did in fact exist in the literatures which affected the Old Testament. Gaster points to vestiges of this drama in various passages in the Old Testament, but he cannot of course claim that these were felt as drama by the audiences for which they were intended—any more than audiences of New Comedy were aware that the infants who were exposed and subsequently recognized were descendents of the year baby in the annual vegetation cycle” [133].

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14.  Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone Frye owned two editions of The Moonstone, both of which he annotated: London: Collins, 1871, and New York: Modern Library, 1964. The novel was first published in 1868. References to The Moonstone in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 200, 201, 203, 232, 242, 244 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 68, 76

Well, The Moonstone. Extraordinary preface, author saying that formerly he traced the influence of circumstances on character and is now reversing the process, studying the motivation of a young girl in an emergency, just like Henry James. The general patterns are: first, the “night world” theme. That is, all through romance there’s a special territory indicating another side of human existence, on which among other things the author’s and readers’ prejudices are projected. In eighteenth‑century Gothic thrillers, as I’ve said, the English Protestant middle-class audience ensures that the night side will be Continental, Catholic and upper-class. With the expansion of the British Empire, the night side extends to Asia, Africa and Central America. Here the diamond, called, in defiance of gemology, the moonstone, comes from India, and three dark little men keep buggering around trying to get it. The encompassing story is very like the Ring theme in Wagner: the diamond was originally stolen by an English officer, hence there’s a real curse on it; eventually the three black little buggers succeed, and the diamond is restored to its original home. Second, the amnesia plot, going back to the Hymn of the Soul. The hero steals the diamond, not knowing what he’s doing, under the influence of opium. Opium is a favorite theme in nineteenth‑century fiction, but the fictional device, as such, goes back to the love potion in Tristram and the like. In fact the second does turn out to be a love potion: the heroine kisses the glass and the hero drinks out of that side of it. Third, the pharmakos role assumed by the hero. He’s a thief, a murderer (of Rosanna Spearman), a liar, and a displaced adulterer, as he goes into the heroine’s bedroom late at night to steal her “jewel.” Hence the story has a sequence of pistis-gnosis “solutions,” Sergeant Cuff’s being the first one. I think Ben Jonson calls this structure a catastasis. Anyway, it’s a common device in detective stories to have a plausible solution precede the real one. Fourth, the imagery of labyrinths and the underworld (the shivering sands are also enlisted) to symbolize the world the hero is wandering in while he’s a pharmakos. The phrase “from darkness to light” occurs more than once.32 At the moment when he’s lost, the figure of Ezra Jennings appears, in a very pre-

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cisely and clearly marked peripeteia. Note that Jennings is also the doctor who brings the hero to life again. The original pseudo-stealing act was prompted by the practical joke of another doctor, whose role corresponds to that of the cursing anchorite in Sakuntala who causes the amnesia. (I should warn people who haven’t read The Moonstone that I’m going to spoil the story for them.) Hence an emphasis on smoking generally—Betteredge’s pipe and Blake’s cigars—as part of the drug theme. For some reason I haven’t quite grasped both the redemptive figures, Cuff and Jennings, are associated with flowers, the former with roses (note Rosanna’s name). It’s part of this underworld imagery that the underworld itself should be a dream world. The archetype of the cipher in the lower world turns up with the disconnected phrases of Candy’s delirium being restored by Jennings into connected sentences. Collins has an extraordinarily shrewd insight into the connexion between what he calls the new disease of detective fever and the operations of psychoanalysis. This is even clearer in The Woman in White than here. Jennings is an inhabitant of the world of dreams, and is Franklin Blake’s sin-eater, taking on the pharmakos role. I’m not quite sure just where Collins’ own social snobbery fits it. The convention of the novel, enthusiastically supported by Collins, is that good families can do no wrong. People who oppose this, like Drusilla Clack, do so only for absurd reasons, and get properly isolated from the action in consequence. Of course Lady Verinder has gone to heaven—she’s a lady, isn’t she? The hero resents being dunned for a bill he owes, and the heroine takes exception to his resentment: he says it’s a romantic high-flown reason, though the modern reader would see it as realistic and low-flown. Expressions of resentment on the part of the lower classes are always encased in something sinister, like Rosanna’s neurotic attachment to Blake. This connects of course with what I’ve already said about the paradoxical revolutionary and reactionary aspect of romance, and with the fact that snobbery seems to be built into the detective story: it needs a well-to-do amateur who can baffle the criminal when the professional police have failed, and it often needs a variant of the pastoral myth—stately homes and lots of weekend guests and faithful servitors like Betteredge. If The Moonstone is still the best detective story, it’s partly because it really belongs to the period, and doesn’t have to reconstruct it as the Agatha Christies and Dorothy Sayerses have to do. I’ll return to this later. Ezra Jennings is a grotesque figure whom nobody likes, a helpful dwarf or even animal. As he takes over the action (he’s enabled to do so when the hero decides he’s really a gentleman in spite of not looking like one), he becomes a master of ceremonies, a role connected with that of the cook in Old (and New) Comedy. The cook in turn is closely related, in nineteenth‑century fiction, to the chemist (i.e. alchemist), and the Fosco of The Woman in White has elements of cook as well as chemist. (Enormously fat and a braggart.)

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The business of re-enacting the scene of the crime, such a cliché in later detective stories, has here overtones of a good deal more. For one thing, it’s profoundly unconvincing, and whatever is unconvincing is archetypally significant, or likely to be. The mouse-trap play in Hamlet is one of the archetypes; also the cancelling out of amnesia by repetition (there’s a certain amount said about past and future). Also a certain amount about time bringing things to light. Incidentally, Rosanna makes a very shrewd comment about her own life: as long as she was a thief, she was relatively happy because she lived in the present; as soon as she decided to go straight, the dimension of the future opened up and brought a heavy emotional burden with it. The law-abiding, the teleological, and the social sanction against the rebellious individual are all connected. The world of the rebellious individual is part of the night side of the map, and maybe that’s some of the reason for the prominence of Robinson Crusoe, the isolated individual as the polarization of the main scene. For Betteredge he goes along with pipes of tobacco, which fits, more or less. The John Herncastle who (maliciously) presents the diamond to the heroine is associated with the devil, and the diamond itself has the role of the apple of discord in the Judgement of Paris story. That is, it’s a social disintegrant. Herncastle, like Fosco, makes chemical investigations and loves animals. Threat to recut the diamond, which like the golden bowl in Henry James, has a flaw, which will destroy its “identity.” The three black buggers experiment in clairvoyance with a boy they’ve picked up: this doesn’t get anywhere, because Collins doesn’t believe in clairvoyance, but he knows it goes in. It’s interesting that the real thief, who gets murdered by the black buggers, is not only called Ablewhite but is expressly made large and blond, with relatives to match. He gets disguised as a black bugger himself, and the disguise is torn off his face (when dead) by the detective, black becoming white in a reversal of the normal symbolic pattern. “When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam.” (p. 54). Light of the counter-world in short. “The Devil (or the Diamond) possessed that dinner party” (60). Incompetent investigator followed by competent one: cf. the two judges in The Chalk Circle. Technique of doubling characters: the Rosanna-Limping Lucy doubling doesn’t seem specifically structural, like the two doctors and the two detectives. Note that the major pistis solution, Cuff’s, is that the heroine has stolen her own diamond, which puts the archetype of the calumniated heroine very dimly into

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the picture. Dimly, because it’s understood from the beginning that she can do no wrong, being a lady. Note the connexion of the word “clue” in detective stories with the suppressed metaphor of a labyrinth. A clue may also be a talisman of recognition. Here, the smear of paint on the hero’s nightgown (didn’t realize men wore them) is the essential clue, and when the hero finds it it’s a scene of self-recognition as a thief. Incidentally, it’s shut in a box and sunk into quicksand at the end of a rope: hero is directed by a posthumous letter of Rosanna’s to fish it up, which brings the Rudens archetype into the story,33 and with it the confrontation of the hero with his own Narcissus oblivious self. It’s a singularly concentrated focus of traditional archetypes. Limping Lucy speaks of an uprising of the poor against the rich: again it gets the lightning-rod treatment. Well, the hero leaves for foreign parts—withdrawal theme, like the hero’s parallel withdrawal in The Woman in White. Symmetry: the hero’s father and the heroine’s mother die in the interval between the loss and the solution. Of course the five non-rhetorical proofs are all there: the story is told by “witnesses,” one of them Miss Clack, who eavesdrops. Miss Clack, as I’ve said, becomes isolated from the society by her fanaticism, which leads her to suggest that Lady Verinder may not after all have gone straight to heaven. She’s thus a second social disintegrant, like the diamond itself. The modern reader is likely to have some sympathy for her. “Strong language! and suggestive of something below the surface, in the shape of a romance.” (219). North side of map: begins with those awful Italians in Elizabethan romance, continuing into the eighteenth century. Note the emphasis on the French, German, Italian sides to the hero’s character. The telos of romance is almost always the heroine’s cunt. This usually turns into a womb from which the next generation is born. The point is the number of symbols for that cunt that are strewn along the way. The sun shining on the quicksands “hid the horror of its false brown face under a passing smile.” Little black buggers modulate “as if some spirit of terror lived and moved and shuddered in the fathomless deeps beneath” (p. 248). Watch for “as ifs.” “An unutterable dread of seeing her {Rosanna} rise through the heaving surface of the sand and point to the place.” Reads his own name on his smeared nightshirt. Discovers himself as thief, and the shock “completely suspended my thinking and feeling power” (250). Rosanna shapes up in her posthumous letter as the dark female polarized against Rachel (note name). Hence her social protests (she became a thief because her mother was deserted by the “gentleman who was my father”) are appropriate, despite the lightning-rods carefully strewn around them. As the heroine who

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gets swallowed by the monster, she has a natural connection with Jennings. The hint of the censored sexual assault by hero on heroine is on p. 255. Note Rosanna’s pleasure at the thought of involving hero with herself because they’re both thieves: imprisonment in the lower world. She wears his nightgown—displaced copulation. The peripeteia is on p. 259, and Jennings has a nose “so often found among the ancient people of the East,” so he comes from the night-world. Maybe Jewish, as Luker (lucre) who gets the diamond almost certainly is. Candy, who played the practical joke of giving the hero opium, has lost his memory—amnesia archetype, of course: cf. the Sturk theme in Le Fanu. Recognition of anamnesis tied up by reference to birth, p. 261. Rosanna could manage hero in lower world because she’s had a record of fraud “on such a grand scale.” Letter concludes by hope of “understanding each other” (266), exactly the phrase used about the first Rachel-Blake interview. Darkness to light, first mention, p. 267. For the recognition of oneself by one’s own name cf. Scrooge in Dickens. When the hero is snitching the diamond the heroine watches everything he’s doing in one of the three mirrors in her room. Time theme: pawned jewel to be redeemed at the end of a year (and a day, I suppose). Lawyer says “let us look to what we can discover in the future instead of to what we can not discover in the past,” but hero says “the whole thing is essentially a matter of the past” (286). Darkness to light, second mention, 288. Period of doubting whether the diamond existed at all (ib.): cf. Alice’s wood of no names.34 After this he takes Betteredge’s “forgotten” letter out of his pocket. “When the pursuit of our own interests causes us to become objects of inquiry to ourselves, we are naturally suspicious of what we don’t know” (289). This starts a series of close parallels between detection and psychoanalysis: “revive my recollection of every thing that happened in the house” (292). The reviving doctor first revives the first doctor, to whom he’s obliged for taking him in—another Rosanna link. “Death and I fought our fight over the bed which should have the man who lay on it” (298). He keeps running away from some “horrible accusation” never specified, like Lord Jim. Only his is. He’s dying, and keeps himself under sedation with opium, hence again he belongs to the dream world. For the drug of forgetfulness cf. the catalepsy in Silas Marner. The patter about the experiment of repetition quotes a doctor as saying that any mental impression may be “reproduced at some subsequent time.” Cf. the business about total recollection in Coleridge. Reference to De Quincey. Jennings has a vice role which is really a “virtue” one, like Edgar. Some by-play twice about keys, one Blake’s to Rachel’s house, another Blake’s to his own supply of tobacco. Not much made of it. In the closing scenes a clever boy with rolling eyes is introduced. Otherwise I have most of it. The diamond gets passed along a series of people.

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15.  Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White Frye’s own edition of The Woman in White, which he annotated: New York: Modern Library, 1964, published with The Moonstone. Frye’s page numbers in parentheses are to this edition. The novel was first published in 1859. References to The Woman in White in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 201, 228, 232, 242, 244 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 75, 96

The Woman in White concentrates all its archetypes at the end. The main things are the father who sets up the daughter as a sacrificial victim. Laura’s father isn’t in the story, but it’s his “wish” that she marry the villain, and he also begets the woman in white. He leaves behind him, as a surrogate, the useless hypochondriac of a brother, a heavy comic humor. Laura is polarized, of course, against a dark heroine, Marian, the passed-over firstborn, as she’s a half-sister. She’s masculine in her temperament, “ugly,” because she has some hair on her lip, and active. Later on the hero takes her on as a displaced wife, because, though he’s married to Laura, Laura has a Victorian child-wife role. The doubling of Laura and the woman in white (Anne Catherick) is much more insisted on. In fact the undisplaced story really has Laura dying and coming to life again out of her tomb; the displaced one kills off the woman in white, of course, and puts Laura in the asylum instead. She comes out practically a double of the woman in white: it’s said that she’d be a double if she were marked by sorrow and suffering (the author doesn’t add mental deficiency, but she has that too). Ekpyrosis theme: image of exploding mine used in connexion with Fosco, but Percival does go up in smoke like the spontaneous combustion man in Dickens. Here it’s partly a matter of God-projecting: the hero has a right to clear the heroine’s name, but no right to personal revenge, hence the latter is for both villains taken out of his hands. Preface to The Woman in White says he’s got the law right with the help of a lawyer friend: example of the nineteenth‑century obsession with the law. Curious example in final scene: the revolver is kept in the drawer, and the possibility of murderous violence remains all through, but what takes place is a contract or bargain, with one profoundly unconvincing element—you gotta write the assend of my story. Nation of shopkeepers. Two interesting passages unconnected with structure: one that suggests that the older generation is more spontaneous than the younger, the latter being overprecocious and perhaps too well brought up. The other that nature is not a comfort to man except in books (417). One step in the shrivelling of nature from Wordsworthian nature to Lawrentian cock.

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Hero gets uneasy at “accidental” likeness suggested between Laura and the Woman in White and says “Call her in, out of the dreary moonlight.” Later: “It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened . . . always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence” (436). Woman in White says grave of her female protector (actually her stepmother, as it turns out) ought to be kept white as snow: she dresses in white because her stepmother did. Obvious ghost displacement, of course. Dog dislikes the villain—the device I call dog nose. Anyway, Laura tells villain her heart will always belong elsewhere—horkos archetype.35 Hero buggers off to central America, and heroine and villain get married at the winter solstice—winter, with its white snow, being part of that bookish nature-ground. Interesting that Laura becomes more childish as she falls from innocence (i.e., half-Lesbian involvement with half-sister) to experience (bride after honeymoon). Phrases: “happy, innocent Victorian for sexless life” (533); “dark, clever, gipsy face” for Marian, the dark girl (534). Second villain, Fosco, compared to Napoleon at beginning and end. One of the finest experimental chemists living, so it’s not surprising that his schemes involve the use of drugs. He’s also an expert chess player, and the whole organization of the plot recalls a chess-game— several metaphors about moves in a game. Very fat, loves animals and is ruthless about human beings. Name suggests fusco, dark, the contrast to the white and the name Fairlie. Describes himself as arch-master of the Rosicrucian Masons of Mesopotamia. A political situation buried in it. A conspiratorial society, evidently for Italian liberation, goes around murdering traitors to it, and one of its members is the Pesca who appears at the beginning to get the hero his job because he owes his life to him. He later drops a silly-ass persona and becomes a serious intriguer. Fosco is a reactionary spy, and never forgives Laura for calling him that by accident. If you join this society, you get tattooed (birthmark archetype); if you later desert it, you get T marked across it when you’re murdered. This story also has a sinister lake, compared to the Dead Sea (547). Fosco says he says what other people only think—his cynicism is lightning-rodded as usual, but he’s a deliberately striking character. Refers to Jesuits and “suspicious Italian character,” rubbing in the close affinity between this situation and that of Emily with Montini in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Interesting use of presaging dreams—interesting because really unnecessary, and introduced only to emphasize the structure. They’re Marian’s dreams, and the hero says in one “The night when I met the lost Woman on the highway was the night which set my life apart to be the instrument of a Design that is yet unseen” (579; capitals his). This hero-as-chosen-instrument business is obvious but needs thinking about, besides being an author-projection. In another dream “he was kneeling by a tomb of white marble; and the shadow of a veiled woman rose

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out of the grave beneath.” Undisplaced version of what actually does happen a few pages further on—a very neat example of how dreams express the undisplaced form of the plot in sentimental romance. Towards the end the hero finds a witness who remembers Lady Glyde because Glyde is his wife’s maiden name. This too is unnecessary, and is an example of overdesigning, something deliberately done in spoof-stories like a lot of Michael Innes’s, and corresponding to knittelvers in poetry. In this story frequent God-projections take care of such things—if it’s all the will of God, it’s more plausible that some of the episodes aren’t, if I follow me. Much said about the sequential shape of the plot—instead of the darkness to light, labyrinth to illumination, metaphors of The Moonstone, we have “advancing, blindfold, to an appointed and an inevitable End.” Cf. “I am blind with crying” at the end of the first section (called “Epoch”). Marian: “I saw the white tomb again, and the veiled woman rising out of it, by Hartright’s side. The thought of Laura welled up like a spring in the depths of my heart.” Names rather obvious: if your name is Hartright, you’re the hero, and can’t go headwrong. Villain’s home is called Blackwater Park—another black-white element. Anyway, Marian overhears a conversation, witness device, and catches cold doing so, which turns into typhus. Fosco is in love with her, which fits the dragon-swallowing-heroine archetype. This isn’t just me: he’s very persistently associated with metaphors of overflowing and of absorbing, besides being fat. Anyway, at the end of the second “Epoch” hero comes to grave with inscription of Laura’s death on it, and there’s a veiled Laura looking at him over the grave. (Of course it’s the woman in white buried in it.) Third “epoch” begins with a clue and labyrinth image, and then talks about “the hopeless struggle against Rank and Power,” underlining the latent revolutionary theme. The woman in white has died like—is the name Marcellus?— in The Winter’s Tale (the “white” business suggests some link with this play). Hero says it was providential that Marian and Laura happened to turn back to the mother’s grave to meet him: “I believe in my soul that the Hand of God was pointing their way back to them,” etc., implying God-projection of the U shape—turn up at the bottom. The three leads settle in a poor and populous part of London—again a slight social overtone; as isolated as “a desert island”—cf. the Crusoe archetype in The Moonstone. Laura by this time has become essentially the reborn woman in white, and, as I say, the menage is really Marian-wife and Laura-child. Cognitio has to take place “without her knowledge or her help.” “I left her; and set forth to pave the way for discovery—the dark and doubtful way, which began at the lawyer’s door.” Four or five archetypes of structure there. In this story Collins shows extraordinary perception, even more than in The Moonstone of the detective story-psychoanalysis link. Begins with a jury choos-

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ing “a plain fact, on the surface, and a long explanation under the surface” (704). Questions of identity are the hardest to settle, especially when there’s a resemblance. The lawyer’s advice is of no help, hence hero has to transcend the law (706). First hero has to know villain’s “secret”—discovery of cipher in the depths archetype. The secret is that he isn’t Percival Glyde at all, as his parents weren’t married. Hero has to disentangle his “pure” motive from a revenge-motive, and avoid “base speculation on the future relations of Laura and myself”—in other words keep his prick in his back pocket, though in fact he does marry her very shortly. Well, I don’t need all the indications of the binary form of this story, the point-by-point reversal of fortunes, but it’s interesting how he encourages people to babble and associate and hopes to pick something essential out of it. “Here, if I could find it—here was the approach to the Secret, hidden deep under the surface of the apparently unpromising story” (726). Also “any chance suggestion” (727). Hero considers putting on a disguise but abandons the idea as “repellent” (734), and Fosco actually is disguised, even if unintentionally. “If the woman’s fierce temper once got beyond her control . . . she might yet say the words which would put the clue in my hands” (738). The clue is associative (743). Percival’s Secret is that he’s not a gentleman born, as the dog perceived earlier. “Our unintelligible world” (766). Note the “no name” device in regard to Percival. The woman in white’s wicked stepmother won’t let her dress in white (773). Note how much turns on the mystery of birth, as in Dickens; also the Little Dorrit device of hero and heroine united by latter’s loss of money. Some phrases about the woman in white (789) suggest an adaptation of the grateful dead theme. Laura hysterically suppresses painful memories but dreams them (794). Wonder if Pesca has any fish connotations—certainly Pesca-Fosco contrast in sound at least. Here’s the “mine” (i.e. the gunpowder plot archetype) image for Fosco (807): cf. Milton’s use of it in Samson Agonistes, Shakespeare’s in Hamlet; Promethean explosion of Orc. Note that the Italian secret society fills the role of the night side of the map, like the Indians in The Moonstone. Final scene with Fosco, where he threatens to shoot the hero, is the descent into ritual death for the latter. What saves hero is identification with the villain. “At that final moment, I thought with his mind; I felt with his fingers” (812). Hero isn’t (much) afraid—reverse of an earlier scene with Fosco and a bloodhound— Fosco can fix the dogs, as Percival can’t. The “mountebank bravado” in Fosco associates him with alazon types, up to a point: “motive of securing the just recognition {note word} of my wife in the birthplace from which she had been driven out.” This last forms an Odysseytype conclusion. The way Fosco’s confession is extracted from him is silly, but of course the convention of the villain’s confession is standard procedure. Fosco doesn’t actually swallow Marian, but wants to: “the complete transformation of

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two separate identities” (823). Fosco’s final statement is full of these metaphors of overflowing and of swallowing that I’ve mentioned earlier. “shrouded in total eclipse” (829): pun on fusco close to surface here. “designed to assist the resurrection of the woman who was dead in the person of the woman who was living. What a situation! I suggest it to the rising romance-writers of England” (830). At end he speaks of reader’s attention as “concentrated breathlessly on myself,” which of course is a point in the villain’s confession device. He doesn’t realize that taking Laura’s identity is worse than taking her life. Marian has, as I think I said, the passed-over firstborn role, and a sort of Paulina isolation, because nobody can in decency marry her: she’s been undisplacedly swallowed by the dragon. Final business of erasing the false inscription from the white tombstone. At the recognition of Laura as Laura in her birthplace she’s raised so as to be visible to the crowd, who naturally cheers her—faithful servitors again. The death of Fosco has dragon overtones too—“a man of immense size, with a strange mark on his left arm.” His death is public—contrast of choruses between him and Laura. At the very end Laura produces an infant who is the heir of the estate (Limmeridge) the hero has married his way into—nostos tie-up, otherwise I don’t get it altogether. Half-witted servant named Porcher (threshold echoes); female jailer type like Mrs. Jewkes, if that’s it, in Pamela. I don’t get the echoes in “Halcombe,” but Marian’s hair on her lip and Fosco’s admiration for her suggest Italian connexions: cf. “gipsy” above. Just enough night-side links. More important, the binary structure, leading first to the triumph of the villains and then to the reversal of the situation, suggests (a) a chess game (Marian also plays chess, though not as well as Fosco), hence the black-and-white patterns (b) the binary form in music. The latter leads to the rovescio, and that again to the mirror separating pistis from gnosis, or what Collins calls “our unintelligible world” from the more intelligible world of fiction which represents a higher reality. This latter phrase sounds phony, but cf. the end of my Dickens essay.36

16.  The Harlequin, Goldoni, and Gozzi Frye’s edition of Eric Bentley’s book, which he annotated: The Classic Theatre, Volume I: Six Italian Plays (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958). Goldoni’s Harlequin was written in 1743. References to Goldoni and Gozzi in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 204, 206, 279, 209, 219, 280 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 27, 47, 70,    71, 368

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On the harlequin as twins: “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 73

I need to know a lot more about Harlequin. In Eric Bentley’s collection of Italian plays there’s a commedia dell’arte scenario written up as a play by someone called Leon Katz.37 If the characteristics assigned to Harlequin are conventional they’re interesting. He is, of course, a vice or merry-andrew, playing tricks on the other characters; also a jester. More important is a curious self-detaching quality about him; he divides himself into two people, one sneering at the antics of the other, and holds other dialogues with himself: he pretends to go to hell and says “Myself came to the door, told me to go away, and went back in without me” [132]. Twin theme. Also he dresses up as a woman; also he plays a mute part, suggesting Harpo Marx, who’s a modern Harlequin. A character says to the audience, “go to the commedia, and laugh at Arlecchino”; Arlecchino says “I am Arlecchino, and I have laughed at him until I cried” [142]. All this must be traditional: it’s (roughly) contemporary with the improvised cadenzas and figured-bass playing of music. There’s a hell of a lot of commedia dell’arte in Shakespeare: this play makes a great to-do over a basket of lemons that’s precisely the buck-basket theme in The Merry Wives. One of the stocks of Pantalone, always an older man, is handing out advice to his son, which implies that Polonius, as his name perhaps implies, is something of a pantaloon (I’ve already called Barbantio that, and the first scene of Othello has a curious resemblance to an Arlecchino type of lazzi, waking up Pantalone by shouts). Evidently catching and eating flies is another Harlequin routine: in Yeats’ poem “The Statues” there seems to be a confusion or identification of Harlequin with Hamlet. In any case the link between the commedia dell’arte and Yeats’ Vision is something I noticed from the beginning, and it was referred to by Yeats himself.38 Four character types in Goldoni derive from the Comedy of Masks: Pantalone, the Dottore, Brighella and Arlecchino. The first three are dressed respectively in red, white and black. Truffaldino is a kind of double of Harlequin. That gives two senex types, of contrasting physical appearance (Pantalone tall and thin; Dottore short and fat), and two servant types, one knave or ruffian, the other fool. Harlequin wears a black mask, which originally represented merely the dirty face of a charcoal burner or chimney sweep. The word “zany” comes from Zanni, the Bergamo dialect form of Giovanni. Bergamo is of course proverbially rustic: cf. Suite Bergamasque. Pierrot and Columbine must be of different origin. I must think about the role of jesters generally in drama: they’re even central to Sanskrit drama, and I’ve noticed that Shakespeare deliberately puts them in where his sources have no mention of them (there’s no trace of Touchstone in Lodge’s Rosalind or of Autolycus in Greene’s Pandosto). I think they have some-

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thing to do with the preservation of an oral tradition in drama—wit and jokes depend on an oral tradition, which is why they’re so damn dismal even in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s melancholy clowns may be connected with Harlequin’s self-detaching quality. It’s not that they’re more realistic than their romantic surroundings, necessarily, but that they create a Brechtian sense of “alienation,” a realization that this is a show. Hence, Jaques, who’s really a jester and wants to wear motley, and whose apotheosis is a long set speech comparing life to a stage. Touchstone’s seven stages of the duel create alienation from the upper-class rituals to which duelling belongs [As You Like It, 5.4.94–108]. Gozzi’s King Stag (Il Re Cervo) is an almost completely undisplaced metamorphosis theme. The King and his ambitious and wicked Prime Minister go hunting (the Prime Minister, who’s evidently a Dottore type, also loves the girl the King’s gonna marry). Then the King, under pressure from the Prime Minister, tells latter a secret confided him by a magician: if you pronounce a formula over a dead body, you die and enter the dead body and bring it to life. King tries it on a stag; Prime Minister promptly tries it on the King, i.e., enters his body, and then offers a huge reward for killing the stag. So we have somebody who looks like the King behaving like a tyrant: the girl senses the difference and promptly falls out of love. The King shuffles off the stag body for a very old man, a beggar; trace of Odyssey theme. Comes to his girl friend and says the Prime Minister “took possession of my real body and had me hunted by my own hounds” [356]. Meanwhile the magician who taught him this spell has been turned into a green parrot, and is captured (voluntarily) by the king’s bird-catcher. At the end he turns back into a magician, and accuses the false king: “you sought to usurp the shape and power of the King, and turn the King into a lowly creature, spurned or hunted by all” [364]. Gozzi again: the other trick the magician taught the king was a statue that laughs like hell when any woman lies to him. So he interviews 2748 females looking for a bride and they all lie, including the Columbine (or equivalent; she’s not called that), who’s naturally in love with somebody else. (She’s also the daughter of the Prime Minister, who goes into a great rage when she tells him she do wanna; the accepted bride, whom Prime Minister also loves, is the daughter of Pantalone, so called.) A lot of by-play about these interviews, making me wonder if Yeats knew this play: it has points in common with The Player Queen. Certainly the Magic Flute links are there, what with the bird-catcher and his birds: he starts out in love with a silly female called Smeraldina, whom he refers to throughout as a bird or “hen”; the name suggests another green parrot. The main story is very like that werewolf folktale in the Lees’ book.39 Anyway, metamorphoses and demonic parody, with the magician assuming the persona of the playwright, more or less, at the end, and, of course, renouncing his magic and saying he’s “free,” at the very end. I know I can’t trust the translation in details, but I wish I

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knew how much was Gozzi—the Tempest links suggest some common source for two plays widely removed in time and culture. The hunt, as the deer and hart puns emphasize, is a cunt-hunt: hunting is male, with both pursuit and linear thrust elements in it. What’s important in romance is less the victim of the hunt than the female enclosing forest, into which the hunter disappears. The victim is often a death symbol, of course: the boar in the Adonis myth, the fox in Surtees as the “thief of the world,”40 and when it is, the enclosing forest becomes the scene in which the drama of death is transmuted into rebirth. The forest is the abode of Diana the virgin, and the lurking tragic possibility is that of metamorphosis, the Actaeon fate of being hunted by one’s own hounds. Hence a lurking identification with the victim: what shall he have that killed the deer? His leather skin and horns to wear [As You Like It, 4.2.11–12]. The song goes on to say that the hunter’s father and grandfather wore the horns before him—usual stale joke about cuckold, but the cuckold joke really does have some connexion, I think, with the Actaeon reversal theme. Male body as prick is what dies, of course. Gozzi was the man quoted by Goethe as having maintained that there were only thirty-six dramatic situations: I’ve been trying to track this down, and a dramatist whose work is so undisplaced would be the most likely person to think in such terms.41 That is (re above), the cuckold is a displaced Actaeon figure: the hounds, symbol of both his erotic and his acquisitive drives, are turned around on him. Because you only get cuckolds when the wife is thought of as her husband’s possession, or rather as part of his honour, the symbol of his social freedom, as her chastity (fidelity to him) is of hers.

17.  Indian Drama The Dream of Vasavadatta was written sometime between the second century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. Ratnavali is attributed to a seventh-century Indian emperor. The other plays mentioned are all from ancient India.

Indian drama isn’t as archetypally rewarding as I thought it might be from Sakuntala, and the Indians sure as hell do make honey a sauce to sugar.42 However. There’s a play called The Dream of Vasavadatta. Vasavadatta is queen of King Udayana, a virtuous enough king, only the astrologers have said that the husband of another woman named Padmavati will be master of all India, so Udayana’s prime minister, Yaugandharayana, is anxious to snag her for Udayana. So he burns up the place where Vasavadatta is, spreads the rumor she’s been burned alive in it, then introduces Vasavadatta, disguised as his sister, into

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an ashrama where Padmavati is also. Udayana and Padmavati are betrothed, and Vasavadatta has to watch all this, though the king’s grief for her is intense, genuine, and therefore pleasant to her. Padmavati says she has a headache; Vasavadatta comes in to try to comfort her; it’s dark; she finds her lying on the bed and lies down beside her; what’s on the bed is not Padmavati but the king. He talks in his sleep and thinks he’s seen his dead wife, as he has, only she ain’t dead. This is where the “Dream” comes; the translator says the title really means “The Dream and Vasavadatta.” Note the displaced or token bed trick theme. Meanwhile Udayana’s commander in chief cleans up his enemies for him, and restores him the kingdom he’s been dispossessed of, more or less. Two tokens of recognition, one of sight and one of sound, handed to him. One is Vasavadatta’s lute: he’s taught her to play it, which links with the lover as music-master theme which is also in Apollonius, and gets realistically down-graded in The Taming of the Shrew and The Marriage of Figaro (the Beaumarchais version, not the Mozart one). The other is a portrait of her brought by her sorrowing relatives. Her mother says he ran away with her instead of marrying her with them (a lot of things aren’t very clear), so “we drew your portrait and hers on a plate and performed the wedding ceremony.” Magical portrait theme. According to the amiable Indian convention, a king can have two wives, so everybody’s happy: note however (the important thing) the survival of the first heroine through a death-and-rebirth theme (the bed in the dark being the stage equivalent of her {reported} death) to emerge again at the end of the play—this is the folklore theme behind Aristophanes recorded by Cornford. Displaced here. Author’s name is Bhasa. Another play, perhaps written a thousand years later, is called Ratnavali: King Udayana and Queen Vasavadatta and Prime Minister, elaborately scheming Yaugandharayana, are the same as above, but the second wife is different in name and the story uses different archetypes. Ratnavali means necklace, which is her talisman of recognition; her name is Sagarika in the play. Same story about how marrying her would make Udayana master of India: she’s brought into the palace in disguise by Yaugandharayana again, and the king falls in love with her, starting by falling in love with her portrait (she’s painted his, and somebody else hers on the same picture). There’s also a tell-tale bird, a mynah, that helps communicate. Here Vasavadatta turns bitchy and has the girl imprisoned—the king isn’t a very royal figure. A Magician turns up, dismissed in favor of an urgent appointment before he can pull off his best trick. Yell that the palace has caught fire; Sagarika is imprisoned in the dungeons of it; Vasavadatta seems to have changed her mind and wants her rescued; she is, only there ain’t no fire; it was the magician’s prize trick. Recognition through necklace; king buys a bed for three and everybody’s happy. Two others, The Toy Cart and The Signet Ring of Rakshasa, haven’t very distinctive outlines: both of them lead up to an execution of a victim who’s delivered at

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the last moment. The former has an innocent and pious man the victim, unjustly accused of a crime; the cognitio is simply the discovery of the real criminal, who is also let go (Barabbas archetype). I don’t know why it’s called The Toy Cart. The other is a drama of political intrigue, where a Machiavellian politician, adviser (and guru, therefore with far more authority) of Chandragupta, manages to win over Chandragupta’s chief enemy, Rakshasa, by a series of cunning devices, in which Rakshasa’s signet ring is a floating talisman, very ingeniously handled, I should think, if I had time to figure it all out. The Later Story of Rama is more interesting from my present point of view. The story is a modification of the sequel stuck on the end of the Ramayana. Rama’s quest is over and he’s ruling Ayodhya with Sita: the play begins with them studying the story of the Ramayana as depicted in a series of pictures. Ecphrasis, or whatever it is; also involvement of art in the argument, as in The Winter’s Tale, and self-recognition of the hero, as with Aeneas at Carthage, as I’ve already mentioned. Considering that Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, is an important character in this play, the Winter’s Tale links are even clearer. Well, the “people” are said to doubt Sita’s purity, so Rama exiles her in the forest (she was going there anyway, but this time she can’t come back). Note the combination of pastoral and slander themes, as in The Faerie Queene, book 6, Spenser’s equivalent of the last two romances. Twelve years pass; Sita has given birth to twins, who are brought up by Valmiki. Meanwhile, Rama has celebrated the horse sacrifice: Hindu law requires that he do this with his wife; the “people” say he should marry again; he says the hell with that and celebrates it with a golden statue of his wife. Rama, in quest of a dragon or whatever to kill, enters the forest where Sita has been revisiting the scenes of her past: she’s invisible, but he feels her presence. She was kept from suicide by Ganga, the spirit of the Ganges. Then we’re introduced to the twins, who are heroes already, and one of them defies an entire army. Rama comes and admires them without knowing that they’re his own sons. Finally, there’s a supernatural spectacle devised by the poet Bharata, a dramatization of the Ramayana, and played by Apsaras (Tempest theme of drama acted by spirits), depicting the sorrows of Sita. Rama sees it, and can’t get over the feeling that it’s real and not just a play, and faints. A somewhat unconvincing jerk into a happy-ending reunion of Rama, Sita and the twins, occurs in the last minute. The original Ramayana ending was better: Sita (the name means “furrow”) asks her mother the Earth (Prithvi) to swallow her up; Rama drowns himself and joins her in the other world. Extraordinary union of Winter’s Tale and Tempest themes. Such a play as The Later Story of Rama, with its many parallels to Winter’s Tale and Tempest, raises a lot of questions about the nature of recognition-reconciliation in drama. Why so much about the arts? Painting, sculpture and music, as well as drama itself, come into The Winter’s Tale; music and drama (masque) into The Tempest. In the Rama play we have first paintings giving the Ramayana story

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that the chief characters involved look at; then Sita goes into exile, where the exile, the pregnancy, the slander are all Winter’s Tale themes; in her absence she’s replaced by a golden statue in Rama’s life and returns to Rama as an invisible spirit—Hermione returns to Leontes as a ghost in a dream and a statue is said to be made of her. The play at the end is acted by Apsaras or spirits, and again it’s the story of the exile of Sita which is a part of the play itself, at least a part of its action, though it’s offstage action. Rama takes it to be real, and it ends with a cognitio of Rama, Sita, and her twins. All this appears to mean that the arts, brought together by drama, have a crucial role in uniting a dream with an awakened life, and by that union bringing about a form of higher consciousness which is what the cognitio at the end symbolizes. Drama, which partakes of both dream and wakened life, points to a form of consciousness transcending the schizophrenic alternation of dreams and waking “reality.” The statue doesn’t come to life in the Indian play, but the drama does. Note too that Valmiki, author of the Ramayana, is the tutor of the twins. Poet as guru—cf. the curious Prospero-Shakespeare link. Why does Sita have twins, for crissake? I thought twins belonged in the journey out, not back in. But of course the Comedy of Errors ends with the twins united; maybe they symbolize the union of the divided identity. Calumniated heroine theme of course—no explanation of why the crowd doubts Sita’s purity: they just do. In the Ramayana the “furrow” and earth-mother aspects seem to point to a phase of symbolism that the dramatist isn’t much interested in.

18.  Sir Walter Scott, Waverley The edition of Waverley Frye is using is apparently the one edited by Andrew Hook (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Frye owned and annotated this edition. Frye’s page references, as well as those in square brackets, are to this edition. Waverley was first published in 1814. References to Waverley in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 192, 195, 238, 276 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 28–9, 57

This is not the type of story that I need to summarize too closely for my present purposes: I have most of my main points about it already. He’s very explicit about the romantic and quixotic cast of Waverley’s mind, to the point of saying his readers may expect an imitation of Cervantes. But Waverley isn’t nuts: he’s describing “that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture

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of its own romantic tone and coloring” [55]. Also “Female forms of exquisite grace and beauty began to mingle in his mental adventures” [55]. He read a good deal, brought up in a household where it was regarded as meritorious just to look at a book, regardless of the degree of understanding involved: true also of the household I was brought up in, and of my first efforts to read Waverley itself. “The vague and unsatisfactory course of reading which he had pursued, working upon a temper naturally retired and abstracted, had given him that wavering and unsettled habit of mind which is most averse to study and rivetted attention” [73]. The word “wavering” indicates how he chose the name for his hero. So Waverley retires to a ruined tower on his Tory uncle’s property and broods over the War of the Roses, some of which was fought there. The reader is assured that he can’t follow the rest of the story without reading all about the Tory-Whig eighteenth‑century background. Anyway, Waverley gets a commission in the king’s Hanoverian army and sets out for Scotland—I forget why at the moment. Scott’s essential characters then begin to appear: Bradwardine is a lovable pedant of the Oldbuck type, and the contrast with Waverley is like the Wardour-Oldbuck relation in some ways. I’m typing badly because most of this is shit. Also the idiotes or whatever figure: Davie Gellatley, who had a brother of unusual talents who died early, and Davie learned a lot of songs from him—Shakespearean singing fool, and the progenitor of the wild character like Wandering Willie. It’s obvious that the Highlanders appear to Waverley as a kind of objectification of his own quixotic daydreams (129). The colors red and black seem to have some thematic significance: sidier roy means red or government soldier; sidier dhu an insurgent. The preface says the wrath of our ancestors was gules, ours black. Two heroines, as I’ve noted: “they would have afforded an artist two admirable subjects for the gay and the melancholy muse,” 170: cf. Pirate. A good deal about the oral poetry of the Highlands. Flora doesn’t mind heights; Waverley does, 175: cf. Anne of Geierstein. She says to him “He who wooes her {The Celtic muse} must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.” This book is really Ossian II, as the civilization of the Highlanders is as remote from an Edinburgh lawyer as that of the Cree Indians would be to me. Scott says the van of the Highland army was tolerably respectable, but “the rear resembled actual banditti” [324]. A great deal is, naturally, made of the intense tribal and comitatus loyalties of the Highland clans: it’s part of the whole tragic theme that the comedy of Waverley runs through. Waverley says think of all the poor sods who’re gonna die in this fight; Fergus says think only sword: “All other reflections are now too late” [336]. Very accurate phrasing. Flora talks to Rose about Waverley and says he’s a sissy, more or less, adding that when it comes to fighting, most male animals are much alike, and it generally takes more courage to run away. Waverley himself says he’s “dedicated myself to one who will never love mortal man, unless old Warwick,

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the King-maker, should arise from the dead” [376]. Curious, this equation of the War of the Roses with the Jacobite rebellion: cf. Eliot’s Little Gidding. The Jacobites wear a white cockade, which is called (390) the “cause of the White Rose.” Of course the other side of comitatus loyalty is hopeless rivalry and dissension on any co-operative occasion, and the Jacobite army soon falls to pieces in consequence. Involved plotting about the Bradwardine estate, seized by the heir-male, and we’ve been told that “from a romantic idea of not prejudicing this young man’s right as heir-male, the Baron had refrained from settling his estate on his daughter” [438]. Sexism here as in Redgauntlet, similarly leading to disaster, or at least connected with it. Waverley is actually saved from the fate he’s provoked (a) by Rose and her intrigues (see 448) (b) by the Colonel Talbot he took prisoner at Prestonpans: he’s a really cuddled pet. Narrative compared to a stone rolling down hill, 480. It passes through the very real tragedy of Fergus to the comedy of Waverley’s escape, pardon, marriage to Rose, fixing up of the Bradwardines, etc. A good example of a principle just dawning in my mind about the miraculous escape of the hero being that of humanity as a whole in romance.

19.  Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering Frye owned two copies of Guy Mannering, both of which he annotated: Boston: Aldine, 1831, and London: Dent, 1957. Frye’s page references, as well as those in square brackets, are to the Dent edition. Guy Mannering was first published in 1815. References to Guy Mannering in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 192, 195, 206, 218, 225, 226 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 6, 71, 75, 77

Note Scott’s fondness for beginning a story with a single, or at most two, traveller(s) in a bleak and lonely landscape, generally in or near the dark. It’s a modulation of the hunting king disappearing into the forest, symbol of trying to screw the whole outdoors as a shrouding female, or getting back into the womb. Said to form a historical trilogy, following Waverley and preceding The Antiquary. Waverley is named after the adulscens hero; The Antiquary after a pedant-senex; Guy Mannering is halfway between. Guy Mannering is a considerably cut-down astrologer: the man Scott doesn’t believe in what the novelist Scott needs, so there’s a good deal of buggering around. The introduction suggests a considerably more undisplaced romance with an astrologer as an old wise man. Some of this gets lightning-rodded onto Julia Mannering, who’s very romanticized, being a bored and intelligent middle-class girl.

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Well; Guy Mannering is night-foundered and stays with Bertram, the Laird of Ellengowan, a pedantic humor and a weakling, who later becomes a judge and shows his weakness in the opposite disguise of tyrannical obstinacy, a moral virtue which creates the evil it fears. Dominie Sampson is a kind of Frankenstein character and partly a helpful animal: ugly, clumsy, pedantic, but faithful. He’s often described as an automaton. Meg Merrilies is of course one of Scott’s wise women: both she and Guy Mannering tell the fortune of the infant being born at the time, Henry Bertram, and arrive at the same result: disasters at five (ten) and twenty-one. He’s kidnapped by pirates (smugglers) at five; adopted by a Dutchman named Brown; goes off to India; engages in a displaced Phèdre affair with Guy Mannering’s silly wife, is wounded (displaced killed) in a duel by Guy Mannering. Guy Mannering finds from his astrology that his wife (then just the girl he’s engaged to) is threatened with death or imprisonment at the same time as Henry Bertram’s 21-year-old disaster. Hero enters death-and-rebirth stage at the time of death of sinister mother, who’s also, like her daughter, a romanticist, and therefore a creator of illusion or false architectus. A lot said about the labyrinth and maze of Guy Mannering’s astrology (39). There are a lot of scale-stairs in the book, including an ascent leading from Bertram’s present abode to an old castle—symbol of historical butterslide, more or less. A very complex imagery of beacons, fires, marsh-lights, and the like, meshing in with the stars (astrological) imagery. Note that The Antiquary features alchemical imagery. Meg’s fortunetelling is done with yarn and a spindle, and her song sounds vaguely Fatal Sisterish. Hatteraick says to her “Come, bless the good ship and the voyage, and be cursed to ye for a hag of Satan.” “A very narrow staircase here went down to the beach” (45). Bertram says Hatteraick is a smuggler when his guns are in ballast and a pirate when they’re mounted (46). Well, Bertram reforms, as he thinks, and makes a mess of everything: “the young women wanted pins, ribbons, combs, and ballads”—implication is that if you banish Autolycus you banish an important part of the world, as with Falstaff (a lot of the mottoes come from The Winter’s Tale, and there’s the same sixteenyear break in the story to give Henry Bertram time to get to be 21) (Pleydell, who’s a Clement figure, recalls Falstaff and Shallow, being introduced as a Lord of Misrule, so the point about roguery is really there.) Gipsies are called banditti. “The wildness of their character, and the indomitable pride with which they despised all regular labour, commanded a certain awe.” They’re proletarian aristocrats, so to speak, and link with all Scott’s wanderers (Edie Chiltree in The Antiquary). Impressive curse pronounced by Meg Merrilies who breaks a switch she’s cut from one of his trees; she’s compared to Margaret of Anjou. Light image, 74. Kennedy (never mind who he is) murdered, Harry kidnapped, Mrs. Bertram dies bringing out Lucy Bertram. Kennedy’s murder is investigated in a remarkable early piece

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of detective-story writing: he was thrown over a cliff, and it was thought Harry might have been too (important cliff imagery in The Antiquary). Guy Mannering “kills” Brown in a duel over his wife; she’s grabbed by “natives,” and though soon released, this covers the “imprisonment” he foresaw in the stars and is counterpoint to Bertram’s abduction. She dies eight months later, leaving him with a female child—more counterpoint. So Henry Bertram “dies” as part of his release from the mother and revives to marry the daughter. Also Guy Mannering is a murderer and cuckold who’s killed his own son (in law). What a tangled web we weave. Well, Bertram goes broke and is sold up, the auction being a displaced rape (“It is disgusting, also, to see the scenes of domestic society and seclusion thrown open to the gaze of the curious and the vulgar,” etc., 99). Glossin, parasite and pharmakos, buys property and Bertram dies as a result of seeing him. Naturally the Dominie sticks with Lucy, “a ridiculous appendage to a beautiful young woman” (111); heroine with grotesque, as in Dickens. Guy Mannering and daughter are now back in Britain; Guy Mannering tries to buy the Ellengowan estate but misses out by a fluke. Series of letter-extract passages from Julia Mannering, who, being an adolescent romantic, can safely be allowed to express some of the undisplaced imagery. “Do you know there was a murmur, half confirmed too by some mysterious words which dropped from my poor mother, that he possesses other sciences, now lost to the world, which enable the possessor to summon up before him the dark and shadowy forms of future events!” [119]. She gets serenaded by Brown-Bertram on a flageolet, which is given magic-flute overtones, from a boat on a lake; her host, a friend of Guy Mannering, tells Guy Mannering and he snatches her out of there. Guy Mannering is an utter prick, self-righteous and prissy, although he does all the right things. “There seemed to be a fate which conjoined the remarkable passages of his own family history with those of the inhabitants of Ellengowan, and he felt a mysterious desire to call the terrace his own, from which he had read in the book of heaven a fortune strangely accomplished in the person of the infant heir of that family, and corresponding so closely with one which had been strikingly fulfilled in his own” [132]. That means he’s a displaced magician-creator, like Prospero; the set-up is not unlike the Gozzi King-stag one. Well, Guy Mannering buys another place, installs the Dominie in it, who assimilates to the Samuel Johnson type of pedant—I only mean the combination of bookishness and awkwardness. So we leave “the principal characters of our tale in a situation which, being sufficiently comfortable to themselves, is, of course, utterly uninteresting to the reader” [140]. So we go on to Brown, who follows the Mannerings into Scotland, and runs into Dandie Dinmont, where there’s a halt for some ritual huntin’ and fishin’ and shootin,’ with some interesting flickering-light imagery for the fishin.’ Pp. 170, 171, and an ignis fatuus on 178. Now we go into a scene where Brown is

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protected by Meg from being murdered, in a hut where somebody (I forget who) has been murdered, so we have death-rebirth and sinister-woman again. One of Meg’s roles is faithful attendant to the Bertram clan, however: an interesting reference to Lady Macbeth on 182. “The little tower, of which only a single vault remained, forming the dismal apartment in which he had spent this remarkable night, was perched on the very point of a projecting rock overhanging the rivulet.” Displaced grave on top of a precipice, “if he had attempted to go round the building, which was once his purpose, he must have been dashed to pieces” (188). Calls Meg mother, and she says “I know it has been the will of God to preserve you in strange dangers, and that I shall be the instrument to set you in your father’s seat again” (190). She gives him money to go on which is a “treasure.” Back to Julia, who’s bored stiff—Scott is fairly shrewd about the plight of respectable young ladies with military prigs for fathers. All she can do is write letters to her girl friend. You, she says, preferred “tales of knights, dwarfs, giants . . . ” while “I was partial to the involved intrigues of private life, or at farthest, to so much only of the supernatural as is conferred by the agency of an Eastern genie or a beneficent fairy” [199]. Too bad Scott hasn’t a prose style: these hay-wagon sentences are a bore. So “you should have had my father, with his. . . abstruse and mystic studies”—I quote all this guff because it’s from the undisplaced Guy Mannering-as-enchanter conception of the story. Well, Brown reappears in the story and by accident shoots Hazlewood, the other adulescens and boy friend of Lucy, with his own gun. Second duel and hero as villain. “I feel the terrors of a child who has, in heedless sport, put in motion some powerful piece of machinery”—this is Julia, and the machinery goes on creaking and rattling. Well, Hatteraick is arrested and threatens to sing about Glossin, who dreams that “after wandering long over a wild heath, he came at length to an inn” [225]. Lights obscured, 227. Glossin and Henry confer about possibility that Brown has returned: Henry, confusing him with the other guy, says “he was laid six feet deep at Derncleugh the day before the thing happened . . . do ye think that he could rise out of the earth to shoot another man?” (233). Guy Mannering goes to Edinburgh and meets Pleydell, who was the sheriff investigating the murder of Kennedy earlier—a well-constructed romance never wastes a character. The Lord of Misrule business is a Saturday-night carnival, Sunday being so damn dismal in Edinburgh. Well, a distant connexion named Margaret Bertram dies and leaves a lot of money to our hero, being assured by Meg Merrilies that he’s still alive. Pleydell takes on a case of Dandie Dinmont, which he refused at first—the Scotch are very litigious, is part of the point. He says “In civilized society, law is the chimney through which all that smoke discharges itself that used to circulate through the whole house, and put every one’s eyes out” [273]. Connects with my point about the fascination of the nineteenth century for law, where we have to allow for the influence of Scott, who of course

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was a lawyer. Pleydell gives Guy Mannering letters of introduction to all the Scotch geniuses, Hume, Home, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, etc. Dunno why, except to bring them in. Back to Brown, 288: “And thus, unconscious as the most absolute stranger, and in circumstances which, if not destitute, were for the present highly embarrassing; without the countenance of a friend within the circle of several hundred miles; accused of a heavy crime, and, what was as bad as all the rest, being nearly penniless, did the harassed wanderer for the first time, after the interval of so many years, approach the remains of the castle, where his ancestors had exercised all but regal dominion.” Then he changes his name back to Bertram, “since he has set foot upon the property of his father” [288]. Naturally he gets a strong sense of deja vu, and wonders about India and reincarnation, also about whether we get it from unconsciously recalling dreams. Refers to “a skirmish in which my father was killed” [290], i.e., Kennedy—like most romantic heroes, he has a string of fathers. His own, Kennedy, Brown, and eventually Guy Mannering. “It happened that the spot upon which young Bertram chanced to station himself for the better viewing the castle was nearly the same on which his father had died. That’s his real father. It was marked by a large old oak-tree . . . used for executions by the barons of Ellengowan” [290]. Meets Glossin, who doesn’t see him at first because “he was quite shrouded by the branches of the large tree” [290]. Glossin “thought the grave had given up its dead” [291]. They converse about the family motto which Bertram sees: “The remnants of an old prophecy, or song, or rhyme, of some kind or other, return to my recollection on hearing that motto” [292]––the prophecy is the usual oracle about the end of the story. Glossin “appeared to wither into the shadow of himself” [293]; Bertram plays a tune on his flageolet which a girl hears and sings to; Glossin says “the devil take all ballads, and ballad-makers, and ballad-singers!” [294]. So Glossin pinches him for assaulting Hazlewood, and he’s stuck in a room in the old castle. Then he’s transferred to jail, where Mrs. McGuffog, the jaileress, is grim comic relief. Meanwhile the Dominie goes for a walk and wanders past the “vestige of a tower, called by the country people the Kaim of Derncleugh” [327]—the place Bertram saw the murder of Hatteraick’s lieutenant. Legend associating it with the last stand of a Macbeth type of murderer. Here the Dominie meets Meg Merrilies, in that wonderful comic scene where she feeds him dinner “which, if the vapours of a witch’s cauldron could in aught be trusted, promised better things than the hell-broth which such vessels are usually supposed to contain” 330: the “lights” image occurs on 327–8, and is part of the undisplaced background of this story, which includes the belief that Meg has the fern-seed and goes invisible, and earlier, that Harry had been spirited away into fairyland. Sunset image 332 and reference to breaking the wand of peace over the father. Meg has a long red cloak, a scar on the forehead, and “a staff in her hand, headed with a sort of spear-point.”

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(The Dominie earlier has been compared to a dumb-waiter and a mental pawnshop.) Bertram is to be committed to trial before Hazlewood’s father, a baronet and justice of the peace who is also a snob and a fathead—usual pattern of dumb judge before wise one (Pleydell). Bertram looks at moon over ocean and wishes that “some siren or Proteus would arise from these billows, to unriddle for me the strange maze of fate” [334]—well, the moon shone from the clouds, counterpoint on p. 344 to the sun on 332, which does ditto and is commented on by Meg. The prison is set on fire, with lots of the light imagery: see p. 349 and elsewhere before. Bertram is rescued along with Dandie Dinmont, who’s come to help him. Back to Pleydell, visiting the Mannerings, who says “I love the cœna, the supper of the ancients” [352] and is given the letter to read that Meg had given the Dominie: it’s the oracle at the climax of the story, and quotes the motto, which he says is “in a vein of poetry worthy of the Cumaean sibyl” [353]. Pleydell is a self-projection, much less amusing than Oldbuck. Chapter 50 has a passage from the inner play in The Critic, which parodies what Guy Mannering takes seriously, more or less. It’s the epigraph. The return of the hero puts the Mannering family into a tizzy and Pleydell says to himself “has this young fellow brought the Gorgon’s head in his hand?” [359]. Dominie says “If the grave can give up the dead, that is my dear and honoured master!” [360]. Recognition by Argus, more or less. Final (more or less) scene of returning heir “would have formed no bad group for a skilful painter” [361]—epopteia image. Guy Mannering of course goes all prissy—son has to appease the father, of course, but too bad those implications couldn’t have been left to the critics, if there had been any. Counsellor was “in his element,” thinking of a wonderful lawsuit—lawyer as projection of a novelist who is a lawyer, trained to observe people, he’s said earlier. Dominie less of an automaton; Dinmont resembles “a huge bear erect upon his hinder legs” [361], which is not just the wild man archetype but repeats the family crest (pp. 289, 361). Anyway, there’s a family-gathering scene, with the lawyer as chairman, of a type I haven’t a name for—it occurs in Eliot’s Confidential Clerk and elsewhere, and is common in detective stories, but is neither a symposium nor a trial scene, but something in between. Bertram recognizes Dominie as his “old master” (363). They have to act “before daybreak” to outwit the bad guys, don’t know why. Final change of name to Bertram, 364, and then he’s asked to remember everything he can about his abduction. This connects with my stuff about Woman in White and the trepanning business in Le Fanu. Pleydell says “since you have wanted a father so long, I wish from my heart I could claim the paternity myself.” “We must pass over his father, and serve him heir to his grandfather”—something about entail, p. 366, ibid. Guy Mannering says “I . . . chanced to be in the house of Ellengowan as unexpectedly as you are now in mine, upon the very night in which you were born.” Called an enfant trouve, 367: Scott, like Shakespeare, knows this stuff is corn, but doesn’t give a damn.

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Incidentally, the Dominie, who can barely speak, is a master of tongues, and has taught Lucy French, Italian, and Spanish. He would have taught her Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but she said no because they were unladylike, so Pleydell has to go on explaining Latin tags to her. He says this just as Bertram meets his sister, and it’s traditional, though I don’t know in what contexts. Bertram speaks of “that dim and imperfect shadow of his memory,” i.e. Sampson, which he’d loved. P. 372: entanglement, wild dream, unriddle: the mixed metaphor of unriddling a maze has come up before. Julia compares the story to an Oriental romance—more lightning-rodding—“this lively crack-brained Scotch lawyer appears like a pantomime at the end of a tragedy” [373]. Julia met Bertram when he shot Hazlewood, but said nothing to her father, so he wants to know why the hell not—well brought up girls tell everything but everything to fathers. Scott has to save his face while indicating to the reader that he’s a prick and mostly wrong anyway, so it’s a silly scene. Like Prospero and Milton’s God, Guy Mannering is hard to take. He says he’ll call off the heavy father act because “Henry Bertram . . . is a very different person from Vanbeest Brown, the son of nobody at all” [375]. Besides he’s respectable because his ancestors fought their guts out in battles, “while our own fought at Cressy and Poictiers” [375]. Oh, well, daughter-fucking is something you can’t give up without a struggle. The Dominie nearly throws boiling water over a fainting Lucy––serves her damn well right—and does throw some over a dog—don’t know why. Now they have to establish Bertram’s legitimacy, or something. Pleydell says he sees doubts, the Dominie says “I trust HE, who hath restored little Harry Bertram to his friends, will not leave His own work imperfect” [378]. Walter Scott as executive son of God. Old Hazlewood still balks; two girls take Bertram for a Pisgah view of his estate, and Meg appears, “as if emerging out of the earth, ascended from the hollow way, and stood before them” [383]. As if always points to what’s undisplaced. She’s compared to the fairy bride of Sir Gawain, and now she’s a Buttercup figure. She reminds Julia of stories heard in India about witches with the evil eyes––remember the gypsies came from India. “There was something frightful and unearthly, as it were, in the rapid and undeviating course which she pursued . . . . Her way was as straight, and nearly as swift, as that of a bird through the air” (385). He’s accompanied (Bertram is) by Dinmont. Something about rejected corner stones (387) and imposing silence. “She paused an instant beneath the tall rock where he had witnessed the burial of a dead body” [387]—second Moses echo. She insists that despite stocks, scourging, brands, banishment and the works, she’s not mad. “I’m stripped too” [388]—she has a red cloak and Sampson calls her whore. To do what she wants to do she has to isolate herself from her people. She says to Bertram he should build up the old walls again for her sake “and let somebody live there that’s ower gude to fear them of another world—for if ever the dead came back amang the living,

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I’ll be seen in this glen mony a night after these crazed banes are in the mould” [388]. “At length she guided them through the mazes of the wood to a little open glade” (389). Spring scene full of flowers. She takes them to the spot where Kennedy was murdered (I think it’s Kennedy). Long and winding passage to the seaside, where there’s a cave—Dimont calls it a dungeon and a badger-hole— “creep after the witch into that hole that she’s opening.” Oracular cave of rebirth. Light image again, 391–2. Hazlewood turns up. Bertram sees Hatteraick and remembers that he, “and his mate Brown, the same who was shot at Woodbourne” (Guy Mannering’s place, on a smuggler’s raid described by Julia) “had been the brutal tyrants of his infancy” [393]––titans around infant Zeus archetype. Flame rose and fell. Then Meg and Hatteraick talk: “Did I not say the auld fire would burn down to a spark, but wad kindle again?” [394]. Hatteraick says the hero “has been a rock ahead to me all my life” [394]—storm-god, more or less—he always swears by donner and blitzen. Meg drops a firebrand on flax that’s been steeped in whatever they used for gasoline: it “rose in a vivid pyramid of the most brilliant light up to the very top of the vault” [394]. Then Meg gives her signal (somewhat inevitably, “Because the hour’s come, and the man” [394]) and the three guys rush out and overpower Hatteraick, but not until he shoots Meg and nearly shoots the hero, who of course stumbles. Meg can’t understand why there are three—cf. the Waste Land extra man business. She says she wanted them to give her Bertram when he was five. (This gives Meg Merrilies a role as the hero’s mother: he calls her mother once.) Then there’s a scene of public recognition of the lost heir, begun by Jock Jabos, the postilion who’s been around earlier scenes. Cf. the Woman in White recognition scene by all the faithful lock-pullers. Jock Jabos gives “just the spark wanted to give fire to the popular feeling” [399]. Moment “when the frost of the Scottish people melts like a snow-wreath” [400]—counterpoint to spring imagery. Meg says “if my curse brought it down, my blessing has taken it off” [400]—womb and tomb mother. She dies attended by a clergyman who says, more or less, she wasn’t a Presbyterian, but her mentality was feudal, so maybe she’ll get to heaven. Glossin and old Hazlewood have been claiming all along that Bertram is really a bastard son of Ellengowan, impersonating the lost heir. But this other double is produced: he exists all right, but he’s someone else. Glossin is then convicted of being accessory to the original kidnapping (we’re in a scene presided over by Pleydell again, who’s also re-enacting his role as sheriff in the earlier case). Testimony of Meg’s nephew, Gabriel Faa, leads to Henry Bertram’s producing “a small velvet bag, which he said he has worn round his neck from his earliest infancy, and which he had preserved, first from superstitious reverence, and, latterly, from the hope that it might serve one day to aid in the discovery of his birth” [410]. Well, that was all we needed. It’s the astrological horoscope, of

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course. Comment on the symmetry: Mannering the colonel and Pleydell the lawyer; Hatteraick the pirate and Glossin the lawyer (411). So then we adjourn to the jail where Glossin calls on Hatteraick, who’s been dreaming that Meg Merrilies dragged Glossin there by the hair and gave Glossin a clasp knife. Hatteraick kills Glossin—bear and fox, corresponding to Dinmont and, I suppose, Pleydell again on the amiable side. Hatteraick promises to write a full account of his doings–– this villain’s statement is frequent, as in Woman in White—but uses the writing materials to hang himself. Back to the white pieces: Pleydell says Guy Mannering, who’s going to be living at the Hazlewood estate next to Ellengowan (I think; it doesn’t matter), can repair the old tower “for the nocturnal contemplation of the celestial bodies” [420]. Guy Mannering says, “No, no, my dear counsellor! Here ends The Astrologer” [420]. Well, it ends, with the magician renouncing his magic. Because the scene annoyed me so much, I forgot to notice that Guy Mannering quizzes Julia on her silence about reporting that “Brown” had shot Hazlewood. This theme of the plot turning on the heroine’s silence recurs in The Moonstone, where Rachel won’t talk, and I think it may be connected with that curious dumbgirl business in Peveril of the Peak. I’ve mentioned the scale-stairs on the cliffs: they’re repeated in connection with Pleydell’s lodgings in Edinburgh, where they’re said to be filthy. There seems to be a kind of counterpoint of law and action (Glossin sneers at Sampson that we go by law here, and not the gospel), which is part of the incorporating into society business.

20.  Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary Frye’s edition of The Antiquary, which he annotated: London: Dent, 1923. The novel was first published in 1816. Page numbers in square brackets are to the Samuel H. Parker edition (Boston) of 1830. References to The Antiquary in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 195, 201, 202, 225, 227 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 72

Said to be Scott’s favorite among the Waverley Novels, and a very genial and pleasant story it is, far less wooden than Guy Mannering. His introduction plays down the structure of the story and sends all the pseudo-critics scurrying off in pursuit of red herrings about “sources.” “The reader may be assured, that this part of the narrative is founded on a fact of actual occurrence” [iv]. He’s talking about Dousterswivel. Then he goes on to an enormous harangue about beggars

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and sources for Edie Ochiltree. Actually, Ochiltree is primarily an Autolycus figure in the sense of being the news, assimilated to the oral tradition. There’s a mail service, of course, and the postmistress has a lot of very snoopy gossips trying to pry into the mail, but Edie is the traditional source of news, and consequently he’s also the vice of the plot. Autolycus and vice suggest roguery, but Edie is a figure of great integrity, with his own strict begging code, and everything he does in the plot is benevolent. He’s compared archetypally with the palmer figure. Two travellers opening, who are strangers but turn out to be a displaced father-and-son team. (That is, the mysterious hero, who lives remote and withdrawn from everybody else, calls himself Lovel but is really Neville, supposed to be somebody’s bastard son; he turns out to be the rightful heir of the Earl of Glenallan, and if I remember correctly the woman the Earl married was somebody Oldbuck was sweet on, which accounts for his crusty-bachelor humor. I suppose it’s time for another bracket.) Oldbuck is a pedant humour, an antiquary, of course, of German and middle-class origin: ancestor was a printer and he inherits bibliophile interests. His neighbour Sir Arthur Wardour is a contrasting humour, obsessed with breeding and purity of descent. Lovel has met his daughter in England and has followed her to Scotland, but the old fool won’t have anything to do with him because he’s convinced all bastards are bastards. He’s a half-assed Jacobite, but nothing serious—Oldbuck, being German in origin, is naturally a loyal Hanoverian. Well, he and Oldbuck have dinner, and quarrel over their opposed interpretations of history, so Arthur flounces off and he and his daughter get into a storm. As in Guy Mannering, the imagery of cliffs and precipices runs against steep staircases (pp. 13, 64). The Wardours get stuck in a terrific storm on a niche on a precipice called Mother Bessy’s apron or something: they’re saved, first by Edie, then by Lovel, then by the help Oldbuck has got for them. The imagery is being hauled up on a rope out of the chaos of sea and air. Father and daughter and the ocean tide, plus a poor Tom type in Edie. Compared to Christian martyrs waiting for the lions to be uncaged––cruel crawling foam archetype.43 Lear epigraphs, of course. Chair on the rope: “to commit oneself in such a vehicle, through a howling tempest of wind and rain, with a beetling precipice above, and a raging abyss below” [83]—well, it’s awful. This Patmos o’ ours, Edie calls it. Well, Lovel goes home with Oldbuck and is put to bed in a “Green Chamber” said to be haunted. It’s full of tapestries, “The subject was a hunting-piece—branches of the woven forest were crowded with fowls of various kinds” [101]—hence green. Lovel has metamorphosis dreams: “He was a bird—he was a fish—or he flew like he one, and swam like the other. Miss Wardour was a syren, or a bird of Paradise . . . wild and wonderful metamorphosis” [104]. Just shows to go. You have to have metamorphosis, hunting and forest images at this point. Another “metamorphosis”

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of Oldbuck’s ancestor holding up a book with a motto—cipher in dream world. The motto is Kunst macht Gunst. Then Lovel wakes up and girl is playing and singing the “Why sitt’st thou by that ruin’d hall” poem [107]. Oldbuck tells Lovel the origin of the motto: mother-right situation of one Bertha choosing a suitor and demanding one who could print. All her noble suitors sloped off, ragged half-beggar suitor turns out to be Mr. Right. Basanos of print as emblem of main story, not that Lovel is a printer. Isabella talking to Edie “might be supposed, by a romantic imagination, an imprisoned damsel communicating a tale of her durance to a palmer” [123]. Oldbuck, who doesn’t know Lovel knows Isabella, much less that he’s in love with her, leaves them alone. “I cannot force you to adopt my advice—I cannot shut the door of my father’s house against the preserver of his life and mine—but the sooner Mr. Lovel can teach his mind to submit to the inevitable disappointment of wishes which have been so rashly formed, the more highly he will rise in my esteem—and, in the meanwhile, for his sake as well as mine, he must excuse my putting an interdict upon conversation on a subject so painful” [130–1]. Or, as she’d say now, Like, it’s no fucking good, man. Lovel gets a letter, I forget who about at the moment, moves into town, and is invited to a party, a sort of picnic luncheon, in a happy valley type of place, with a “pure and profound lake” [173]. Dousterswivel is there, and Lovel reads a story (inset tale) written (apparently) by Isabella, about a German of the sixteenth century who made his fortune by getting lumps of gold from the demon of the Harz forest, then buggers it all and dies poor and disgraced. The point is to underline the alchemical symbolism which runs through the book, as astrological does Guy Mannering. The fairies, or whatever they are, are celebrating “the wedding of Hermes with the Black Dragon” [190]. Oldbuck says her skill is akin to that of the alchemists (extracting good moral from silly story). Hector M’Intyre, Oldbuck’s nephew and brother of Mary, who lives with Oldbuck (superfluous heroine Scott evidently can’t find a use for), instantly picks a quarrel with Lovel and fights a duel with him: M’Intyre is “killed,” as usual, so the hero goes into a pharmakos phase. Edie, who’d tried to stop the duel, hides Lovel in a cave, “screened by the boughs of an aged oak,” underneath a church, connected with it by a stair (193). They overhear Sir Arthur and Dousterswivel, whose patter runs “you see this little plate of silver—you know de moon measureth de whole zodiack in de space of twenty-eight day—every shild knows dat. Well, I take a silver plate when she is in her fifteenth mansion” [228], and so on. They sneeze and frighten Dousterswivel, who goes to “where a flat stone lay upon the ground” [232] and gets some silver he’d planted there beforehand. Twin senex device, both pedants, Whig and Tory. They go back with Edie, who guides them to some real treasure—I forget how all this works out, but it does—and Dousterswivel is astonished. Edie decoys Dousterswivel back to the church (I think it’s all in the church—an ancient

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ruined abbey) provokes him to quarrel, and Dousterswivel gets whacked by Steenie Mucklebackit, who’s there as part of the joke. They escape, but unluckily Steenie Mucklebackit steals, or rather picks up by accident, Dousterswivel’s notebook of something: the whole incident is interrupted by a Roman Catholic funeral, the burial of the Earl of Glenallan’s mother, whose servant Elspeth was. Elspeth is the old gammer in the Mucklebackit family. When she hears of it she digs out a talisman of recognition and gives it to Edie to give to the Earl, which he does, and says she has to see him. On hearing the news she’s “like a mummy animated by some wandering spirit into a temporary resurrection” [58]. The Earl is a melancholy recluse; his younger brother, who went to England and turned Protestant, is Lovel’s father, or maybe foster-father. Edie’s again called a palmer, and mistaken for a Catholic priest or friar. “The secrets of grit folk,” he says, “are just like the wild beasts that are shut up in cages” [74]. Steenie’s drowned; Hector M’Intyre attacks a seal (female) and is defeated, as he has only one arm good, other wounded in duel; Oldbuck teases him about this: curious emblematic significance before the cognitio begins. Proteus is mentioned. Note the epigraph to chapter 30 (273). Hector knows some Gaelic, and recites bits of a poem to Oldbuck which is a dialogue between Oisin and Patrick. Meanwhile Edie’s arrested for the assault on Dousterswivel. Cognitio begins in fisherman’s hut in a house of mourning. “The minister next passed to the mother, moving along the floor as slowly, silently, and gradually, as if he had been afraid that the ground would, like unsafe ice, break beneath his feet, or that the first echo of a footstep was to dissolve some magic spell, and plunge the hut, with all its inmates, into a subterranean abyss” [99]. Dunno what that’s all about. Well, the cognitio. The Earl of Glenallan, made so by his mother’s death, hears from his mother’s old servant Elspeth that his mother and Elspeth plotted to murder the girl he’d married, and also made him think the girl was his sister, which she wasn’t. His father for some reason had her pass as his daughter for a while; motive for murder was the old bag’s jealousy about the Neville family—the girl wasn’t the earl’s sister but she was his cousin from that side. Elspeth suggests the earl burn her as a witch (303). Point is comitatus mentality: Elspeth hates whatever her mistress hates, though she also hated the Neville girl because of some silly schoolgirl remarks about her Scotch accent. Countess (old bag) didn’t know they were secretly married. Anyway, they pushed her over a cliff into the sea: tie-up of this theme. Note that the new generation, Lovel and Isabella, are hauled out of it. No, actually that didn’t happen: she had to produce the hero first, and die in chee-yildbirth. Countess gives Elspeth a gold bodkin to kill the kid with: “Nothing but gold must shed the blood of Glenallan” [120]— God, what a ham. Peroration: she’s had lousy luck ever since: “Has not the fire had its share o’ them—the winds had their part—the sea had her part?-–And oh!’ . . . that the earth would take her part” [121].

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Well, of course Oldbuck was in love with the Neville girl, who’s Lovel’s mother, so the Antiquary and Lovel, meeting on the first page of the book, are displaced father and son. Glenallan comes to stay with Oldbuck, who puts him to bed in the Green Chamber—the tapestries have a motto from Chaucer, which we now learn was supplied by Miss Neville, so in a way Lovel spent the night in his mother’s womb, while all this metamorphosing was going on. Glenallan, of course, had spent his whole life stewing over God, I screwed my sister. Oldbuck, being a magistrate, had made inquiries at the time, and thinks there’s a good chance that the infant survived. Emphasis on both Earl and Elspeth as already dead. Choice and chance, 314: wonder if Yeats read this book early on. Oldbuck decides to take on more investigation, and says to Glenallan “If you want an affair of consequence properly managed, put it into the hands of an antiquary; for, as they are eternally exercising their genius and research upon trifles, it is impossible they can be baffled in affairs of importance” [142]. Dim background connexion of detection and archaeology, a physical equivalent of psychoanalysis. Meanwhile Lovel has fled out to sea with his second in the duel, a sailor named Taffrill—a lot of silly names in this book. Hero exiled and returning from the sea, after having murder and (by descent) incest charges hanging over him. Anyway, Oldbuck becomes a figure like the Pleydell of Guy Mannering: I haven’t a name of it; it’s the Judge Clement of Everyman in His Humour. He has to get Edie out of hock from a stupid magistrate. M’Intyre gives Edie a guinea, which he takes although it’s beyond his rules {he doesn’t take gold}, but doesn’t want “to be fishing for bawbees out at the jail window wi’ the fit o’ a stocking and a string” [160]. Rudens image. He’s been described by Oldbuck in Zen terms: “When he is hungry he eats. . . when weary he sleeps,” and is “the oracle of the district through which he travels—their genealogist, their newsman, their master of the revels, their doctor at a pinch, or their divine” [153]. Oldbuck bails him out, and there’s a rumor that Taffrill’s ship has been wrecked and the hero lost. Explicit reference to Plautus’ Euclio—buried treasure play, 345. Oldbuck wants to go back to Elspeth and get some more cognitio, and says “The human mind is to be treated like a skein of ravelled silk, where you must cautiously secure one free end before you can make any progress in disentangling it” [179]. Edie, who’s to go with him, says “she may come to wind us a pirn” [180]—I’m sure Yeats read this book. They don’t get much out of Elspeth except ballads (naturally Oldbuck’s a collector), notably one on the battle of Harlaw, and her death-speech “Teresa—my lady calls us!—Bring a candle, the grand staircase is as mirk as a Yule midnight” [187]. Teresa was the furren [foreign] servant who was much more likely to have killed the baby. Well, Sir Arthur, whose “language and carriage were those of a man who had acquired the philosopher’s stone” [191] is being sold up. Dousterswivel had promised “to convert all his lead into gold” [193]—previously Dousterswivel has said something about the duel and people putting lead in each other, which leads to an alchemical remark of Oldbuck’s—I note this only because

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there’s a lot of treasure (reference to L’Avare, 367, as well as Euclio) imagery. So poor old Wardour is “in the fearful state of one who, hanging over a precipice, and without the means of retreat, perceives the stone on which he rests gradually parting from the rest of the crag” [194]—tie-up of this imagery. Isabella (her creator always calls her Miss Wardour) goes for a walk, and “chance” directed her into a glen, with a brook and an ascending path. Here she meets Edie, after a “recapitulation” in her mind of Lovel’s courting. Edie says “when the night’s darkest, the dawn’s nearest” [202], and that God, “wha rebuked the waters” [202] can save her again, then buggers off—incidentally, there’s a complex of transportation images, horses, carriages, ships, walking, etc., as part of the communication, or Staple of News, theme. A lot made of the fact that Oldbuck is a pedestrian hero, who never rides a horse. A lot of images, including “They stepped slowly down the magnificent staircase—every well-known object seeming to the unfortunate father and daughter,” etc. (383). Rescued by a last-minute letter from Wardour’s absent son, brought by Edie. Edie’s called a blue pigeon—his uniform is blue, an agent of communication, Noah’s ark, etc. Oldbuck says “This is a day of news” [216] and “these are such sieges and such reliefs as our time of day admits of” [220]—low mimetic is part of the point. There’s a wig-maker, technologically unemployed, as there are only three in the neighbourhood, who has nothing to do and so also retails gossip. More cognitio: the treasure discovered by Edie in the Church was labelled “Search,” which turns out to be the name of the ship Lovel’s on. It was Lovel’s scheme to help Wardour out. Several times Oldbuck refers to Lovel as a “phoenix”—suggests death-rebirth, unique friend because displaced son, bird, alchemical affinities, etc. Edie is not only in a tricky slave role (much emphasis on his freedom, though he’s hardly an Ariel type) but an architectus of the plot. Curious final scene: a false alarm of a French invasion, inspired by a “beacon” which turns out to be a bonfire made of the shovels and picks and stuff made of the digging, out of sheer pettishness, apparently. Oldbuck says Dousterswivel “has bequeathed us a legacy of blunders and mischief, as if he has lighted some train of fireworks at his departure” [237]. Final recognition scene: “let me have the pleasure of introducing a son to a father” [241]. “The proofs on all sides were found to be complete, for Mr. Neville had left a distinct account of the whole transaction with his confidential steward in a sealed packet, which was not to be opened until the death of the old Countess” [241]. Natch. A lot made of the Tory-Whig contrast between Oldbuck and Wardour, between the Teutonic and Celtic sympathies of Oldbuck and his nephew Hector M’Intyre—he won’t listen to Ossian but is delighted by the ballad. It looks as though the Battle of Harlaw, where the Celts (Highlanders) were repelled by a Saxon and Norman army in 1411, were the ultimate archetype of the whole story, historically speaking, because Elspeth’s feudal mentality derives from the fact that her ancestor waited on Glenallan’s in that battle.

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The point about the invasion is the consolidation of society in front of a common enemy, heralded by Dousterswivel escaping back to Germany with fire in his tail, so to speak. It takes the place of an elaborate recognition scene. Naturally one would expect a good deal about the oral tradition in the background of Scott, considering that he was a collector of ballads. Waverley is almost what I called it, Ossian II, and every novel almost has some character who sings snatches of ballads. David Gellatley in Waverley, Meg Merrilies, Madge Wildfire, Wandering Willie, Elspeth—there’s no end to them. The thing is that sometimes the oral tradition seems to be in background shaping the plots and archetypal destinies of the characters––I keep thinking of that Battle of Harlaw one in The Antiquary. Classical romance is often said to be in the form of a commentary on a painting—Daphnis and Chloe is, and Achilles Tatius’ story is. I wonder if there’s a conventional connexion with the immensely elaborate descriptions in Scott, and the frequent references to what a painter could do with this here scene. Rembrandt, Wilkie, and several others get mentioned by name. Also: I remember when mother was reading Scott to me, how the descriptions made sense when the presentation was oral: had nothing to do but listen, and they could build up in my mind, point by point. Also I noticed in reading Richardson’s Wacousta how the very badness of the style seemed in a way appropriate to the romance form. I haven’t got this clear, but it seems to me that writing of Jane Austen’s quality goes with a strong degree of realistic displacement, and that Scott’s creaky hay-waggon style really does seem the right medium for a romance where there’s a removal from reality: the characters aren’t speaking to you but are just being swept down the narrative current. I noticed that particularly in Anne of Geierstein, which is a late story, written after the financial collapse. In a sense the book isn’t written at all: it’s a draft written out, and the dialogue is too stilted to be believed. And yet it has an extraordinary pulling power, and I think it’s partly that goddam style.

21. Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet Frye owned two editions of Redgauntlet, both of which he annotated: London: Dent, 1957, and Boston: Aldine, 1832, the latter published with The Pirate. Redgauntlet was first published in 1824. The page references in square brackets, as well as those Frye inserts, are to the Dent edition. References to Redgauntlet in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 195, 196, 238, 244, 279 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 74

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Begins with the folklore situation of the two brothers, one staying at home, the other wandering: they’re not brothers, but the set up is traditional. The wanderer heads for the same part of Scotland that Guy Mannering is about, and is rescued from an incoming tide (same opening as The Antiquary) by a sullen and mysterious stranger who turns out to be his father. The same man calls on the friend’s father, though of course he isn’t recognized at that stage to be the same man, and the friend is warned (another folktale theme) of the hero’s danger by a mysterious female named Green Mantle, who turns out to be (what a revealing phrase that is) (a) a girl the hero had met in his father’s house (b) his own sister. The hero goes on to stay with a Quaker, then falls in with a blind fiddler: as he can play the fiddle too, he arranges to be an associate of his at a dance. On the way to the dance we get “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” about one of the stranger’s ancestors (and therefore the hero’s as well). Superb story as it is, I’m not sure about its relation, as an inset tale, to the whole design. The hero’s name is Darsie Latimer and his friend’s Alan Fairford; former English, latter Scottish and the son of a lawyer who thinks there’s nothing in the world but law. Hero doesn’t know who the hell he is, of course, and says “My life is like the subterranean river in the Peak of Derby, visible only where it crosses the celebrated cavern” [86]. Wandering Willie is the usual idiotes figure, usually a woman (Meg Merrilies, Madge Wildfire). The lawyer-father, Alexander Fairford, is another pedant, but the supremacy of the law which is his obsession, almost, is thematic: the point of this book is that civil power is supreme over military power, mercantile over heroic ethics, which makes Redgauntlet’s corresponding obsession (Jacobitism) border on the psychotic. The 1745 rebellion is over, and nobody but nobody (except him) wants to revive it. So the lawyer father is a superego figure and the heroic one ain’t. Obvious that young Fairford has fallen in love with Green Mantle, to make things symmetrical: Darsie meets her at the dance and she bawls hell out of him for associating with “low” company, evidently with Scott’s approval: Scott the man is of course much more of a snob than Scott the romancer. Well, after an exchange of letters (the usual clumsy epistolary device, introduced parenthetically into Guy Mannering also), we get on to narrative, and begin with young Fairford getting, as his first case, one Peter Peebles, the kind of person who spends his life on a lawsuit that gets to be a joke to everyone but him, and who becomes a lawyer himself about his own case. Remarkable how different Scott’s attitude, as a professional lawyer, is to Dickens’. Well, Fairford takes the case, and is just going to make a resounding success of it, when he gets news that Darsie has been kidnapped in a smuggler’s raid on a fishing-net set-up operated by the Quaker (organized, it turns out, by Herries {who is Redgauntlet and the hero’s ultimate father}), and scrams the hell out of the court. Then we go back to the hero and his damn journal—third means of telling the story. He’s abducted from the fishing-weir by his father, saved from a tide again

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(“the foamy crests of the devouring waves, as they advanced with the speed and fury of a pack of hungry wolves”). Incidentally, there are some interesting undisplaced images in the first tidal adventure: the servant of his father has teeth like an “ogre,” etc. Hero goes into delirium, during which “I am convinced I saw G.M.” [198].44 Curiously literal repetition of the Waverley situation. So he’s stuck like Pamela, unfucked and scribbling. Like Pamela, he shoves his MS into the lining of his coat––Word as clothing, as in the Hymn of the Soul. He’s interviewed by an old ass of a judge, a double of old Hazlewood in Guy Mannering, under the thumb of Herries. Father is present, and has a horseshoe mark when he frowns, which he does most of the time. This is a family trait, mentioned in the Tale, and also “awaked a dreadful vision of infancy” [214]. Peebles wanders in, looking for a “fugie warrant” to get back his advocate who’d buggered off. He calls Herries by his name, which makes latter look like Lucifer—Byronic topos. Hero remarks, 214, that he’d never known sorrow or hardship, and what he called that was “only the weariness of mind, which, having nothing actually present to complain of, turns upon itself, and becomes anxious about the past and the future.” Sufficient unto the day is the moral. Well, Herries is a Quixote figure of this historically obsessed type. He goes back to a Balliol-Bruce feud in the fourteenth century, much as Elspeth in The Antiquary goes back to Harlaw. As a result of that feud an ancient Redgauntlet killed his son in battle. That gave the horseshoe mark to the family. Father says “You were withdrawn from the bosom of your family, and the care of your legal guardian, by the timidity and ignorance of a doting mother” [234]––Zanoni setup, only with the general sympathy rather different. “The young hawk, accustomed only to the fostering care of its dam, must be tamed by darkness and sleeplessness” [234]—that’s his line. Note the doubled senex figures, and the Esau-Jacob relation between them. The imprisoned hero is supposed by the attendants to be mad, and Wandering Willie comes under his window and plays a collection of significant tunes: miniature anthology of them given. “In a wild, wandering, and disorderly course of life, men, as they become loosened from the ordinary bonds of civil society, hold those of comradeship more closely sacred” [243]—tribalism, in short, the characteristic of the outlawed societies of the night-world. Richard I and Blondel archetype45 referred to. Well, the compulsory interval of hero’s imprisonment finally ends, and he’s—guess what—disguised as a woman. Meanwhile Alan Fairford goes in search of him, and lays a complaint before another ass of a magistrate: he’s not so much an ass as a henpecked husband whose wife is related to the Redgauntlets and is a furious Jacobite. “In his feudal pride, Redgauntlet might venture on the deeds of violence exercised by the aristocracy in other times” [259]. So the aristocracy has become a semi-outlawed society, still tribal but largely impotent. Usual relay race of romance, Alan being referred from one place to another. The drop-in-ocean passage from Comedy of

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Errors is quoted, 281. Alan goes to an old hypocrite with a cellar, “dived into the subterranean descent to which this secret aperture gave access” [286]. He’s in cahoots with smugglers, so we have for forza-froda Glossin-Hatteraick setup. Scott repeats his formulas pretty literally: the Earl of Glenallan in Antiquary is a double of Herries here, in temperament anyway. “Fairford, still following Job, was involved in another tortuous and dark passage, which involuntarily reminded him of Peter Peeble’s lawsuit,” 289. Of course the resemblance to Guy Mannering is natural enough, this being also a sequel to Waverley. Well, Alan gets on a ship run by a pirate (another novel echoes), whose name is Nanty Ewart, a person of some education, intelligence, even sensitivity, like the second pirate in The Pirate. Horrible story of screwing a girl he wanted to marry, but destroyed by moral virtue, so his father dies of heartbreak, the girl turns whore and is transported—four lives destroyed by nothing but social repression. Ewart assumes that Fairford must be a Jacobite, a cause he despises, his own being smuggling: “You think because the pot is boiling, that no scum but yours can come uppermost” [310]. Fairford is delicate and gets sick, so he’s transferred to “the old girls at Fairladies” [316]—two ancient Roman Catholic females. There he meets a mysterious priest called His Eminence—curious: he turns out to be Prince Charles, who of course has a brother who was a cardinal. Glimpse of his mistress, who turns out to be Charles’ undoing. Back to Darsie and his female costume; sister buggering around, “and the air of mystery with which that interest was veiled, gave her, to his lively imagination, the character of a benevolent and protecting spirit,” 343. Sister-recognition scene follows—I mean he doesn’t know it yet; she does. Actually the man I’ve been calling his father is his goddam uncle: I never get these things quite straight. Anyway, she’s got birth tattoos too: “these five blood-specks on my arm are a mark by which mysterious Nature has impressed, on an unborn infant, a record of its father’s violent death and its mother’s miseries,” 354. Yuh. Footnotes emphasizing author’s and general male gullibility. She tells him a story about throwing down a Jacobite glove at the coronation of George III. (She did it.) “His fever-fit of love had departed like a morning’s dream, and left nothing behind but a painful sense of shame, and a resolution to be more cautious. . . .” [369]. You never know when a girl may be your sister. Darsie finds himself in the regular hero-isolation role: if he doesn’t turn Jacobite he’ll be imprisoned for life in some Bastille on the Continent; his only friend, apart from his sister, is a blind fiddler (Wandering Willie was a Faithful Attendant of the goddam family, of course). Cognitio begins somewhere around 378, with the practically psychotic obsession of Redgauntlet. Darsie can’t get off his horse properly in his women’s clothes, so falls on top of Alan Fairford, who thinks he’s receiving a lady. However, the recognition is postponed. Redgauntlet has an extraordinary power of

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sewing things up: defeats Ewart the pirate in a duel; Benjie has a vice role in a tussle with the Quaker (too complicated to figure out). Redgauntlet condoles with Darsie on having stuffed him into a skirt: “Do not blush at having worn a disguise to which kings and heroes have been reduced. It is when female craft or female cowardice find their way into a manly bosom” [407], etc. Gradually, the antithesis of the pistis of Jacobite obsession vs. the gnosis of social reality takes shape. A richly comic scene at the end, where superannuated Jacobites, now at the stage where they just want to talk about their past loyalties, are confronted by Redgauntlet with a demand to do something. The representative of Oxford says that of course Oxford will support any cause in theory, as long as it’s reactionary enough, but won’t do anything. Others “whom mere habit, or a desire of preserving consistency, had engaged in the affair” [411] back away too. Disguised woman theme takes shape when the Jacobites ask about Prince Charles’s mistress. She’s a government spy, among other things: the moral rationalizations they put up make Redgauntlet mutter something about the last King Charles— a pathetic example of his general out-of-dateness. Redgauntlet says “I did not think so slight an impediment as that of a woman’s society” [419], etc. His sexism is what buggers him, ultimately. Strong suggestion that Prince Charles doesn’t want to do anything either: it’s all talk except for Redgauntlet, and his obstinacy in hanging on to his mistress is just a manufactured issue. Final irony when the Prince scolds Redgauntlet for not telling him how obstinate the Jacobites would be about his mistress: obviously he, like Redgauntlet, has no notion that he’s living in the eighteenth century, not the seventeenth. Several counterpoints of the obsession theme: Peter Peebles turns up again, and the Quaker says “were other human objects of ambition looked upon as closely” [429], etc. Peebles finds Fairford, whom of course he’s hunting for, with Darsie as female, and says “Ye maun leave this quean” [433], in a neat bit of counterpoint. The Campbells come: the king’s men: note final intervention of king, as in Tartuffe; the cause is so silly and trumpery nobody’s worried about it, so everybody’s pardoned. When the king’s general says “this will be remembered against no one,” Redgauntlet says “then the cause is lost for ever” [439]. However, there has to be a slaughter of suitors: I think Peebles, Crystal Nixon, a treacherous servant of Redgauntlet and Nanty Ewart all got killed somehow or other; but the main thing of course is Redgauntlet’s Esau role: “I shall leave England for ever” [442]; “as my hand will never draw weapon more, I shall sink it forty fathoms deep in the wide ocean” [442]—parallel to Prospero’s renunciation of magic. “The fatal doom will, I trust, now depart from the House of Redgauntlet” [442]; Prince Charles says the general has taught him the principle by which condemned men feel forgiveness for their executioner; general “could not help joining in the universal Amen! which resounded from the shore” [443]—great Pan is dead. Nanty Ewart and Nixon kill each other—latter tries to rat and former is disgusted—Peebles turns out

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to be somebody responsible for Ewart’s original disaster, in some way I’ve not marked, but I remember thinking it was a piece of over-designing. The inset tale, dealing with the Redgauntlet ancestry, is a far more expert way of dealing with the historical background than the usual harrumph explicatory chapters such as we have in Waverley. Even Anne of Geierstein, a story that Scott never really wrote, but simply produced a draft of, in his usual hay-waggon prose style, has an inset tale dealing with the ancestry of the heroine. Many of the novels go back to oppositions of centuries back: the Tory-Whig business in Waverley really goes back to the “pacification” of Scotland in the massacre of Glencoe days; the kafuffle in Old Mortality is the Reformation issue of a hundred years back; Elspeth’s loyalties in The Antiquary were fixed by the Battle of Harlaw three centuries before, and so on.

22.  Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia, 1590 version. Book One Frye apparently read Arcadia in Sir Philip Sidney, The Complete Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–26), an annotated copy of which was in his own library. Page references in square brackets below are from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). References to Arcadia in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 200, 209, 218, 224, 228, 231, 235, 243,    250, 272, 278 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 6, 40, 59,    70, 81, 86–7, 94, 172 Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, CW 5: 232

1. Begins with ow-oo of two shepherds, Strephon and Claius, about the departure of their (evidently mutual) girl friend, Urania. Strephon described as a hopeless shepherd: the setting is the sands which lie against the Island of Cithera. A curious technique, not quite euphuism, though there is a good deal of euphuistic prose in the Arcadia, of dropping into metrical units of rhythm, like the “John Peel” and other bits of jingle in Finnegans Wake. Things like “where we last (alas that the word last should so long last) did gaze” [61], etc., are pure euphuism, and so are bits of antithesis: “rather to commit themselves to the cold mercy of the sea, than to abide the hot cruelty of the fire” [65] (by the way, this first chapter introduces Pyrocles clinging to a burned ship: cf. Spenser’s Pyrocles, burning in unquenchable fire). No, I mean bits like “like a widow having lost her make of whom she held her honour” [66], and “they absented his eyes from beholding the issue” [68], and, still more, from the introduction (dedication to Countess

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Pembroke): “This say I, because I know the virtue so; and this say I, because it may be ever so” [57]. Well, back to the ow-oo: they then see Musidorus sitting on a “coffer”—theme of shipwreck and treasure from the sea—it turns out to be full of jewels. Strephon and Claius are Arcadians living in Laconia; asked why, they say only “Guarded with poverty, and guided with love” [70]. Emphasis on the “natural” learning inspired by love in Arcadia—a “pagan” equivalent of the prenatural powers of Adam in Eden. “Hath not the only love of her made us (being silly ignorant shepherds) raise up our thoughts about the ordinary level of the world, so as great clerks do not disdain our conference?” [63]. Well, Musidorus sees his friend Pyrocles out in the sea, and gets the shepherds to get a “Fisherman” to get a boat to rescue him, but those inevitable creatures the Pirates arrive; those manning the boat run away, and Musidorus has to leave his friend to his own devices: the fishermen don’t fancy Pyrocles much anyway, because he’s so goddam beautiful they think he’s a god. 2. Musidorus conducted from Laconia into Arcadia by the shepherds to the house of Kalander, a kindly but nosy old Polonius character. Arcadia described as a locus amoenus, not quite an earthly paradise. Kalander has a statue of Venus suckling Aeneas, where the blue streaks in the marble are made to look like her veins: I used to think this was deliberate allusion to bad taste which would give the reader an insight into Kalander’s character in this polite-style Henry James writing, but I dunno. A shepherd’s boy piping “as though he should never be old” [37]. Musidorus calls himself Palladius, and his friend Pyrocles Daiphantus. Romance convention of changed names, just to make it hard; there may however be something of a change of identity symbolized by it—in other words the amnesia archetype. House is hospitable, “not so dainty as not to be trod on, nor yet slubbered up with good fellowship” [71]. Kalander says he’s more impressed with virtue than pedigree, but nevertheless the sight of Musidorus’ jewels inspires a greater respect in him. Musidorus falls sick and nearly dies, taking six weeks to recover—death and rebirth archetype. 3. Kalander tells Musidorus about the Prince of the country, one Basilius, who has a wife “of more princely virtues than her husband” [76], and “it was happy she took a good course, for otherwise it would have been terrible” [76]. Two daughters, constructed on the sublime-beautiful principle. The Prince is in retirement with wife and younger daughter Philoclea; older daughter, the majestic type, is called Pamela. Pamela is forced to live with a trio of grotesques called Dametas, wife Miso, daughter Mopsa—praises of latter sung in ironic parody. Why? Reason picked up in King Lear, I think: Basilius interprets Dametas’ clownish boorishness as plain honesty—shrewd remark about the Prince “according to the nature of great persons, in love with that he had done himself” [78].

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4. Prince sets a nobleman named Philanax to be Regent of the country in his retirement. Only son of Kalander, Clitophon, finds the Prince’s letter left around and makes a copy of it: Kalander theoretically doesn’t like this, but is too snoopy not to read the letter himself and even carry it around with him. So he reads it to Musidorus. One phrase, “it is weakness too much to remember what should have been done” [80], is repeated by the whore in The Duchess of Malfi at the moment of her death46—don’t know if it’s a common phrase. Well, Philanax tells Basilius he’s a silly ass to abdicate because of some damn oracle or other, “like one that should kill himself for fear of death” [81]. He’s sillier to have resolved not to allow either of his daughters to marry, acting the part of the grabby father of romantic comedy, and still sillier to allow Dametas the guardianship of Pamela. His judgment is “corrupted with a prince’s fortune” [82]. There follows a description of the amazing poetic culture of the shepherds of Arcadia. Two reasons assigned: one, “their living standing but upon the looking to their beasts, they have ease, the Nurse of Poetry” [84]. The other is that, unlike shepherds in other countries (i.e. England), they own their own sheep. Can’t get any poetry out of an enclosure movement. Anticipation of the great festivals of poetry that each book of the Arcadia ends with. “Sometimes under hidden forms uttering such matters, as otherwise they durst not deal with” [84]. 5. War with the Helots, who don’t like gentlemen: Sidney naturally takes the side of the gentry. The captain of the Helots is a man named Demagoras, a suitor to an awful-beautiful heroine named Parthenia. Mother presses the match; she says nothing doing, because she loves Argalus, a hero to match. Demagoras, “loving nobody but himself, and for his own delight’s sake Parthenia” [88], is out in the cold after Parthenia’s mother dies of pure spite, and realizes “that not Parthenia was her own, she would never be his” [90]—God, Sidney writes well. So he rubs her face all over with a poison that makes her hideous. This makes no difference to Argalus, who wants to marry her as much as ever, but she won’t have it, and disappears. So Argalus goes against the Helots to revenge himself on Demagoras, but is captured. So is Clitophon, Kalander’s son, who goes to his rescue, which is how Musidorus comes to hear of it: Kalander doesn’t want to afflict his guest with his story, but he discovers it anyway and asks the steward. So both Argalus and Clitophon are being held for a torture-death. Note loathly lady archetype. 6. Sidney doesn’t tell a straight story so well, but Kalander and Musidorus (not called Palladius) make an expedition against a town held by the Helots, and get in by saying they’re Arcadian revolutionaries making common cause with them. Quite a fight, and it turns out that the Captain of the Helots is the hero’s old pal Pyrocles (Diaphantus). Peace and treaty, with Clitophon delivered, and Kalander, who’s been captured in the fight.

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7. Treaty between Helots and Lacedaemonians, abolishing the class distinction and making the Helots equal with their former masters. Sidney isn’t such a snob as I thought—I don’t know what the hell happened to Demagoras. Anyway, when Argalus and others return to Kalander’s house, Parthenia turns up, only she says she ain’t, and proposes to Argalus, who turns her down because he assumes she isn’t Parthenia despite the resemblance. Well, she is: she visited the Queen of Corinth (Helen), who got her story out of her and got the well known Physician to fix her up. Somewhat strained comedy situation, with loathly-lady, death-rebirth, twin archetypes. Anyway, they’re fuxed up, or whatever the past tense is. 8. Pyrocles tells his adventures from the in medias res beginning: captured by pirates, promised his liberty if he’ll fight for them against the Spartans; kills the son or nephew of the King of Sparta; captured; rescued by Helots and becomes their chief. Argalus and Parthenia married. End of Section One: a comedy complete in itself. Oh, I see: Demagoras was killed, I think by Argalus, and succeeded in the Helot command by Pyrocles. 9. New section begins with Pyrocles falling in love: Musidorus makes a long speech at him. In an earlier chapter it’s said that to describe Parthenia one should set down what is excellent and then apply it—commonplace, but Renaissance Platonic commonplace. Here, the harangue says that behavior indicates the harmony between the graceful outward and well disciplined inward person—Courtier commonplace. Pyrocles isn’t listening, but “the very sound having imprinted the general point of his speech in his heart” [111], he answers. The prose style is getting opaque: in the previous chapter the summary of Pyrocles’ adventures includes one sentence about thirty lines of closely packed type long. My prose style ain’t anything to write epic poems about nuther. 10. Description of a hunt, of that curiously ritual kind that gets into Shakespearean comedy so much (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It). I think it’s a displacement, by way of the Actaeon myth, of the Apuleius theme of metamorphosis; a quest which is part of the journey away from identity. Usually a love quest of some kind, with puns on deer and hart. In this chapter Kalander and two friends go out hunting, with Kalander yacking on and on like the garrulous old buffer he is—curious how thoroughgoing Sidney’s polite style is. Of course Kalander is genuinely kindly and hospitable, not an old fool. “The huntsmen handsomely attired in their green liveries, as though they were children of summer” [115]. “Their cry being composed of so well sorted mouths, that any man would perceive therein some kind of proportion, but the skilful woodmen did find a music” [115]. Very close to that extraordinary Midsummer Night’s Dream passage—something in the hunt-music business I haven’t figured

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out. “Even the Nymph Echo left to bewail the loss of Narcissus, and became a hunter” [115]. Death of the beast (stag), who sheds tears, as in As You Like It. “The Stag had bestowed himself liberally among them that had killed him” [116]. Sparagmos image, natch. Well, Pyrocles disappears—he’s in love, but it’s rather a blow to the friendship which is conventionally supposed to be superior to it. So we get a Two Brothers theme of Musidorus leaving Kalander (accompanied by Kalander’s son Clitophon however) to go hunt his friend in a secondary quest. If I can work out this hunting-metamorphosis theme it’s probably where my Surtees stuff goes.47 Incidentally, the changing of names is a part of the journey from identity, and the convention of the special pastoral name. Daphnis and Chloe, as I remember, are given special names to suit the world they’re in. Because I think PyroclesDaiphantus is about to acquire yet a third name. Musidorus and Clitophon enter a locus amoenus, called “A pleasant valley” [118] with the murmuring music of waters “like a commonwealth of many families” [119] (springs running into a brook), and there Musidorus finds his friend’s armour strewed all over the damn place. Second sparagmos symbol, displaced. Puts it on; it’s hacked up and too big: cf. the opening of The Faerie Queene. Then Musidorus meets a coach with twelve servants who set upon him: he kills them all, approaches the coach, finds a lady with two female servants in it, apologizes perfunctorily for the minor social error of killing twelve people, which he does “either with cunning or with force, or rather with a cunning force” [119]—forza and froda48 again. The same turns out to be the Helen Queen of Corinth, previously mentioned. Sorry, it’s not Pyrocles’ armour he finds, but that of somebody called Amphialus, also mentioned, and Queen Helen’s lover, or something. 11. Helen tells her story which is that she was a Virgin Queen who didn’t want a lover, on account that would reverse things (“I as then esteeming myself born to rule, and thinking foul scorn willingly to submit myself to be ruled” [122].) Elizabeth in background, and also the archetype of the disdainful mistress, who’s really the virgin on the comic side, the Eros counterpart of the Christ to be sued for forgiveness as the descending virgin is to the incarnating Christ. The best of her suitors (note the Penelope situation again) is Philoxenus, whose friend is Amphialus: latter comes to plead the suit of the former in a Miles Standish or whatever it was situation; Helen natch falls in love with Amphialus; Knight’s Tale situation blows up; Philoxenus is killed and his father Tomotheus, who’s also Amphialus’ guardian, dies of grief on his body. So Amphialus tells Helen to go to hell and buggers off, also telling his page not to follow him (he does). So Helen takes on the role of travelling heroine and goes out to look for him, carrying his picture, so there’s a counterpoint of two hunts, Helen hunting Amphialus and Musidorus hunting Pyrocles, a love and a friendship. Page (Ismenus) meets

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Musidorus and Clitophon. Helen says “For this cause have I left my country, putting in hazard how my people will in time deal by me” [127], a contrapuntal movement to the abdication of Basilius. This abdication movement, by the way, besides being another West-side incarnation movement (Measure for Measure going through Nomos) also prefigures the recovery of the aristocracy projection. “The high-working powers make second causes unwittingly accessory to their determinations” [125]—references to providence rarer here than in Heliodorus. 12. Musidorus hunts all over Greece for Pyrocles, including Laconia, where “he found his fame flourishing, his monument engraved in Marble” [129]. Reflection of the hero in his story: cf. the sculptures on the walls of Carthage seen by Aeneas, which include a picture of him. His horse gets tired: one should keep in mind the quest symbolism of the animals on the pursuing side: hounds I’ve just mentioned: the “music” of their yapping being the descending to earth of the heavenly harmony of the sky—hound of heaven, in short. Or something connected with that: I still haven’t quite got it. Anyway: every knight is a centaur, a man on a horse, the horse being the helpful animal. The dog, as distinct from the group of hounds, is more commonly an attendant on a lower-world descent, as in Tobit, and the dog guarding the seven sleepers. There’s a dog here, attendant of Amphialus, and evidently symbolizing his fall to a still lower state through grief and guilt. The horse brings Musidorus to a full stop, and he sees an Amazon, whose clothes are fully described in a way perhaps reflected in Spenser’s description of Belphoebe. She, or it, has a jewel-clasp representing Hercules with a distaff (Omphale archetype), and the motto “Never more valiant” [131]. Sings a song about being transformed, and Musidorus realizes it’s Pyrocles. P. doesn’t fancy M. staring at him “as Apollo is painted when he saw Daphne suddenly turned into a Laurel” [132], or asking him “what was the causer of this Metamorphosis” [132]. Musidorus gives him a long harangue telling him it’s silly to dress up like a woman: reason ought to be supreme over passion, and, in a Miltonic association, “it utterly subverts the course of nature, in making reason give place to sense, and man to woman” [133]. The harangue is Platonic “the true love hath that excellent nature in it, that it doth transform the very essence of the lover into the thing loved, uniting, and as it were incorporating it with a secret and inward working” [134]. Dialectic of heavenly love and the other kind, which “will not only make him an Amazon; but a launder, a distaff-spinner {Omphale}” [134]. Heroism obeys commands of reason: “We are to resolve, that if reason direct it, we must do it, and if we must do it, we will do it; for to say I cannot, is childish, and I will not, womanish” [133]. Pyrocles says he’s born and nursed of a woman, but he mostly says ow-oo and what’s wrong with this skirt anyway? One phrase of Musidorus’s fits the imagery of this area admirably: “O sweet Pyrocles, sepa-

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rate yourself a little, if it be possible, from yourself, and let your own mind look upon your own proceedings” [132]. Pyrocles’ answer is equally accurate on the East side: “In that heavenly love since there are two parts, the one the love itself, the other the excellency of the thing loved; I, not able at the first leap to frame both in me, do now (like a diligent workman) make ready the chief instrument, and first part of that great work, which is love itself” [136]. They go on to involved echoes of the word “measure,” which Pyrocles identifies with the “end” of love, which is desiring, though that’s not just fucking but a lifelong connection. Musidorus says “it was a very white and red virtue, which you could pick out of a painterly gloss of a visage” [137]. White and red are symbols, not so much of love in itself, as of the outward manifestation or physical appearance of love: cf. Spenser’s “Hath white and red in it such wondrous power” (A Hymn in Honour of Beauty l. 71), and Marvell’s allusion in “The Garden.”49 That is, it’s the dame’s complexion, which in the medicine of that age was a clue to the inward temperament. The emphasis on the lover’s sickness, and the wound given him, presumably by the arrow of Eros, unites, all through the history of romance, three things: love itself, death and rebirth imagery (because the lover ritually dies of his attack of love and his mistress brings him to life again), and love as war (love as wound or disease, although the disease part of it is really a fourth area of imagery). Musidorus’ efforts to talk Pyrocles around are not very successful, so Pyrocles says “you are fitter to be a Prince, than a Counsellor” [139]. Incidentally, the name of the Amazon Pyrocles disguises himself as is Zelmane, so that gives the bastard three names. Evidently Zelmane is a real person Pyrocles was formerly in love with, so his dressing up as Zelmane brings a kind of Demeter-Proserpine or Venus-Psyche archetype in. I keep missing things: in ch. 9, when Pyrocles falls in love, he wants to clear out, but Musidorus wants to stay, and describes the Arcadia they’re in as an earthly Paradise. “Do not these stately trees seem to maintain their flourishing old age with the only happiness of their seat, being clothed with a continual spring, because no beauty here should ever fade?” [112]. Grass like emeralds; harmony of birds; echoes and murmuring brooks, “some Goddess inhabiteth this Region, who is the soul of this soil” [112]. The point is that the same landscape looks different to different people, like the island in The Tempest. 13. Pyrocles’ story is that he fell in love with Philoclea’s picture, which he saw in Kalander’s house. Somewhere else—Man of Law’s Tale, isn’t it? Anyway, the picture is used as a communication medium, so to speak, and of course the whole ut pictura poesis complex is involved. Complicated, picture as Eros’ arrow: I haven’t got it all. So he dresses up as Zelmane and approaches the retreat where Basilius is with his queen Gynecia and his two daughters. Eunuchus archetype of man getting access to women’s quarters by making himself a woman

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or eunuch. Philoclea has black eyes, like Stella: color of hair not stated, but “why should I not rather call them [hairs] her beams” [146] suggests a blonde, also like Stella. Unusual coloring not commented on, either here or in Astrophel and Stella. Between her gawdawful-beautiful tits “there hung a very rich diamond set but in a black horn, the word I have since read is this: ‘yet still myself’ ” [146]. Fine virgin-in-lower-world-symbol. 14. The king has a revolving restaurant, turned around by water underneath, and artificial birds going guggle-guggle with water-pipes stuck into them—this childish nonsense is in Nashe, where one would expect it, as well as here, where one doesn’t. So the connection with Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, I don’t know what. “My Reason (now grown a servant to passion) did yet often tell his master, that he should more moderately use his delight” [149]. Carrying on of princeand-counsellor allegory, in the Miltonic shape. Complications: Basilius, who in spite of being a king is an old fool, and eighty years old besides, falls in love with Zelmane, and so does Gynecia, who suspects she ain’t a she. Twelfth Night situation: described as a “maze” [151] and a “labyrinth.” So Zelmane, like the woman who married the pansy, doesn’t know which way to turn. 15. The “ladies” amuse themselves, mainly by torturing birds. Then a challenge comes from Phalantus, a bastard brother of Helen of Corinth, and a good guy, only he’s fallen for a silly mistress named Artesia, sister of the Ismenus who’s Amphialus’ page: she got him the job because she likes Amphialus. In spite of her name Artesia isn’t a gusher but a narcist pool: she’d been taught “to think that there is no wisdom but in including heaven and earth in one’s self: and that love, courtesy, gratefulness, friendship, and all other virtues are rather to be taken on, than in one’s self” [154]. The person who taught her this was Cecropia, sister in law of Basilius, of whom more later. Anyway, she insists that Phalantus go charging around the country challenging everybody in her name. The reasoning is conventional: if Knight A knocks Knight B off his horse, Knight A’s girl friend is more beautiful than Knight B’s girlfriend. This seems to be the origin of the Squire of Dames business in Spenser. 16. So we get a tournament, with the usual procession and description of arms and mottoes. This progress of pictorial symbols certainly has some archetypal significance, but I don’t yet know what it is. It’s a development of course of things like the shield of Achilles, a contemplative pause is the headlong rush of “and-then” incidents. Sidney does his best with his compulsory scene, describing the procession of conquered beauties with great conciseness and wit: of one he says “she was a Queen, and therefore beautiful” [159]. The eleven include Parthenia (who wasn’t defended by her husband, and tells him to stay out of the nonsense), Urania, and

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finally a “daughter to the King Plexirtus” [161] who bears the highly confusing name of Zelmane. 17. Phalantus does his stuff, overthrowing five knights, including one who’s supporting Gynecia, “which Basilius himself was content, not only to suffer, but to be delighted with” [162]. Cavaliere servente in its literal sense. Young shepherd named Lalus who wants to fight for Urania but hasn’t any armour; king won’t let him, “then began to feel poverty, that he could not set himself to that trial” [163]. Clitophon then enters and loses on points, to his great annoyance; then two disguised knights, who turn out to be respectively Pyrocles (Zelmane) for Philoclea and Musidorus for Pamela. After a lot of kafuffle Pyrocles is selected (after a three-cornered fight), and whales the daylight out of Phalantus, whose mistress promptly deserts him. Phalantus takes a courteous leave of Basilius, escorts Artesia back to her home, and tells her to go to hell—curiously incisive scene. 18. “Zelmane was like the one that stood in a tree waiting a good occasion to shoot” [168], carrying on the hunting metaphor. Yes, Muridorus has fallen in love too, luckily with Pamela, so everything’s symmetrical. Extraordinary story about keeping a man named Menalcas prisoner who has befriended him in the most generous way—romances like this sure don’t care about ordinary morals, except when they follow romantic conventions. 19. Musidorus, now calling himself Dorus, bribes Dametas to become a shepherd in his service. A remarkable locus amoenus description of the place the “pastorals” are going to be held follows. Trees “as if it had been to enclose a Theatre” [175], and arbors making a gallery, shaded from the sun—Paradise Lost echo, very slight. Well, out of the woods come a lion and a bear, symmetrical to the last, one for each hero. Philoclea runs away from the lion and Pyrocles tears him up, cutting off the head and running back to give it to his girlfriend. She runs “like Arethus when she ran from Alpheus” [176], the winds blow up her skirts, so Pyrocles doesn’t run too fast or start yelling hey here’s your head on account he wants to see more. Lovely parody-song by Dametas in praise of his own life—he hides from the bear like the peasant in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, book 6. He’s “no whit out of countenance with all that had been said, because he had no worse to fall into than his own” [181]. The beasts were let out by Lady Cecropia, mother of Amphialus (who was originally Basilius’ nephew and his heir, until the two girls were born). She’s a Bad Woman, clearly. Basilius pays no attention, because he “thought so much of his late conceived commonwealth, that all other matters were but digressions unto him” [182]. That is, his retreat is a comic obsession like the philosophy one in Love’s Labour’s Lost and other humorous resolves. Some Gonzalo overtones. After this the great firework show of the “Eclogues” begins and winds up the book.

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Extraordinary firework display of poetic virtuosity at the end of the first book: this is a central idea of the whole design from the beginning. I suppose it represents a climb up the Eros hill: first we get the tournament, a ritual war for the sake of ladies, corresponding roughly to the games section of Classical epics; then, as we get nearer the summit of the pastoral world, a higher ritual or contest of poetry. Cf. Spenser, using this for the final quest of Courtesy or good words. This final scene is a masque with torches used. The shepherds who ran away from the lion and bear are made torch-bearers. The first offering is a leaping dance like a braule, to pipe music, which “made a right picture of their chief god Pan, and his companions the Satyrs” [182]. Pan is, I suppose, the element of rusticity in shepherd life: Dametas’ parody song about having save his own life is addressed to Pan. Then the shepherds improvise couplets; then there’s a dialogue poem; then a long poem containing a fable, sung by, apparently, Sidney himself, who’s represented as being sunk in love-melancholy, like Jaques in the forest of Arden. Then a lively dialogue about the pros and cons of married life; then Strephon and Claius come back into the action and sing that magnificent double sestina. Then Zelmane sings Sapphics, and that ends the show. Arcadia, Book Two (1590 version) 1. Operatic scene of erotic complications: the old Basilius loves Zelmane, and sings a poem beginning and ending “Let not old age disgrace my high desire.” Gynecia, who knows that Zelmane is actually a man, and is violently in love with him, finds herself in a Phaedria type of situation. Zelmane, of course, wants Philoclea (as Gynecia knows). 2. Scene shifts to Musidorus, or Dorus, who wants Pamela, and makes love to the foolish Mopsa as a way of getting his sentiments across to Pamela. Apparently this sort of thing is considered cricket. “These beasts, like children to nature, inherit her blessings quietly; we, like bastards, are laid abroad, even as foundlings to be trained up by grief and sorrow” [222]. Pastoral model of state of innocence; love melancholy as symbol of the Angst that such a surrounding inspires in humanity, nature’s bastard. Pamela says “it is not for us {women} to play the philosophers, in seeking out your hidden virtues; since that, which in a wise prince would be counted wisdom, in us will be taken for a light-grounded affection” [226]. Not quite sure what this means, but it’s clearly about the female role in love rituals. 3. Very complicated chapter, a narrative on two levels. Musidorus is telling Pyrocles that he told Pamela that story of his origin, so that his account is on the level of “truth” in relation to Pyrocles, and of “fiction” in relation to Pamela (because, by a further complication, he’s telling it to her in front of Mopsa, who has to be

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deceived). Musidorus and Pyrocles are princes of Thessaly and Macedon respectively, shipwrecked at the beginning of the story. “Arcadia was . . . the charmed circle, where all his spirits for ever should be enchanted” [229]. I.e., he’s in love with Pamela, the “sublime” or haughty (well, majestic) sister. Note that Basilius is really the impotent old king, modulated to (a) retirement (b) deception, or better self-deception, about the honesty of Dametas (c) infatuation with Zelmane (senile). Hero says when he fell in love with Pamela “he left in himself nothing, but a maze of longing, and a dungeon of sorrow” [229]. Maze and dungeon are objective correlatives of love-melancholy in a pastoral setting, drawn from the night-world below. Strephon and Claius do have the same girl friend, but are still friends. 4. Basilius goes out hawking. “For as a good builder to a high tower will not make his stair upright, but winding almost the full compass about, that the steepness be the more unsensible; so she, seeing the towering of her pursued chase, went circling, and compassing about, rising so with the less sense of rising” [236]. Widening gyre: note the winding stair in the tower image. Well, Sidney asks himself why the hell he doesn’t get down to how Philoclea’s feeling. It appears she’s got a terrific Lesbian crush on Zelmane (these things are easy to suggest in disguiseplots). “The only two bands of good will, loveliness and lovingness” [238]. Well, she makes a heroine of Zelmane and wants to imitate her, “Then dreams by night began to bring more unto her, than she durst wish by day” [240]. She goes to a “goodly white marble stone” [241] dedicated in ancient time to the Sylvan gods, where she’s already written a poem in praise of virginity. Stone of morality like the Pierre one—well, not really; it’s more a hard chastity symbol. “She went in among those few trees, so closed in the tops together, as they might seem a little chapel; and there might she by the help of the moonlight perceive the goodly stone, which served as an altar in that woody devotion” [241]. So she writes a palinode or retractation, saying she’s spotted, or something. “My parents have told me, that in these fair heavenly bodies, there are great hidden deities, which have their working in the ebbing and flowing of our estates” [243]. “Unlawful desires are punished after the effect of enjoying; but unpossible desires are punished in the desire itself” [243]. Not easy to see how far Lesbian affection can go. 5. Girls get together, and “with dear, through chaste embracements” [245], tell each other they’re in love. Usual setup, as I’ve said, of elder-sublime and younger-beautiful, hence some appropriateness as an Amazon. Pamela describes how well her boyfriend can ride, which of course proves he’s of noble birth. Centaur, and takes the ring with sprezzatura: great emphasis on the perfection of his bodily rhythms as, first, a rider, then a dancer, then an actor. “The handmaid of wisdom is slow belief” [247], says she, but she’s catching on fast. Note of course the Castiglione emphasis on grace of accomplishments, and the link, which as

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Yeats says is also in early Japanese culture (Tale of Genji), between heroism and delicacy. The knight is always the man on the horse (hippes, equites, cavaliers, rittere, etc.), and the horse symbolizes his mastery of what’s below him, in other words the integrity of his microcosm. Well, Dorus writes her a letter, delivering it “as if he had been but the coffin that carried himself to his sepulchre” [250]. Of course his accomplishments show he’s of princely blood despite the disguise. Here’s a central point for the fifth lecture: in primitive belief the king incarnates his whole people, so the Egyptian Pharaoh achieves immorality for that people: the notion of individual immorality comes later. Similarly, the fact that romance is usually about princes and princesses goes with the expectation that the reader will identify with that prince or princess, so the snobbery turns inside out as what I call fraternity. 6. Dorus continues his story, a contemporary one about him to Pamela, a historical one to Mopsa. In this chapter we begin to get the Utopian “historiology,” as Sidney calls it, that Fulke Greville speaks of. Note the appropriateness of flashback techniques to an Arcadian scene, as in Morris’ Earthly Paradise: i.e., reminiscent stories are what one would expect. Anyway, he tells the story of Euarchus, Pyrocles’ father, King of Macedon. He created a Tudor revolution in Macedon, finding his people victims of baronial tyranny, “the worst kind of Oligarchy; that is, when men are governed indeed by a few, and yet are not taught to know what those few be, to whom they should obey” [254]. Hence the king’s name was being abused to foster tyranny, and “wit abused, rather to feign reason why it should be amiss, than how it should be amended” [255]. The king cleaned up the exactions of those who “by a fallacy of argument thinking themselves most Kings, when the subject is most basely subjected” [256]. “In sum, I might as easily set down the whole Art of government, as to lay before your eyes the picture of his proceedings” [256]. He makes friends with Dorilaus, King of Thessaly, and they make a cross-marriage, marrying each other’s sisters. Musidorus born first; soothsayers predict great things of him; King of Phrygia gets scared (Herod theme) and goes to war, “not considering, that if it were a work of the superior powers, the heavens at length are never children” [257]. Well, he and his allies got beat up, and “they begat of a just war, the best child, peace” [257]. Wonder if Yeats, of course [sic]: wish he’d inherited Sidney’s sense. 7. Sketch of ideal education of prince(s): “so that a habit of commanding was naturalized in them” [259]. Go off in the inevitable ship, and learn something about sailing: “to consider the art of catching the wind prisoner, to no other end, but to run away with it; to see how beauty and use can so well agree together, that of all the trinkets, wherewith they are attired, there is not one but serves to some necessary purpose” [260]. He goes on to a digressive sentence about love and the loadstone, latter compared to mistress drawing a hard heart, and “make it aspire to

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so high a Love, as of the heavenly Poles” [260]. These random images have some point always, even one in chapter 6 about shooting at the mid-day sun. Well, we then get the inevitable storm, described with great liveliness and, I think, reminiscent of the opening of the Aeneid. These storms symbolize (a) plunge into experience (b) the anxiety of “falling” asleep in a dream world. “The tyranny of the wind, and the treason of the sea” [262]—these are political overtones latent in the opening scene of The Tempest too. “Certainly there is no danger carries with it more horror, than that which grows in those floating kingdoms. For that dwelling place is unnatural to mankind . . . .” [262]. Well, the princes escape; two Phrygians captured in the recent war and ransomed by their generosity give up their planks to them, or something—twin servant theme. (Incidentally, Pyrocles’ father and mother die early and he’s brought up with Musidorus.) 8. Pyrocles cast on shore of Phrygia, which has a shore, like Bohemia in Shakespeare, and is grabbed by the Herod-type king, still terrified by prophecies about Musidorus. He’d much rather kill Musidorus, but Pyrocles will have to do. Interesting assumption that tyranny and an inquisitive police force go together: tyrant is of course melancholy, with a “toad-like retiredness” [265]. Makes a great ritual of executing Pyrocles; Musidorus picked up by a fisherman and taken to the King of Pontus, where he hears of Pyrocles’ trouble and offers himself instead. Damon and Pythias archetype. He’s accepted, but Pyrocles disguises himself as the executioner’s assistant and puts a sword in his hand at the moment of death: they start fighting and eventually the soldiers start fighting among themselves, on the dragons’-teeth principle, “wherewith certain young men of the bravest minds, cried with loud voice, Liberty” [269], and a revolution breaks out. King flees, gathers a counter-revolutionary force and is beaten in the field—Bosworth archetype.50 Also killed, with his son, one by Musidorus, other by Pyrocles, nach. People are cautious, in a Renaissance way, make Musidorus their king because he’s born a prince, but Musidorus resigns the crown to an older man next in succession—Gonzalo archetype, and buggers off. During the story he lapses into the first person, but Mopsa’s apparently asleep. 9. Sorry, it’s a nobleman of Pontus that picked up Musidorus; the king is another tyrant, though “humorous” and capricious rather than consistently melancholy. He has an envious counsellor, “a man whose favour no man could win, but by being miserable” [272]. The two brothers who’d given up their plank fall into his hands; he makes a great deal of them at first, “praising himself in heart, in that he praised them” [272]. But of course it can’t last, and he eventually executes them. So Musidorus and Pyrocles make war on him (the people of Phrygia are grateful enough to follow them), and execute him on their tomb, which they build. The counsellor is under sentence, but “his heart brake even to death with the beholding the honour done to the dead carcasses” [273]. The princes then go and kill a

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couple of giants, and bugger off again: “thinking it not so worthy, to be brought to heroical effects by fortune, or necessity (like Ulysses and Aeneas), as by one’s own choice, and working” [275]. 10. This chapter is the source of the Gloucester theme in King Lear. (Dropped stitch in 9: Pyrocles could have been King of Pontus, as Musidorus of Phrygia, but he finds a sister in the line of succession, marries her to the Gonzalo type in Phrygia, and unites the kingdoms.) Back to 10: princes are in Galatia in the winter, where there’s “so extreme and foul a storm, that never any winter, I think, brought forth a fouler child” [275]. They see an old blind man and his son, “poorly arrayed” [275]: he’s the King of Paphlagonia; son’s name is Leonatus (Shakespearean name). Refugees, “no man dare know, but that must be miserable” [276]. Leonatus begins the story and says his father was “driven to such grief, as even now he would have had me to have led him to the top of this rock, thence to cast himself headlong to death” [276]. King takes over story in order to blame himself for favoring a bastard son named Plexirtus, to the point of condemning his good son to death, only the ruffians as usual don’t do it, so he escapes and lives poorly. Pyrocles takes over all government, “so that ere I was aware, I had left myself nothing but the name of a King” [278]—link with the main Lear story. Also the Tempest theme, of course. Blinds the king and then lets him go, “neither imprisoning, nor killing me; but rather delighting to make me feel my misery” [278]. So he wants to jump over the cliff, “meaning to free him [the good son] from so Serpentine a companion as I am” [279]. Well, Plexirtus turns up, having heard of Leonatus and determined to kill him himself, “though no eyes of sufficient credit in such matter, but his own; and therefore came himself to be actor, and spectator” [279]. The two princes try to rescue them, and are assisted by a force from the new King of Pontus, who was warned in a dream to follow them, because where they were was “a fit place enough to make the state of any Tragedy” [280]. Pyrocles is rescued by a couple of heroic, if mistaken supporters, wanting “rather to be good friends, than good men” [280], but he loses the kingdom and the blind king is re-established, giving the rule to his good son, then “even in a moment died” [281]. Pyrocles manages to get himself pardoned by hypocrisy and fawning and self-accusation, “while the poor villains, chief ministers of his wicked, now betrayed by the author thereof, were delivered to many cruel sorts of death” [282]. Usually sharp tone. Princes go off to rescue the Queen of Lycia, named Erona. 11. Interruption and back to the Arcadian retreat—cf. Ariosto and the retirement of Orlando. Mopsa falls asleep and snores, but as soon as Musidorus attempts a declaration of love “while this dragon sleeps, that keeps the golden fruit” [283], Pamela wakes her up. Well, then the girls go to the river Ladon to bathe (“wash themselves,” Sidney says), and Zelmane, in an Actaeon-among-Diana’s-nymphs

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role, watches them get undressed and into the stream. Zelmane naturally gets a tremendous erection which inspires her with song; she (i.e. Zelmane) grabs a lute; her heart danced to the music and her feet beat time to it, “while her body was the room where it should be celebrated; her soul the Queen which should be delighted” [287]. The song, not unnaturally, turns out to be a catalogue of Philoclea’s beauties, from stem to stern, or rather from hair to feet. Black eyes again; ears with “maze” imagery—curious how the ears are labyrinthine long before their anatomy was known; navel (I’m skipping, though he doesn’t) a “seal of virgin-wax” (symbol of the virginal cunt); belly is, or leads to, the place where In that sweet seat the boy doth sport:   Loath, I must leave his chief resort,   For such a use the world hath gotten,   The best things still must be forgotten. [289]

The last couplet is apparently being quoted. Curiously haunting pieces of prudery, with overtones that go away beyond it. Maybe we’re close here to the whole secret of forgetting, and of why the most obvious things are the hardest to see— cf. also of course the maternal diagram in Finnegans Wake. Some overtones too in the prose ow-oo that precedes the poem: why doesn’t the river stop and embrace Philoclea properly? “But the reason is manifest, the upper streams make such haste to have their part of embracing, that the nether, though loathly, must needs give place unto them” [286]. Elizabethans put political metaphors into the damnedest places. A silly episode follows: Amphialus, referred to in Book One, is close by, and his spaniel grabs Philoclea’s glove and then her notebook. Zelmane follows, and as soon as he hears that he’s facing a potential rival his erection modulates and he gets as furious as a bull in heat (which he is) and falls on Amphialus, who, thinking he’s fighting a woman, backs off and finally gets a wound in the—guess where—thigh. They part as chivalrous enemies. Actually the episode isn’t really silly: it’s psychologically quite accurate. What makes me impatient is (a) the idealizing of the hero (Pyrocles) which makes this kind of thing ideal too and (b) the general atmosphere of tee-hee. 12. It wasn’t a notebook of course; it was a “paper” containing a poem written by Basilius, which is a dialogue between Basilius and Plangus about the latter’s ow-oo about Erona, who’s being threatened with death. Only things to note are: first, Shakespeare seems to have kept reading after chapter 10: Let dolts in hast some altars fair erect To those high powers, which idly sit above, And virtue do in greatest need neglect. [297]

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Not that it’s a particularly specific echo. The rhymes get longer as the poem goes on, and towards the end they become triple: rightfulness and sightfulness. Interesting that so many of these poems are dialogues; there’s a comment in the Eclogue section of Book One about the shepherds’ composing their poems antiphonally, and the dialogue poem (I don’t want to be superstitious about it, but that’s what it looks like) introduces the Platonic conception of the symposiumdialogue into the Arcadian surrounding. I wish the bloody ribbon would work.51 13. Philoclea tells the story of Erona. Daughter of king of Lycia, where Cupid is worshipped, with a lot of naked statues. Erona goes tsk-tsk and gets her father to destroy all the images: this gets Cupid sore and he makes her fall in love with someone called Antiphilus. Tiridates king of Armenia, who used to love her, now hates her and leads an army in to bugger things up. Pyrocles and Musidorus turn up and in a combat of three apiece they kill their opponents but Plangus, on Armenia’s side, takes Antiphilus prisoner. So Tiridates holds him as a hostage: Erona gets Pyrocles and Musidorus to rescue him; they do and kill Tiridates. A Christian writer dealing with pagan polytheism of course can get some interesting results; “if Cupid be a god, or that tyranny of our own thoughts seem as a God unto us” [304]. 14. Regular technique of interruption of these retrospective narratives: Miso brings in a scheme to tell stories by lot and insists on telling hers first, so we have a grotesque lower-class parody besides all the courtly stuff. It appears that the ability to tell a story well is an upper-class characteristic, as in the third book of Castiglione. It’s followed by a parody-poem deriving Love’s descent from Argus and Io. Mopsa then has her turn, telling an old nurse’s fairy tale, until she’s interrupted by the ladies. 15. Story of Plangus. It’s the Phaedria story again: he falls in love with a woman, or thinks he does: “if that may be called love, which he rather did take into himself willingly, than by which he was taken forcibly” [313]. His father the king (his mother’s dead) gets to hear about this, and tries to stop it, but the only result is that the silly old bugger falls in love with her himself. Sends son away to a war and marries her; son comes back, stepmother makes a play for him. When he says no, she plots against him, and he’s exiled to avoid being executed. Curious how persistent this theme is in romance. 16. More about the Basilius-Zelmane business: he gets Philoclea to plead his cause, or rather Zelmane arranges this, for obvious reasons. 17. In the resulting interview between Philoclea and Zelmane, the latter declares himself to be himself, i.e., Pyrocles. Philoclea knows she ought to disapprove, but doesn’t, and the epiphany of a male lover is compared to the satisfaction of Pyg-

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malion. “Though the pureness of my virgin mind be stained, let me keep the true simplicity of my word” [330]. This means that Pyrocles can go on telling the story of his achievements in the first person—epiphany by hearing as well as sight. 18. Anaxius, the son of a man killed earlier by Pyrocles, is very proud, and challenges Pyrocles to single combat. Pyrocles agrees, but on the way he finds a man, Pamphilus, tied to a tree by nine women, who are pricking him, probably to death, with bodkins, proposing to end the fun by putting out his eyes. Pyrocles chases them away, all but one, named Dido, who’s still plenty sore. It appears he’s not very nice to the ladies. “He came with such an authority among us, as if the Planets had done enough for us, that by us once he had been delighted” [337]. He passes up nine women on various excuses, and her on the excuse that he’s seen prettier women, which naturally infuriates her. 19. Goes on to meet Anaxius, who comes two days late because he doesn’t like being kept waiting. Terrific fight, because Anaxius is no set-up, but in the middle of it comes the rescued Pamphilus, flogging his Dido with whips. Pyrocles leaves the fight to rescue her; she’s driven toward a castle where Pamphilus and his friends are going to strip her, apparently for a gang-rape or something. Pyrocles gets laughed at by onlookers for being a coward, but he thinks the lady has priority. So he rescues her in her own castle, and then finds that her father, named Chremes (comic churl name) is a miser and hates to be grateful because it might cost him something. Sounds like the Malbecco theme in Spenser. “Such a man, as any enemy could not wish him worse, than to be himself” [343]. There’s a price on Pyrocles’ head, so Chremes decides to betray him: Pyrocles is in a very tight spot until Musidorus comes along, and then the King of Iberia, father of Plangus. Chremes is sentenced to be hanged and his daughter is killed by “clowns” [344]. 20. The Phaedria lady is named Andromana, and when Musidorus and Pyrocles come into her kingdom she’s sole ruler, her infatuated husband having given everything into her hands. Well, she wants both Musidorus and Pyrocles, “often wishing, that she might be the angle, where the lines of our friendship might meet” [348]. Sounds like a fairly acute angle. They say so, she says you won’t, eh, and sticks them in prison. She’s got her fool king to disinherit Plangus and give the heir rights to her own son, named Pallidius, a Good Guy in spite of his ancestry. He’s in love with a woman named Zelmane, who doesn’t love him and does love Pyrocles. Anyway, they get let out of jail. 21. Another tournament, less elaborately described than the earlier one: held on the anniversary of Andromana’s marriage to her clunkhead. Queen Helen of Corinth sends knights. She’s praised because “she made her people by peace, warlike; her courtiers by sports, learned; her Ladies by Love, chaste” [352]. Sounds vaguely allegorical, though there’s very little if any Elizabethan-nudges

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in this story. Well, the heroes are let out to take part in this tournament, then run away to Bithynia, whence Andromana chases them with, I think, “threescore” knights, but, hell, that’s only thirty apiece, and “we esteemed few swords in a just defence, able to resist many unjust assaulters” [356]. Curious that Sidney goes in for this crap: he’s enough of a soldier himself to know how silly it is. Palladius, the virtuous son of this randy hag, is treacherously murdered, whereupon “many of his subjects’ bodies we left there dead, to wait on him more faithfully to the other world” [356]. Andromana eventually discovers her son’s death and kills herself. 22. I thought he’d killed Pamphilus, the treacherous Don Juan type, but he evidently hadn’t: this chapter begins with another lady’s ow-oo. So he sticks her in a house “dedicated to Vestal Nuns” [359], and is then overtaken by Zelmane disguised as a page-boy and calling her Daiphantus, both names that P. himself takes earlier. She serves him for two months, at least, while he’s in Bithynia; then he goes back to Galatia, the kingdom where the Gloucester type was blinded by Plexirtus and rescued by Leonatus. We remember that Leonatus forgave his bastard brother, whose cause was supported by two very brave but misguided knights, named Tydeus and Telenor. Leonatus finds that Plexirtus is gonna poison him, so he sends him off to conquer Trebizond: he goes, but manages to inveigle Tydeus and Telenor into fighting each other, so they kill each other, so Plexirtus is killed at the end of the chapter, and as he’s Zelmane’s father that makes a complication for the next chapter. 23. Actually he isn’t dead; Sidney’s language is ambiguous. What happens is that Zelmane, now Pyrocles’ page, pines away and dies, because (a) her father’s a Bad Guy and Pyrocles is his enemy and (b) Pyrocles doesn’t love her and never will. Death-bed speech, asking Pyrocles and Musidorus to take the names Daiphantus and Palladius (her unsuccessful lover) when they go to Greece. Pyrocles remarks to Philoclea, to whom of course he’s telling all this story, that “if my stars had not wholly reserved me for you, there else perhaps I might have loved, and (which had been most strange) begun my love after death” [367]. Then: “yet something there was, which (when I saw a picture of yours) brought again her figure into my remembrance” [367]. I don’t know what he’ll make of this, if anything, but the Ligeia archetype is there. Somebody named Otave, along with two giants, is attacking the King of Pontus, who’s the friend of Musidorus and Pyrocles. Plexirtus has been made prisoner by a knight who has reason to hate him, and lets him out to be devoured by a horrible monster, with the proviso that if anybody likes him well enough to kill the master instead he’ll go free. So Pyrocles does, on account he’s promised Zelmane he would, while Musidorus cleans up on the giants.

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24. (I forgot to note the headnote to chapter 17: “Their conclusion, with re-entry to their intermitted historiology.” He uses this word at least twice in the headnotes, and it must be a very early use of it in English: note the persistence of the convention of romance, which runs from Heliodorus to Scott, of seeking affinity to historical writing.) This chapter brings us back to the in medias res beginning, both the circular technique and the circumstances of the beginning being strongly reminiscent of Heliodorus. The two heroes decide to go into Greece, and their ship is outfitted by Plexirtus, who also plots to have them killed. The plot is disclosed by one of his henchmen, but the Captain, who has been a pirate, has also been suborned. They take new names as above, “as well for our own promise to Zelmane, as because we desired to come unknown into Greece” [371]. Theme of hero (doubled) coming over the sea to a new land. Captain does his stuff; some sailors take the heroes’ part, a fight breaks out, “(like the children of Cadmus) we continued still to slay one another” [374], the ship catches fire and burns up, Pyrocles grabs a mast, finds his sword on it, kills the Captain who’s also grabbed it, and gets tossed ashore in Laconia. And, says Philoclea, what about Musidorus? Dunno, he’s lost, says Pyrocles. No he ain’t and you know it, says she. “What is mine, even to my soul, is yours: but the secret of my friend is not mine” [375]. Anyway that’s cleared up, and we’re back where we started, now that we’re near the end of Book Two. 25. Gycenia has a curious dream, about Zelmane, whom of course she’s in love with. “Zelmane was vanished, and she found nothing but a dead body like unto her husband, which seeming at the first with a strange smell to infect her. . . . the dead body, she thought, took her in his arms, and said, Gynecia, leave all; for here is thy only rest” [376]. Funny how much the poets actually do know about dreams. More stuff about this, then a rebellion breaks out, where again Sidney takes the side of the gentry. Of course they aren’t armed, so it’s a little more plausible that Zelmane can kill them by droves, ending with a painter who wanted to see wounds as background study for a painting of the Centaurs and Lapithae. Zelmane cuts off both his hands, haw, haw. 26. Zelmane makes a speech to the surviving rebels, which makes a division of opinion among them, according to Elizabethan beliefs about the hydra-headed mob—and of course they would be mobs, too, in the absence of any authentic information. “Do you think them fools, that saw you should not enjoy your vines, your cattle, no, not your wives and children, without government; and that there could be no government without a Magistrate, and no Magistrate without obedience, and no obedience where every one upon own private passion, may interpret the doing of the rulers?” [385]. Typical example of sorites reason from anxiety-premises. This struck through “the rugged wilderness of their imaginations” [386]

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27. Clinias, a leader of the mob, and a spy in the pay of Cecropia, had been stirring them up, taking advantage of the “strange retiring of Basilius” [387]. Funny how Sidney, and all his contemporaries, can advance these anxiety-arguments about order simultaneously with depicting actual rulers as fools. Being a hypocrite, he swings around as soon as his cause is lost, calling the mob “more mad than the Giants that would have plucked Jupiter out of heaven” [388], and starting opposition with a man who’s fallen in love with Zelmane and perceives “that the people, once anything down the hill from their fury, would never stop till they came to the bottom of absolute yielding” [388]—effective description of the avalanche mentality of crowds—so Clinias is wounded and takes shelter with the establishment, “bleeding for that was past, and quaking for fear of more” [388]. The mob is “divided in minds and not divided in companies” [388], so they start fighting with each other. After they disperse with about a score left alive, he tells a lying story about his part in the insurrection. There are some quite effective phrases about rebellion, as Sidney is nobody’s fool: “Public affairs were mingled with private grudges, neither was any man thought of wit, that did not pretend some cause of mislike. Railing was counted the fruit of freedom, and saying nothing had his uttermost praise in ignorance” [390]. The crowd says, according to him, “Let us do that, which all the rest think. Let it be said, that we only are not astonished with vain titles, which have their force but in our force” [391]. 28. Dametas sings a second song in praise of himself for having preserved his own life: these songs are brilliant little parodies, and ought to be better known. Long discourse between Basilius and his regent Philanax, which takes us back to the situation at the beginning, contrapuntal to the shipwrecking of the two heroes. Basilius quotes the oracle, which he interprets favorably to his pursuit of Pyrocles-Zelmane. Recites a poem in praise of Apollo—note of course the oracle design theme. 29. Goes back to the story of Antiphilus and Erona (chapter 13). Antiphilus is loved by Erona, and evidently marries her, but he’s no good, falls in love with Artaxia, who hates his guts, passes a law making polygamy legal so he can marry Artaxia, is kidnapped by her and along with Erona sentenced to be sacrificed: he on Tiridates’ birthday, she on his death day six months later. Antiphilus “could not perceive that he was a king of reasonable creatures, who would quickly scorn follies, and repine at injuries” [398]. Well, Antiphilus does get sacrificed, mainly through women’s-lib types who don’t like the polygamy law. Silly story about agreement that Erona can be let go if Pyrocles and Musidorus turn up in time to rescue her. Plangus, the rightful heir of the story in chapter 15, does his best to find them, but they’ve disappeared, of course, and his appeal to Basilius himself is ignored (Basilius is telling this story to Zelmane), “the course of my life being otherwise bent” [406]. In other words he’s no better than Dametas.

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Some hope that Euarchus, whoever he is, will rescue her. Euarchus is Pyrocles’ father. The Eclogues of the Second Book are less impressive than those of the First, but they’re very lively poems all the same. In reference to the late rebellion, the shepherds make a dialogue-song of Reason and Passion; then there are couple of debate poems, the second lively and humorous. Zelmane wants an ow-oo, as being more suited to her condition, and more aristocratic anyway. So a shepherd sings a dialogue-song of Strephon and Klaius, who appear to be absent. Then there’s an echo song and that’s it. Arcadia, Book Three, 1590 Version. 1. Stock Courtly Love foolishness about Musidorus, who not only loves Pamela but says so, so she goes into the haughty-mistress routine and he goes charging around the woods saying ow-oo and writing an interminable elegy, which, we’re told, took him a lot of trouble. “Being a child of Passion, and never acquainted with mediocrity” [435]. Doesn’t want to commit suicide because “if it destroyed Dorus, it should also destroy the image of her that lived in Dorus” [437]. Leisureclass amusements. 2. Young women are invited to country-wenches sports, consisting of six girls in scarlet petticoats up to the knee—at least they come with the invitation. They decide to go, and are seized by twenty armed men, along with Zelmane, who doesn’t get a chance to draw her sword. This is Cecropia’s idea: when she married, she thought her husband would be the successor of Basilius; the husband died and she thought her son Amphialus would make it; then the old fool Basilius married Gynecia, a young woman—she’s the one who calls him a doting fool, but she’s right. So they’re stuck in a castle in the midst of a great lake, upon a high rock. Amphialus remains very decent; Cecropia does the Lady Macbeth act, saying she’d rather he hated Philoclea than loved her, because “Hate often begetteth victory; Love commonly is the instrument of subjection” [447]. 3. So Amphialus goes in to make love to Philoclea, who gives him the obvious answers. She looks like Venus bewailing the murder of Adonis, although the Pluto-Proserpine myth is a lot closer. “You entitle yourself my slave, but I am sure I am yours” [449], etc. Heroine as slave—note the name Pamela echoing in Richardson. 4. A political chapter, telling how Amphialus tried to get a crusade going against Basilius’ regent, whom he represents as not only a bad man but of lower birth. A quite brilliant description of what the Elizabethans would call policy, using people according to their gifts, even according to their vices. He strengthens his

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castle “which at least would win him much time, the mother of many mutations” [454]. However, he has to remember at intervals that he’s in love. 5. Something I missed: Cecropia’s speech to Amphialus in chapter 2 is called in the headnotes her “auricular confession.” Also, in 3: Amphialus doesn’t want to dress too cheerfully because that looks like triumph, nor too mournfully because that looks like a bad omen for her. So his actual choice is carefully described: Sidney has his points as a novelist. Well, in 5 Cecropia visits Philoclea and tries to talk her over: “You think you are offended, and are indeed defended” [458], and other antitheses. Tries to rouse Philoclea’s curiosity by breaking off, but Philoclea “rather wished to unknow what she knew” [458]. Philoclea says she’s vowed to virginity: Cecropia makes a long rhetorical speech in favor of marriage and motherhood. Actually Cecropia is quite good at rhetoric. Finally Philoclea. says “whilst she was so captived, she could not conceive of any such persuasions . . . than as constraints” [462]. 6. Cecropia now tackles Pamela, who responds with the prayer that got into Eikon Basilike and was so exploited by Milton. Not a bad prayer either, only the last sentence, God bless Musidorus, would have to be left off. 7. Basilius’ army, led by Philanax, comes to attack Amphialus, so we get an Iliadtype gut-cut. Amphialus’ chief counsellor, Clinias, is a coward, but Amphialus isn’t, so there’s a long catalogue of who got killed. 8. More gut-cut. Ismenus, Amphialus’ squire killed by Philanax, who’s then taken prisoner. A black knight, who will undoubtedly turn out to be Musidorus, appears and fights. 9. Amphialus retreats, and then makes an immensely long song to Philoclea. No dice. Philanax is release on Philoclea’s entreaty, after a speech about his honour. 10. A very long chapter, beginning with Pamela’s making an embroidered purse and going on to Cecropia’s temptation. She makes long speeches of the Shakespeare Venus type, urging that beauty should marry and produce offspring—Venus rather than the sonnets, because the arguments are supposed to be specious. Pamela says no, I marry whom daddy says I should marry, otherwise I offend God. To hell with God, says Cecropia: this sets up one of those endless Elizabethan arguments about how there must be a God, how impossible it is that the universe arose from chance, how absurd it is to think of nature as a democracy or anything but a Tudor monarchy, etc.: wonder if Milton was at all influenced by this for Comus. After all, he did spot the prayer in 6, unless Liljegren and that fool Empson are right.52 “Man, who while by the pregnancy of his imagination he strives to things supernatural, meanwhile he loseth his own natural felicity” [488]—that’s Cecropia. Pamela says if chance had ordered the cosmos heaviness

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would have gone so far down and lightness so far up that they’d never have stuck together. The sea “seems to observe so just a dance, and yet understands no music” [490]. “As if one should say, that one’s foot might be wise, and himself foolish” [491]. “whether you will allow to be the Creator thereof, as undoubtedly he is, or the soul and governor thereof” [491]. In other words the usual strawatheist argument, with a great deal of anxiety about filthiness and corruption and shamelessness. 11. Cecropia is silenced but not convinced, being a bad lot anyway. Meanwhile Phalantus sends a very courteous challenge to Amphialus, which is accepted, and there’s a joust which Amphialus more or less wins. A great deal made of the pictorial designs made by the armour. Funny damn book, and a funny society, that wants this kind of thing for a literary convention. “Rather angry with fighting, than fighting for anger” [498]. 12. Another very courteous challenge, this time from Argalus, who’s also trying to rescue Philoclea, although the general attitude of these knights seems extremely indifferent to the moral aspect of the situation. Anyway, Argalus is killed, and there’s a very tragic situation, with laments of his girlfriend Parthenia. 13. Dametas challenges Clinias, thinking he’ll be too big a coward to answer: they get prodded on by other people who want some amusement, so they have a farcical encounter in which on the whole Dametas has the best of it. “The cruel haste of a prevailing coward” [514]. Note carefully that the general rule about not following tragic-heroic with farcical-clownish scenes, which Sidney appears to accept for drama, appears not to hold for prose romance. 14. Clinias takes out his defeat in treachery and suggests poisoning Amphialus, with the connivance of Artesia—don’t know if she’s the same one that appeared before, but she’s the sister of Ismenus, so is looking for revenge. The two girls turn down the suggestion of assassination; Philoclea just says no, but Pamela makes a long speech beginning “wicked woman” [520]. “In whose mind Virtue governed with the scepter of Knowledge” [520]. The idea seems to be that Pamela and Philoclea are respectively penseroso and allegro types: certainly the emphasis on prayer and theology for Pamela indicates that she gets the sublimated symbolism. Zelmane more closely imprisoned, Artesia locked up and Clinias executed. 15. A knight named Anaxius breaks through the Basilius besiegers to help Amphialus: he saved his life once, so he “could not choose but like him, whom he found a match for himself” [521], because he’s pretty sold on himself. He’s welcomed by Amphialus, who proposes to show him the girls, but Anaxius says no, all girls fall in love with him and it’s a bore. They take him out on the lake anyway, with a quite lovely description of water music and a quite lovely poem

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(Amphialus is serenading Philoclea, of course, and this is just an excuse). Anaxius is crippled in the fight by a “cowardly” blow and “fell down, blaspheming heaven” [525]—Capaneus alazon type, maybe. The sortie almost does for the besiegers, but three knights, including the black one, turn the scale. 16. Somebody called the Knight of the Tombs challenges Amphialus, and is rather easily beaten. A. wants to spare the knight, but has already killed him–– that is, her, on account it’s Parthenia. Tragic conclusion, and an epitaph, which in this edition is a blank. 17. Amphialus naturally feels terrible, and his mother comes to cheer him up by telling him he should rape Philoclea. He says no, he wants to respect her; his mother’s on the sado-masochist roller coaster and says women prefer being violated: they don’t really respect a man otherwise. Her example is Helen and Menelaus. “For what can be more agreeable, than upon force to lay the fault of desire, and in one instant to join a dear delight with a just excuse?” [533]. 18. Amphialus is challenged by a “forsaken knight,” Musidorus again, and there’s a terrific fight, indecisive, that damn near kills both. Anaxius’ brothers try to help Amphialus and a green and a white knight (armour carefully described) defend Musidorus. Musidorus is awful sore he didn’t win. But Amphialus is getting to be a figure of almost tragic proportions, breaking his sword after Parthenia’s death, and trying to avoid this combat. He says when Musidorus says he’s doing injury to two ladies, “You shall not fight with me upon that quarrel; for I confess the same too: but it proceeds from their own beauty, to enforce Love to offer this force” [536]. 19. Cecropia threatens to kill the two girls and Zelmane if the siege isn’t raised, and exhibits them on a scaffold. Zelmane is so mad she has a nosebleed. Kalander advises raising the siege; Philanax speaks against it, but Gynecia is so besotted on Zelmane, as the silly old dope himself also is, that he shuffles off. 20. Incidentally, it’s curious how these heroes call themselves cowards just because they lose in a fight: it’s not as though they’d quit. Partly rationalized by the convention that if Philoclea is watching, Amphialus ought to be able to lick anybody. Oh, well, I’ll never understand the gut-cut code: I didn’t understand the Iliad and still don’t. Anyway, the virgin-baiting gets going in this chapter, with Cecropia flogging the two sisters, “her heart growing not only to desire the fruit of punishing them, but even to delight in the punishing them” [553]. No dice: “they found in themselves how much good the hardness of education doth to the resistance of misery” [551]. 21. Cecropia tries executing Pamela in the sight of Philoclea and Zelmane—probably it’s just a trick, but anyway we get the regulation ow-oo from Philoclea, “like lamentable Philomela” [559], which is the archetype, I suppose.

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22. Cecropia tries to get Zelmane to propose submission to Philoclea, which he tries feebly to do, not happy about it, but no dice. Then he’s shown a dumb-show with Philoclea’s head cut off. Ow-oo follows. “And when he came again to himself, he heard, or he thought he heard a voice, which cried, Revenge, Revenge; whether indeed it were his good Angel, which used that voice to stay him from unnatural murdering of himself; or that his wandering spirit lighted upon that conceit, and by their weakness (subject to apprehension) supposed they heard it” [564]. 23. Philoclea comes to Zelmane and explains that she ain’t dead, neither is Pamela: the one that got chopped was Artesia, dressed in Pamela’s clothes. All this is partly because Amphialus is so bunged up with fighting Musidorus he can’t do much, and Cecropia realizes if she overdoes it he’ll kill himself, or something. 24. Well, Amphialus gets up off his bed and goes to see the girls; Pamela, much the bitchier of the two, says go to hell you bastard; Philoclea just cries, because she loves his love if not him. He gets out of some woman what’s been happening, then charges after his mother, who’s on the “leads” at the top of the castle. She thinks he’s gonna kill her and falls off, confessing before she dies her scheme to poison whichever princess won’t marry him. So he sums up his life—not a good score, according to him—tries suicide, but his sword misses; however, he’s been wearing Philoclea’s “knives” next to him (they took them from her so she wouldn’t, etc.), so he kills himself with them. 25. Actually Amphialus isn’t dead yet: he’s awful tough. Anaxius gets over his wound, and threatens all the doctors with hanging if he doesn’t get better. Queen Helen, who’s always loved Amphialus, comes and begs his body to bury, which Anaxius eventually grants—he seems to be second in command for some reason. She, “straight warned with the obedience of an overthrown mind” [578], asks Anaxius for a safe-conduct, and his prestige prevents the people from rebelling at seeing his (Amphialus’) body carried away. Lamentation, long poem by one of the people. Anaxius has taken a scunner to all women, especially the two princesses. 26. So he charges into their room and says he’s gonna hang them with his own hands. Pamela says “Sister, see how many acts our Tragedy hath: Fortune is not yet a weary of vexing us” [580]. It’s tough because they were just beginning to hope for better things. Keep the heroines behind the bloody eight-ball. Trouble is, Anaxius falls in love with Pamela while doing his stuff; Zelmane then challenges him to combat, which he refuses. Anaxius is a comic character, an alazon strong enough to make good most of his boasts, and so conceited he can hardly believe Pamela when she goes into her disdain act. “Proud beast (said she) yet thou playest worse thy Comedy, than thy Tragedy” [583].

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27. Zelmane tries to persuade the girls to temporize, and refer themselves to Basilius. They don’t want to, but they do. Basilius “took the common course of men, to fly only then to devotion, when they want resolution” [586]—he doesn’t know what the hell to do, so he consults the Delphic oracle, which says “to deny his daughters to Anaxius and his brothers, for that they were reserved for such as were better beloved of the gods.” 28. Anaxius has two brothers, Zolius and Lycurgus; they’re supposed to be for Zelmane and Philoclea respectively. Zoilus makes for Zelmane, who kills him; Lycurgus then falls on Zelmane, who eventually kills him too, because he’s wearing a garter he snatched off Philoclea’s leg. So Anaxius falls on Zelmane, and there’s a terrific fight, in spite of Zelmane’s having fought two already and being, I should think, somewhat out of condition. Zoilus’s soul is sent “to Proserpina, an angry Goddess against ravishers” [590]. 29. “The Combatants first breathing, reencounter, and” [headnote to chapter 29] Arcadia, 1593 continuation We seem to be back at home. Musidorus appears now to have got the consent of Pamela to leave with her, which will break him away of Pyrocles. The latter, still disguised as Zelmane, is made love to by old Basilius, who in this version is as ridiculous as Dametas. Dialogue between the two friends making friendship and its loyalties supreme over love, even though Musidorus is evidently not doing so. Zelmane put Basilius off, then goes to the mouth of a cave, which is where Dametas had kept Pamela safely “in the late uproar,” with gold sand like the Tagas on the floor. “There ran through it a little sweet River, which had left the face of the earth to drown herself for a small way in this dark but pleasant mansion” [632]. Zelmane makes up a charming little song turning on the words dark and light, then she hears noises and sees pieces of paper with poems on them, so she realizes she’s not alone. The cave is also inhabited by Gynecia, who’s getting into a really sinister Phèdre mood, especially now that that old Basilius is thinking of going back to court. Meanwhile Musidorus has fits of conscience about leaving his friend (they’ve agreed not to reveal their real names, which seem extremely important), “but then was his first study, how to get away” [638]. The characterization belongs to the early version: Pamela is anxious to get away with Musidorus, whereas in the fuller version she’s the sublime penseroso virgin, full of prayers and theology, bristling at the least touch. Here in order to escape Musidorus has to fool Dametas, Miso and Mopsa, and exploits their vices, avarice in Dametas (tale of a buried treature [treasure]), jealousy in Miso (tale of Dametas’ carrying on with another dame), a story which includes the “my true love hath my heart, and I have his” [643] song, worthy of a better place) and cu-

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riosity in Mopsa (tale of Apollo and Admetus, not Alcestis but a wishing tree). A pretty scruffy set of lies, implying a far lower conception of Musidorus’ honour than the 1590 version would have tolerated. Anyway, Pamela and Musidorus do get away, and sing songs to each other. This is altogether a cruder and coarser book: Musidorus sings Pamela a song, Pamela falls asleep, Musidorus gloats over everything including “that well‑closed paradise” [653], gets interrupted by clowns, back to Zelmane in the cave—crude narrative switching. Well, Zelmane decides to tell Gynecia some of the truth— fraud is far more the impelling force of this version of the romance than of the fuller one—so she says she had to dress like an Amazon because she’d challenged an eighty-year-old (female) Amazon and been overthrown: hopes this will lessen Gynecia’s opinion of him-her, but no dice: “Gynecia whose end of loving her, was not her fighting” [656]. Gynecia even tries a striptease: “under a feigned rage, tearing her clothes, she discovered some parts of her fair body, which” [657], etc. Well, Zelmane has to temporize, so “they both issued out of that obscure mansion” [658] with Gynecia thinking she’s got a nibble. It occurs to Zelmane that “deceit cannot otherwise be maintained but by deceit” [658]; anyway, in the presence of Gynecia, Basilius and Philoclea, the last gets jealous and suspects Zelmane has thrown her over for her mother. Ow-oo follows. This version is very full of songs, some of them exquisite: the general idea seems to be when in doubt sing something. Well, Zelmane figures she’d better get the hell out of there too, now her friend has, so she “left the pleasant darkness of her melancholy cave, to go take her dinner of the King and Queen” [669]. Curious how persistently Sidney calls him her. Zelmane now hatches a great scheme for getting both of Philoclea’s parents out of her way. She says she wants to live in the cave for a while, then makes assignations with both Basilius. and Gynecia to meet her in the cave. Meanwhile Philoclea’s sick, thinking Zelmane doesn’t love her any more. He doesn’t know this. So Zelmane promises both Basilius and Gynecia he’ll screw and get screwed in the cave, so they both have off for it. The archetypal shape of the young lovers escaping with the parents left jerking off in the cave has its points, I suppose. However, Philoclea sets up an ow-oo, after a rather interesting scene in which Zelmane comes and finds her lying on the bed in her smock. A lot of Courtly Love guff: Philoclea reproaches, Zelmane faints and thinks she’s dying; Philoclea thinks so too; Pyramus and Thisbe are referred to; he wakes up just in time, and then “began from point to point to discover unto her all that had passed between his loathed lovers and him” [688]. She says O.K. and faints; Zelmane begins to wonder if he’s done the real right thing and figures maybe not, however “he soon turned him from remembering what might have been done to considering what was now to be done” [689]. Not much, apparently, so he lies down with her on the bed, chaste as all hell, “it seemed love had come thither to lay a plot in that

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picture of death how gladly, if death came, their souls would go together” [690]. The third Eclogues then abruptly begin. The occasion is the marriage of Thyrsis and Kala: “I think it shall not be impertinent, to remember a little of our shepherds, while the other greater persons, are either sleeping or otherwise troubled” [691]. More use of the class-contrasting scenes in romance, which of course the title Arcadia in itself justifies. One of the songs, the fable of the beasts said to be taught the poet by Lanquet, is transferred in 1590 to the end of I. The Old Arcadia is close to the knockabout amorality of New Comedy, with the double adulescens role, impudent tricks by young men to get possession of their girls, baffling of the old and exploiting their senile eroticism (Gynecia of course isn’t old; she’s the stock Phèdre theme), and the general aim of anything goes. The New Arcadia is a sensitive and carefully thought out piece of writing, also far more conservative, the parental wishes being regarded as sacred no matter how silly they are. It’s quite an object lesson in the evolution from New Comedy to Romance. The use of fraud as the activating force is largely unquestioned in the older version (as it is to some degree in Heliodorus); in the later there’s hardly any explicit fraud at all, apart from the disguise theme. The Old Arcadia wasn’t known until two MSS turned up in 1907; there are now six. A Dublin edition in 1621, by Sir William Alexander, added connecting material between the end of 1590 and the beginning of 1593; in a 1627 edition of R. B(eling) [Sir Richard Beling] added a Sixth Book. These are included in a modernized text by E.A. Baker in 1907. The 1593 Folio reprints a new version of the 1590 Quarto and adds a new version of the Old Arcadia to complete it. Feuillerat, who may be an ass but must know, says the 1593 Folio version of the 1590 Quarto includes a great deal of revision by the Countess of Pembroke, amounting almost to collaboration. Book Four, 1593 Version Begins with a farcical scene of Dametas, digging up a buried treasure that isn’t there, coming back to find Pamela run off with Musidorus, which he assumed means hanging for him, as he’s supposed to be holding her fast. He comes upon Mopsa, who’s climbed a tree that she thinks will grant her wishes; she falls out of it and keeps calling Dametas Apollo; then Miso comes back from the city, where she’s been sent on a wild-goose chase of jealousy, and where she got the whole city stirred up to hunt for Dametas and an imaginary Charita (they were delighted to hunt, Sidney says, because Dametas was unpopular and ridiculous). She thinks Mopsa is Charita, and so on. Dametas adjures his daughter by all the kindness he showed her when she was an infant, sure she wouldn’t remember back so far. It’s a good lively scene, but the brutality is crude. The book begins

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“The almighty wisdom evermore delighting to show the world, that by unlikeliest means greatest matters may come to conclusion: that human reason may be the more humbled, and more willingly give place to divine providence: as at the first it brought in Dametas to play a part in this royal pageant, so having continued him still an actor, now that all things were grown ripe for an end, made his folly the instrument of revealing that, which far greater cunning had sought to conceal” [715]. I quote this because it’s an excellent example of God as authorprojection. Cf. the Dogberry outfit in Much Ado about Nothing. Well, Dametas goes to look for Pamela in Philoclea’s chamber, where he finds her in bed with a Zelmane who quite obviously ain’t a female. Holds a lamp over them—Psyche is referred to. (Sidney keeps calling Pyrocles Zelmane, although he says he doesn’t need to any more). Meanwhile Basilius has had the bed trick played on him in the cave, and when dawn breaks he finds he’s there with his wife, after he’s made a long soliloquy about the beauty of Zelmane. She strikes a pose of great dignity and reproves him; he stammers and promises to do better, then drinks up a love potion she’s brought to the cafe for a different purpose. He gets too much of it and passes out. In fact it looks as though he’s really dead. Anyway, this sobers up Gynecia, whose ow-oo begins: “O bottomless pit of sorrow, in which I cannot contain myself, having the firebrands of all furies within me, still falling, and yet by the infiniteness of it never fallen” [727]. “She remembered a dream she had had some nights before, wherein thinking herself called by Zelmane, passing a troublesome passage, she found a dead body which told her there should be her only rest” [730]. Quite a dream. Meanwhile Dametas is giving the same scene a farcical turn: “Dametas that saw her run away in Zelmane’s upper raiment. I remember Zelmane told her to put this on, but I forgot why, and judging her to be so, thought certainly all the spirits in hell were come to play a Tragedy in these woods, such strange change he saw every way. The King dead at the Cave’s mouth; the Queen as he thought absent; Pamela fled away with Dorus; his wife and Mopsa in divers frenzies” [731]. Also Zelmane turned into a man. So he goes into the field and begins to make circles, conjurations against devils. Gynecia is caught running away by the Arcadian peasants, and says she wants to die or be put to death; the peasants mourn the death of Basilius “generally giving a true testimony, that men are loving creatures when injuries put them not from their natural course; and how easy a thing it is for a Prince by succession deeply to sink into the souls of his subjects, a more lively moment than Mausolus’ tomb” [733]. Well, Philanax arrives, arrests Gynecia, fetters Dametas, Miso and Mopsa with all the chains they can bear and orders them whipped every third hour, until “the determinate judgement should be given of all these matters”; i.e., this is the way of making the accused innocent until proven guilty. Meanwhile Pyrocles is going through a lot of uneasy meditation. Arcadia has one of those Midsum-

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mer Night’s Dream and Measure for Measure laws that any couple found “in the act of marriage without solemnity of marriage” [737] should be put to death; so maybe Philoclea will be executed, and how the hell did Dametas get in anyway? (through the cellar door). So he’s her murderer, as Gynecia is Basilius’. This is all in “the fourth book, or act,” the appropriate place for confrontation with death, I suppose. Thinks of killing himself, but there’s nothing to do it with (note that Dametas tried to hang himself before, his failure being ascribed to cowardice, this, evidently, to courage). Actually this Pyrocles-Philoclea Liebestod scene is quite affecting, hard as it is to read in these interminable unparagraphed pages. His prayer (“and whensoever to the eternal darkness of the earth she doth follow me, let our spirits possess one place, and let them be more happy in that uniting” [740]) has its own beauty. The scene follows the outline completed so much more elaborately by Milton in Book Ten, of the two being willing to die with each other and then for each other. Well, it isn’t quite that, but Pyrocles tries to kill himself with a “bar” (Dametas has pinched his sword); the noise wakes up Philoclea: she says suicide is cowardly; he says not necessarily. Quite a bit of casuistry about the morality of suicide: he says “it is the right I owe to the general nature, that (though against private nature) makes me seek the preservation of all that she hath done in this age, let me, let me die” [741]. I don’t get it all, but the distinction of general and private nature is interesting. In Philoclea “a man might perceive, what small difference in the working there is, betwixt a simple voidness of evil, and a judicial habit of virtue” [741]. He reaches for the bar again, and she threatens she’ll kill herself by worse methods. Philanax then comes, the avenger of the order-figure, which is all he can take in, though he has had a hard time not being impressed by Philoclea’s obvious innocence. Back to Musidorus, and Pamela awakened by the rabble of clowns: note the one escaping and the other left behind for sacrifice archetype, not that that lasts. The clowns are the remnant of the earlier rebellion, who have become forest outlaws. Musidorus kills a lot of them, but as he’s chasing them some more surround Pamela, and threaten to kill her, so in short they get the best of it and decide to haul Pamela back to the court and get a reward from the king. Pamela is so overcome she actually gives Musidorus a kiss. He tries to talk his way out of the situation, and nearly succeeds, but a troop of horsemen sent by Philanax comes along, grabs them, and hangs all the outlaws. Actually Pamela should be the next monarch, but in the meantime she’s a prisoner accused of a mortal crime—neat enough patterning. “There was a notable example, how great dissipations, monarchal government are subject unto” [766]. Actually the people are very confused, and there are parties wanting Gynecia as regent or Pamela or Philoclea Queen, or the two princes kings, and so on. An ambitious man named Timantus tries to make capital of it, and Kalander comes in, with his strong bias in favor of the two heroes. So Act Four ends indecisively.

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The eclogues really form a chorus of the action, beginning with a “complaint” or lament for the dead king, a sestina, followed by a longer lament, then a rhymed sestina. In the first sestina all the end words are disyllabic; in the second most are. (Second sestina is in an ababcc stanza.) Arcadia, Book Five, 1593 Version Euarchus, King of Macedon and father of one of the heroes, visits Arcadia intending to see Basilius. Philanax thinks he sees a chance to end the commotion by making him judge, a sort of last-scene Clement figure. Oration: “Methinks I am not without appearance of cause, as if you were Cyclops or Cannibals, to desire that our Prince’s body, which hath thirty years maintained us in a flourishing peace, be not torn to pieces, or devoured among you” [785] (147; cf. 121). People are tired of faction and accept. Back to a long complicated account of the affairs in Greece, Euarchus preparing for a Latin invasion which gets called off when they realize he’s too well prepared for them, and something about Plangus and his effort to rescue Erona. Sounds as though this were following a different version than 1590, as of course it would be; it’s just that I don’t know how different. He gets to Laconia, and finds the Helot war, which Pyrocles had patched up, has broken out again, so he heads for Arcadia to see if he can persuade Basilius to go back to work. “Whether by his authority he might withdraw Basilius from burying himself alive, and to employ the rest of his old years in doing good, the only happy action of man’s life . . . a Prince being, and not doing like a Prince, keeping and not exercising the place, they were in so much more evil case, as they could not provide for their evil” [791]. So much for all the howl about his death. The Elizabethans, like the Erewhonians, looked their own hypocrisies straight in the eye and maintained they didn’t matter. Philanax meets Euarchus with humility, “which not only the great reverence of the party but the conceit of one’s own misery is wont to frame” [791]. Euarchus is modest but knows he’s good. He meets a popular assembly: “no man thinking the matter would be well done, without he had his voice in it, and each deeming his own eyes the best guardians of his throat in that unaccustomed tumult” [796]. Unusually incisive writing in this part: “one man’s sufficiency is more available than ten thousand’s multitude” [796]. This Tudor sentiment accounts for what the impossible heroic achievements in battle symbolize. Euarchus’ oration: “Nor promise yourselves wonders, out of a sudden liking; but remember I am a man, that is to say a creature, whose reason is often darkened with error” [797]. Gynecia is in torments of self-accusation: these people appear to be instinctively Christian, in the sense of believing in a single God, though nominally pagan. Thus a prayer by Musidorus, back on 123: “looking up to the stars, O mind of minds, said he, the living power of all things. . . .” [758]. Well, Gynecia thinks in terms of “cries of hellish ghosts” [799] and the like; the two girls don’t

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have much to say, but the heroes are pretty eloquent. Thus Musidorus: “We have lived, and have lived to be good to our selves, and others: our souls which are put into the stirring earth of our bodies, have achieved the causes of their hither coming: They have known, and honoured with knowledge, the cause of their creation, and to many men (for in this time, place, and fortune, it is lawful for us to speak gloriously it hath been behoveful, that we should live” [803]. They discuss whether they can have memory in the next world, dependent as it is on bodily sense. “Then is there left nothing, but the intellectual part or intelligence, which void of all moral virtues, which stand in the mean of perturbations, doth only live in the contemplative virtue, and power of the omnipotent good, the soul of souls, and universal life of this great work, and therefore is utterly void, from the possibility of drawing to itself, these sensible considerations” [804]. Stoicism, verging on something very like a Buddhist annihilation of the ego. I suppose Stoicism, along with the Hermetic writings, was the evidence for the Elizabethans that every religion is Christian covered over with the rust of false tradition. Memory as we know it will be destroyed at death, but then we get a new memory when we return “to the life of all things, where all infinite knowledge is” [804], and become one with the Creator. Kalander brings the talismans left with him—omens of death again. The trial scene is very long drawn out, with immense speeches by the prosecutor Philanax, and there’s a recognition scene in which Euarchus finds himself confronted by his own son and foster-son. So he doesn’t want to condemn them, but does. Finally the old fool himself gets up from the table his corpse has been laid on, and says—no, he doesn’t say anything, like Finnegan, but of course his poison has been only a thirty‑hour sleeping draught. So the court dissolves, as Euarchus has no more power; Basilius is reconciled to his wife Gynecia, who’s now regarded as a pattern of virtue by everyone except Pyrocles and Philoclea who don’t give her away; and on the last page the heroes marry the girls and proceed to have offspring. Silly story, except for the archetypes.

23.  Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe Frye owned two editions of Ivanhoe: London: Dent, 1970, which he annotated, and Boston: Aldine, 1832, which was published along with The Talisman and Castle Dangerous. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the 1904 edition, published by the American Book Co. and edited by Francis Hovey Stoddard. Numbers in parentheses, which are Frye’s, are to the Dent edition. Ivanhoe was first published in 1819. References to Ivanhoe in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 2, 25, 28, 29, 143, 172, 215–16, 218,    225–6, 228–9, 313

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“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 58, 59, 72, 87,    88–9, 106 Anatomy of Criticism, 101; CW 22: 93

Begins with Gurth and Wamba discussing language, a subject returned to at the end. Norman-Saxon relations said to be those of an army of occupation and a resentful revolutionary population: historically dubious, but the point is that the Waverley situation is reappearing: outlawed society that can’t bring off an armed rebellion, but can infiltrate and eventually take over the oppressing society. Gurth and Wamba are near a circle of stones “dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition” [6]. Gurth is the son of “Beowulph.” Wamba is the jester figure that runs all through comedy, but has the fidelity of the fool in Lear. Gurth is a swineherd, a more highly regarded occupation than now: pigmeat gets quite a play in this book, what with the Jews. Cedric is the usual fanatical separatist, actually just an insular, wogs-begin-atCalais Englishman, though in a position where he gets more sympathy from the reader. He’s a “franklin” or free Englishman, with his own servants: Athelstane, a good-natured glutton, is his candidate for the king of England, and he wants to marry him to Rowena, the blonde doll who is the technical heroine of this story. So he disowns and disinherits his son Ivanhoe, who has gone off to the Crusade with Richard I. Cedric’s dog is called Balder. Well, a worldly Prior and Brian de Bois-Guilbert turn up at Cedric’s demanding hospitality, and enter the stranger least likely to succeed, the disguised Ivanhoe. Isaac the Jew comes in later, I forget why. “Magnificence there was, with some rude attempt at taste; but of comfort there was little, and, being unknown, it was unmissed” [55]. Ivanhoe is disguised as a palmer; gets up early next morning and takes off the Jew, who’s about to be kidnapped by Front-de-Boeuf, also Gurth (by revealing his name in a whisper: convention of impenetrable disguise). Ivanhoe is a good example of the way romance glosses over historical facts, but it also makes clear that they are being glossed over. That is, Isaac is stuck in Front-de-Boeuf’s dungeon and threatened with hideous tortures, and Rebecca is condemned at a so-called trial, actually a rationalized lynching as a sorceress. They both get rescued by a good-natured novelist, whose readers wouldn’t have tolerated anything else, but historically Jews were tortured and burned for witchcraft on no evidence. Scott emphasizes this (a) by notes: he even interrupts his narrative with a quotation from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to show what happened to people without rescuing novelists (b) by allusion: he says Rebecca got her medical knowledge from Miriam, who was burned at the stake as a witch (c) by the device of the inset tale coming in the opposite direction, as when the story of Ulrica, whose name for some reason has been changed to Urfried, demonstrates that kidnapped blonde dolls don’t always get away unscrewed. There’s also the pseudo-historical treatment of Richard I: Scott is not so irre-

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sponsible that he doesn’t say that Richard was a lousy king, buggering off on a crusade and letting his kingdom go, almost literally, to hell. But he makes passes about his romantic temperament and his love of achieving errant quests all by himself. The “temple” on Zion becomes a kind of antithetical symbol in this book: Rebecca is compared by Prince John to the Bride of the Canticles, and there’s all the “Templar” business associated with Brian de Bois-Guilbert. Two big set scenes: the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche and the storming of Front-de-Boeuf’s castle. One of the slogans shouted at tournaments was “Death of Champions” which assimilates them to gladiatorial fights, except for the status of the combatants. Scott has a remark on this, though he talks about applauding tragedies, which suggests that he thinks tragedies immoral (95). Ivanhoe, in disguise as usual, is called “Desdichado”—guess who read Ivanhoe.53 Vows to remain incognito very common then, Scott says. Gurth, carrying money, is stopped by the outlaw society of Robin Hood but let go unrobbed: again a resemblance to the Highlanders of the Scottish novels. At the tournament four are killed, thirty desperately wounded, four or five of whom never recovered, several more disabled for life. “Hence it is always mentioned in the old records, as the Gentle and Joyous Passage of Arms of Ashby” [136]. Three people are in disguise in this tournament, Ivanhoe, King Richard, and Robin Hood, who is called Locksley—guess somebody else who read Ivanhoe.54 Robin Hood is a practically superhuman archer, not surprisingly. None of them attends the banquet John unwillingly (he wanted his own side to win, of course) gives. King Richard wanders through the forest and takes refuge with a hermit who turns out to be Friar Tuck. Jokes about the holy water of St. Dunstan: “many a hundred pagans did he baptize there, but I never heard that he drank any of it. Everything should be put to its proper use in this world” [180]. Meanwhile Cedric is still nursing his senex humor, and is a most tedious old ass, except that his efforts are to consolidate the English around Athelstane and Rowena, not himself. The outlaws “were chiefly peasants and yeomen of Saxon descent” [192]. Cedric, Athelstane, Rowena, Wamba, Isaac and Rebecca are all kidnapped by a Norman raiding party and stuck in Front-de-Boeuf’s castle. The idea is a Norman’s named de Bracy, who wants Rowena. No, not Wamba: he volunteers to change places with Cedric, and does, risking being hanged. Gurth says of the outlaws “were the horned devil to rise and proffer me his assistance” [206], etc.: wonder if Margaret Murray is another reader of Ivanhoe.55 There’s some wit in the writing, even in the dialogue, despite the wooden style and the extraordinary ho-thou-caitiff-varlet lingo, which I think is Scott’s invention. “I saw the javelin was well aimed—I heard it whiz through the air with all the wrathful malevolence of him who cast it, and it quivered after it had pitched in the ground, as if with regret for having missed its mark” [188]. That’s Gurth

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the swineherd. Captives in the castle hear a horn “as if it had been blown before an enchanted castle by the destined knight, at whose summons halls and towers, barbican and battlement, were to roll off like a morning vapour” [217]. Undisplaced version. Various parties hear it, beginning with Isaac, threatened with torture: the scene is a terrible one, the rescue extremely perfunctory—nobody but nobody gives a damn about him, and he’s discovered by Friar Tuck who’s looking for liquor—all quite true to the time, though I wish Scott weren’t so damn literary that he had to model Isaac on Shylock. De Bracy’s assault on Rowena includes “dream not that Richard Coeur de Lion will ever resume his throne” [230]. Rowena can do the haughty-dame act because she’s been spoiled: naturally her disposition is what “physiognomists consider as proper to fair complexions, mild, timid, and gentle” [232]. Magical association with the weather, I suppose. Well, we have to have an old sibyl in Scott, so we get Urfried or Ulrica, female prize of Norman conquest in earlier generation, and execrated by Cedric, very unfairly it seems to me even for him, in consequence. She does a Rahab act, setting the castle on fire and putting up a red flag to show it. “My father and his seven sons defended their inheritance from story to story, from chamber to chamber” [237]—Churchill tactics even then. “from hence there is no escape but through the gates of death. . . . My thread is spun out” [237]. Archetypal resonance. Rebecca again, “the arbitrary despotism of religious preiudice” [238], means she can have only “that strong reliance on Heaven natural to great and generous characters” [239]. Especially when heaven is backed by a novelist. Assaulted by Brian de Bois-Guilbert, she jumps up on the verge of a parapet, which is over a precipice as usual, and threatens to jump down. This gives Brian de Bois-Guilbert quite a charge. He’s a freethinker, by the way—use of the old legend about Templars used to rationalize Philip’s robbing and murdering of them. “Gold can be only known by the application of the touchstone” [247]—if she prefers death to dishonour she’s gold. Ulrica/Urfried again—no explanation why her name’s changed, but she underlines the hell imagery connected with the castle (248–9). Pre-Christian religion just behind her—I don’t know who Scott thinks Zernebock is—Borrow has something about it. “We become like the fiends in hell, who may feel remorse, but never repentance” [269]. Assault on the castle, with jumps back and forth in the narrative. Rebecca heals Ivanhoe, with a hint of romantic magic (263); tells him he’ll be well on the eighth day, though Scott doesn’t quite follow through the magic. “The idea of so young and beautiful a person engaged in attendance on a sick-bed, or in dressing the wound of one of a different sex, was melted away and lost in that of a beneficent being contributing her effectual aid to relieve pain” [288]—God, Scott’s a windy bugger. The sentence means that the displaced is lost in the romantic undisplaced. Rebecca is the dark girl, of course, “whose general expression was that of contemplative melancholy” [289]. Melodrama scene of Rebecca watching the

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assault from window and reporting to the invalid. She thinks it’s silly; he thinks boys have to fight. She says “is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard” [307] that knights do such things to become heroes of minstrel poems. Front-de-Boeuf dies like a fee-yund incardinate: he’s murdered his father, according to Ulrica, as though we needed that. She consigns him to the Saxon gods—“fiends, as the priests now call them” [317]. Scott says he got the castle burning from Le Grand Cyrus. Ulrica “appeared on a turret, in the guise of one of the ancient furies, yelling forth a war-song, such as was of yore raised on the field of battle by the scalds of the yet heathen Saxons” [331]. We get the war-song. “As if she had been one of the Fatal Sisters” (304). Athelstane is killed in the assault, which removes the obstacle to the hero’s progress. Scott brings him to life again later, because some reader of his wanted him revived, which gives us the same cadence we have in Sidney’s Arcadia: in other words a romancer can only go from one archetype to another, even when he’s doing something “original”—that is, silly and dishonest. De Bracy, in a passage of some pathos, asks Rowena to forgive him; she says she forgives him as a Christian; Wamba says that means she doesn’t forgive him at all. She’s a stupid dope, although her routines are I suppose the right ones. More of Isaac and his tiresome ducats-and-daughter act: I suppose part of the point, as in The Merchant of Venice it’s all stolen from, is that all the Christians are usurers too, only they’re not as clever at it. The fall of Torquilstone, Front-de-Boeuf’s castle, is a death-and-revival symbol: it’s simply hell with Front-de-Boeuf in charge, but it really belongs to Ivanhoe, and as soon as it falls Richard begins to make his presence felt in the country. John meanwhile is plotting a conspiracy to seize control of the country: Richard, being an ass, lets him go, though a few of John’s lieutenants are hanged. Then we go on to this dismal shit Beaumanoir, Grand Master of the Templar order, who wants to burn Rebecca because she’s “bewitched” Brian de Bois-Guilbert and he’s trying to reform the order. Demonic counterpart of sudden return of Richard I, so both white and black sides get consolidated. He’s decided “that the death of a Jewess will be a sin-offering sufficient to atone for all the amorous indulgences of the Knights Templars” [390]. Caiaphas mentality. Brian de Bois-Guilbert uses words like bigotry: he’d have to be a pretty advanced heretic even to take in the notion of bigotry. Trial of Rebecca framed by agents for their own purposes, with false witnesses. Note the trial scene at the bottom of the well. The Grand Master thinks it’s an “approaching triumph . . . over the powers of darkness” [396]. (Incidentally, Front-de-Boeuf, much earlier, has spoken of a new regime about to begin, of unmitigated tyranny of Norman brigands) (254). Brian de Bois-Guilbert doodles on the floor with the end of his sword; Grand Master calls this “cabalistic lines” [397]. Archetype of the Depression Doodle. Grand Master’s tactic of purifying Brian de Bois-Guilbert by burning Rebecca achieves the pure perversion

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of life at the nadir of the action. This is emphasized by the fact that she almost miraculously restored crippled and bedridden people to life is turned against her as part of her witchery. In fact some of the witnesses against her are so-called doctors, “with the true professional hatred to a successful practitioner of their art” [403]. They want to tear Rebecca’s veil off—symbolic rape. Scott the lawyer says the evidence against Rebecca was half irrelevant and half impossible, but all accepted. “greedily swallowed, however incredible” [406]. I must think about this very common metaphor—it has some significance I haven’t quite got about the evil of belief. Rebecca speaks of “the fictions and surmises which seem to convert the tyrant into the victim” [407]. Jews say maybe her persecutors can be bought off, as money “rules the savage minds of those ungodly men” [415]. Point here: they’re too stupid to know what money is; they only know they want it. Rebecca’s hymn. Scene with Brian de Bois-Guilbert as the Templar-tempter. Rebecca: “Thy resolution may fluctuate on the wild and changeful billows of human opinion, but mine is anchored on the Rock of Ages” [421]. Gives her an Andromeda cast, of course. Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the amorous dragon wanting to eat this virgin, proposes escape to Holy Land, joining Saracens, and making Rebecca a queen on Mt. Carmel. Zionism of a sort. Harps on the hideousness of her death, partly sales pitch, partly because he has no faith in an after-life himself. As the overlong dialogue goes on, it becomes clear that Brian de Bois-Guilbert, the strongest knight in England next to Richard and Ivanhoe, is a very weak man, and the despised Rebecca a very strong woman. Like Redgauntlet, his sexism is blinding: he can’t take in the notion of a strong woman, but he’s beaten on every front. Even his proud descent looks pretty parvenu compared to what a Jewess has. He thinks maybe he is bewitched after a fashion. The point is that he’s slipped a note into her hand saying demand a champion, meaning him; she does demand one and some boob rushes in to make sure that Brian de Bois-Guilbert will fight on the opposite side. He hasn’t the guts to get out of this, so he has to say things like “I have been a child of battle from my youth upward, high in my views, steady and inflexible in pursuing them. Such must I remain—proud, inflexible and unchanging” [429]. He says to his pal Malvoisin that if no champion for Rebecca appears he’ll have nothing to do; Malvoisin says “no more than the armed image of Saint George when it makes part of a procession” [431]. Ironic reversal. Richard and Wamba are waylaid in the forest by another Norman raiding party, this time led by Waldemar Fitzurse, who’s put all his eggs in John’s basket. The party is defeated with the aid of the Robin Hood bunch (horn), but Richard can’t resist “generous” actions and lets Waldemar Fitzurse go. Richard says to Wamba he thought he’d run away; Wamba says “I take flight; when you do ever find Folly separated from Valour?” [448]. Eventually Scott gets around to saying that knights-errant

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of romance are not historical heroes: “the wild spirit of chivalry which so often impelled his master {Richard} upon dangers which he might easily have avoided, or rather, which it was unpardonable in him to have sought out” [453]. “In the lion-hearted king, the brilliant, but useless character, of a knight of romance, was in a great measure realized and revived.” “his reign was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor. . . . his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country. . .” [454]. Note that he’s a king who retains his Falstaff band of outlaws, though even Robin Hood says “I would not that he dallied with time” [454]. Charter of the Forest extorted from the unwilling hands of King John—don’t know if that means Magna Carta was the charter of the oppressed Saxons—it sure as hell wasn’t. Cedric again, with elderly Saxons committed to separatism and looking like “a band of ancient worshipers of Woden recalled to life to mourn over the decay of their national glory” [461]—the younger ones are all compromising with the Normans. Separatism, sexism, and racism are all obsessive humors in Scott, as Scott should be given the credit for realizing. Then we have to go through the revival-of-Athelstane nonsense. So back to Rebecca’s trial, where Richard and Ivanhoe are both haring to rescue her—interesting that the three most powerful knights in England are all concerned about her. What strength Ivanhoe has is her creation, we may note: but Scott doesn’t go all the way with his eighth-day cure: Ivanhoe is easily flung off his horse by Brian de Bois-Guilbert. Latter gets out of swearing the justice of his cause: Grand Master says “Bring forward the crucifix and the Te igitur” (433) [481], which I should check.56 However Brian de Bois-Guilbert blows up and busts of moral spontaneous combustion, “a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.” I suppose that’s partly because the hero and the dragon both have to symbolically die. Then we have the epiphany of Richard I, first made to the Robin Hood band; Athelstane, the stupid giant of the lower world, comes back from his death thinking better of his suit to Rowena and Cedric has to like it. “it was not until the reign of Edward the Third that the mixed language, now termed English, was spoken at the court of London”––language (446) [496] tie-up from beginning. Final interview of Rebecca and Rowena, with former leaving with her father for Spain. Rowena says get converted and I’ll be a sister to you; Rebecca stays polite but says she’s going to be one of the “women who have devoted their thoughts to Heaven, and their actions to works of kindness to men, tending the sick . . . ” [499]. Virgin celibate fate: Rowena asks her if there are Jewish convents. Dumb girl. Points of design: Richard I and the Grand Master both return before expected, consolidating light and dark worlds. Torquilstone is usurped by Front-de-Boeuf and is really Ivanhoe’s: it’s destroyed along with Ulrica and presumably rebuilt in some form by Ivanhoe and Rowena. Rowena and Rebecca are the light and dark girls: mortal enemy of Ivanhoe and Brian de Bois-Guilbert parallel them.

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Athenstane the obstacle-king, pushed out of the way for both Ivanhoe and Richard I. Note the containing irony of history, in which John becomes king after all— Shakespearean wheel of fortune. Two separatist groups combine, as in Waverley, the Robin Hood bunch and the Cedric bunch. As George Borrow’s father said to his mother, “it is in the nature of women invariably to take the part of the second-born” (Lavengro 46).

24.  Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate Frye owned one edition of The Pirate: Boston: Aldine, 1832, which was published along with Redgauntlet. The page references in square bracket are to the J.M. Dent edition (London, 1906). The novel was first published in 1822. References to The Pirate in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 195–6, 217, 225, 226, 229, 313 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 58, 76, 95

Remarks in the introduction that “the professed explanation of a tale, where appearances or incidents of a supernatural character are explained on natural causes, has often, in the winding up of the story, a degree of improbability almost equal to an absolute goblin tale. Even the genius of Mrs. Radcliffe could not always surmount this difficulty” [6]. Could use as a comment on the Anne of Geierstein passage. Scene in the Shetland Islands, where the Scotch, no less than the English, are Southerners. Begins with Basil Mertoun, the retired gloomy misanthropist with which so many romancers begin (cf. the figure in Le Fanu’s House by the Churchyard). “His misanthropy or aversion to the business and intercourse of ordinary life was often expressed in an antithetical manner, which often passed for wit, when better was not to be had” [13]. Tenant of Magnus Troil, who’s convivial and can’t understand him. “The usual thrill of indignation which indolent people always feel when roused into action on some unpleasant occasion” [18]. Beliefs in kraken, mermaids, sea-snakes; bottomless depths and secret caves of ocean. Two girls described in a penseroso-allegro contrast: Minna’s black, melancholy, sublime. “As if Minna Troil belonged naturally to some higher or better sphere, and was only the chance visitant of a world that was not worthy of her” [27]. Brenda’s a blonde, fairy form, not so tall. Minna has “enthusiastic feelings proper to the romantic race from which her mother descended, the love of natural objects was to her a passion” [29]. Mordaunt Mertoun, the hero, visits them a good deal, partly because his father prefers a lot of absence, but his general attitude is phase two brother-sister. Terrific storm blows up and hero takes refuge

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with Triptolemus Yellowley, a comic Scotch miser and pedant (a less attractive Dominie Sampson), who lives with his sister, who’s more of a miser. Tedious chapter tracing his ancestry. Sister sees the hero has a gold chain around his neck. Discussion about “Dangling in a rope’s‑end betwixt earth and heaven,” answered by hero that it’s great to be “perched in mid-air between a high-browed cliff and a roaring ocean” [57]—cf. Antiquary. Enter Norna, the wild woman of this tale: the Shetlanders are good-natured people who don’t burn witches, so she gets away with being a “prophetess,” compared to Boadicea and Velleda. Dressed in red, dark blue and silver ornaments “cut into the shape of planetary signs,” and a staff “engraved with Runic characters and figures, forming one of those portable and perpetual calendars which were used among the ancient natives of Scandinavia” [60] and a divining rod. It isn’t that the Shetlanders are good-natured but that they’re in the primitive stage; Norna for them isn’t in league with Satan but with the “drows” (dwarfs). Her name is assumed and “signifies one of those fatal sisters who weave the web of human fate” [61]; she’d be sunk if anybody knew her real name. She claims power over the weather, which is stormy: Scott has been reading his namesake Reginald. Footnote saying the word “fey” means someone suddenly released from a humor, and therefore likely to die soon—projection of literary conventions on life. Shetlanders are kindly and hospitable, but utterly ruthless and rapacious about wrecks: one of their earls passed a law against helping anybody getting wrecked. Hero stops peddler from stealing, as he considers it, a chest full of linen, and rescues a drowning man named Cleveland (the pirate of the title). Theme of treasure from the sea and of the saving of a man who turns out to be the villain (Cleveland isn’t quite that, but he sure gives a lot of trouble). It’s said that drowning men should be left to drown so they won’t care about the treasures they leave behind, “nae mair than the great Yarls and Seakings, in the Norse days, did about the treasures that they buried in the tombs” [91]. Grave robbery on land corresponds to this sort of thing on the sea. Norna again, compared this time to a Valkyrie. “When I hung around thy neck that gifted chain, which all in our isles know was wrought by no earthly artist, but by the Drows, in the secret recesses of their caverns” [109–10]. Scott doesn’t have a proper language for this female, and he gives her an intolerably lousy rhetoric, based on standard English—Meg Merrilies and Madge Wildfire don’t have this problem. Apart from that, Norna is interesting enough: she’s just sane enough to be able to ask herself if she’s crazy, and when she decides that it’s more fun being crazy, she certainly has my sympathy. Hero finds himself excluded from Troil’s hospitality and from the two girls: he thinks it’s Cleveland’s fault (bad luck fished out of the sea) and it partly is, but it’s mostly the peddler’s revenge. He’s spread the notion that Mordaunt is playing eeny-meeny with the two girls. Several comic humors: Yellowley with his

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Utopian notions of turning Shetland into an eighteenth-century farming community; Halcro the bore, a small poet obsessed by his one glimpse of Dryden who holds on to people’s coat buttons and lectures the hero on not making speeches about himself. “Several of his pieces were translations or imitations from the Scaldic sagas, which continued to be sung by the fishermen of these islands” [160], who recognized Gray’s Fatal Sisters. Long set piece about Troil’s party, where Minna emerges as a Pirates-of-Penzance go-to-glory-and-the-grave female. A sword dance and a masque are elaborately described. Latter “represent the Tritons and Mermaids with whom ancient tradition and popular belief have peopled the northern seas,” are “grotesque,” and “no strangers, but a part of the guests” [167–8]. The only advantage of the hero’s isolated situation is that Brenda emerges as the girl he wants, i.e., who wants him. Halcro says the sun summons to labor and misery, the moon to mirth and love. A whale hunt follows—funny to find this in Scott—and Cleveland saves Mordaunt, primarily to pay off his debt and become his enemy. The wreck and peddler themes, along with the ballads, have strong Winter’s Tale associations. Pirate calls Yellowley the farmer “clodcompeller” [195]. Minna has a dream that says more than Scott knows about her state of mind: a mermaid “lashing the waves with that long scaly train . . . fair face, long tresses, and displayed bosom” [204]. Norna turns up in the girls’ bedroom: she’s a real Buttercup sibyl whom Minna believes without trembling, and makes Brenda tremble without believing. Evidently she’s their aunt and got screwed by a lover and went nuts. Also she was educated by her father (note this archetype) in pagan legends about Thor and Odin, she wants “like our primitive mother, to desire increase of knowledge” [209]. “I longed to possess the power of the Voluspae and divining women of our ancient race” [209], and naturally kids herself she does. At something called the Dwarfie stone she has a vision, “I felt the impulse of that high courage which thrust the ancient champions and Druidesses upon contests with the invisible world” [212]. Some being tells her she has to kill her father or something. Well, the lover turns up and screws; makes an assignation for midnight: she closes her father’s door so he won’t see her and he suffocates—I don’t know what with—charcoal, maybe. Well, the girls discuss all this next morning: Minna wants like hell to believe; Brenda doesn’t; Minna says she’s in love with Cleveland; Brenda obviously is with Mordaunt. The rest of the household are engaged in a sort of Halloween game (that parallel is mentioned) of consulting a sibyl, who’s supposed to be questioned and to answer in improvised verse. Norna takes over from another female, and tells the fortunes of the two girls, giving them the appropriate beautiful and sublime ones. Displaced oracle, of course. Magnus Troil also has the will to believe, and resents rational explanations of Norna’s powers. Minna is, as I’ve said, a separatist, with the Celtic (only it’s Norse) type of brooding on history, and the racism: “No one must ally with his house that is not

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of untainted northern descent” [244]—though this is her father’s. I should think about racist metaphors in romance: they’re more frequently class ones, of course: nobody must marry this girl but untainted noblemen or what not. Minna’s rhetoric is sillier, if not worse as rhetoric, than Norna’s: I’m sure Gilbert read this book. Well, we’re gradually shifting over to the pirate theme: Cleveland begins to tell his story to Minna, and says “I saw, in short, that, to attain authority, I must assume the external semblance, at least, of those over whom it was to be exercised” [249]. Minna plays Desdemona to all this: “it seemed to me that a war on the cruel and superstitious Spaniards had in it something ennobling” [251], but as soon as she realizes that, as he says, a gang of pirates is not a choir of saints, she walks off in a huff of outraged adolescence. Then she hears Cleveland serenade her, a quarrel with Mordaunt under her window; goes out to investigate, runs into Claud Halcro, and gets blood on her bare foot. All this is going on at the summer solstice, St. John’s Eve, which the Troil family is celebrating. Mordaunt disappears, and even his father is worried. Proverbs: fey folk run fast, and the thing we are born to, we cannot win by. Anyway, he (father) runs into Norna at a ruined church: two nuts together. She tells him to go to the Orkneys: the fair at Kirkwall, whispering something in his ear to make him do so that we’ll find out about on p. 400 and something. Minna’s sick, and is given medicines without relief—sounds as though she had to shit her guts out—and her father lets it out that Norna’s lover was named Vaughan and that she was stuck with a chee-yild. Note that Magnus Troil talks quite well: “after all the shifting of ballast, poor Norna is as heavily loaded in the bows as” [269], etc. Well, Minna forlornly wipes herself and they start off to Norna’s dwelling, “fabricated out of one of those dens which are called Burghs and Picts-houses in Zetland” [291]—sounds like the Skara Brae neolithic remains, or whatever they’re called. It’s away the hell up in a tower (so called) on a projecting point of rock divided from the mainland by a chasm of some depth (paraphrasing). Compared to an osprey’s eyrie: between heaven and earth; you get there up a dangerous path, approaching the verge of a precipice. Guarded by a dwarf who can hear and grin but has a shrivelled tongue and can’t talk. They creep through a crooked and dusty passage. Runic parchments, stone axes, a stone sacrificial knife, “used perhaps for immolating human victims, and one or two of the brazen implements called Celts” [297]. Tame seal, compared to a “terrestrial dog,” i.e., there are lot of these sea-parallels to land archetypes. Magnus says to Norna yack or else; she says that’s right, the spirits don’t answer unless you compel them. She recites a lot of rhymes, one with the line “When crimson foot meets crimson hand” [305], the latter being Cleveland, who’s referred earlier to washing blood off his hand as a pirate. Scott’s ain’t-it-quaint attitude to all this gives me a pain: after all, who’s using it for his benefit? What Norna does is put a heartshaped piece of lead on a gold chain and stick it in Minna’s bzoom—alchemi-

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cal symbolism in the background, with a lot of imputed-by-the-lower-orders-to gabble that Scott strews around like an insect repellent. This novel is an excellent example of the way a novelist uses undisplaced material for “atmosphere” while pretending that both he and his reader are awfully superior to it. “The feeble lamp by which the sibyl was probably pursuing her mystical and nocturnal studies” [312]—penseroso tower, of course. Norna turns them out of her crag and throws most of the supper they’ve brought over the cliff, so they slope off and find a small cabin inhabited by Yellowley, Halcro, and somebody else. They were returning from an unsuccessful effort to get a hoard of coins Yellowley had found, which was stolen by her dwarf. “Scalds and wise women were always accounted something akin” [326]. She told Halcro and Yellowley to go to Kirkwall: romantic theme of appointed place for the stretto. So they go to the Orkneys. Attack on synthetic Gothic: wonder what Abbotsford’s like. Cleveland meets an old pal of a pirate named (eventually: Scott is damn Scotch with his names) Jack Bunce. Part of the point is that the Orkneys are remote from the land point of view, but a sea-focus where sea-men of all countries and trades gather. A loop and a leap in the air. Occasion is the Fair of Saint Olla (Olaus), a few weeks after St. John’s. They talk together: Bunce is an attractive character who should have been an actor and is quoting constantly tags of plays. Cleveland tells him he stabbed Mordaunt, thought he killed him, but didn’t, and had him taken off him by Norna, “a person . . . to whom they ascribe the character of a sorceress, or, as the negroes say, an Obi woman” [340]. Sense of this kind of natural-religion all over the world. “She then pressed her finger on her lip as a sign of secrecy, whistled very low, and a shapeless, deformed brute of a dwarf coming to her assistance, they carried the wounded man into one of the caverns” [340]. Dumb attendant: cf. the girl in Peveril of the Peak. Friend says: “That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an honest man’s case;—but to puzzle your pate about the mummeries of an old one, is far too great a folly to indulge a friend in” [342]. Archetypes are interesting: so is the device of the peddler’s booth, “resembling our first parents in their vegetable garments” [342]. Peddler is the one who stole Cleveland’s clothes (or bought them from Mordaunt senior’s housekeeper), and the pirate’s recognition of them is the first recognition scene. In the scuffle ensuing he’s nabbed by the police and Bunce escapes––familiar formula—but is rescued by the other pirates who are lounging about the place in a repetition of the masque formula. Chapter 33 has one of the “old play” epigraphs which refers to The Tempest: I’ve noticed the Winter’s Tale links, and when the Troil family comes to the cabin above Halcro says come to these yellow sands. Well, hero’s cured, “so efficacious were the vulnerary plants and salves” [350] that Norna used. Norna is the vice of the plot, appearing everywhere, though Scott says if all the people she appeared to held a meeting to discuss her there’d be nothing marvelous left. Yuh.

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Hero wants to leave now he’s cured: Norna calls him ungrateful-clutch of night-world mother. He says he has his father; she says I yam yer mothaw. She hung the chain around his neck “which an Elfin King gave to the founder of our race” [352] (it would be a race), and a mere mortal mother wouldn’t have conjured the mermaid at midnight to give him good winds. She took the chain and put it on Minna because their union is “the only earthly wish which I have had the power to form” [353]. He says he prefers Brenda; she says Brenda’s a sissy. Note lower mother and dark girl link; hero’s going up the spiral. She says she told Cleveland to bugger off; Mordaunt tells her to stop her “intrigues”—vice role again. She says there’s a “demon” that tells her her control of the weather is a delusion: “there are rebellious thoughts in this wild brain of mine . . . that, like an insurrection in an invaded country, arise to take part against their distressed sovereign . . . Few would covet to rule over gibbering ghosts, and howling winds, and raging currents. My throne is a cloud, my sceptre a meteor, my realm is only peopled with fantasies; but I must either cease to be, or continue to be the mightiest as well as the most miserable of beings” [356]. Good summing up of night-world as illusion: note that Norna’s not only sane enough to ask herself if she’s sane, but sane enough to prefer her obsession, because it’s more fun. “My post must be high on yon lofty headland, where never stood human foot save mine—or I must sleep at the bottom of the unfathomable ocean, its white billows booming over my senseless corpse” [356]. Note (a) the top and bottom are the only possible points (b) the antithesis of cliff and ocean, which seems to haunt Scott. Well, pirates have a parliament, where all but an inner cabinet get too drunk to know what they’re doing, and Cleveland is chosen captain instead of a tough nut named Goffe. They make a deal with the town council and Yellowley, called the “Factor,” is chosen hostage, “after the manner in which the victim of ancient days was garlanded and greeted by shouts when a sacrifice for the common weal” [374]. He escapes through Goffe’s connivance, so Bunce grabs the boat containing Troil and his daughters and the poet Halcro. A lot of aha-me-proud beauty, but Bunce lets the women go, remarking that they’re torches in a powder-room—not the modern kind, of course. He and Halcro recognize each other from old stage days, which makes the pirate sentimental—touch of self-mockery as Scott recognizes the affinity of his own scene to mellerdrammer. Minna’s still in love with the pirate, and once the yeow-my-cunt stage is over, goes around with a dopey look that Scott calls an “expression of high-minded melancholy” [399]. She finds Cleveland and proposes a wild scheme to “muffle yourself in my cloak, and you will easily pass the guards—I have given them the means of carousing” [400]. She musta been reading Scott or somebody. We part forever, she says, forever, answers a voice “as from a sepulchral vault” [400]. That’s Norna,

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believe it or not. Minna thinks she’s got her father out of danger, got Cleveland to go and got the hero safe. I haven’t got all the details clear. Norna then interviews Cleveland—she takes pains to figure out every “secret pass and recess” to build up her character as supernatural. She says “You are of that temperament which the dark Influences desire as the tools of their agency” [408]; he says cut out the shit; he’s known enough incarnate devils not to be afraid of a disembodied fiend. Point here: evil has to be incarnate as well as God. Dwarf appears “like some overgrown reptile, extricating himself out of a subterranean passage, the entrance to which the stone had covered” [410]. We get the works in this stretto. “Remarkable semicircle of huge upright stones, which has no rival in Britain, excepting the inimitable monument at Stonehenge” [411]. Troil is released: incidentally, Norna says she and her lover were betrothed by joining hands in one of these “Druid” circles. So Minna, corny to the last, insists on meeting her pirate at this stone circle, where she looks like a Druid priestess if they built it, or Freya if the Danes did. As it is, she’s a neolithic nut. Fortunately the hero and his law-and-order bunch are watching, so when Bunce and others come to grab the girls they’re stopped and grabbed themselves: they get there “by cover of an old hollow way or trench, which perhaps had anciently been connected with the monumental circle” [428]. Well, Norna has her date with Mordaunt—I mean Mertoun—senior. He of course is the Vaughan who was her lover, but the hero ain’t her son, as she thinks: it’s Cleveland; Vaughan Mertoun married later and Mordaunt was the younger halfbrother: Esau archetype, of course. Well, you can’t have these scenes without talismans, so she fishes out a box Cleveland had given her with a “legend” around the lid. So Norna figures she’s buggered her son as well as her father, but the son and Bunce get pardons because they saved the virtue of two Spanish women, “persons of quality” [441], not just bargain cunts. So things straighten out: EsauCleveland remains spiritually attached to Minna the dark girl, who of course remains inscrewtable; he goes off to the Spanish Main again to do it legal. JacobBrenda get married, Jacob being Mordaunt; father goes into a convent, being a Catholic like most of Scott’s maladjusted people; Norna gets converted and almost cured, her architectus role finished, pushes the weather job off on God, and says in her will all her magic books should be burned. Renunciation of magic is all we needed. Minna hears Cleveland’s fallen in battle, which gives her all the sexual charge she wants. That’s all, and don’t ever again take so long to summarize one of these damn stories. Some of the notes are interesting, by the way: a prophetess named Little Vola in Greenland, circle of Odin where couples (“of the lower orders,” of course) plight their troth [457], drows or duergar associated with mines and metals under the earth attracted by blood [111], etc.

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25.  Sir Walter Scott, Anne of Geierstein Frye owned one edition of Anne of Geierstein, which he annotated: Boston: Aldine, 1831, which was published along with Guy Mannering. The page numbers in square brackets below are to the Clarendon Press edition (Oxford, 1920), ed. C.B. Wheeler. The novel was first published in 1829. References to Anne of Geierstein in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 218, 226, 229, 265 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 29

Begins with the inevitable two travellers, this time a father and son, with an Italian guide, clambering around mountain-tops in Switzerland. They’ve lost their way: I can’t figure out all the landscape, but the general idea is that an avalanche has destroyed the path they’re following and left an abyss between them and refuge, refuge being the house of Arnold Biedermann, whose niece is Anne. The father and son are actually the Earl and son of Oxford, faithful to the Lancaster cause, going to Burgundy to get Charles the Bold on their side (it’s 1474, about); but they’re disguised as merchants named Philipson. It takes a long time to find that out. Well, what with mist and terrific winds, Arthur (the son) has a hell of a time wriggling up a precipice to find some continuation of the path, prays to the Virgin, sees Anne whom he at first thinks is the Virgin; she helps him to walk over a tree trunk which is a bridge over a chasm with a torrent running a hundred yards below. He’s scared. Note mountain-climb, maiden separated by a chasm with a torrent of water (the novel is subtitled Maid of the Mist), saved by maiden, clinging to tree to save himself from the torrent (there’s a second avalanche right where he’s there that nearly does for him). That’s most of it. “Clinging to the decayed trunk of an old tree, from which, suspended between heaven and earth, he saw the fall of the crag which he had so nearly accompanied” [24]. However, she’s as sure-footed as a mule, trips lightly over a narrow arch, disregarding a waterfall below, and takes him to safety, “a limited space of a mild and fertile character” [36]. “Through this mountain paradise the course of a small brook might be traced” [39]. Beauty in scenes of horror—Geierstein means vulture-rock, of course. I think there’s a farm and an abandoned castle beside it which was the abode of Arnold’s brother, who was an aristocrat (Arnold is too, but doesn’t make anything of it) and Anne’s father. Somewhat similar setup to the Bertram place in Guy Mannering. This is a late book and Scott has something of a phobia about dialogue, which considering what he produces (“Unhand me, base peasant” [20]) is no wonder. Arnold looks like Hercules and Jupiter. Arthur is regarded as a sissy by the Swiss until he proves to be a terrific ar-

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cher, wielding a bow nobody else can string, to which a “prophecy” is attached. This infuriates a Swiss named Rudolph Donnerhugel (curious how Scott likes words like that: cf. Hatteraick’s storm-language in Guy Mannering), so they fight a duel, interrupted because Anne sees what’s going on––heroine activity again. Anne with Swiss “bears” around her—maiden and shaggy grotesques. Arnold explains to Philipson senior how she was left with him by her father. They discover that they both have business with Charles the Bold, so they set out together. Heroine flitters around, for reasons explained later connected with seeing her father: a lot of buildup about her being a phantom, then Rudolph tells a “Gothic” inset tale about the “Arnheim” family. What I’ve got in the MS is all right, I guess: it suggests a world of primary identity where she really is a fairy or spiritual being, but of course that has to be displaced.57 Arnheim, who’s a Rosicrucian or something, has a “Persian” magician come to stay with him: he had a thought she’d been supplied with a sin twister—I mean a twin sister––but the displacement is pretty dismal. So they take fond farewells and Arthur rejoins his father, where they go into a church to meet Margaret of Anjou, the Lancastrian queen. A lot of Shakespearean echoes, naturally: Arthur and her son born on the same night—I knew there had to be a twin theme somewhere. Finally Oxford gets to the end of his mission and the presence of Charles the Bold, who eavesdrops on a conversation he has with Colvin, the English artillery expert in Charles’ service. Oxford says he hopes to see the red rose bloom in the spring again—Apuleius echo. Charles wants to “punish” the Swiss; Oxford tries to talk him out of it, knowing that the Swiss will be his Vietnam, the rock in the shallows: “these Swiss are very Scots to my dominions in their neighbourhood— poor, proud, ferocious, easily offended, because they gain by war” [370]—that’s Charles. Also he wants to clear out the Vehmgericht, which Oxford calls “those tremendous societies, whose creatures are above, beneath, and around us” [372]. Charles listens to deputies of his nobles and commons saying they won’t support any war with the Swiss; this annoys what Scott calls his “hereditary obstinacy” [396], as do the Swiss themselves, who turn up looking republican and base as all hell (actually Arnold is afraid of war, less because of possible loss than possible victory: that would corrupt their simplicity). So the embassy ends with declaring war. Meanwhile Arthur goes to Provence, where King Rene, Margaret’s father, holds a court with nothing but troubadour poets in it: he’s good-natured but fatuous, and can’t take in anything but amusement. Story of Cabestan told. “His Highness introduced also a new ritual into the consecration of the Boy Bishop, and composed an entire set of grotesque music for the Festival of Asses” [422]. So Arthur goes up a steep, rocky, circuitous path to a convent in a cleft of the crest of a mountain—monastery, I guess it is—“the wall on which the parapet rested stretched along the edge of a precipice” [426]. Wild sounds of wind—in

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short, a close repetition of the opening scene, only it’s the dark female, Margaret of Anjou, that he finds this time. Queen has a black plume with a red rose—she’s not a possible love object, but the penseroso polarizing with Anne is curious. The rain resembles the roar of cataracts. Well, there’s a cavern under the foundation of the convent. “Oracles, it is said, spoke from thence in pagan days by subterranean voices, arising from the abyss” [431]. This is the Queen, who’s consulted the oracle without result except of course a long penance for doing so. Arthur is reminded of his place of imprisonment. He wears a holy relic she’s given him, but of course a charm Anne gave him is beside it, and she sees it, though she doesn’t mind. He’s bitched up his job, because a Carmelite he trusted wasn’t trustworthy, and a passage in a letter written by his father said so, in invisible ink that had to be heated. I forget what happens in this complication. Anyway, Arthur doesn’t like all the jigging of music in Provence, being a solemn English philistine. “He was now initiated in the actual business of human life, and looked on its amusements with an air of something like contempt” [441]. Margaret’s plan involves pushing aside her sister Yolande, whose husband is allied with the Swiss—naturally when Charles attacks the Swiss and the Swiss take him to the cleaners her plans all fall to pieces. Oh, the Carmelite is our friend the Black Priest again, the hero’s prospective father-in-law. The story also has a talisman of identity I haven’t been dealing with, a diamond necklace which de Hagenbach tries to steal and which Arthur tries to give Queen Margaret. The Queen dies on p. 389 and the Oxfords decide to enter Henry of Richmond’s service. Commines the historian, Scott’s main source, is introduced as a character. Charles is beaten a second time; Oxford goes and pulls him out of his melancholy, though not permanently. Rudolph Donnerhugel sends a challenge again to Arthur, but this is a joust on horses with lances and flat ground, something the Swiss don’t have, so Arthur skewers him. Meanwhile Charles gets tapped by the Vehmgericht bunch and Arthur has an interview with his fatherin-law-to-be in propria persona. “I stand so much on the edge of the grave, that methinks I command a view beyond it.” “The Duke of Burgundy is sentenced to die, and the secret and Invisible Judges, who doom in secret, and avenge in secret, like the Deity” [497]. Undisplaced archetype closely behind. “He has won great los and honour” [501]—that’s twice that word is used.58 Anyway, papa approves of the match. Well, there’s a third battle, Charles is murdered as foretold and uncle Albert is dead too. The dumb Sigismund says “It is to be hoped he has not gambled away his soul beforehand”––dice: and refers to Arthur’s killing Rudolph, “no more than if you had beat him in wrestling or at quoits—only it is a game cannot be played over again” [510]. “The high blood, and the moderate fortunes, of Anne of Geierstein and Arthur de Verde, joined to their mutual inclination, made their marriage in every respect rational” [511].

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26.  The Volsunga Saga Frye’s annotated edition: Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, ed. William Morris (New York: Collier Books, 1971). The page numbers in square brackets below are to the Walter Scott edition (London, 1888). The Volsung Saga dates from ancient times. References to The Volsunga Saga in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 219, 227, 245, 283, 285

The Volsunga Saga, in William Morris’ horrible translation. Starts with Sigi, son of Odin, who murders a thrall, apparently because he thought the servant was gittin’ above himself. So “he is given forth to be a wolf in holy places” [2], Morris says, whatever he thought he meant by that. Interesting if this wanton and brutal murder is the starting point of the ancestral curse on the family and its hereditary kinship with werewolves, but I suppose that’s asking too much. Sigi’s son Rerir wants an heir, so the gods send his queen an apple, which makes her pregnant when she eats it. Rerir “went home to Odin” [4], as a lot of people wanted to do then, and the queen goes six years pregnant; finally a man-child is cut out of her, and is called Volsung. Volsung’s son is Sigmund: there’s an oak tree growing in the middle of the palace; enter Odin, with his slouch hat and one eye, and he sticks a sword into the trunk. Everybody yanks, but only Sigmund can pull it out; Siggeir, suitor to his sister Signy, wants to buy the sword, and is enraged when Sigmund contemptuously refuses. Signy doesn’t wanna marry him, but her father Volsung says he’s given his word—rash vow modulation. He adds that he took an even more rash vow never to run away from fire or sword while he was still in his mother’s womb, being there so long he had time to think. Well, Signy is married to Siggeir; treachery follows; Sigmund and nine followers are put in the stocks; Siggeir’s mother, who’s a wolf, comes and eats one every night, but Sigmund busts loose and kills her. Very confused episode: in the original the shewolf was some kind of death or night or waning moon principle, I suppose. Signy has a couple of children by Siggeir, but feels they don’t measure up, so she kills them, then “changes semblance” with another woman. Latter goes in to Siggeir; Signy goes to her brother Sigmund, and the result is Sinfjotli, who goes off with his father-uncle: “in summer-tide they fare wide through the woods and slay men for their wealth” [20]. Abortive episode of Helgi, fuller in other parts of the Edda; then Sinfjotli is poisoned, is carried by his father to a ferry-boat that’s supposed to take them across a fjord, but boat and ferryman (Odin) vanish, with the corpse. Sigmund is killed in battle, essentially by Odin, who turns up again, and his sword is shattered. The story of the forging of a new sword out of the shards, by

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the smith Regin for Sigmund’s son Sigurd, is an excellent sparagmos symbol, and indicates how a warrior’s sword is really his “life” or “soul,” or talismanic projection. Sigurd’s mother Hjordis exchanges clothes with her maid in an archetypal but otherwise pointless episode. So Sigurd is born posthumously, his real father being dead and his foster-father bringing him up. Well, Regin, has two brothers, Fafnir and Otter. Otter is an otter, and is killed in that guise by Loki; the father Hreidmar, holds three gods to ransom until they give him compensation payment by covering his otter’s hide with gold. One whisker has to be covered by the ring of the dwarf Andvari, who’s really a pike, and there’s a curse put on that when it’s stolen, by Loki. Stealing of ring by trickster god; metamorphosis theme (as Fafnir of course turns into a dragon) and vengeance within the family (Regin eggs on Sigurd to kill Fafnir). The sword is forged: it can both break an anvil and cut locks of wool in midstream (Richard and Saladin), and then Sigurd’s uncle Grifir prophesies the rest of the story. Sigurd avenges his father, of course, by killing everybody who had to do with killing him, and then goes to finish off Fafnir. Regin is of course going to murder him, but wants to drink Fafnir’s blood and eat his heart. Sigurd cooks the heart, puts his finger in his mouth after touching it, and finds he knows the language of birds, who happen to be remarking what a treacherous bastard Regin is. So he kills Regin, and then goes off to awaken Brynhild, the birds having suggested that that’s a good idea. She’s been surrounded with fire by Odin because she disobeyed him about a battle: she’s an incarnation of the wise underworld mother, and teaches Sigurd both oracles and proverb lore. Sigurd carries the insignia of the dragon on his shield, like the Gorgon on Athene’s. Then Sigurd goes to the Giukings, where the crafty queen Grimhild gives him a potion that destroys the memory of Brynhild in his mind, so he marries Gudrun. Then he “changes semblance” [95] with Gunnar, so Sigurd looking-likeGunnar rides through the fire to Brynhild, who by her vow is compelled to marry Gunnar, though she’s dismayed it isn’t Sigurd. Wonder how these themes got through to Spenser: even the name Brynhild echoes. Brynhild is almost literally busting a gut because she loves Sigurd but won’t be unfaithful to Gunnar, won’t love him either, and in short she’s just gotta have Sigurd murdered. So he is, and she climbs on his funeral pyre. Sigurd’s horse Grani dies along with him—horse an extension of knight’s personality. Gudrun then marries Atli (Attila the Hun, a bloodthirsty and treacherous tyrant in western saga, but a magnanimous ruler in the east: he’s the latter in the Nibelungenlied, under the name of Etzel). Gudrun is given another amnesiac drink; Atli invites the Giukings to feast with him: Gudrun sends them runes of warning, but some go-between alters them into words of welcome, so they go. However, there are a lot of oracular dreams by the wives, who try to dissuade their husbands from going. Pilate’s wife archetype: the women usually know that their dreams are allegories of the future, but their husbands, who think they belong to the waking

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world, interpret them as allegories of the past (too much cucumber sandwich type of thing). So there’s a terrific battle with the Giukings in the hall of Atli. The tone gets harsher as the story goes on. They’re going to kill a “thrall” instead of Hogni the hero, but the latter pleads for the thrall’s life; however, it’s too much fun not to kill him too. It’s dimly possible that this is the return of the thrall theme at the beginning. Gudrun then cuts the throats of her two children by Atli and serves them up to him for dinner. Atli is killed, along with practically everybody else; Gudrun tries to drown herself, but is washed ashore on the lands of King Jonakr, who becomes her third husband. Well, her daughter by Sigurd, Swanhild, is trampled by horses because of a (faked) charge of adultery, and her lover is hanged. Gudrun gets her two sons to avenge Swanhild—three, but they kill one for no very good reason—and they’re stoned to death, on the advice of Odin, who’s getting bored with the Volsungs. That’s most of it: of course Fafnir is, like Brynhild, a source of occult wisdom, and Sigurd learns a good deal from him before he dies. A daughter named Aslaug was born to Brynhild from Sigurd, but the saga as we have it protests that there was no sexual contact between them. Maybe she et an apple, or maybe Aslaug was an immaculate conception. The main things are the metamorphoses with animals, the talisman of curse, the amnesiac liquids, and the components of the tragic world-view—tribalism, the comitatus where the followers are part of the leader’s body, as with Shakespeare’s Talbot, blood ties in tragedy stronger than marriage ties and the transfer of loyalties mentioned in Psalm 45, which are part of the renewal cycle. Incest and cannibal feasts on one’s children are the demonic dead ends of this. Signy, by the way, is Sigmund’s twin sister. Brynhild’s father Budli makes no appearance in the action and she’s brought up by a foster-father: it seems clear that her real father is Odin. Hogni’s son is called Nibelung, but otherwise that name doesn’t seem to get into the Icelandic version. From hebel, mist, fog, and connected with Niflheim or hell, inhabited by giants and dwarfs (note both in lower world), guarded by a dog Garm.

27.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha The edition of the poem Frye read is unknown. Page references in square brackets below are to the Rand McNally edition (Chicago, 1911). The poem was first published in 1855. References to Hiawatha in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 244, 272, 284

One of the nineteenth‑century unifable efforts:59 Longfellow was obviously inter-

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ested in Hiawatha as a culture hero who gathered around him the same kind of mythology that he’d found in other cultures including his own. We begin with a Lollius figure, one Nawadaha, who is said to be the source of the stories, then we go on to God (“Gitche Manito, the mighty” [157, 233]) who gets fed up with all the fighting, calls a conference, gives the Indians the peace pipe, and says he’ll send them a “Deliverer of the nations” [12], or culture-hero. The next section is about the four winds: oldest and greatest is the west wind; the cruel north wind tries to kill the diving bird that stays in his domain through the winter, but fails. South wind loves a maiden who’s the dandelion, but he’s lazy and she turns gray before he gets around to proposing or something. Well, Hiawatha’s grandmother, who brings him up, is Nokomis, daughter of the moon, who falls to earth when some jealous rivals cut the grape-vines she’s swinging in. She has a daughter named Wenonah, and warns her against the west wind (Mudjekeewis), in the tone of the Sumerian poem about Enki. However, the west wind screws her anyway, and the result is Hiawatha—mother dies in childbirth or thereabouts. Nokomis educates him—milky way is the pathway of ghosts and shadows; northern lights the death-dance of the spirits; a warrior threw his grandmother up to the sky and she became the moon (contrast counterpoint); rainbow is the permanent spiritual form of the flowers—amaranth archetype. Hiawatha learns the languages of birds and beasts, and kills a deer with bow and arrow. Then he goes west to avenge his mother on his father. Terrific fight, but the west wind is immortal and is only testing his son: mother’s son has to come to terms with father. Meets Minnehaha, Laughing Water, on his way home. Then Hiawatha goes out into the wilderness and fasts: trying to find what his life really depends on, like Lear on the heath. Curious wrestling-with-angel passage: the angel is Mondamin the corn-spirit, and Hiawatha learns how to kill and bury him so that he’ll rise again and provide food for his people. Hiawatha has two wonderful servants, the delicate musician Chibiabos and the wild-man the powerful Kwasind: he learns how to build canoes, taking the best of each tree: no paddles, “For his thoughts as paddles served him” [79]. Goes fishing in the Gitche Gumee (Lake Superior), looking for the King of Fishes; finally gets him, a huge sturgeon who nearly swallows him and his canoe. Goes west again to kill the evil magician the Pearlfeather, who brings disease—passes over a “sluggish water”: full of the “mould of ages” [95] where fireflies try to mislead him. The magician can only be wounded in a certain tuft of hair, and of course is. Then he wooes and wins Minnehaha, partly a dynastic marriage bringing peace with the Dacotahs. Then a description of Hiawatha’s wedding feast, with the stories of the great boaster Iagoo—the tall talk convention isn’t only white, evidently. One of Iagoo’s stories is about Osseo, the poor, ugly, old son of the evening star, who marries the youngest and prettiest of ten daughters, who’s

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devoted to him though her relatives make fun of them both. Passing through the trunk of a hollow oak, he gets rejuvenated but she turns old. Then they eat some enchanted food and their tent arises into the sky, the relatives transformed into birds; the bride Oweenee gets her youth and beauty back. Then their little boy shoots a bird who turns into a young woman as she dies; this breaks the spell and they return to earth, the bird-relatives becoming human again, but pygmies. Ceremony of blessing the cornfields: Minnehaha walks naked around them in the dark, forming a magic circle. Even this doesn’t keep the ravens, the vegetable vultures, away, but Hiawatha catches the raven king and ties him up. Then he invents picture-writing, including the Great Doodle of Frye’s celebrated masterpieces.60 Gitche Manito (God) is an egg; Mitche Manito (Satan) a serpent; Life and Death white and black circles: “For the earth he drew a straight line/For the sky a bow above it” [157]. Then his fortunes decline: first Chibiabos is killed by (I think) falling through the ice, then there’s trouble with the mischievous Paupuk-Keewis. Gambles with red, white, and black pieces; goes and buggers up Hiawatha’s abode; Hiawatha chases him and he’s beaten to death with clubs like maize, but his spirit slips into the forest and changes into a brant goose. Looks down and is smashed to pieces again, but the soul continues in human shape, in which he’s finally killed. Then Kwasind, who again is vulnerable only on the crown of his head, is murdered by pygmies, who are afraid of him. Then there’s a section about the return of the dead to Hiawatha’s house in late autumn: they say stop making so much noise, we can’t sleep, and don’t burden us down with a lot of pots and kettles; just food and fire. The final sections deal with a great winter famine, in the course of which Minnehaha dies. Then there’s an encounter between a white man (Winter) and a red man (Spring), in which the former eventually has to give way and disappear. Then Iagoo comes back and tells stories about the coming of the white man, which makes everybody grin knowingly and nod at each other; but Hiawatha says it’s all true, as he’s seen it too in a vision. So the “Black-Robe chief” [238] comes and talks about the Virgin Mary and stuff, and Hiawatha buggers off to the “Islands of the Blessed” [223], a sort of John the Baptist figure. The killing of Kwasind by the Pygmies is part of the general archetype of there being both giants and dwarfs in the underworld: that’s why Gulliver’s Travels begins with little people surrounding a giant, then reverses the perspective. Similarly in Norse mythology, and in Greek too for that matter—both giants and subterranean gnomes or kobolds. Wonder why. Anything to do with the objectification process, giant as object, perceiver as dwarf? Note that dwarfs are almost invariably workers, miners: giants can work but are more usually presented as lazy and exploiters.

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28.  William Morris, The Wood beyond the World Frye owned two editions of The Wood beyond the World, the first of which he annotated: New York: Ballantine Books, 1969, and London: Oxford University Press, 1980. The page numbers in square brackets below are to the Longmans, Green edition (London, 1913). Frye’s page references are in parentheses. The Wood beyond the World was first published in 1894. References to The Wood beyond the World in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 121, 143, 219, 236, 249, 323 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 101, 302, 382 Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 310, 311–    12

Golden Walter is the son of a merchant, and is unhappy with a bitchy and unfaithful wife. Decides to take ship and go somewhere else: father says they may never meet again (they don’t). “Yet if we do meet, father, then shalt thou see a new man in me” [3]. So he goes down to the wharves, where everything seems to him “like curious images woven on a tapestry,” and has a vision of three people, a dwarf, a maiden, and her mistress. The dwarf is dressed in yellow but looks like an animal: later he does a lot of crawling about on all fours and is said to resemble a ferret, though of course the serpent image is also associated with him. The maiden has an iron ring on her ankle, meaning that she’s a slave. They get on another ship; Walter gets on his, and “it all seemed but the double of what the other ship had done” [7], as though his fate were interlocked with those three. Where he first lands a friend tells him that his father has returned his wife to her people as damaged goods; a feud has broken out and his father has been killed. Walter never returns to continue the feud: note the theme of turning one’s back on the more obvious quest, as in Dante’s three beasts. The friend also sees the three people, the lady being “as lovely as a goddess of the gentiles” [11], so it’s not just a dream. Incidentally, the relation of the two women is developed from the Venus-Psyche relation in the Apuleius story, which Morris had already told in The Earthly Paradise. A storm drives the ship off her course: the usual Mediterranean setting of sentimental romance is being replaced by something like the North Atlantic. However, Walter wants to go “to those three that seemed to call him unto them” [16]. He meets an old man living all by himself who tells him about the “bears,” who are actually humans, and do some trading with him. He himself has evidently been a former lover of the mistress and has lost his soul in consequence, and his will power: he’s a walking corpse. So Walter goes through a “shard” in the cliff

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wall that encloses this country, and after quite a hike finds himself in The Wood Beyond the World. He’s hungry and picks some cherries off a tree, whereupon the dwarf turns up and makes noises: Beauty and Beast theme. The dwarf hates the Maid and is devoted to the Mistress, who may have created him, he thinks: he emphasizes her whiteness. Then he meets the Maid, who’s bending over water like those old White Rock ads:61 Walter says “there is a river betwixt us, though it be no big one” [42] and proposes to stride over it. She says nothing doing, and he mustn’t above all else touch her (we learn that this is because the mistress has the scent of a retriever and would instantly know if he did). They decide they’re permanently in love, which means they have to plot against and escape from the Mistress, who’s a white goddess, her current lover being somebody called a “King’s Son.” Maid realizes that the Mistress is already planning to get rid of the King’s Son and annex Walter, so they make a compact saying “by both of us shall all guile and all falling away be forgiven on the day when we shall be free” [47]. In other words they can escape only through fraud, and the fraud is essential to the comic resolution. Well, Walter eventually meets the Mistress dallying with her lover, and he gets a very cold reception, so he arses around for four days, during which he sees her walking naked with her love in the night, with “long crispy yellow hair” [56]. Slight thaw then ensues in the atmosphere and the prince gets jealous, to be told it’s not his will that’s important but hers (81). Walter goes on a hunt with her: she fondles her maid and pulls her clothes down, to see if Walter reacts, but of course he’s been carefully coached not to. Kills a lion for her, although it later disappears, and is evidently a mirage. One or two meetings with the Maid, spied on by the dwarf. Both Mistress and Maid and magicians; former has power “to change the aspect of folk so utterly that they seem other than they verily are” (112) [79]. In an interview with the mistress Walter, who, it’s emphasized, comes from a Christian country, says “perchance thou art an idol . . . me seemeth there hath been none such since the old days of the Gentiles” [82]—God, this lingo. She gets sore, refers to the Maid as “the Enemy,” and calls Walter “an alien, an outcast, one endowed with the little wisdom of the World without the Wood” [83]. During this interview she’s naked, for all practical purposes, and it seems relatively clear that she does become Walter’s mistress. Finding the lion gone, Walter thinks “this is a land of mere lies, and that there is nought real and alive therein save me” [90]. He’s also uneasy because it’s a land of female will: he can escape with the Maid only by doing exactly as she says, and he feels, he says, like a “pawn,” pushed about by others. Interview with the King’s Son, who says he’s through and is going away with the Maid. The King’s Son indicates that he has no intention of marrying the Maid on equal terms once he gets away with her. Meanwhile Walter is still the Mistress’s

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favorite, and on putting on the clothes she gives him he “became as the most glorious of kings, and yet lovelier than any king of the world” (135) [96]. First of two clothes-choosing scenes, second a contrast. Well, Walter escapes with the maiden and kills the dwarf who comes chasing them. It comes out that the Maid has pulled a double badger game: She made a date with Walter while the dwarf was listening, then another when he wasn’t, then dates the King’s Son for a time and place coincident with the former, then gets the Mistress to go to the same room furious at Walter’s treachery in preferring the Maid, then changes the semblance of the King’s Son to Walter’s. I think that’s it, more or less. Well, the Maid says Walter has to cut the dwarf’s head off and “lay it by his buttocks when he is in the earth; or evil things will happen else” [106]. Sounds like an ouroboros setup. She’s wounded by the dwarf’s arrows, but knows about herbs, natch. Walter makes shoes for her out of his jerkin—she’d fled barefoot, I suppose partly for symbolic reasons. Her cognitio begins in chapter 24 (154). “If I be wholly of the race of Adam I wot not; nor can I tell thee how many years old I may be” [111]. Paradisal childhood, then evidently stolen, anyway a descent into worlds three and finally four. She’s first “in a great and foul city” [112], then in a “wild dream” [112] with the dwarf and the mistress. She had however been in charge of an old woman who taught her magic, and she learned some more from and in spite of the mistress. She explains all the above, being so persecuted by the King’s Son that “I was wellnigh brought to the point of yeasaying his desires” [116]. Mistress comes and stabs the King’s Son in the guise of Walter, though “I went nigh to swooning lest perchance I had wrought over well, and thine image were thy very self” [120]. “Then I heard her say: I shall forget; I shall forget; and the new days shall come.” (167) [120]. Motto of white goddess: extraordinary how much Morris knows about that. So the Mistress sticks the knife in herself: Maid considers herself her murderer, wants to know if Walter still wants to have anything to do with her; Walter says they’re spiritually married and one flesh (168–9). In Chapter 25 the Maid, who’s nearly naked, dresses herself in “summer array” [122], i.e., in flowers. She becomes the spirit of the summer, in fact, which is lucky, because they’re headed for the country of the “Bears,” who will sacrifice them to their god, who’s a woman, last incarnate in the Mistress. So the Maid, who’s killed her predecessor, ought to be their next deity, or incarnation. Well, she has enough magic to make the drooping flowers around her revive; she has in short the feminine power of rebirth, but she says she’ll lose it as soon as she loses her virginity. Twist to the renunciation-of-magic theme (175). Well, they come to the Country of the Bears, who are relatively decent but very stupid: they hold a conference at “a doom-ring of big stones” (177) [127]. They sleep under guard as brother and sister (interesting to know that that’s what Morris assumes brothers and sisters of that age do), and she says you gotta leave it all to me,

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and be my servant while I put on my show and don’t argue. There’s a terrible drought and what the Bears want is rain. They threaten horrible death of whipping and stoning and the like if they’re lacking in any way, and there are an old man and two huge women with flint knives. Walter is dressed in red and white, though it’s travel-worn: Maid just has her “smock” and her flowers. Something traditional that she had to flee from her mistress in her smock, I suppose. “Then said the Maid; Now, then, is the day of your gladness come; for the old body is dead, and I am the new body of your God, come amongst you for your welfare” (192) [137]. She does her flower-reviving act, and so talks the Bears into letting them pass out of the country to where she can bring them rain. Walter gets separated from her in a pass for two days, and on the third day there’s revival of hope and the maid comes back. Two days of despair, also of pouring rain, because she really does do her stuff. Thinks “the Maid was of the fays, or of some race even mightier” [142], and that he’ll have to “seek his Maiden through the wide world” [143], but she’s actually there listening to him. So they talk: she wants the city and he prefers the “wilderness”: her attitude is Miranda’s brave new world one; he’s had cities and wants just to stay with her. (The dark wood of despair has slight Midsummer Night’s Dream overtones.) But she points out that the wilderness is a place of female will (“in the wilderness amongst the devils, what was to be done by manly might or valiancy? There hadst thou to fall back upon the guile and wizardry which I had filched from my very foes” [148].) The city they’re making for is called Starkwall, and the inhabitants have a custom that when their king dies they grab the first guy that comes through the pass and take his clothes off. If his balls are too small (I’m paraphrasing) they make him a slave or “roll him in a great carpet till he dies” [157]; otherwise they give him a choice of garments of peace or war. If he chooses peace he better prove he’s a good counsellor or he’s for it; Walter chooses the armour, to great approval. This is called faring “the narrow edge betwixt death and kingship” (222) [157]. They say wuddia want done with the dame, he says ask her: they bring her in dressed in red and white (red roses, white smock or something), and fall for her like a ton of pricks. “And as to her raiment, I see of her that she is clad in white and wreathed with roses, but that the flesh of her is so wholly pure and sweet that it maketh all her attire but a part of her body, and halloweth it, so that it hath the semblance of gems” [161]. If Morris had been an Elizabethan the queen would have thought this kind of thing overdone. “she went past as though paradise had come anigh to our city” (230) [163]. Anyway, they have so many children their people forget their old custom. She takes her girdle off and hands it to him: that means her magic goes with her virginity. “All wizardry left her since the day of her wedding; yet of wit and wisdom she had enough left, and to spare; for she needed no going about, and no guile, any more than hard commands, to have her will done. . . . To be short, she was the land’s increase, and the city’s safeguard,

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and the bliss of the folk” [166]. Then she goes to the Bears, whom she feels she’s been neglecting, and teaches them the art of “tillage.” Traditional features: the regressive and progressive females (with a slight hint that the hero’s original wife was a manifestation of the same kind of thing as the mistress: this comes out in a colloquy between mistress and Walter, but it throws the whole story into a new perspective); the remarkable association between the mistress and Graves’ white goddess; the heroine’s magical powers dependent on her virginity; the strange people who think they have to sacrifice newcomers to their god, who in fact is the white goddess: the sense that the Wood Beyond the World is dreamland and yet has an objective reality that dreamland doesn’t have; the cyclical rhythm associating the heroine with the spirit of summer; the humiliation (whipping and slavery) of the heroine; the association of escape and freedom with guile, as well as a certain amount of violence; the confused identity brought about by the bedtrick and by changing shapes. Note that the heroine passes beyond the stage of being the next incarnation of the white goddess to being a human queen. Some sense that Walter comes from the “waking” world and that the Wood is a dream one, yet that reality comes in the union of the two. That is, Walter’s awake and headed for dreamland; the Maiden is dreaming and headed for waking: the point where they cross is the union of the two. I’m not clear about all this, but the Alice and Red King business is somehow involved, I think. Anyway, it’s amazing (a) how traditional the story is, preserving the Heliodorus sacrifice and tricky-heroine themes and (b) how much Morris knows about Frazer, Graves and Jung archetypes. Mackail says somebody interpreted it as an allegory of the victory of the proletariat over capitalism or something, and that because he sounded as though he had inside knowledge Morris had to write in to contradict this.62 Well, that’s certainly a reduction, and a vulgar and insensitive one at that, but still the romance does take in the Prometheus-Eros comic movement that revolutionary mythology also has. Besides, it seems clear that Morris himself didn’t know what the hell his book was about.

29.  William Morris, The Well at the World’s End Frye owned two editions of The Well at the World’s End, the second of which he annotated: London: Longmans, Green, 1896, 2 vols., and New York: Ballantine Books, 1970, 2 vols. The page numbers in square brackets below are from the Pomona Press reissue of the two‑volume Pocket Books edition (2006). The Well at the World’s End was first published in 1896. References to The Well at the World’s End in Frye’s published works:

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Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 240 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 302, 382 Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 310

Well, this is it, in the sense that it’s the Eros quest romance I’ve been looking for. I suppose the world’s end is Iceland (Ultima Thule), and the landscape is certainly Icelandic. Begins with a small kinglet letting three of his four sons draw lots for a direction of the compass to travel and seek their fortunes in. The fourth son, Ralph, is to stay at home and succeed him. So naturally it’s Ralph who runs off (south) and is the hero. First, he goes to his “gossip” (godmother), Katherine Chapman, whose husband Clement is the merchant his name suggests. She gives Ralph a necklace of blue and green stones with gold knobs between, and tells him about the well. We learn later (a) that nobody finds the well without this necklace, and that it’s only given to men: women apparently can only find it in the company of a man (b) that this particular necklace was given to her by a woman who is the first of a line of three heroines in the story. Actually she’s not in the story, but is a “carline” who teaches the first heroine, known only as the Lady of Abundance or the Lady of the Woodland, who’s killed halfway through. So the whole book turns inside out at the end, showing a woman’s operation as the essential story. The well is partly a fountain of youth, and renews strength and puts off death, so that the carline’s charge to Katherine to give it to a young man not of her blood, whose advent she prophesies, is from one point of view an Alcestis quest. Katherine herself is “somewhat foreseeing” [1:15], as are many of the women in this story. She’s a displaced mother, only her feelings for her godson are not wholly maternal. Ralph is a nice boy who blushes on practically every page. About the first thing he sees on leaving them is a big chalk drawing like the White Horse in southern England, a tree with a bear on each side, marking a “bear hill” and “an earth-work of the ancient folk” [1:21] called Bear Castle. Cf. the Bear-people in The Wood Beyond the World. Careful dating all through the book: he gets to these downs on St. John’s Eve, mid-summer, and several things happen at that time. Ralph sees a play of St. George and the “worm,” and is told there’ll be other plays, “of wild men and their feasting in the woods in the Golden Age of the world.” He meets a man who keeps saying “the first time,” and “the second time”: eventually he proves to be a brother of the man who kills the first heroine. He meets a monk, who wants him to stay there and tries to take his necklace off him, but Ralph decides he’ll be educated by the world instead. Then he meets the girl who turns out to be the heroine: she’s just lost her lover, though she doesn’t love him. This girl is named Dorothea, according to a dream he has of her, but she’s called Ursula throughout the story when she has a name: another curious example of motiveless name-changing in romance.

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Then he goes into the “wood perilous,” where he delivers a woman being lugged off by two men. This is the first heroine: she’s being abducted by the men of the Burg at the Four Friths, an unpleasant town whose inhabitants hate her as a witch. She’s the chief lady of a band of63 It’s interesting what a sullen, vicious, brutal society Morris depicts for the most part: it’s like the early poems, where the most explicitly medieval are also the most realistic. Just outside Utterbol are the great mountains, where his quest lies: interesting that he has to climb mountains on this Eros quest. One of his friends at Utterbol (he does make a friend or two there) says “it is my thought, that all we of these parts should be milder men and of better conditions, if yonder terrible wall were away. It is as if we were thralls of the great mountains” 290 [2:15]: the whole colloquy is interesting. Also an earlier “How many miles to Babylon?” one on p. 279. Well, the queen of Utterbol naturally falls for Ralph, and her maid Agatha does the confidante and go-between act. A good deal said about a red pillar, a white one and a black one, apparently all used for flogging: Agatha is whipped at the white one, I think. So we have a cross-pattern set up: king wants heroine (who’s sold as a slave, but nobody will buy her because she’s so fiercely proud, and won’t be inspected); queen wants hero. King is called the “dark lord” [2:23]—Tolkien owes a lot to these episodes, I think. Ralph is tried out in jousting, and overthrows a whole series of antagonists: if he hadn’t he’d have been put to a shameful death, and the Lord proposes that the first one he defeats should be bent over and shot at by archers at his arse until he dies. This turns out to be “Redhead,” afterwards a faithful friend of Ralph’s, and the “boon” Ralph is granted is to let him off. Panic underlying the brutality (304). Well, Ralph is set free, so he can get away through the “one pass” with the aid of Redhead. He’s told that getting away is the only way he can help his girlfriend. Volume II: Curious episode in which Agatha plans to divert him to her mistress and gives up the plan as soon as she sees him: result, of course, more flogging for her, but she speaks of “this adventure, like to a minstrel’s tale done in the flesh” [2:56]. There’s no doubt that Utterbol is conceived as a hell to be passed through. Anyway, Ralph runs into his new girlfriend, and they go on the quest together. The unmotivated change of name from Dorothea to Ursula still seems to have no point that I can get, except that: cf. the Ulrica-Urfried business in Ivanhoe. No, Morris isn’t a male chauvinist, but it looks (16) as though the lady leads in the quest, and the man leads her home in marriage once the quest is achieved. Extraordinary way Morris dismisses the actual world, though she invariably gets up earlier and finds somewhere to bathe herself: these English girls of Morris are trained to get to the bathroom early. She’s got a necklace too, and says “By this token we must live as long as we may, whatsoever may befall” [2:71] They fall in with the “Sage of Swevenham,” the old wise man (he’s called that) of the town of dreams, and he teaches them out of a book: as we get nearer the

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quest Morris sounds more and more like Bunyan. They have to get their armour off and put on white clothes with red girdles: the woman the Lady buried was also dressed in white and red. They read the book on a “stone table,” one of the Stonehenge bits. The Utterbol people chase them, but the Sage creates an illusion where they think they’re seeing skeletons. That’s the end of danger from pursuit: from now on they run dangers but not those dangers. The Sage says (36) [2:89] “if ye love not the earth and the world with all your souls, and will not strive all ye may to be frank and happy therein, your toil and peril aforesaid shall win you no blessing but a curse.” So don’t build cities for “merchants and usurers and warriors and thralls” [2:89], like Blake’s man who built the pyramids. So Ralph says “The dead would I love and remember; the living would I love and cherish; and Earth shall be the well beloved house of my Fathers, and Heaven the highest hall thereof” [2:90]. Note that the Well confers a prolonging of life, as in Zanoni and (vulgarly) Back to Methusaleh. The Sage approves: “the lost which was verily thine shalt thou find again” [2:90]. Volcanic region; ascent in a spiral (39). Speaks of seeing it as “it hath become a part of me for ever” [2:94]—influence of Iceland visit on Morris, I suppose partly. Sage says “I am one who hath not dared to use it lest I should abuse it, I being alone amongst weaklings and fools” [2:95]—it being the well water; but he thinks he’ll do better if Ralph and Ursula get it. Cf. the Earthly Paradise prelude. His last word to them is “redeem ye the time” [2:97]. So they tuck into a cave and stay there the whole damn winter without, apparently, one single fuck. In the spring the bears get active and Ursula runs away stark naked from one that Ralph kills. He thinks the cock-teasing act is going a bit far and says how about it? What she says is interesting: she wants to marry him in front of witnesses, and make their marriage the focus of a community. Also he’d like to leave for home right there, and she says they haven’t a chance of getting home safely without drinking of the well first. Her armor assimilates her to Athene chastity-images. Well, people called “the innocent folk” [2:111] turn up, and Ralph asks an old man of them “if our wedding and the knowing each other carnally shall be to our hurt in the Quest” [2:112]. The old man says “Nay, son, we hear not that it shall be the worse for you in any wise that ye shall become one flesh” [2:112]. Their Lady told them to come every year to look for seekers, and these are the first ones. So there’s a communion meal, I think (58) and a marriage. I get the notion that Ralph and Ursula are, like the old men of The Earthly Paradise, incarnations of stories (the innocent folk, or some of them, want to make then gods or royalty), but stories of getting through, not of old men who don’t make the Eros bit. Innocence as art talking about itself again. They go on to the House of Sorceress, where the Lady was under the manage of the hag, and arrive at “June at its full” [2:117]. Sense that she’s there: “how grievous it is when the dead that we have loved come across our ways, and we

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may not speak to them, nor they to us” [2:119]. Long and interesting explanation by the innocent folk why they don’t all go after the water (65): they’re in an earthly paradise and they don’t need it, is the general idea. Then they cross a terrible desert full of dead unburied people—none of them have the necklace. An unharrowed hell. The Dry Tree is in this desert, a trunk with armor and stuff hanging from it, but no leaves. There’s also a water he nearly drinks from, but she prevents it: it’s the water of death. They’re following a blazed trail and this has no mark on it. They come out of it and “it was no long time ere they twain slept fast at the uttermost end of the world” [2:136]. There’s the well, out on the sea visible at low tide, a sign on it saying don’t drink if you can’t bear a long life; a golden cup to drink from with the sign of the blazed trail on it, which is a sword crossed with a bough. Gold cup, golden bough, golden sword: also the four suits of Tarot, cup sword, wand, and the fact that they’re gold supplies the fourth denier suit. Repetition of gold and green imagery, which runs all through, and of the resemblance of Ralph to one of the painted angels on the choir walls of St. Lawrence of Upmeads. Drinking the water removes the scars they’ve acquired in fights and such. So they bathe in the sea, which “comes over the sand like the creeping of a sly wood-snake” [2:141], and see that they have no more scars: “here is no mark nor blemish but the best handiwork of God, as when he first made a woman from the side of the Ancient Father of the field of Damask” [2:142]. I don’t get the last word, but later it says “it seemed to them that they had come into the very Garden of God” [2:144]. Significant for the nostos, which is what follows, that Ursula says “the fear of thee has already entered into the hearts of thy foemen far away” [2:143]. That is, his achievement starts social uprisings and revolutions in every tyrannical place he’s been in. “let it be evening, and let the morning see to its own matters” [2:143– 4]—Edenic phrasing. Otherwise I don’t think there’s too much in the nostos I need. Bull Shockhead is the new Lord of Utterbol, and there’s a strong Shelleyan sense of revolution as a simple matter of replacing a bad ruler with a good one. Bull Shockhead says “thou hast changed my conditions: How, I wot not” [2:167]. The return is a Kierkegaardian repetition, everything made new. The Queen of Goldburg has disappeared, clearly for love of him; Cheaping Knowe is still bad, but its king is killed in an attempt to grab Ursula. As they get closer to home the fact that she’s a yeoman’s daughter begins to bother her: socially it’s the Pamela solution, of course. She says he has the world at his feet if he wants to pick it up, so it’s important that his aims are so modest. Richard says “now hast thou wedded into the World of living men, and not to a dream of the Land of Fairy” [2:199]. Important for locating the two heroines. They come to the spot where the Lady was killed, and the brother gets killed there this time, saying appropriately “the last time” [2:210]. The nostos is a continuous recognition scene, as he picks up another brother and their old friend Roger, now a hermit, though a lukewarm

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one. Ursula talks of a “she-bear” who tyrannized over her earlier: I don’t remember her, though of course she bear is what her name means. Ursula looks “like an image of the early summer-tide itself” [2:246], succeeding to the Lady, although the Fellowship of the Dry Tree, whom we’re picking up now, are still faithful to the older memory. A song (194) suggests that as a result of achieving the quest the dry tree will bloom again, which ties up that half of the Eden business. “And the Well-spring hath come/From the waste to the home” [2:264]. Curious that I remember so little of the early part when it’s repeated because of that synthetic glup Morris writes in: if he’d written his story in anything resembling the English language it’d be a lot easier to follow. Back to the Chapmans, where as usual Clement is attracted by Ursula, who’s again compared to Diana. They seem to be his real parents: the king and queen are forced out of Upmeads, their home, by invaders (the “Burg” has been conquered by Good Guys, so the Bad Buggers, I mean Burgers, are on the prowl for a new home), and the king, Peter, seems to have only the impotent-king role. Cognitio from Katherine telling what I’ve said earlier: she got the beads and her instructions in “Sarras,” which as I remember is the town Joseph of Arimathea went to from Jerusalem. Now, she says “if a woman have them {the beads} of a woman, or the like of them, they may serve her for a token; but will be no talisman or leading-stone to her” [2:294]—she has to give them to a man not of her blood. This is the final cognitio (222) and should be looked at again, I suppose. Of Ursula Ralph says “for all that she hath done without help of talisman or witchcraft is she the more worshipful and the dearer” [2:295]. Katherine had thought of giving the beads to her husband, but he didn’t believe in the existence of the Well, and said “where the world endeth the clouds begin” [2:296]. Morris must have had more intuitions than he lets on he had. Final battle with the Buggers; Good Guys have “the banner of the fruited tree” [2:298] and are “laughing for the joy of battle and the rage of the oppressed” [2:299]. Ralph’s puss seems to be a secret weapon: when the Bad Guys look at him they start crouching and cowering. Messianic or at least Galahadic imagery. Anyway, he wins the battle, very easily, against great odds, and takes over the kingdom from his mother and father. Note the father-right setup: Ursula takes her rank from her husband: what I meant by the Pamela solution. In the last chapter Ralph goes to see the Prior of St. Austin’s, who’s come up before, and a monk in his priory takes down the story; that’s how we got it.

30.  William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain Frye’s own edition, which he annotated, of Morris’s romance, The Story of the Glittering Plain Which Has Been also Called the Land of Living Men or the Acre of the Undying:

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Hollywood, CA: Newcastle, 1973. Page numbers in square brackets are to the 1892 edition published in Boston by Roberts Brothers. The Story of the Glittering Plain was first published in 1891. References to The Story of the Glittering Plain in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 376 Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 310

God knows what was in Morris’ mind when he wrote these stories. Here we have a hero and heroine in love, about to be married on Midsummer Night, and she gets—guess what—stolen by pirates. Hero, whose name is Hallblithe, challenges a giant of a man who tells him to get into his boat if he ever wants to hear anything more about his girl, so he does, and goes to a place called the Isle of Ransom, a Bad Place. Meanwhile he’s encountered visionary travellers looking for a land. The Isle of Ransom has a precipitous cliff with a hole in it, and boats have to make the hole accurately not to be smashed up. It’s a cave, and it’s unlucky to sleep in it. When he does sleep he dreams of the girlfriend, who comes to him and says maybe she’ll get to the “land,” the glittering plain. It’s called the Land of Living Men. That makes the hero a seeker of the land too, and he meets his host’s father, or grandfather, anyway a very old man who’s heading for that place, because it’s a land of renewed youth. He also says the heroine ain’t there, and the man-giant who brought the hero there, named Puny Fox, was lying. He attends a feast at the Isle of Ransom, and stolen female slaves are exhibited, but his isn’t among them. He notices that the tapestries on the walls feature only the Glittering Plain. So the hero heads for there, along with the old man, who wants to renew his youth there, and find, he says, “myself.” “For this is the land of the Undying King, who is our lord and our gift-giver; and to some he giveth the gift of youth renewed, and life that shall abide here the Gloom of the Gods. But none of us all may come to the Glittering Plain and the King Undying without turning the back for the last time on the Isle of Ransom” [78], etc. So the old man becomes young again, grabs the first dame within reach—they’re abundant and all willing—and becomes a good friend to the hero, though limited by staying where he is. Something of a Lotus Land archetype. Then the hero meets the king, who’s very gracious and friendly, but there’s a complication: he expects the hero to look for, not the heroine he loves (who never enters the story except in the final procession), but the heroine who loves him. The latter is his daughter, who’s fallen in love with his picture, and is in consequence the only unhappy person on the island. The king is called “the Lord of the Treasure of the Sea” [112]. I suppose it could be the undisplaced form of what old Gripus fishes up in Plautus—renewed youth, that is. The hero on the other hand is the only person on the island subject to time.

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So the hero falls out of the king’s favor, who says he will neither help nor hinder; others say he’s chasing a dream; he says he’s seeking the end of dreams, and wants to get out of this country of lies. The old man (now young) and his new girlfriend accompany the hero to the edge of the country, where there’s a warden who helps people in but says nobody can get out. He has to leave his friends, roams around and meets three seekers coming in, and goes back a way with them. He finds it very hard to get out, the country being so desolate he starves (it isn’t really an island, I guess, though it’s certainly on the sea). As guide to the three, he finds a “great cavern in the face of the cliff at the path’s ending” [147], which may be the gate of the Glittering Plain or the gate of death. They get in, but hero hangs around on the edges of his world. Another dream, with the identities of heroine and king’s daughter mixed up. Calypso archetype. Then hero builds him a boat, greatly to the curiosity of his neighbours who of course don’t dream he’s really trying to get away. Noah archetype, or rather the Gilgamesh (i.e. Utnapishtim) one; boat-building plus immortality themes. But I don’t really feel that Morris knew what the hell he was doing. At the same time there’s an odd link between this Glittering Plain place and his Nowhere, a more displaced form of the same kind of thing. He spends exactly a year in the Glittering Plain. Goes back to the Isle of Ransom, finds the Puny Fox again, asks him why he lied to him and made him waste a year of his life. Puny Fox says the Undying King made him do it. But as I read the story, it was a dream that impelled the hero himself to go to the Glittering Plain. Hero wants to fight the Puny Fox, who’s a shifty character but a far more likeable one than the hero. Then there’s another feast in the hall, and these characters, who are always fighting and prefer seeing somebody killed before they eat, arrange a fight between the hero and the Puny Fox which the hero wins, admitting later that it was a put-up job. However, that’s accepted, and then they bring in the heroine, who’s called simply the Hostage, also the Daughter of the Rose, “and his very speech-friend” [204]. This is the word Morris always uses for fuck-bird. Well, she says there’s been a lot of lying around her too, so she can’t believe it’s him without talismanic recognition. He tells her what became of a ring she gave him, or vice versa, and she says O.K., you’re it, but who are these “huge images around us” [206] among whom she’s sat every month for the past year? Image of Proserpine in an underworld of giants. So they go back to their own land (named Cleveland), in the company of Puny Fox, who’s become theoretically the hero’s slave by losing the duel, but who really wants to get away from his fighting race and join a more peaceful community. He’s the vice of the story, and is able to “change his skin” [210], and the story ends with his coming to the Cleveland bunch and presenting them with their hero and heroine. The end of this story is curiously botched up: Morris so often gives the impression of starting something he doesn’t want to finish.

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31.  William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains Frye’s own edition, which he annotated, of Morris’s romance, The Roots of the Mountains Wherein Is Told Somewhat of the Lives of the Men of Burgdale, Their Friends, Their Neighbours, Their Foemen and Their Fellows in Arms: 2 vols., London: Longmans, Green, 1913. Page numbers in square brackets are to the Longman’s, Green 1893 edition. The Roots of the Mountains was first published in 1890. References to The Roots of the Mountains in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 323 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 31 Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 312

Too displaced to be very interesting. The first chapter has a loving description of Morris’ usual cunt-shaped land, large enough to hold three classes of people, the Dalesmen, who are small farmers, the Shepherds, and the Woodlanders, who are very good at carving, in wood. A river called the Weltering Water runs through the land, and the capital town of the Dalesmen, Burgstead, is on a peninsula it runs around. The religion is pagan: not just the two solstices, as usually in Morris: they have harvest and ancestor festivals too. The hero is called Face-ofgod, apparently named after a solar image; he’s also nicknamed Gold-mane. He belongs to the House of the Face, which includes a brother named Hall-Face, a father named Iron-Face, a smith, and a “foster-father” named Stone-Face, who has the function, being a very old man, of giving the undisplaced versions of the experiences the hero meets. The story is an uneasy transitional type of tale between the early House of the Wolfings and the later quest romances: things start that don’t get anywhere, or get cut down to commonplace size. Naturally there’s a mysterious wood behind this world and the hero feels fated (it’s calling him, of course) to go and explore it. What eventually happens is that he falls in love with the heroine, who belongs to the tribe of the Wolf that lives there, and hence out of love with the other heroine, who’s just called the “Bride.” When he first comes into the forest he’s attacked by a man and the heroine pulls him off, otherwise the hero would have been killed right there. It turns out that this man is in love with the Bride, and thinks the hero doesn’t appreciate her, so we get the usual symmetrical business. On the way the hero meets three girls in their shifts, or kirtles, or something, although it’s a cold morning—this doesn’t get anywhere, except to make it obvious that all girls love the hero. The Bride “was a woman born to be the ransom of her Folk” [17]. Well, the Wolf tribe include a very attractive girl called Bow-may, who’s a dead shot with a bow, but nothing comes of Stone-Face’s “And there abide the ghosts of those that may not rest; and there wander the dwarfs and the moun-

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tain-dwellers, the dealers in marvels, the givers of gifts that destroy Houses; the forgers of the curse that clingeth and the murder that flitteth to and fro. There moreover are the lairs of Wights in the shapes of women, that draw a young man’s heart out of his body, and fill up the empty place with desire never to be satisfied” [22]—tain’t nothin’ like that. At the same time when the hero meets the heroine “she seemed as aweful as a Goddess; and they withal dealing with him as father and mother deal with a wayward child” [40]. Nope, just guys. “For now he doubted whether the other folk were aught save shows and shadows, and she the Goddess who had fashioned them out of nothing for his bewilderment, presently to return to nothing” [51]. Nope, tee-hee. So there’s really nothing in the story except the growing apocalyptic war between the Goodies and the Baddies. The Dalesmen and their neighbours are presented as an upright, fair-dealing, courageous bunch of people who have a democratic society: Morris’ motto is always the 1066 one: Witgemot is Damgudthyng. They spend a lot of time having Things, and making it clear that they’re anarchist saints, combining discipline with their own choice of leaders. It’s only recently freed slaves who aren’t amenable to discipline, and of course the fact that some of them at least are carvers indicates that they belong to Morris’ buried free and equal community. Eventually there’s an alliance made between the three peoples of the main setting and the Wolf woodsmen of the forest behind. The latter have been driven out of their rightful country by the villains, who are called the Dusky Men. These latter have a slave community: they tend to exterminate males and make slaves of the women, and—well, no, they make slaves of both. Women-whipping fantasies come into this story too, but less so than the quest ones. Their religion is Aztec human sacrifice, of course, so they’re a thoroughly bad lot. The good people say they’re descended from the Gods, and call themselves the Kindred. The place from which the Wolf people have been expelled is called the Shadowy vale, and it’s reached as usual by a cave. Behind are great ice-peaks, “the wall of the world” (116) [102]. As in Scott’s Pirate, hero and heroine plight their troth (I think that’s it) at the doom-ring of stones. It’s impossible not to remember the opening chapter of Mackail and the boy Morris prancing around in a toy suit of armor, and the self-indulgent quality of these fantasies does put one off rather. Still, the extraction of the definitively good and bad societies out of the romance world is undisplaced. “This hand that lieth in thine is the hand of a wilful woman, who desireth a man, and would keep him for her speech-friend.” The Dusky Men, alias wogs, are forming a conspiracy to attack the Dalesmen. There’s a lot about true blood and people growing soft with ease and the like—I suppose Morris is really capturing the fascist myth for his own very different purposes. He did after all understand something about fascism, as News from Nowhere shows. Stone Face (cf. p. 88) says “one tale belike shall be knit up with the

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others, as it fareth with the figures that come one after other on the weaver’s cloth; though one maketh not the other, yet one cometh of the other” (187) [164]. A number of fugitive slaves from the wogs are picked up, and one man says “great will be the gain to us if we become so like the Gods that we may deliver the poor from misery” [198]—another hint of the real meaning of the descent from the Gods theme (224). Slavery is something new to the hero, “For here was he brought face to face with the Sorrow of the Earth, whereof he had known nought heretofore, save it might be as a tale in a minstrel’s song” (236) [208]. The wogs get so much pleasure from others’ misery “that they doubted if they were men or trolls” (239) [211]. Volume II I don’t need to summarize in much detail: it’s almost entirely the big assault on the wogs, like the finale of Lorna Doone. A few parenthetical allusions—the wood of the wolf-folk called the “Land of Dreams” by hero’s father, and the description of the Dalesmen: “so glad were they, and so friendly, that you might rather have deemed that this was the land whereof tales tell, wherein people die not, but live for ever, without growing any older than when they first come thither, unless they be born into the land itself, and then they grow into fair manhood, and so abide” [239]. Link with the Glittering Plain story, I suppose, only less of a lotus land. They carry weapons, not because they’re quarrelsome, but as a symbol of freedom. Morris tries hard to use aristocratic symbols as symbols of genuine fraternity. Some winter-slavery and spring-freedom imagery. “The very Gods, though they slay me, cannot unmake my life that has been” [243]. Song of four girls representing the seasons, 55. Then they distribute liquor—it’s called the Holy Play. The heroine is called the Sun-beam, which matches the hero’s solar names. She says now he’s gonna marry her he’s the God, not the other way round. Interesting that women fight beside men in this crusade, though Morris says they boast more than the men do. Religion of Goodies focuses on their Folk-mote, which Morris lingers over: one of its features is that you pay fines for breaches of the peace, and that makes “folk sackless” and is an “atonement.” Restoration of innocence is in contrast to the sacrificial cult of the wogs. Curious that Morris clings so closely to the seeded list of romance: hero is the No. 1 man, so he’s gotta have the No. 1 woman, and the No. 2 woman, the Bride, goes to the No. 2 man, who incidentally is Sun-beam’s brother. Well, they’re planning an all-out assault on the wogs in their centre at Shadowy Vale, although they’re greatly outnumbered, because otherwise they might disperse in the woods, and only Goodies can be allowed to become guerrillas. The Bride goes to battle with the general idea of getting herself killed, but of course doesn’t succeed. They fall on the wogs just as they’re doing the opposite of a Damgudthyng: namely pushing a large number of naked white-skinned slaves, male and female, toward the stake to be burned alive as sacrifices to a God they dassent cheat—i.e., these slaves are the best they have, though they expect

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to get more from their planned raid on the Dale. The Goodies get their archers to shoot first, then set fire to the stake, then rush the wogs, and eventually gain possession of the Folk-mote building, which of course was originally theirs, or at least the Wolf people’s. It’s defiled, the wogs being dirty, and the embalmed bodies of their own four chieftains, murdered in the original raid, hang from the ceiling. One of them is called Hostage of the Earth, dunno why: his shield is painted “with the green world circled with the worm of the sea” [367]. After the victory troth is plighted again, with a gold ring of the God of the Face, “who is akin to the God of the Earth, as we all be” [380]. This book keeps bursting into song: the later ones don’t so much. Every time Stone-Face speaks he says something undisplaced (200); he’s a lightning-rod. Conversate between hero and Bride: “Belike the sundering came because we were so sure, and had no defense against the wearing of the days; even as it fareth with a folk that hath no foes” [397]. At Midsummer they hold something called a Maiden Ward, meaning apparently a general marriage. Five hundred fucking pages, but eventually the wogs are buggered and the principals bedded.

32.  William Morris, The Sundering Flood Frye’s own editions of The Sundering Flood: New York: Longmans, Green, 1898, and New York: Ballantine Books, 1973. He annotated the latter. Page numbers in square brackets refer to the Wildside Press edition (Holicong, PA, 2001). The Sundering Flood was first published in 1897. References to The Sundering Flood in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 238, 323 Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 310, 312

The last one, and to some extent the most serious. We start with the river, a swift “force” as Morris calls it, which divides the east from the west, though in one place it’s narrow enough to talk across. In all these romances the title comes from the setting, and that’s described first: people grow out of the landscape. In this tale the religion is nominally Christian, and is said to be (I mean the tale is) written in a monastery. But even so the only festivals are Yule and Midsummer, the latter featuring games like “trundle the fire-wheel” [7]. The society is not structured, but seems anarchic even for Morris: there are no administrative rulers of any kind, so if someone walks into a house and decides to make slaves of the inhabitants he can do it if they can’t fight him. Hero grows up obviously destined to be a hero: name of Osberne. His father and mother died immediately after he was born and he’s brought up by his

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grandfather. Funny that no hero of romance is allowed to have his own parents. East and West Dalers hold a “cloven mote” [28] on both sides of the river. Dwarfs, real ones, which means genuinely imaginary ones, not fake ones like the imaginary ones in The Roots of the Mountains, inhabit the landscape, and Osberne is a dwarf’s friend. As a child he has an experience with one, who cuts his own head off and then sticks it on again, giving Osberne the knife. Osberne is also a poet, seized periodically by inspiration. Wolves harry the sheepfold: Osberne goes out, still a child, and kills them. Archetype of Hercules and the snakes. Like the young Percival, he meets a knight in armor, but this knight, who gives him three arrows he can’t miss with, is a mysterious figure, probably the ancestor of “Strider” in Tolkien. “My very name I may not tell thee, for thy tongue has no word for it, but now and when we meet again thou mayst call me Steelhead” [38–9]. The country is so sparsely inhabited the hero grows up in a Tempest world where you can count the number of people you see. The narrowest part of the river has a cave on the other side, a dwarf’s cave, and from there the heroine appears. Name of Elfhild. She’s dressed in blue, and he (as he normally is) in red; she’s also a golden blonde, and of course they’re in love from the start. She says “Now are we as near to each other as we may be today; yea for many days, or it may be for all our lives long: so now let us talk” [46]. Very Freudian situation. They’re both thirteen, he a month older. “My father and mother are dead, so that my father I never saw, and now I dwell with my two aunts, and they be both older than was my mother” [47]. He thinks she’s a Fairy because she comes out of the cave; it belongs to the Dwarfs but they don’t mind her, and in fact have given her a pipe to call her sheep with. The sheep dance too—Orpheus imagery in this Eros world. She needs it, as she’d get spanked if she didn’t bring the sheep back. They want to exchange presents, though she’s afraid “lest the Sundering Flood devour it” [56]—several dragon touches in the imagery of the river. He shoots a penny for her lover with an arrow: very Freudian passage indicating it’s a displaced fuck, p. 41. Even the child of the union is indicated by the image of the penny. “At such times the Sundering Flood seemed to him like the coils of a deadly serpent which was strangling the life out of him,” p. 44 [65]. Steelhead comes back, disguised as a beggar, and gives him his sword, Broadcleaver, which cannot be drawn without having a life. This means he can’t draw it except in a righteous cause. Steelhead then strips him and paws him all over. “Thus then have I done to thee to take the place of a father to thee, I who am of the warriors of while agone” [76]. This makes Osberne feel “as though the earth were a new made for him” [77]. Osberne’s grandfather has a sulky hired man named Surly John, with whom he’s already had a fight. In revenge, John brings a bully named Hardcastle in to take the place over and make them slaves, waiting on him. Osberne tries hard to

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get out of a fight, but realizes this is his sword’s first job, so he kills Hardcastle, who dies with a curious dignity: “the fey man,” Osberne’s song calls him. He and Elfhild are still children, but they’re growing fast, and she’s already shy about dancing in front of him. (Shows her legs, see.) Well, a war comes up: a local Baron is exploiting the local town, and a knight is raising forces to defend the town’s traditional rights: there’s a good deal in this book about the freedom of a city vs. the brigandage of an aristocracy. Osberne is made captain of the dalesmen, despite his youth, and takes leave of Elfhild, remarking that he doesn’t see how the hell he’s ever going to get hold of her unless he does something that will outflank the Sundering Flood. Meanwhile he’s got a new hired man, called Stephen the Eater, who’s all right, and he’s accompanied by him as his squire. Stephen develops a scheme to kidnap the Baron; it comes off, and peace is made. Goes back to Elfhild (one of her old women, the one who did most of the spanking, is dead), and she tells him of what turns out to be a cruising slave-grabber. “He asked her also if they loved their bairns and children well, and also if they had any custom thereabout of casting any of their women-children forth, if it happened to be their fortune to have many daughters and a little meat” [168]—the answer’s Haro, meaning hell, no. Luckily Elfhild has acquired a new protector, an old woman living with them who knows spells to cast, just in time, as “he took off his outer raiment, gat his bare whittle in one hand, and laid the other on the door” [170]. “Whittle” is Morris’ idiotic word for dagger, used throughout the book, though “tool” would have been more expressive. This bird is followed up by a slave-raid in the West Dale, which is dispersed, with the help of some arrow-shooting from the East Dalers, but in the course of it Elfhild and her new guardian disappear. Chapter 34 is the ow-oo chapter; some eloquence. Osberne consults Steelhead, who says (127) “the only way to bridge the Sundering Flood is for one of you, or both, to wander wide in the world.” Osberne decides to go “birdalone,” another silly word that recurs in The Water of the Wondrous Isles. Curious dialogue at end: Osberne says “And that house whereto thou art now going, shall I ever see thee there?” [199]. Steelhead says “Surely I deem that thou shalt; and yet most surely not till thine earthly days are over” [199]. Next comes Midsummer, with “the Trundling of the Fiery Wheel, and the Kindling of the Bale, and the Leaping through the Fire”—the local church is called Allhallows, I suppose to emphasize the close connection with the original feast of the dead. Then he sets out on his errant life, saying “I go to seek a life which will lead me back to Wethermel” (the place he lives in). Joins another knight named Godrick, who’s engaged in the same type of struggle against aristocratic brigandage. Godrick thinks he’s pretty young, but “many a man lies hid within himself.” The spearhead of the revolutionary movement Godrick is organizing, it’s amusing to note, is “the gilds of the Lesser Crafts and the husbandmen and simple mariners” [213], and the Lesser Crafts play a prominent

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role in what happens. Osborne quizzes Godrick quite hard about the justice of his cause, and Godrick, somewhat exasperated answers his questions and says “Now then, deemest thou me so evil a lord? Or dost thou deem thee meet for nought save the host of heaven and to be a sergeant of the blessed Michael himself? May he help and save us?” Osberne’s answer is curious: he says “That may come to pass, lord, one day.” So he’s called the Red Lad and signed on. “So yeomanly and free seemed all about him” [221]. Morris’ social sentiments are certainly lower-middle class and pre-Marxist: the cities fighting for their charters against the barons, the independent farmers and the artisans, are his heroes. The Baddies are called the Black Skinners and the Red Skinners: the former are worse, I forget just why: more sadist, I think. Well, they get down to the mouth of the river, where the big city is—there’s a map that goes with this country, for the first time in Morris. This is the Sundering Flood’s arse-hole, so to speak. Godrick and Osberne throw out the king, Godrick becomes “Burgreve” of the city, which changes to a republic and thinks the change is very nice. Osberne then takes leave of Godrick and resumes his quest to find Elfhild. He’s beguiled by felons and nearly killed: Steelhead turns up and carries him off to a hermit. The hermit seems a decent enough guy, and says “I think to heal him with the help of the Holy Saints.” Steelhead says “Thou hast in thy mouth, my friend, a deal of holiness that I know nought of.” Then the hermit says God keep you and Steelhead says “Well, we will not contend about it, but I look to it to keep myself” [280]. Sounds as though the hermit were treacherous, but no: it’s just Morris on his deathbed (practically) apologizing to himself for having made very oblique remarks indicating that he could see a little way past death. Anyway, Osberne has too damn many trump cards, even for his author’s Parsifal. He recovers in six weeks, and this time he’s got hold of by Elfhild’s protectress, who brings him to see her. She’s in charge of the people who abducted her, of course, but the magic sword makes short work of them. “And he cried out: ‘O my sweet, where is now the Sundering Flood?’ [287]. And there they were in each other’s arms, as though the long years had never been.” Definitely there are echoes. There follows the cognitio of the Carline—her account of what happened to Elfhild in between. She tried to comfort the girl in her loneliness at first: “she would, as it were, tell stories of how it would betide that at last they should meet, both grown old, and kiss once, and so walk hand in hand into the Paradise of the Blessed, there to grow young again amidst the undying spring” [292]. Elfhild is protected by a decent guy called the Blue Knight, who’d like her, but reconciles himself to no dice, and is on the wrong side in the Godrick war. He’s killed, and as Elfhild and her protectress think his mother will take it out on them, they flee to the convent of the Grey Sisters. (The Blue Knight had actually bought her out of slavery.) They’re kidnapped again by slave traders—some glints of the

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Pardoner’s Tale in the background—but the carline’s wizardry gets them out. So Osberne and Elfhild are together: they go back to his home, and go to their old meeting-place, only on the same side of the river. A dwarf in the cave indicates that he wants his pipe back, and Osberne throws it across: it falls short, but the dwarf gets it anyway. End of Orpheus Phase 2. Final scenes indicate that Godrick has lost his dominions and is on the run again—not very clear just what is happening. Anyway, Osberne lives happily with Elfhild and Steelhead—the last doesn’t get any older. Godrick won’t let Osberne fight for him again, because he sees that Osberne will die if he will, and that’s tough for anybody who’s got to the lived-happily-ever-after chapter.

33.  George MacDonald, Phantastes Frye’s three editions of Phantastes, all of which he annotated: Boston: D. Lothrop, n.d.; London: Dent, 1940; and Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964. Page references in square brackets are to the Eerdmans edition. Phantastes was first published in 1858. References to Phantastes in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 168, 296 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 41 Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, CW 5: 198, 350 Words with Power, 287; CW 26: 245 The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 142

This represents I suppose the second level of sentimental romance, where one has to think less about the narrative sequence and the kind of landscape implied by the imagery and think more about the organizing ideas. Of course these come from the structure, if they’re authentic, but most romancers, including MacDonald, are allegorists to a greater or less degree, and allegory, even if it doesn’t alter the narrative and imagery patterns the author would have put there anyway, can certainly bugger things up. Well, the hero of this story is called Anodos, though Kathodos64 would have been more accurate. He’s twenty-one, his father evidently dead, and he’s standing in front of his secretary—a piece of furniture, not a female. He finds a secret drawer and a tiny woman steps out. She becomes normal size, because she says he has silly ideas about smallness; she’s 237 years old; she’s his grandmother. His mother died when he was a baby; his father’s personal history was unknown to him. Wash water of his pitcher overflows on the carpet; he descends into a submarine world which is fairyland (his grandmother had said he was going there). He should have followed the stream, but doesn’t, and meets a woman who tells

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him which trees are safe and which not—the Ash and Alder, male and female respectively, are Bad. Night is day in fairyland; our moon is its sun; the moon is a mirror. He stays with the woman and reads a romance about Percival and Galahad; the former enters the story. The little people we call fairies are the children of the flower-fairies, who use flowers as houses, leaving them as soon as the flowers start to die. In fairyland everything shines by “an internal, peculiar light, proceeding from each, and not reflected from a common source of light as in the daytime” [32]. Trees glow with a phosphorescent light: “You could trace the very course of the great roots in the earth by the faint light that came through” [34]. “I constantly imagined that forms were visible in all directions except that to which my gaze was turned, and that they only became invisible . . . the moment my looks were directed towards them” [34]. The ash chases him; in this story various incarnations of Mamma turn up to save the hero, dry his tears, and the like: this time it’s a beech-tree, who expects some day to grow into a woman. I bet he’s making all this up. Well, there’s the inevitable cave in the rock, with a beautiful statue or relief or something—yes, bas-relief, subject Pygmalion’s statue. He pries off the moss and sees his own anima figure: “more near the face that had been born with me in my soul, than anything I had seen before in nature or art” (43) [45]. He compares her to a great many archetypes (43), which is significant in itself. Finally Orpheus. Sits down by her “antenatal tomb” [45] (this is in quotes but he doesn’t say what from) and sings at her. She busts loose and buggers off— extraordinary how persistent this Pygmalion theme is in romance. Next Anodos meets Percival, who also warns him of the ash; then he thinks he hears the maiden he’s set free, and she takes him to her grotto and tells him stories. “I listened till she and I were blended with the tale; till she and I were the whole history” [53]. Well, she’s the alder, a treacherous female; she takes away the charm the beech tree had given him, so the ash is all set to eat him or something when Percival starts whacking the original ash with an axe. Another mamma turns up, human this time, married to a genial farmer who doesn’t believe in any of that stuff. She however gives him a brilliant exposition of the siren mentality (59), and he goes on his way. He’s been warned, even by the skeptical farmer, of danger from an ogre-lady, but of course the first thing he does is fall over her: she’s in a room later called the Church of Darkness, and is reading aloud from a scripture in praise of darkness. He wants to open a door; she tells him he’d better not; he does of course—God, he’s a stupid bastard—and in walks his Shadow, which sticks to him practically for the rest of the story. She says “Everybody’s shadow is ranging up and down looking for him” [64]. So now he’s stuck with that; it blights everything in sight and breaks a little girl’s “globe.” She says later she was probably better off without it: the allegory has something to do with experience vs. the imaginary: I’d say the globe was the Logos vision, the toy the Middle Ages hated so to give up, but I suppose that won’t do.

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Epigraph to chapter x (80) a verse, probably his, about a tiny rivulet running from here to Eden, in contrast to the four rivers coming the other way. Here he’s in a locus amoenus with red and white flowers, finds a stream and a little boat, and gets in. There follows an extraordinary passage about the magic of mirrors, indicating that here we’re going through one. “All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass” [73]. There follows a reference to the inset tale which also follows, later. Memories of past pain are beautiful, because mirrored. The boat takes him to a labyrinthine palace, where he wanders a long time and finally finds a door labelled with his own name. Only it calls him Sir Anodos. It leads him to his own room with the water spilled on the carpet, only he’s still in the palace. End of first individuation cycle. He’s very happy in this Beulah palace (silver is preferred to gold), and spends most of his time reading in the library. His books being dream books, he’s instantly identified with these subjects. He takes a bath in a swimming pool, and “It clothed me as with a new sense and its object both in one” [79]. There are a lot of people around, but they don’t see him. The first story he reads and gets identified with talks about the world of the unborn, i.e., the world in which people die in order to become babies in our world. This leads him to talk about “the community of the centre of all creation” and the “intermundane relationships” [82] there must be if there are different worlds. “The blank, which is only a forgotten life, lying behind the consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an undeveloped life, lying before it, may be full of mysterious revelations of other connexions with the worlds around us, than those of science and poetry” [83]. What this says to me is important in the structure of romance: everybody is born with a displaced identity, hence the primary myth is the alienation myth distorted in the Biblical account of the Fall. He goes on to describe a Micronesian world in which girls go for walks and find babies under trees. In this world the waters reflect nothing, “a visible shadow of oblivion” [86], but the sky reflects everything beneath it. The men have arms, the women only wings—curious how this fantasy recurs: I think naturally of Peter Wilkins.65 This unborn world comes into the children’s’ books too. Next comes a story I’m sure is translated from Hoffmann, and I think I’ve read it before.66 Poor student priding himself on his poverty, “what will not a man pride himself upon, when he cannot get rid of it?” [90]. Buys a mirror; an animafigure turns up in the mirror. The story continues the magic-mirror theme, an emblem of art, which, “appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child” [94]. Well, the lady is imprisoned in the mirror: the hero, whose name is Cosmo, fixes up his own room despite his poverty to give her nicer surroundings, but there they are, symbols of couples who never enter each other, “and part at last, with but the vaguest notion of the universe on the borders of which

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they have been hovering for years” [99]. Note the identity of this relationship to that of the sundering flood in Morris. He has magic books, and uses them to call the real lady to him, but his love is not pure enough to let her go. However, he does eventually set her free, although it sounds as though he got killed by a rival in a duel: anyway, he dies at the moment they’re united. Rather a commonplace story of its type, but the mirror theme, connecting as it does with Blake’s crystal cabinet, needs a lot of thinking about. We go on (the epigraph to the next chapter, xiv, is significantly from The Winter’s Tale) to a room full of statues, who dance when he’s not looking, more or less. Sign saying don’t touch: please do not pat the statues on the ass. There’s one statue that’s his, and it’s invisible. He waits for inspiration, and when it comes he sings to her a song about her anatomy, starting with her feet. As he sings, the part he’s describing comes into view, “stars of the inward firmament” [114]. He gets past her “holy mystery” and up to her head, leaving her with a head of hair. Allegory of creativity, of course, also of Orpheus and Eurydice archetype. Tries to grab her (Crystal Cabinet again), but she runs off screaming he shouldn’t have touched her and should have sung to her. Ungrateful damn bitch. The result is that the palace disappears and he makes a second descent, this time to the demonic world. This takes him down a spiral staircase to a world where he’s free of the sun, which in his present mood he hates. He’s assaulted by gnomes (he calls them kobolds), the gibbering part of consciousness, telling him she’s gone off with a better man. He gets rid of them by saying spontaneously that if he’s a better man he can have her. An old woman who mocks him and assumes the appearance of a beautiful siren for an instant––Duessa figure. “Sad sepulchral illumination” [125]. I dreamt I was left with marble balls. So he goes on in his demonic world, plodding through a gradually enclosing tunnel which “recalled terrible dreams of childhood” [126]. Several suggestions that Fairyland is a purgatory he has to get through, and there are places where all he can do is plod. Comes out in daylight on the shore of a wintry sea, with “hopeless waves” [127] falling on the shore; dead stars and curtain of cloud. It’s about time for mamma to turn up again (160); what does turn up is another boat. As usual, oarless and relatively sober, this being an English story, and by a clergyman at that—otherwise there are some close connexions with the Rimbaud poem.67 “Vaguely revealed beneath the wave, I floated above my whole Past” [128]. Finishes up at an island. Here’s mamma, inside a cottage, calling him a poor child and feeding him with a spoon. Sings ballads to him, one reproduced about a Sir Aglovaile who loves a female ghost, in direct counterpoint to the PygmalionEurydice theme. There are four doors to this cottage, one to each point of the compass. She gives him a mark by which he’ll recognize his way back. The first door takes him into a nostalgic recall of his own childhood, climaxed by a memory of

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his brother drowning before they’d made up a childish quarrel. Then the door of Sighs (the allegory is beginning to creak slightly), where he sees and overhears his lady love, now in the arms of the Percival who’s already rescued the hero. She says that Anodos twice awakened her from an enchantment, so she feels grateful, but he was only her moon; Percival is her sun. “Then they disappeared through a door which closed behind them” [140]. The parallel with a child realizing that daddy’s ganna fuck mamma is very close; so is the constant effort at sublimating the jealousy by recognizing that Percival is the better man. They assign Anodos to a second-class category: “There was something noble in him, but it was a nobleness of thought, and not of deed” [139]. Parallel also with the Cosmo story. Third door is door of dismay, where he sees these parental figures and himself in a tomb in a church. Evidently the three doors are the three dimensions of time, past, present, and future, like the ghosts of Christmas in Dickens. There’s a fourth door, called the Timeless and he’s not supposed to go through there, but of course the stupid bastard does: he has no notion of what he sees there, but mamma has to go to rescue him, and because she does so the waters around her island start flooding. She has enough “fuel” to keep them away until they recede again in a hundred years (I don’t get any of this), and pushes him out of his sweaty little nest. The next episode finds him made the third of a group of brothers, the other two forging a sword for clearing out three giants who are imprisoning people and laying waste the countryside. They’ve been told to wait for Anodos by mamma. Elder brother has a girlfriend and younger one is bound up with his papa, an aged impotent king type. So far as I can see, the other two brothers are memory and judgment, Anodos having the role of Phantastes. So he’s the poet (Fletcher’s arrangement, not Spenser’s; though I suppose the giants may have connexions with the Sans brothers in The Faerie Queene, book 1). He sings them songs, not very comforting ones, as their death in the approaching conflict seems certain; the giants do turn up and Anados is the only survivor of the six. Still stuck with his Shadow, though. “I had but aided in carrying out the thought born in their brain” [156]. Goes to the old king, is knighted (his room in the palace was labelled Sir Anodos); is feted by the court, and gets a swelled head. Goes out again, meets a knight blocking his way who turns out to be his shadow. Something inside him says fight him or else, but he or elses. So the “knight” shuts him into a lonely tower with nothing in it except him. Theme of self-imprisonment, like Giant Despair in Bunyan where Christian has a key; or like Orgoglio in Spenser who’s a bag of wind. Mamma sings to him and he opens the door, not knowing why he didn’t do so before. Actually the singer is the girl whose “globe” he broke earlier––as I say, I’d make it the Logos vision, but I don’t know what MacDonald makes it. She leaves him, he takes off his armour, as he’s finally identified himself: he’s not good enough to be a knight, but should be a

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squire. This realization is a rebirth; there have to be further rebirths, but they’re outside this story. “Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul” (212) [165]. Well, he becomes Percival’s squire, who’s just rescued a child from a wolf or something. A rather silly inset tale about a little girl gathering wings to fly away and getting walked over by wooden dummies––allegory of innocence and the wrong kind of experience, but as wooden as most of the characters. Percival can only deal with them by standing them upside down. Final scene is the inevitable one of human sacrifice, which they come upon by accident. A boy and a girl are all set to be sacrificed; Percival, who doesn’t understand evil, thinks it’s a scene of genuine religion; Anodos realizes it ain’t. He (Anodos) disguises himself as one of the worshipers, sneaks up, tears off the idol set up at the centre of the doings, and that “revealed a great hole in the throne, . . . going down apparently a great way” [176]. At the bottom is a huge wolf: Anodos grapples with it and strangles it, but is killed himself in the process. So he’s dead, and overhears Percival and the lady saying he died well. But his function is evidently to round off the sacrificial climax. He has a good time floating around as a dead ghost, living in primroses and the like; but the instant he feels solicitous about the human dilemma he reincarnates (233). Wakes up in his own room, having spilt water on the carpet; has been out of commission for 21 days; feels like 21 years. “Thus I, who set out to find my Ideal, came back rejoicing that I had lost my Shadow” [182]—I suppose the wolf was it. The final suggestion, considerably displaced, is that maybe Anodos will some day be able to screw his mother after all.

34. George MacDonald, Essay on the Imagination The edition Frye used was most likely A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespere, enlarged ed. (London: Samson Low Marston & Co., 1893). The page numbers in square brackets are to this edition. The essay was first published in 1882.

Education is not for adjustment: “its end is a noble unrest” [1]. General Schopenhauer pattern I’ve found in all the Romantics: enlightenment on top; imagination suppressed underneath; revolutionary optimism about this, as in most Romantics. I suppose only people like James Mill would disagree. Example of Lady Macbeth: “Thus her long down-trodden imagination rose and took vengeance” [32]. Shelley too, of course; also the hard facts school scene in Hard Times. A lot of God-building, of the type one would expect from a nineteenth‑century clergyman:68 creation belongs only to God; imagination echoes it second-hand, more or

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less as in Coleridge. Because of this “a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind” [4]. Cf. Rimbaud’s Je est un autre.69 Correspondence: “the world around him is an outward figuration of the condition of his mind” [5]. Invention of language poetic, words being radically metaphorical. “For the world is––allow us the homely figure—the human being turned inside out” [9]. Only “the uncultivated imagination that will amuse itself where it ought to worship and work” [12]. Prophecy is the perfect working of the historical imagination––examples from death-scenes in Shakespeare like Hotspur’s. “Nowhere can the imagination be more healthily and rewardingly occupied than in endeavouring to construct the life of an individual out of the fragments which are all that can reach us of the history of even the noblest of our race. How this will apply to the reading of the gospel story we leave to the earnest thought of our readers” [18]. Material world informed by the thought. The human meaning of the snowdrop or daisy. Candle of the Lord image applied to imagination. “We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are in vain, if only they be large enough” [28]. “A wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God” [28]. Poetry, probably his, about Imaginative Faith, which goes “In progress towards the fount of love” [30]. Imagination and common sense work together; end of imagination is harmony, being the reflex of the creation; true microcosm. Remarkable essay: there are others in the book70 I’ve not yet read, including one on Individual Development, on education of children, which says “What can the world be to him who lives for thought, if there be no supreme and perfect Thought,—none but such poor struggles after thought as he finds in himself?” [60]. Essay on Shakespeare with two things I need. “But, besides the Bible, every nation has a Bible, or at least an Old Testament, in its own history” [83]. Goes in very easily. “When Shakspere was about thirty-two, Sir Walter Raleigh published his glowing account of Guiana, which instantly provided the English mind with an earthly paradise or fairy land” [89]. Cf. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out.

35.  George MacDonald, Lilith Frye’s edition of Lilith, which he annotated, published along with Phantastes: Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964. The page numbers that Frye gives in parentheses are to this edition. Lilith was first published in 1895. References to Lilith in Frye’s published works: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 188 The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 97–8, 259 Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, CW 13:    455

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Begins with hero who lost both parents in childhood. As in Phantastes, we start with haunted furniture, this time a library, also a mysterious portrait. Mysterious librarian named Raven, popularly regarded as the devil. Mirror in garret: hero steps through it into another world. Talks to a raven who’s of course the old librarian: says he didn’t see any doors; raven says all the doors you see are doors in; this one was out. Damn raven keeps shifting back and forth from bird to old man with a tail-coat (cf. the puns on raven in the Morris Glittering Plain story). He’s in some sort of wood, but eventually finds himself back in his garret, with a “winding stair” and a “spiral” (197). More conversations: raven digs up worms, throws them into the air, and they became butterflies. A man is as free as he chooses to make himself; no one can make you do things against your will— when you have a will. That sort of thing. Asked if he sees that old hawthorn, he says I see a gnarled old man, with a great white head. This is 1895, so there’s lots of time for him to have read Blake. “All live things were thoughts to begin with” (206). “The business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise (207). Raven turns into Adam, and his wife is Eve. They’re hospital wardens now, with people lying asleep. Everyone has a beast-self, birdself, even tree and crystal self, all to get together. The sleepers are naturally very calm: “in your world he {sexton} lays huge stones on them, as if to keep them down” (215). Hero worries about space on the angels and pin model (215). Raven points to couch waiting for hero: cf. Thel’s grave-plot. Hero gets back home and reads his father’s manuscript, indicating father had same experience with Raven. “Home is ever so far away in the palm of your hand”: a good deal of discussion of the “where is here” type. “The universe is a riddle trying to get out” (226). Author’s comment: he can present his experiences only in “the modes in which they affected me—not the things themselves, but the feelings they woke in me” (227). Very Mallarmé-ish. Even then he can only present one “phase” of significance, “or one concentric sphere of a graduated embodiment.” Uncertain identity. Well, the hallucinations, as we might call them, begin in chapter x, in a world of hideous monsters controlled by the moon. There are several moons in this world. The atmosphere is very like de Nerval. Allegorical vision of a battle of “spectres,” i.e., opinions, with a glimpse of Lilith, who’s encouraging the battle, like Vala: “Ye are men: slay one another.” Then he goes cute, as he so often does, and we’re with the Little Ones, tiny childlike people living alongside very stupid giants. The giants catch and enslave the hero, who remains with them partly to defend the little ones. Giants and dwarfs in lower world. A little girl older and bigger than the others, named Lona, becomes the heroine later on. Some of the little ones do grow into giants, which is a perversion, because they get stupid. If only she {Lona} would teach me to grow the other way, says hero—several indications of a double-gyre symbolism. Hero finally gets clear of giants and “saw above me

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constellations unknown to my former world” (251): cf. Dante’s Purgatorio. Meets a female later called Mara, who’s Good. She’s later identified with the Magdalen, so she ain’t the Church or the Virgin Mary; her name of course means bitterness, and I think she’s the power of repentance. Hero’s name is Vane: it “whirls about” on his forehead. The Little Ones eat fruit but don’t have any water, though hero can hear water gurgling below. He stays with her, unchaperoned: tries to take bread for his journey, but it petrifies over night: cf. manna. She’s heavily veiled and keeps turning into cats and leopards and things. He’s on his way to a town called Bulika, but it’s not explained why he wants to go there. Very curious scene of watching a ballroom full of dancing skeletons. “But what mattered where while everywhere was the same as nowhere! I had not yet, by doing something in it, made anywhere into a place! I was not yet alive; I was only dreaming I lived! I was but a consciousness with an outlook!” (261). Too many of these exclamation points. Hell is “a bare existence never going out of itself.” Danse macabre: vision of still living woman; others stare at her, “frozen to a new death by the vision of a life that killed,” but console themselves by saying Thou also wilt soon become weak as we. King of Babylon in hell. Chapel perilous-wind blows out every light. Whoever would cross the threshold of any world must leave fear behind him (266). The next chapter is a grisly quarrel between a lord and a lady, both dead and skeletons, only he’s worse off because his leg bone keeps coming off. She has some affection for him, but he isn’t capable of much: however, they’re bound together in the same hell. He says “Where are we? Locality is the question! To be or not to be, is not the question!” Hero and Raven discuss them: clear that for MacDonald, as for all people not actually driven crazy, there’s no hell, only purgatory. Raven says even the bitching helps, “for every grain of truthfulness adds a fibre to the show of their humanity. Nothing but truth can appear; and whatever is must seem.” (272). Then hero discovers the naked body of Lilith, not quite a skeleton like the others but the next thing to it. Wonder how many heroines first appear stark naked—there’s a silly story of Baron Corvo, of course. Well, the hero, not realizing what he’s doing, spends months trying to force a little food down her, make clothes for her, and generally bring her to life. Eventually she gets to the point of being able to suck his blood, whereupon she’s all right: it takes some time for him to realize that she’s a vampire. Her left hand is continually shut, grasping something: cf. Gwendolen in Blake’s Jerusalem. “To be enough for himself, a being must be an eternal, self-existent worm” (279). When she comes to life she’s bitchy: compelling her to live and putting her to shame are the two deadliest insults. Viper in bzoom;71 Blake’s female will. His feelings for her are pretty exasperating, as he insists on trying to save and protect and defend and stuff. Well, Bulika. It’s a town where everybody’s rich, because if you’re poor people

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forget about you. Strangers can’t stay there, because the Bulikans are a pure race and anybody else defiles them. Lilith is the princess of this grisly town, and lives on their babies. Hero meets a woman who’s defended her baby against Lilith, tries to make friends with her, and goes home with her to Bulika, but the woman’s been so indoctrinated she can’t after all let him into the house, so he has to sleep outside the door. Meanwhile we get several fights between a white and a spotted leopardess, former being Mara and latter Lilith. “All was so still that sleep seemed to interpenetrate the structure, causing the very moonlight to look discordantly awake” (300). Lilith’s palace is red, white and black. Some rather confused action, in which Lilith tries to exploit the hero’s idiotic love for her; it becomes clear that she’s out to destroy the Little Ones, or at least use them for her peculiar diet. When Lilith turns from a spotted leopardess back into a person the spots gather into her eyes and disappear. “I knew that in the black ellipsoid I had been in the brain of the princess” (313). Haven’t the context, but the Red King’s dream seems involved. She wants him to climb a tree to get a blossom for her that will heal her scratches (fight with Mara), so the fool climbs it and wakes up in the fountain-basin on his own estate with the Raven saying I told you so. Dove, raven, deluge, upside-down tree with serpent and temptress (313–4). Nobody knows what anything is: a man can learn only what a thing means (316). Well, Raven being Adam, he’s learned how to control Lilith, so he keeps her prisoned while he reads a long poem about her to the hero. The poem is quite remarkable in its way, while Lilith, now in her cat form, keeps yowling at intervals. Evidently Lilith produced one daughter (in this story it’s Lona), decided she’d created it herself, insisted on Adam’s worshipping her, and self-deifies the power she thinks she has. So the “Shadow” took up with her, and she becomes a fallen angel (Eve of course is a woman) and Queen of Hell. Adam says of her “The birth of children is in her eyes the death of their parents, and every new generation the enemy of the last” (325). Adam and Eve were unfit to train Lona, so she was carried into the wilderness and divinely fostered (325). Sounds like Revelations xii, also Auden’s girl-child in “Kairos and Logos.” So Lilith’s out to get the children, but can’t enter the world of three dimensions except through contact with someone else dumb enough to let her, like the hero. Hero is given a wonderful horse, and he likes horses, so when he’s on one he decides to bugger off on his own to save the children. Raven tells him he’s silly, but the horse gives him an erection and off he buggers. Moon descends like fiery wheel rolling down hill (333). So we’re back to the Ariel-Caliban world of children and giants (called Bags): birds and frogs of SE.72 Children call the metamorphosis of butterflies metanoia—about as wooden as he gets, thank God. The Bulika woman is there, who wants the children to attack Bulika and capture it. So they do: a very curious episode reminding me of nothing except the monkey army in the Ramayana. It’s nearly as silly a story as the Ramayana one too. The

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kids ride on elephants and shoot arrows and things. Of course Bulika is so degenerate it can’t defend itself anyway. Well, Lilith is captured and bound on a horse and taken back (the kids soon decide the damn city isn’t worth taking), but not before she’s grabbed Lona and killed her. Lona’s body won’t stink, so she’s symbolically still alive. The Shadow is there too, of course, and one of the children is called Luva (female, though). Back to the danse macabre, perhaps the spectres know the little ones, “for they had themselves long been on their way back to childhood” (362). Double gyre again. Children and spectres make friends: Mental Traveller desert stage. Then back to the hospital, or cemetery, with the bound Lilith, who still resists improvement: “My own thought makes me me,” she says. Adam says her notion of freedom is shit: “There is no slave but the creature that wills against its creator” (372). They start giving her the third degree, all carefully rationalized: “The soul of Lilith lay naked to the torture of pure interpenetrating inward light” (374). She gets stuck in the hell of her self-consciousness and so on: one rather interesting stage is on 375: “A horrible Nothingness, a Negation positive infolded her. . . . It was not the absence of everything I felt, but the presence of Nothing . . . The princess dashed herself. . . . It was the recoil of Being from Annihilation” (375). That ought to be the final stage, but it isn’t: the final one is Life in Death—“life dead, yet existent,” though I should think it would be consciousness, not just life. Lilith eventually can’t take any more, so she “repents,” and it starts to rain, and the waters are released from below. They (Adam and Eve) keep urging her to try to open her hand, but she can’t: it’s grown closed. So they cut the damn hand off—gospel echo, I suppose, and perhaps a dim echo of the maiden without hands folktale. “The Life that dwells in Death” (385) is the opposite of Life-inDeath, of course. Lona is said to have been a long time dead when she was killed by her mother—don’t get that. The Little Ones all go and lie down and go by-by: harrowing of hell and recognition of holy family, more or less. Hero is sent out to go bury Lilith’s hand; the result is a journey through Bardo where he’s tempted in rather obvious ways. Meets an old man like the one in the Pardoner’s Tale. I’m not at all sure what’s meant by death and sleep in this book: Adam says “Every creature must one night yield himself and lie down. . . . he was made for liberty, and must not be left a slave” (399). He’s certainly in quite a yank to get everybody into bed—if it die symbolism,73 I suppose. Incidentally hero’s father and mother are there, and have been from the beginning. “Truth is all in all; and the truth of things lies, at once hid and revealed, in their seeming.” God seems to be something of a Hegelian. Mara is “the voice that cried in the wilderness before ever the Baptist came,” besides being the Magdalen (408–9). This stuff is a bit oppressive, but I suppose the author’s own death permeates it: I think it’s one of those last works. No, he didn’t die for ten years. Well, we’re somewhere around the resurrection by now (chapter xlv, “The Journey Home”).

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Fairyland vision again, as in Phantastes: “Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light.” “Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and colour, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out . . . . The microcosm and macrocosm were at length atoned, at length in harmony: I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me” (412). Life and truth are one. Vision of the City, where clouds “gyrated like whirlpools.” Serpents grow birds, as caterpillars used to grow butterflies: that’s come up before, and the reptiles-to-bird business is pretty widespread, long before evolution, not that this is. Living stones (418) and various other Scriptural echoes about desert blossoming as rose and such. Last chapter: he hasn’t found Lona but has found Mara. “Hope” asks where his dream came: “out of my dark self, into the light of my consciousness.” “Man dreams and desires; God broods and wills and quickens. When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it” (420). That should do something about the ivory and horn business. Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one—that’s Novalis, also quoted in Phantastes (180).

36.  George MacDonald, The Portent Frye’s edition of The Portent, which he annotated, published along with Phantastes: Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964. Frye has inserted page numbers in parentheses. The Portent was first published in 1864.

Starts with a solitary boy-hero whose mother died in his infancy, brought up by an old nurse or foster-mother. Father owns a hill which is a weed-sand-wilderness type of point of epiphany; purple; looks like gems in the dew; no sound but a bird; great blocks of stone looking like petrified corpses after a battle, and a big trilithon on the side of a hill, forming a cave. This was his favorite haunt, associated with wind and sea imagery: sea of darkness flooding the faces of the stars; then he’d go home “as if I had been descending a dark staircase in my father’s house” (11). Also falling streams in “that uplifted land” (12). He has visions of the dead at night, like De Quincey; not frightened by them: “I could call up from underground all who had passed away.” He has, not second sight, but second hearing, the title of the second chapter. Mountains in background; star on tip of highest one, “which seemed the spire of a mighty temple” [16]. Foster-mother lives at the bottom of “a deep green circular hollow”; he tells her he heard a horse’s loose shoe, and this prompts a story. Two brothers, one amiable, one sinister, riding a powerful and savage black horse; heroine loves first and is loved by second. Drives amiable brother over a precipice and manages to turn his horse around on a narrow ledge over a precipice. Picks up heroine,

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who’s dead; goes mad and plunges over the cliff with his horse, who had a loose shoe. Recurrently seen with heroine on his saddle with her long hair: the hair grows and at the Last Day “the hair will twist, and twine, and wreathe itself like a mist of threads about him, and blind him to everything but her. Then the body will rise up within it . . . animated by a fiend” (37–8). She sees him now as a wild hunt figure, tearing around on the dame—I mean with her on the horse. She suggests that he’s a reincarnation of the amiable youth and that the sinister brother is still after him. On leaving her cottage he loses his way and very nearly gets drowned in a bog or something. He’s poor and gets a job tutoring two young sons of a Lord Hilton, though what he wants is a commission in the army. First thing he sees in his new home is a white statue; then he sees the statue within a rainbow, being that kind of weather; then “a figure in white” rises from the base of the pedestal and glides past him. So he turns to the front door: “I passed under its flat arch, as if into the midst of the waiting events of my story” (61). Strong deja vu feeling when inside. Interesting that in a culture where reincarnation is not believed in the theme should turn up as part of an Adonis pattern of anamnesis repetition. Well, the Woman in White is very like the one in Collins, who’s also associated with a statue: she passes for an idiot, or at least a natural, though he’s sure she isn’t one. Lady Alice. Parenthesis: “What is time, but the airy ocean in which ghosts come and go” [65]. Deep marbly whiteness of her arms; profuse ravenblack hair. Heroine-medium type; can’t read or spell. She’s an heiress in her own right, but Lord and Lady Hilton want her to be as dumb as possible so they can embezzle what she’s got. His room is the usual mysterious one that turns up in Phantastes and Lilith; secret door opening into a hall, allegedly haunted. Asks to catalogue books in the library—another Lilith theme. It’s “dusty as a catacomb, the private room of Old Time himself” (84). She walks in her sleep; he explores the haunted hall, filled by moonlight with “an ancient dream-light which wrought strangely on my brain, and filled it, as if it, too, were but a deserted, sleepy house, haunted by old dreams and memories” (88). Staircase. Well, she walks in her sleep; he finds her and carries her to his own room and wraps her in a plaid, “for she was as cold as the dead” (92); snow maiden theme; associated with statues; hears the clank and fears the “common-minded domestics,” i.e., the fuck-minded flunkeys. She wakes and does the haughty-beauty act; however, she gets reconciled and he takes her back to the haunted hall: “I seem to see the ghosts and the memories flitting together through the spectral moonlight, and weaving mystic dances in and out of the storied windows and the tapestried walls” (99). Repetition of his infantile ghost-fantasies. Next time (he’s fallen in love with her, natch), he compels her to come to his room by an act of will. “In something deeper than sleep she lay, and yet not

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in death” (108). Sleeping beauty archetype. Parallel with his foster-mother, who goes into trances where she’s not technically dead but does leave this world for the world of the dead. Well, Lady Alice wakes up finally; the waking signs are faint blushes in the white face, “dawn of a soul on the horizon of the visible.” More haughty-beauty act, but “the Lady Alice of the night, and the Lady Alice of the day, were two distinct persons. I believe that the former was the real one” (113). Seemed like calling “the real immortal Alice forth from the tomb in which she wandered about all day” (114). Well, she thaws a bit and wants to learn to spell. He suggests a double heroine. Her efforts to become sane are thwarted by the parental figures, but she turns out to be a poet, improvising songs. Some obstruction dams her up, he thinks, but “a fresh surge from the sea of her unknown being, unrepressed by the hitherto of the objects of sense, had burst the gates and bars” (129). Note (a) the creative sea (b) the explicit Job echo (c) the association of creative power with the release from repression in the unconscious. Well, she realizes she’s in love too, and there’s an echo of the coming-of-spring passage from the Song of Songs to celebrate. Her “parents” are, of course, a stepmother and her husband. “It would be to tell the soul which you have called forth, to go back into its dark moaning cavern, and never more come out to the light of day” [135]. I suppose these dumb medium-like child-dames in such fiction are emanation figures, but God they’re wraith-like. Rather silly chapter on “jealousy,” where he wonders if she’s making the scene with some other guy in her dreams; I suppose he needed that to outline the two-brothers theme. She keeps coming to his room and waking up, which he calls resurrection (140), and he untwines “from the heart the cold death-worm that twisted around it” [139], i.e., his jealousy: the image comes from a thread in the plaid cloak he wrapped her in, which he preserves, as a fetish. Echoes from The Tempest. Well, she calls him to her by the same power he used once on her, and he goes to the “haunted chamber,” where the ghosts are produced by moon shining through stained-glass windows. General hero-sun-red-intellect-day-creator-body and heroine-moon-white-imagination-night-emanation-ghost antithesis. “A white figure, flitting across the chaos of lights, bedewed, besprinkled, bespattered, as she passed, with their multitudinous colors” (147). Room is “a rendezvous for the ghosts of the past” or chamber of recognition; but their love keeps the ghosts at a distance. In the library he finds a translation of a hymn or poem about Psyche from the German, made by someone who left it unfinished at the exact moment hero was born, so hero is his reincarnation. Then he finds Alice was born at exactly the same time he was, and that they’re related, though not so closely as to stir up the wrong feelings (note the incest and nightmare associations). Cf. p. 174. Well, they’re surprised in their love nest and he’s turned out of the house. He gets his army commission, fights at Waterloo, and is wounded in the head. Then

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he devotes the rest of his life to searching for Alice. “They say that Time and Space exist not, save in our thoughts. If so, then that which has been, is, and the Past can never cease. She is mine, and I shall find her,—what matters is where, or when, or how? Till then, my soul is but a moon-lighted chamber of ghosts; and I sit within, the dreariest of them all. When she enters it will be a home of love” (165). Wonders sometimes if there ever was a Lady Alice, and whether the sabre-wound on the head accounts for the whole story; if so, he’d rather be mad with Alice than sane without her. Sympathetic doctor, who says he sometimes thought there was a woman beside his bed. He’s in Wales convalescing, and goes for a walk. “I was delighted with the multitude of the daisies peeping from the grass everywhere,—the first attempts of the earth, become conscious of blindness, to open eyes” (176). I get it: day’s eye. But there’s something missing, and eventually he sees a “gowan,” a white daisy with a red tip like the ones in Scotland, and this impels him to go back to the home of his childhood. Ingenious bugger, MacDonald. Comes back with a black horse named Constancy—silly name for a horse. Soon there’s another storm—lousy weather they have in that country––and the horse goes through the manoeuvre in the nurse’s story, but falls with his rider and kills himself. Loose shoe, see. Goes to see his old foster-mother, name of Margaret, who spends most of her time now (she’s a hundred years old) in trance, seeing how he’s doing. Her murmurs in sleep are a summary of Eros themes: water, path, grass, hill, sleep (194). She goes into a trance to see if she can see where Alice is now; it appears she’s still at the Hilton place, where one of the hero’s tutees is now master, but away. Well, Margaret then dies and he has to attend her funeral; also his dead horse comes back to life—I don’t know why. Several repetitions of the word “home” in connexion with Alice (208); emanation symbolism. Margaret says she can’t see mirrors in her trances. He goes back to Hilton Hall, meets the housekeeper, who’s friendly, and finds that Alice is indeed there, but regarded as hopelessly mad. Worries about seeing her, feeling that to see a mad Alice would be seeing a “statue” like that of Hermione (explicit allusion). He can sneak back to the place at will, because he knows it so well, and sees “the same statue from whose base had arisen the lovely form which soon became a part of my existence” (225). Reference to the death of the lady in The Sensitive Plant. Sees Alice asleep, under the eye of the housekeeper, who keeps him there that night because there’s a––guess what—terrible storm. Well, Alice comes promptly to his room, eventually wakes up, and doesn’t realize twelve years have passed since they originally plotted to run away together when they were so rudely interrupted. Alice says she dreamed she was sitting on a “stone” in the dark; tried to answer his call, but “I could only make a queer sound”––cf. Apuleius. She feels mentally inadequate: “The red is withered, somehow” (251): shows he’s aware of his own symbolism. More moon, looking “almost malignant”; “I longed to climb

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the sky, and cut her in pieces” (252). Alice dreams normally, whereas most people’s dreams are insane; when she smiles in sleep, “That smile was the sign of the dream life beginning to leaven the waking and false life” (253). He starts teaching her again; she knows nothing until he tells her and then does know it, like Eve in Paradise Lost. “The moment she shared the light of my mind, all was plain” (256); sun and hero. He goes to the haunted hall and waits while the sun goes down and the moon comes up and talks about the oblivion in her mind. “She had never ceased to live it; but had renewed it in dreams, unknown as such, from which she awoke to forgetfulness and quiet, while I awoke from my troubled fancies to tears and battles” [263]. Final Eve of St. Agnes type of flight under the nose of the returning owners; they get to Scotland and marry. Then they live happily ever after; Alice’s hair doesn’t turn gray. Strong emphasis on the reality of the past: what has happened is. This is one of the most elusive but important themes of the book: the Eastern view of time as illusion is counter-balanced in the West by some sense of Blake’s Los’s Halls—the permanent reality of what has been, which I find growing in myself all the time. Note links with Ernest Jones’ book on the nightmare:74 horse and storm; dim incest wish (the word “sister” is used once); identification of hero with both the earlier brothers, one being clearly the shadow of the other: woman killed in earlier story has her hair grow until she becomes a terrible mother and strangles her captor with it. The Apuleius theme with the heroine associated both with Psyche and with Lucius. Blake’s spectre and emanation poem as archetypal of searches outside for what’s inside: cf. the “home” references. I should look at more Anne Radcliffe: De Quincey admired her and associates her with the north.

37.  Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis Frye’s editions of De Quincey, all annotated: The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 3, new, enl. edition, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1890); The English Mail-Coach: and Other Essays (London: Dent, 1912); and Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York: Modern Library, 1949). Frye is using the Modern Library edition. The page numbers in parentheses (Frye’s) and square brackets (mine) are to that edition. The Confessions was first published in 1821; Suspiria in 1845. References to Confessions of an English Opium‑Eater in Frye’s published work: “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 190, 265 Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, CW 5: 40

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De Quincey represents the second level of this damn book; theory of dreams and the subconscious, and consideration of the dianoia of romance, rather than the mere geography of the sort I’ve been collecting. For De Quincey, as for everyone else in Romanticism, there are two levels of the mind, the reason on top and the imagination underneath, and the view taken of them is revolutionary: the mind goes sterile unless it’s transformed from below. The two levels cannot be simply equated with waking and dreaming experience. De Quincey is one of those people whose work is all attached to a huge book of himself, like Sterne, Coleridge, and others: practically everything first-rate that he writes is part of his autobiography. Like many such people, including of course Coleridge, he has a conscience about projecting this into an encyclopaedic objective work: Coleridge’s great treatise of the Logos has its counterpart in De Quincey’s dream of a great work starting with economics, a commentary on Ricardo, and going on to theological and philosophical ideas, including a demonstration of the superiority of Christianity to paganism. Like Coleridge too, he has some remarkable ideas about the language of the Bible, and of religion generally. Well, the Confessions was designed to fall into three parts. The first part is the relaxed, easy-going narrative of his early sufferings and starvation, with Ann looming out of it; the second part is concerned with the pleasures and pains of opium; the third part, the Suspiria de Profundis, was intended to be a sequence of—guess what—thirty-two visions. Of these only about nine have survived, the rest being burned in a fire. But the superb Mail-Coach essay was intended to be one of them, and in many ways it’s the same scheme boiled down. First, the easygoing and beautifully written narrative of the stage coach and the carrying of war news; second, the imminent crash with the young couple and vision of sudden death; third, the dream-fugue summing it up in the subconscious. First, emotion recollected in tranquility, more or less; second, vision of crisis of confrontation with death; third, second recollection through dream. In his autobiographical sketches outside the Confessions he describes his infant experiences of death of his sisters, then writes an essay on their “dream echoes” which he begins “psychological experiences of deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fullness of expression when they are reverberated from dreams” (Autobiographical Sketches 51). The phrase “reverberated from” is important: he doesn’t say “when they become dreams.” It’s the carryover of dream into waking life, the process of imaginative digestion, so to speak, that’s important. One point about the Schopenhauer diagram of reason on top and imagination underneath: there’s a political analogy indicated in the use of “English” in the title of both the Confessions and the Mail-Coach. Reason on top of French culture; imagination underneath is German Romanticism. Similarly with Coleridge and, to some extent, with George MacDonald.

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Also: the essay on Murder has the same structure as the other two: first, a paradoxical aesthetic consideration of murder, which he compares himself to Swift’s Modest Proposal; second, the first postscript, bringing murder into the foreground but still preserving the paradoxical tone; third, the second postscript, the epopteia of horror. Why do De Quincey and Poe both get interested in the sort of aesthetic view of murder that produces the detective story? De Quincey contrasts himself to Swift, saying Swift’s paradox is not based on a universal human tendency and his is. But the basis is literary convention and archetype, not psychology, and cannibalism belongs as much in the SSW region75 as murder. His tone about opium-eating is very curious: half apologetic and half defiant, speaking of it alternatively as a curse and as a blessing. Very like the drug apologist of today. Sorry, he doesn’t say thirty-two; the editor of his posthumous writings does.76 He says twenty to twenty‑five. Speaking of the dream-transformation of Ann into the Daughter of Lebanon, he says: “The general idea of a search and a chase reproduced itself in many shapes.” He begins by greatly resenting Coleridge’s contrast of himself with him (I assume there was one), and speaks of Coleridge’s “demoniac inaccuracy in the statement of facts” [640], also “inaccuracy as to facts and citations from books was in Coleridge a mere necessity of nature” [640]. He took opium because of pain from toothache; but the real reason (644) was ennui. Explains first section by saying “in these incidents of my early life is found the entire substratum, together with the secret and underlying motive, of those pompous dreams and dream-scenarios which were in reality the true objects— first and last—contemplated in these Confessions” [646]. Footnote saying motive means motif.77 Part of the point is a kind of parody of the opening of Wordsworth’s Prelude: a violent disjunction from the routine of his youth (running away) which, as he hasn’t any money, makes him an outsider on the Grove model. 78 Establishes one of his key symbols: the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s emblem of the low whisper of dreams which grows to a mighty roar. Running away was wrong, and his conscience says “Even now thy conscience speaks against it in sullen whispers; but at the other end of thy long life-gallery that same conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders” [689]. Several modulations of this image, including a trunk falling downstairs (691), and the “bore” in the river Dee (700), which of course has a sinister reputation. Quarrel with his mother leads to reflection that the burden of the incommunicable is the worst of all miseries {hence our pity for the “dumb” animals, I suppose}. His running away is the “leap” of Kierkegaard’s original sin, the Whispering Gallery being the symbol of the sin and conscience. Compares himself to Io, fleeing where no man pursued; some masochism behind his heading for London with no money. Curious reference to libraries of books under the sea sunk in shipwreck (738). London is the loud end of the Whispering Gallery; he even finds himself in a

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huge hotel room with “echoing hollowness” (745). Digression on the dishonesty of his guardians and then we get the ten-year-old girl held in his arms through a night of bitter cold—thawing out the frozen statue archetype; she slept when he couldn’t, and his lack of sustained sleep accounts for the prominence of dreams, I suppose. She’s followed by Ann, an anima symbol: even her name echoes it, and a footnote associates her with Electra. Pleasures of Opium: begins by idealizing the first man he got it from, in the manner of Leary79 idealizing the pusher. Result is “a resurrection, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit” and “an apocalypse of the world within me” (786). Opium harmonizes the faculties; alcohol disturbs them; opium gives the kind of feeling “which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health” [789]. Most men are “disguised by sobriety,” revealed by liquor, which has a tragic or parabola effect. Effect on listening to music: “a chorus, etc., of elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras-work, the whole of my past life––not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its passion exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed” [796]. Speaks of introversion, like one who “had entered the cave of Trophonius” [800], and need of social encounters. Vision of a Malay, in actual life apparently, becoming an archetype in a dream. Little black buggers archetype.80 Pains of Opium: still much the same in tone as the predecessor. “The final object of the whole record lay in the dreams. For the sake of those the entire narrative arose” [821]. So naturally he doesn’t get them finished. “Opium I pursued under a harsh necessity, as an unknown, shadowy power, leading I knew not whither, and a power that might suddenly change countenance upon this unknown road. Habitually I lived under such an impression of awe as we have all felt from stories of fawns, or seeming fawns, that have run before some mounted hunter for many a league, until they have tempted him far into the mazes of a boundless forest, and at that point, where all regress had become lost and impossible, either suddenly vanished, leaving the man utterly bewildered, or assumed some more fearful shape” (824). Link between main theme and the hunting archetype as threshold image. Afraid of spontaneous combustion, as drunks were believed to get from “some volcanic agency” [827]. “Nervous irritation is the secret desolator of human life; and for this there is probably no adequate controlling power but that of opium” [831]. However, he does admit it leads to procrastination and loss of will power: “his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of proposing or willing” (844– 5). “A theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain” [846]. “Whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams” [846]. “I seemed every night

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to descend—not metaphorically, but literally to descend—into chasms and sunless abysses” [846]. Speculation like Coleridge’s based on principle “that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting” (847), and consequently everything we remember, which is everything that happens to us, becomes the Bible’s “dread book of account.” Quotes a woman as saying she nearly drowned at the age of nine and “saw in a moment her whole life, clothed in its forgotten incidents, arrayed before her as in a mirror, not successively, but simultaneously; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part” [847]. Stars in daytime analogy. Architectural dreams too, and refers to Piranesi. Also the Malay; all Asiatics terrify him, and he had nightmares about Asiatic people, animals, and gods. “I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brahma through all the forest of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Siva lay in wait for me” (854). Sacrificial nadir of imagination. “The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than all the rest.” Vision of Ann in a dream dated Easter Sunday early in May. As Easter never falls in May, this is the same type of amalgamation we get in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Resurrection; distance, as with Matilda across water (only there isn’t water here). Last line of book is Milton’s on the expulsion from Eden. The Suspiria deal with the doctrine of creative suffering, more especially the suffering of childhood which formulates the dream patterns of adult life. Although De Quincey has all kinds of wit and humor, he says that these dream visions are purely oracular and solemn: cave of Trophonius visions. The first one, Daughter of Lebanon, appended to the Confessions, is a dream metamorphosis of Ann (he says so himself); a calumniated maiden with a twin sister who is taken into the protection of an evangelist (apparently Luke), who says God will grant her a wish: she wishes to be taken back into her father’s house, so she dies, just after the twin sister who had died of grief. Identified with the Magdalen. Dreaming. A very important essay81 which says the expansion of civilization into mechanical dimensions forces a crisis: it will meet disaster unless met by a counter-force “of corresponding magnitude—forces in the direction of religion or profound philosophy that shall radiate centrifugally against this storm of life so perilously centripetal towards the vortex of the merely human” [871], and which destroys the sense of “grandeur which is latent in all men” [871]. Dreaming is the first line of defense, for “the dreaming organ, in connexion with the heart, the eye, and the ear, composes the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of that mysterious camera obscura—the sleeping mind” [872]. Opium is good especially “for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities” [872]. Note the assumption that the infinite world is below, and comes through the subconscious. A very interesting comment about his original project: “From that point according to the principles of art which govern the movement

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of these Confessions, I had meant to launch him {the reader} upwards through the whole arch of ascending visions which seemed requisite to balance the sweep downwards, so recently described in his course” (875). Well, he didn’t. Maybe he did have thirty‑two in mind after all: if he’d really done it I suppose I’d have nothing to do now.82 The Palimpsest of the Human Brain.83 Several layers of writing recovered by chemical means an allegory of the brain that forgets nothing it experiences. “Ever­lasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light” [883]. I’m sure Joyce read this, and could supply the archaeological image that De Quincey wouldn’t have available to him. Images of Paracelsus’ boast of restoring the original rose out of the ashes; of an Athenian chorus unweaving in the antistrophe every step that had been mystically woven through the strophe (double gyre image); of the Erichtho of Lucan getting messages out of the dead, of the phoenix and his ashes. Final sentence about the abiding memory of childhood grief. Vision of Life. Future can be seen in experiences of the past; not a very decisive one. Savannah-la-Mar. Vision of a city under the sea, “human life still subsisting in submarine asylums” [889]; a “dark Interpreter” [889] who sees inhabitants asleep and waiting for resurrection. Goes on to point out that there’s really no present, but draws the foolish inference that “the future is the present of God”—one of the many confusions of God with Nature. Levana. This was a goddess of education who raised up (levare) the infant child. She has three colleagues, a trinity of Norns or Fates. Mater Lachtymarum, expressed grief; Mater Suspiriorum, quiet and suppressed grief; Mater Tenebrarum, diabolic and rebellious. They get hold of the young De Quincey and say God’s commission for them is to plague his heart until they unfold the capacities of his spirit. “So shall he rise again before he dies” (900). Cf. Smart on being sent to sea for pearls. Who is this Woman that Beckoneth? Anima vision, and sense of pre-existence. The Dark Interpreter. This is a “shadow” who tells us that suffering is a mighty agency, a Demiurgus creating the intellect. “There are creative agencies in every part of human nature, of which the thousandth part could never be revealed in one life” [908]. Emphasis on suffering and misery of infants in particular. Three thousand burnt to death each year, mostly from stupid or drunk parents— Moloch worship. Solitude of Childhood. Intensity of desire for death in childhood, not as death, but as gateway to home; recurring in homesickness of adults. Fable of Princess who overlooked one seed in a pomegranate: tiny actions in childhood grow into great burden of remorse: a development of his Whispering Gallery symbol. “Such as the course of my own opium career.”

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38.  Thomas De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach Frye’s editions of De Quincey, all annotated: The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 3, new, enl. edition, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1890); The English Mail-Coach: and Other Essays (London: Dent, 1912); and Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York: Modern Library, 1949). The page numbers in square brackets are to the Modern Library edition. The English Mail-Coach was first published in 1849. References to The English Mail‑Coach in Frye’s published work: “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 265, 268 Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, CW 5: 40, 238, 311, and CW 6: 431, 435–6, 438, 498,    525–6, 560–1, 586

The vision of social co-ordination, just about to break into a mechanical parody of itself, has already inspired, if that is the word, the first essay in my Modern Century. I don’t know if I need a thorough analysis of this superb work in my book or not. Mail service “through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances—of storms, of darkness, of danger-overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation to a national result” [914]. Orchestra image. Especially during the Napoleonic (Peninsular) Wars, bringing news “like the opening of apocalyptic vials” [914]. De Quincey is a great advocate of the aristocratic principle, and says “No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the mysterious” [923]. But the splendor depended on personal and organic factors, including the horse. But now, “The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever; man’s imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master,” etc. [928]. Brilliant imagery, but his point, the expansion of the body into the inorganic extensions of the body, is pretty central. Footnote expressing resentment against Americans for ridiculing the small size of Great Britain; makes the point that intensity and history rather than size are important [940–1]. America of course is the symbol of the new inorganicism. Vivid episode of meeting a mother whose son is in the Peninsular army with news of the great victory of Talavera, with De Quincey knowing that her son’s regiment was cut to pieces, but not telling her, letting her sleep one more night. Vision of sudden death. The crucial thing here is what’s expressed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as the vision of Chih-kai Bardo: i.e., the instant of death is a crisis that only the profoundly disciplined yogi can meet; everybody foozles it and goes on around the cycle to rebirth. Not many men have to face the crucial trial that exposes their peculiar weakness. “But potentially, and in shadowy out-

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line, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men’s natures” [951]. Focusses on a type of anxiety dream, of lying down in front of a lion (cf. Dante’s ducking away from the three beasts), “that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden” [951]. “It is not without probability that in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the original transgression” [953]. Joyce knew this passage, according to Frank Budgen (there’s also an account of a conversation with George III in the autobiographies that sounds a bit like the dialogue in the second chapter of Finnegans Wake). Here the driver of the mail coach was asleep, and the crisis came partly for De Quincey, who was at the back of the coach and couldn’t have grabbed the reins, and more particularly for the young man in the light calash who was taking his girlfriend for a drive. In our inorganic society this is just the kind of highway fatality that we have by the hundreds every week; De Quincey focuses on it without that kind of blurring. Reflections on the road: Lancashire was the place where “more than upon any equal area known to man past or present, had descended the original curse of labour in its heaviest form . . . working through the fiery will” [959] (i.e., not slavery). Tremendous systole-diastole of energy and repose all around them. Nevertheless a vision of peace—we don’t really believe in a limited atmosphere; we believe the air goes all the way up to heaven. Contrast with the sudden emergency: he itemizes all the aspects of it that he saw in one super-Gestalt. Well, the young man in the calash (I’m not sure that’s the word) does his stuff, the accident is avoided; “the turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever” [968]. Dream-Fugue. First a vision of female figures on church monuments awaiting the Resurrection, in attitudes he saw the girl in on the highway. Then a vision of two boats on the sea—the sea is blended with a park: “that ancient watery park, within that pathless chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress . . . ” [969]. The blending is typical of the W84 threshold. The girl reappears on one boat; he’s on the other. Voice saying her boat will founder in 70 seconds (this is the time counted by him in his account of the near accident). Sea blends into aisles of a cathedral; pinnace is threatened with ramming by a frigate, but is carried over the waters into the distance. Note the use of the ship-wrecked heroine of romance theme. Then a vision of a girl sinking in quicksand—subterranean counterpart. Then dreamer realizes such things are either “the very anarchy of strife” or else a “victory that swallows up all strife” [972]. This links with the news of victories in Spain brought by the mail coach, which expand into an apocalypse of “the secret word” bringing news of Waterloo and recovered Christendom. “The dreadful word shone by its own light. . . . And the darkness comprehended it” [973]. Landscape changes to a Campo Santo or cemetery of rising bodies. Repetition of early theme of trumpeter announcing news; vision

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of female child which disappears, then reappears clinging to horns of altar in a huge east wall of a cathedral with light streaming through windows; angel beside her who does for her what she can’t do for herself. Addressing the female of the near-accident, he says “A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, have I seen thee entering the gates of the golden dawn––with the secret word riding before thee—with the armies of the grave behind thee” [978]—sinking and despairing and yet rescued. The thirty-two is derived from a MS left behind in De Quincey’s papers, which lists that many. Japp, editor of the posthumous works, says “The sense of a great pariah world is ever present with him—a world of outcasts and of innocents bearing the burden of vicarious woes; and thus it is that his title is justified—Suspiria de Profundis” (Posthumous Works 2). This proletarian awareness is part of the diagram with the imagination underneath. Note in the Late Poets about ultimate destiny of English language to eat up all other languages, like Aaron’s rod. The Arabian Nights story about the sultan who dipped his head into a basin of enchanted water and found himself in another world, which gets into Finnegans Wake, is referred to by De Quincey as from Addison. Regarding what was said above about writers whose work forms a vast book of themselves,85 often projecting this into an objective encyclopaedic work: has any writer of English literature except Robert Burton ever found a subject that completely united the two?

39.  Achilles Tatius, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon The edition Frye is using is the translation by S. Gaselee in the Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1917). The page numbers in parentheses (Frye’s) and in square brackets (mine) are to this edition. Achilles Tatius flourished early in the second century C.E. References to Achilles Tatius in Frye’s published work: Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 184, 193, 276 “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 58, 62, 82, 401

Starts in Sidon, where a narrator is contemplating a picture of Europa and the Bull, very pickily described. Background of trees forming a shelter against the sun, not quite shutting it out, but nearly so. He’s accosted by Clitophon, the hero of the story, who says he’s had adventures; narrator wants to hear them and disappears from the book, the rest being Clitophon’s first-person narrative. Well, Clitophon lost his mother in infancy; father wanted him to marry his half-sister Calligone. Dream: fierce woman with sickle; he’s joined from the belly down

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to Calligone and woman cuts them apart. Father’s brother, Sostratus, sends his daughter Leucippe to him from Byzantium (Clitophon, by the way, comes from Tyre) for safety during a war. Falls in love with her at once, of course: she resembles the picture of Europa (which I suppose is introduced as an emblem of a story about shipwreck and hapless journeys). The story is clumsy and naive, with nothing of Heliodorus’ skill in construction: it’s full of digressions of two types. One is the set rhetorical piece about love and stuff; the other is the description of curiosities, mainly animals, which gives the reader the sense of perusing an improving book; romance laced, not so much with history, as with geography and what passes for natural history. First, a colloquy about love with a pansy, who naturally prefers another kind. Archetypes: don’t forget Stheneboea in connexion with the calumny stories.86 The pansy’s name is Clinias, and he’s just given his boyfriend a horse, which runs away with him and kills him. Apart from the dim echo of Hippolytus, one doesn’t altogether see why: calculated abruptness like the “Gerald died that afternoon” in one of Forster’s novels.87 Full description of death, a lot of ow-oo, then sudden transition to a locus amoenus scene of flowers, a spring, birds, where he meets his lady-love. Discourse on love: loadstone part of it (51). Stuff from Pliny (I think) about attractions in nature: viper and lamprey. References to rose as the “king” of flowers and later to eagle as king of birds: early development of primate mythology. We’re in Book II now. Digression on the origin of wine (“purple water”) [59], said to have started in Tyre; reference to story of Icarus (the wine man, not Daedalus’ son). A feast of Dionysus starts this off. Hero turns to a (tricky) slave, Satyrus, who’s also in love with Clio, Leucippe’s servant, for help in his affair. Episode of bee-sting, a little like the Sakuntala one: a lot of teehee about this and about exchanging cups. Father proceeds with plans to marry hero to Calligone, who’s dressed in a Tyrian purple dress, so we get a digression about the origin of that. Treasure from sea theme, and modulation of the “purple water” one. Well, some bird named Callisthenes falls in love with Leucippe by hearsay; his suit is rejected because he’s a no-good; decides to abduct her, and of course the upshot is that he abducts Calligone by mistake instead. Hero’s reaction is too bad, thank God. He found out she was in Tyre because of an oracle circulating in Byzantium. Digression on natural wonders: fishing for gold in Libya with a pole smeared with pitch. Treasure from water theme again. Well, the affair with Leucippe goes on very well, especially after Calligone disappears, so he says to her how about it. She’s willing. Meddlesome servant named Conops, gnat, which gives rise to two fables about the gnat. He has to be drugged. But stepmother has a dream (actually it seems to be Leucippe’s mother) about a robber ripping up Leucippe’s belly from below with a sword (anticipatory), so she wakes up and frustrates the scheme, bawling the hell out of Leucippe and threatening to torture Clio, the servant involved in it. She makes

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such a fuss that the lovers and their two servants set off for Alexandria in Egypt, meeting and making friends on board ship with an Egyptian named Menelaus, another pansy who’s lost his boyfriend in a boar-hunt, like Adonis. There follows what the Loeb translator calls a dubbio amoroso, and translates into Latin, the stupid bugger: suppose a lot of these translators are half-employed clergymen.88 It begins with a discussion of homosexual vs. heterosexual love and beauty, then goes on to some description of oral fore-play: the author is clearly fascinated by the psychology of kissing. Book III: the inevitable storm and wreck, including fights between sailors and passengers, who both want to get into the life-boat. Hero prays to Poseidon asking that he and girlfriend should be swallowed by the same fish, so as to have a common tomb. However, the principal characters have got hold of the mast, and Menelaus and Clitophon come to land at Pelusium (Egypt, said to be wholly given over to robbers). Long description of pictures of Andromeda and Prometheus. I suppose this ecphrasis, or whatever it’s called, underlines my point about Pericles in Shakespeare being a series of pictorial archetypes to stare at. The archetypal appropriateness of both seems clear; Zeus there has a statue holding a pomegranate, which has a mystical significance—doesn’t say what it is; editor suggests its seeds typify fertility of nature. Awfully realistic, of course; anyone would think Andromeda was in a “tomb.” The dragon is based on the crocodile, who’s described later. Well, they’re captured by robbers, of course: they just happen to have a little money, but the robbers grab most of it, and of course what do they wanna do with Leucippe but sacrifice her? A law and order squad comes up and disposes of one bunch of robbers, releasing hero and his friends, but Leucippe’s still in the hands of the rest. In the distance hero sees her led to the place of sacrifice, her belly ripped up and her guts gushing out, and her body placed in a coffin. He doesn’t like this, and prepares to kill himself over her coffin, but is prevented by Menelaus and Satyrus, who were the sacrificers (they were in armor, so he didn’t recognize them). Well, of course, they knock on the tomb, Leucippe says come in, and eventually we learn that they were deputed to sacrifice her as part of their initiation into the robber band, stuffed her skirt with sheep’s guts and I suppose, bored a breath-hole in the coffin (I don’t mean tomb). The robbers were gonna eat her liver and make the whole bunch of them march over the place of the sacrifice. It just so happened that there was a Homeric actor on board ship and that they discovered a chest floating to land which had a stage sword in it, of the kind used for mimic killings in plays. Clinias is still missing. Inevitable digression on the Phoenix—he seems fond of ending his books with digressions. They make friends with the general of the law-and-order squad, whose name is Charmides. “The voice is the mirror of the soul.” Book IV. Hero says to heroine, now let’s fuck: heroine says nothing doing; she’s just had a dream in which Artemis appeared and said she had to stay a virgin

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until she (Artemis) decked her as a bride; however, she would marry Clitophon. After that there seems to be nothing to do but discourse on the hippopotamus. This leads to the elephant, who has a sweet breath on account he dines off a black flower that’s fragrant, probably the clove, only I wonder if Milton’s haemony owes anything to this passage.89 Well, the general wants to screw Leucippe; tricky slave stalls. Too small a burg they’re in; wait till they’re in Alexandria. That’s too long, says the general. Well, she’s got the curse. That only takes a few days, says the general: meanwhile I can kiss her, can’t I? Ow-oo, says the hero; he’d rather die than see that. After all, kissing her is all the poor bastard can do. Meanwhile Leucippe has been driven mad by a drug given her by somebody called Gorgias. By a stratagem involving the destruction of dykes and flooding the country, a town full of pirates manages to destroy the law-and-order bunch, which presumably gets rid of the general and certainly kills Gorgias. A lot of digressions about the Nile, and one about the crocodile: evidently these hippo-croc descriptions are conventional, as in the Book of Job. Gorgias’ servant cures Leucippe by giving her another drug. Egyptians drink water, because the Nile is pure. The crocodile ends the book. These descriptions are parallel to the series of pictures but a contrast in function: the pictures focus and concentrate the archetype of the story; the description interrupts the story and makes it discontinuous, thereby helping to turn it into the procession of episodic scenes that I noted as the structural principle of Pericles. Achilles Tatius also goes in for remarks about those funny barbarians: Egyptians, he says, run to excesses of confidence and cowardice. Book V. The second half of the story shows more interest in the narrative, but, while it cuts down on the travelogue stuff, it increases the percentage of sententiae and rhetorical set pieces. Hero enters Alexandria, which has two main entrances, the Sun Gate and the Moon Gate. Festival of Serapis. Chaereas, the man who told the hero about Gorgias, now wants to abduct Leucippe and gets a bunch of pirates together, inviting hero to dinner. Two bad omens: a hawk touches Leucippe’s head with its wing and they see a picture of Tereus and Co. Note that “ornis” and “oionos” mean both bird and omen. Well, natch we have to have the whole damn Philomela story again. Augurs tell us to attend to stories of pictures because they tell us what’s likely to happen (243); what happens will be like the story. Hero tells heroine the story: barbarians, he explains, want more than one wife. Well, Chaereas’ pirates do their stuff; Leucippe is put on a ship and the hero, though wounded in the thigh, gives chase: pirate cuts her head off. He rescues the headless body and buries it with appropriate ow-oos. Six months later he meets Clinias in Alexandria, who explains how he survived the shipwreck and says Leucippe’s father had sent Clitophon a letter betrothing his daughter to him, which he missed by a day—Thomas Hardy type of device, with the same appeal to Tyche. Hero says ow-oo; his friends say the hell with that: here’s an Ephesian widow named Melitte, young, beautiful, wealthy, husband drowned at sea; has

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fallen for Clitophon; better marry her. Well, there’s a voyage to Ephesus in which the hero does an inordinate amount of cunt-teasing: keeps putting her off with one excuse after another, so much so that she has to make sour jokes about their so-called marriage. He says they say those drowned at sea don’t go to Hades but wander around the water; maybe Leucippe’s ghost would be watching them fuck, and how would she like that? She says she wouldn’t mind much: anyway, doesn’t he know Aphrodite is a sea-goddess? However, there are more excuses when he gets ashore, and then Melitte finds that her steward has acquired a female slave who won’t co-operate, so she’s been flogged and abused and appeals to her new-come mistress. The slave looks like Leucippe, but her hair’s been cut, so she’s impenetrably disguised. However, she is Leucippe, and writes a letter to the hero reproaching him for all she’s been through and he marries someone else. He sends her a return letter saying he can explain everything. Hero keeps stalling: Melitte says what the hell are we waiting for now? Answer is for the author’s next childish narrative device, which is to bring back Melitte’s husband Thersander, who (haw, haw) wasn’t drowned at all. However, he’s damn mad, beats up the hero and puts him in jail (he has a private one, evidently); Melitte goes to see him there, and after several pages of a no-balls-at-all tirade she softens again, and he ends Book V by screwing the bejezus out of her despite lack of all modern conveniences, which the author explains aren’t really necessary. Book VI: Melitte dresses hero up in her clothes, comparing him to Achilles at Scyros (note that both Achilles and Hercules turn into women), so jailer finds her instead. Everything seems set now, but there are three more books, so Sosthenes, the rascally steward who’s been fired by Melitte and wants revenge, gets Thersander to abduct Leucippe and heats him up with a tale about how beautiful she is. Face is mirror of mind; Thersander urges her to look at him—this author is strong on visual fucks. However, he’s still self-righteous about his wife, who tells him that Rumor is Slander’s daughter. He’s unimpressed and still on the double standard; meanwhile Leucippe has gone delirious, so Thersander and Sosthenes overhear what she says, which is that she loves Clitophon although pirates and such have stolen everything from her, including her name (she’s called Lacaena). Thersander doesn’t like this much, especially when he proceeds to more direct measures and she tells him it’s no use. A lot about the kindred emotions of hate and love, from liver and heart respectively. She says “Feast your eyes with a new sight; one woman contends against all manner of tortures, and overcomes all her trials” [345]. This is because they’ve threatened her with torture and lashes. She says they’re worse than the pirates, who left her alone, but “you are piling up the greater eulogies for me; if you kill me now . . . people will say ‘Here is Leucippe, who remained a virgin after falling among’ ” [347]—well, she summarizes her story. “I am defenceless, and alone, and a woman; but one shield I have, and that

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is my free soul, which cannot be subdued by the cutting of the lash, or the piercing of the sword, or the burning of the fire” [347]. Book VII: Well, first, this is my example of the fact that virginity in romance is a symbol of human dignity. True, the defiant virgin is always a most respectable woman of free birth—no slave is ever given lines like that—but again the symbolism doesn’t work out unless you think of the creature (i.e., the fabulous hero or heroine) as of the right line of descent, in mythical terms a child of God. Scott’s Rebecca90 takes this a stage farther, because she’s Jewish and therefore socially “base,” as far as her society’s notions are concerned. But Leucippe as well as Rebecca give us a sense of integrity that belongs to the soul and not to the hymen membrane. Besides, while she’s really freeborn and so on, she is a slave when she’s saying all this. I forgot to note earlier that Melitte picks up Leucippe’s letter from Clitophon when her husband’s beating him up: quite a bit of this soap opera situation comedy. Book VII: Clitophon’s in jail again: Thersander puts a spy in the jail to tell him that Leucippe’s dead again. This makes the hero resolve to destroy himself, although Clinias points out that she’s come to life again twice. Most of the rest of the book is a big trial scene, where the hero starts out by accusing himself as the murderer of Leucippe. Clinias speaks against this, and the situation comes up in which Thersander and Melitte, who are opposed in this trial, have to offer their slaves to be tortured. Sosthenes, who’d be for in on [sic] this scheme, scrams out of there: “The whole tribe of slaves is greatly inclined to cowardice in any circumstances where there is the slightest room for fear” [373]. Yuh. Well, hero is condemned and sentenced to be tortured to find out extent of Melitte’s complicity in Leucippe’s murder. He’s strung up for this when “Artemis’ bishop {hierus} was descried approaching, crowned with bay” [379]. This happens when there’s a sacred embassy to Artemis, and this time there’s one from Byzantium because Artemis helped the Byzantines in a war with Thrace, so the envoy from there is Sostratus, Leucippe’s father. Note that the final scenes of this story are in Ephesus because that city is associated with Artemis, hence with female virginity. Similarly in the Apollonius romance. This means that the hero has to be released. Artemis has told Sostratus he’d find his daughter and future son-in-law at Ephesus. Leucippe then seeks sanctuary with Artemis’ temple, which is only open to men and maidens. I say “then,” but “she only missed meeting her father by a few moments” [383]. Female slaves with a legal complaint against their masters can also take refuge there: if the decision is for them they become slaves of Artemis; if against them the master takes them back but takes an oath he won’t hurt them. Book ends: “so we greeted one another only with our eyes” [389]. He’s great on visual fucks: it seems to be part of his dianoia, in a way I haven’t quite grasped. Anyway, the book ends with hero and heroine united.

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Book VIII. Trial continues, with long speeches from the prosecution, Thersander and his lawyer. Actually the book begins with Thersander hitting the hero in the temple, whereupon the hero raises a big outcry about sacrilege. Bishop invites Sostratus, hero and heroine to dinner. Leucippe has been, as a slave, both flogged and had her hair cut off: both indignities are titles of plays by Menander, the former lost.91 Conversation includes an appeal to Aphrodite not to get sore about the absence of sexual intercourse. Well, there’s another virgin-detecting gadget in this story, Pan’s pipes in the temple. Story of Pan and Syrinx of course remorselessly follows: note however that these Syrinx and Daphne stories are bound up with the whole defence of the virgin theme. One phrase is interesting: “he {Pan} collected the fragments of reed as though they had been the maiden’s limbs and put them together as though to form a single body” (407). Speeches of trial follow: demands for Melitte to take oath on the water of the Styx, which is apparently there, that “she has not had to do with this foreigner during the time that I was abroad” [433]—which of course she can do; Leucippe gets the panpipes ordeal (they sound nice if she is a virgin and moan and fart if she isn’t). Well, we get the story of the Styx. Euthynicus and Rhodopis, man and maiden, devoted to hunting and the service of Artemis, annoy Venus by their chastity and she makes them screw; Artemis changes girl to spring. Hero uneasy about Leucippe’s ordeal, not because he doubts the intactiture of her hymen but because he thinks maybe Pan will rape her, a Syrinx who can’t get away. However, these gadgets never miss. Dinner with bishop again, clearing up two last points. How did Leucippe get her head cut off and survive? Easy: It was another woman dressed in her clothes. As for the Callisthenes who abducted Calligone away back, he’s a reformed character now, and being of good birth he marries her and they’re all right. Story ends with author having totally forgotten that it was supposed to be told to him by Clitophon at Sidon, not Tyre. When hero is making row about sacrilege in temple he says he’s a free man and a citizen of no mean city (ouk aemou poleos polites), which is quoted from Acts 21:39 [394–5]. Maybe Achilles Tacitus was a bishop after all: his bishop, anyway, if the translation is right, is a most urbane character, said to be familiar with Aristophanes, whose speech in court is full of double entendres about his opponent’s character (Thersander). Note the continuity of Paul’s wanderings around the Mediterranean and later romance. It must mean something that the heroine’s virginity is preserved only by accident and the hero’s isn’t at all.

14 Romance as Secular Scripture: Interview and Discussion at the Thomas More Institute, Montreal (1976)

A conversation with Eric O’Connor, Charlotte Tansey, Cathleen Going, Martin O’Hara, Stan Machnik, Roberta Machnik, Patricia Coonan, Helene Loiselle, Gerald MacGuigan, and others, recorded 14 May 1976. The Thomas More Institute, located in Montreal, is a university-level academic institution, offering B.A. degrees in the liberal arts through an affiliation with Bishop’s University. The Institute organized year-long courses around recently published books, in this case Frye’s The Secular Scripture. Frye was invited by Fr. Eric O’Connor to attend one of the discussion sessions at the end of the course. The discussants and questioners were members of the class. The dialogue was transcribed by Nicholas Graham in 2007 and is published here with his kind permission.

Eric O’Connor: I do not know whether I am to introduce Dr. Frye or not, but our delight in having Dr. Frye for this class is what I would like to express to him. I don’t think we need to have him introduced to you. Thank you, Dr. Frye. Gerald MacGuigan: As we know, Dr. Frye has been engaged in the exploration of what he calls “that mysterious world” [The Secular Scripture 166; CW 18: 108] of the imagination. It is to his credit that he first glimpsed light in an area where he was convinced that a dark inscrutable workmanship was present and brought light to it; but for most of us who are trying desperately to follow in his footsteps there is still a lot of dark inscrutable workmanship in romance. Your adventures in this work remind me of this passage from Wordsworth: Oh! when I have hung Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed) Suspended by the blast that blew amain, Sholdering the naked crag, oh, at that time While on the perilous ridge I hung alone

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Romance as Secular Scripture With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ear! the sky seemed not a sky Of earth––and with what motion moved the clouds.  [The Prelude, Book I, 330–9]

This must have been something like the adventures, the personal adventures in this area of yours. To begin the discussion, I would like again to use Wordsworth’s image: an image that has stayed with me over the years of the artist’s work:   As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow‑moving boat, upon the breast Of a still water, solacing himself With such discoveries as his eye can make Beneath him in the bottom of the deep, Sees many beauteous sights––weeds, fishes, flowers, Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more, Yet often is perplexed and cannot part The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth Of the clear flood, from things which there abide In their true dwelling; now is crossed by gleam Of his own image, by a sun-beam now, And wavering motions sent he knows not whence Impediments that make his task more sweet; Such pleasant office have we long pursued.  [The Prelude, Book IV, 256–70]

And I took this as the artist, the literary artist both reflecting and making possible the revelations from deep within. And I wonder if we could begin with this for a discussion of, a reassurance, regarding archetypes and perhaps beginning with the distinction between the existential and the imaginative archetypes. Frye: I spoke of Jung’s archetypes as existential. I meant that they were the archetypes that emerge during, say, a Jungian analysis as elements of the personality which have been conditioning the social behavior of that personality. That is, when he discovers from Jung what an anima figure is, he realizes that in a man’s experience with women, this inner anima figure gets projected on various people and as a consequence is a conditioning aspect of behavior. And, in the study of literature, one is examining these things, not with reference to one’s own personal life and behavior, but simply as something hypothetical and something that passes in front of you in a kind of cinematic world. That is the very, very simple distinction that I really had in mind. I always get

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a little nervous when I am classed with Jung as a critic, because I am never quite certain what the next step is; but it does seem to me that psychology, not only Jung, but a great deal of contemporary psychology has to do with trying to isolate and clarify certain elements of behavior as though everybody carried around a whole sort of commedia dell’arte inside him, and put on various masks and acted various roles. And that is, of course, a completely different area from watching these various masks and roles passing in front of you in a romance. Q: I was wondering about value judgments: it’s a term we have been dealing with throughout the course. If you were a literary psychologist, you would formulate value judgments. Frye: Why would you? Q: If you don’t, then it is only descriptive: you describe and classify. Frye: My position on value judgments is that they are incidental by‑products of literary experience. They are the kind of thing that you are forced to admit to account for the fact that some things that you read stick with you and other things that you read slip away from you. I don’t discourage the use of judgment at all in literature; it is utterly inevitable. What I do feel suspicious of is the attaching a value to that judgment. Because that is what the person who believes in value judgments always says he is not doing, but is what he invariably winds up doing. Patricia Coonan: At one stage, where you complimented Hippolyta [The Secular Scripture 187; CW 18: 122–3] as being a good critic; was it on the level of imagination or of projecting? Frye: I was just looking at the dramatic situation as it unfolds in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the way in which Shakespeare sets up these contrasting figures: and here’s this amiable, bumbling, gracious Prince, Theseus, doing his best trying to act up to his own image of himself and Hippolyta, the very sharp mind that never misses, but says very little, and you couldn’t have more perfect dramatic foils than that; but that’s what you always get in Shakespeare: one character paired off against another so that you are forced to recognize the complete validity of both without making any sort of comparative statement between them. It’s the same thing that you have at the end of Measure for Measure where the Duke comes back and he is practically in the role of God or, at least, he thinks he is and takes charge of the whole scene; and there’s Lucio beside him making the most impertinent remarks; but every time he says something, he scores off the Duke. The Duke tries to shut him up, but he doesn’t succeed. Again, you don’t compare them. You just recognize that they are dramatic foils for each other.

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Eric O’Connor: What the novelist is saying in the story as opposed to what the convention is saying: for example, the incest theme––it keeps coming out. Does the novelist have to know the convention and to be writing within it? Frye: He has to know it on a practical level, yes. He may not have a theoretical notion of what it is, but he certainly has to know it as a craftsman; he has to have a practical shaping knowledge of it. I remember when I was listening to a Mozart symphony, the first movement, and thinking of this complete and utter serenity of spirit, it suddenly came to me that this is the sonata form taking over. Mozart is one of those very rare spirits who can occasionally just lose himself and be taken over. It is same thing that fascinates me, with some work I’m now doing on the Bible––the point at which you pass from possessing words, from being the wise man to the point when the words start possessing you and turn you into a prophet. Eric O’Connor: Could a person, could an able writer decide to go against all the structures and steep himself in something else? Frye: Then he would have to set up another structure; and that structure would be certain to have a heredity. Charlotte Tansey: The new artistic creation––could you say a little more about that? Or is that the mystery that can’t be talked about? Frye: The analogy I always think of is that of the new human being, the baby that gets born, who is the unique individual, as his mother will point out at some length. But the mother would not be proud of the infant if it did not conform to a convention, if it weren’t a recognizable human being. And it is the same way with literature. When Ulysses and The Waste Land appeared in 1922, a lot of people said these are monsters; these are simply spawned from the mouth of the Nile; they have no shape and no tradition. They are the works of literary Bolsheviks, and so forth. But we know now that they were very deeply traditional works. And this is what is always happening in literature: that what seems new and original and unexpected is actually recreating tradition on a deeper level. The new detective story recreates its convention on a relatively shallow level; that is, it’s very much like other detective stories. But occasionally you come across, say, in the history of painting, with the Barbizon school doing early nineteenth-century landscapes, and then Manet comes along with the impressionists: something cataclysmic has happened here––a complete break with tradition. But what has happened is that a deeper layer of tradition than the layer of where Goya and Velasquez are–– that’s what begins to emerge. Q: When you say there’s a tendency today to avoid technique and composition and tradition, how does that relate to convention?

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Frye: The avoiding of technique is in itself a convention, because convention is a tricky thing. One of the central elements of convention is that it is always pretending not to be convention. You take the rhetoricians, in Shakespeare’s time, for example. The one thing that they are almost certain to say is that “I am a plain, blunt man and I don’t know anything about rhetoric.” And in the sixteenth century with Petrarchan love-poem writers, the most conventional thing they can say is: “all other poets are conventional, they got their emotions out of books but I’m getting mine out of my own real experience.” The abandoning of conceptions of craftsmanship is conforming to another kind of convention. In Dickens you have a convention of a carefully contrived plot, which keeps the readers guessing as to how the story is going to turn out. And then we pass to what I think of as the ironic convention where it is part of that convention that there should be no contrivance, that you should pretend to your readers that this is just the way things happen. And eventually, of course, there is a convention; it meets itself coming around the corner, and the abandoning of technique becomes a form which disappears into language. I think that happens with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the “chatter” novels and Ivy Compton-Burnett where you feel that all human relationships are disappearing into language relationships, and you are right back with the medieval rhetoricians, with things like medieval manuals of rhetoric where, again, everything disappears into a whole set of linguistic formulae. Charlotte Tansey: There’s a point, then, where ritual and convention somehow meet? Frye: But in ritual there is usually a kind of teleological element; I mean there is something that is supposed to emerge as a result of ritual; it is more consciously and deliberately structured. If you look at William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, you will see, as I say in The Secular Scripture [57; CW 18: 41] that some people show great skill in ritualizing their own lives in patterns of that kind; but there is always this teleological side to it. Charlotte Tansey: I have difficulty with the word “recreate”: it doesn’t seem fresh enough? Are there other words one could use? Frye: What Harold Bloom says is “misunderstand”; and that is all right––you do misunderstand. I don’t like “misunderstand” because it seems a bit negative and it seems to lead to a filleted conception of literature where you don’t have a structure that gets reconstructed: you have sort of spineless flipflop of misreadings. But that’s just emphasizing different things—that’s all. Gerald MacGuigan: If you speak of secular scripture, then, in the cluster of words that go along with “scripture,” you have “fundamentalist.” Are the real-

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istic critics in much the same tradition as the scriptural fundamentalists, and the difficulty is that they are not fundamental enough: that they don’t know where to place the literal meaning? Frye: It is a confusion over the term “literal.” There is an analogy, I think, between realism in criticism and fundamentalism in religion. I would say they are greatly confused about the term “literal,” because of certain curious twists in our cultural tradition. And we tend to say that a thing is literally true if it reflects something outside itself, i.e., you hold to production of truth by correspondence: where if “A” is a satisfactory verbal replica for “B,” then it is literally true of “B” to say “A.” I’ve always taken the view, which seems to be inseparable from literary criticism, that a thing means what it says and not what it points to. And that, of course, is the great strength of realism, that it does set up a literary structure beside a set of social conditions and says, “Now let’s see how good the literary structure is at reflecting these conditions.” But sooner or later you have to come back to the structure of the work itself. Eric O’Connor: I’m confused as to your answer about the fundamentalist and the literal. Is the point that the fundamentalist took the literal as descriptive? Frye: That’s what I understood: that’s what I thought Gerald MacGuigan meant by the question. Gerald MacGuigan: A term we had difficulty with was “kidnapping” [The Secular Scripture, 29–30, 57, 58, 165, 168; CW 18: 24, 41, 107, 109]. Is the concept of “kidnapping” coextensive with your concept of “displacement” or, is it restricted to the displacement or conditioning to cliché mythology? Frye: I would say that “displacement” and “kidnapping” were really quite different things. The “displacement” is the adapting of the structural principles of fiction to the demands of plausibility and credibility. And what I meant by “kidnapping” is really the existing social structure taking over a certain form and using it for its own purposes. Criticism is always polarized between what a work was in its own day and what it is to us now. That is, a play of Shakespeare meant a certain orbit of things to its original audience and within the culture for which it was written. It communicates to us over the centuries for reasons which neither that audience nor Shakespeare could possibly have understood. So you have always these two poles. If you are going to be a purely historical critic, and try to study Shakespeare only as his original audience understood him, then literature becomes a kind of astronomy: that is, you make no kind of contact whatever with these works. If, on the other hand, you disregard the historical setting and simply say

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what Shakespeare says is Shakespeare our contemporary, then you are putting Shakespeare within your own network of values completely, and judging him by twentieth‑century standards. That is one of the things I mean by “kidnapping.” Q: You say that modern criticism is coming closer to formulation, to some kind of consensus or jelling. Could you expand on that? Frye: Literary criticism is a very new discipline and it’s been for a great many years in the condition, say, that Jungian psychology was fifty years ago, where the existence of competing schools, with each calling the others heretics, was a sign that nobody really knew what the hell he was talking about. And, I think, that that is to some extent still true. But I see larger patterns emerging in the critical scene; I think that certain things are slowly getting established. That is what I mean by formulation. I’ve always thought of literary criticism as a kind of social science, that is, as a discipline which works on a certain body of material and can establish certain things, so that certain things do get established and you don’t need to keep going back and starting from fundamentals all over again. Q: It’s a beginning that’s established? Frye: Yes. Gerald MacGuigan: You spoke of the two poles of criticism: what Shakespeare was to his audience three-hundred years ago, and what Shakespeare is today, to an English‑speaking audience. Do you in that polarization allow for the possibility of cross talk? Frye: I think there has to be a good deal of cross talk, even if it is all invented by the same person. I think that to some extent Shakespeare’s context in his own age is really the liberalizing element in the liberal education that one gets by reading Shakespeare. If you think of Shakespeare as, in part, not our contemporary, that means that he does set up standards and formulas and values, which are a little different from our own. And in the process of trying to understand them, we expand and liberalize our own. Because our ways of apprehension are just as narrow and just as provincial and prejudiced as Elizabethan London. Q: You were also talking about two cultures: the Apollonian as being passive and the Dionysian culture as being more active. Are they not two of the same elements? Frye: Yes, they are two elements of the same general imaginative universe. One very often finds that societies have a tendency to commit themselves either to one or to the other. Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, for example, shows very clearly how certain societies like the Zuni Indians in California are what she

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would call Apollonian and the Plains Indians are Dionysian. And you find this similarly in writers: what we think of as the French tradition, for example, in comparison, say, with the German tradition. Q: What would you call the culture today? Frye: We have moved from Dionysus the drunk to Dionysus the dead drunk. Charlotte Tansey: Does mystery with you generally carry a sense of mystification rather than a sense of clarification? Frye: As a rule, yes. That was because I started out with Blake who, of course, is a person who sets up very simple Biblical categories. Revelation is white; that’s the light that starts the Creation. Mystery is black; that’s everything that leads to tyranny and to misery. And I’ve never quite shaken off that influence. But I recognize as, of course, Blake recognized that there are forms of mystery which are more creative than that. And I speak in the Anatomy [88; CW 22: 81] of there being a mystery at the heart of a play like King Lear, which arises not from the unknown but from the unlimited. Gerald MacGuigan: But the unlimited would have to be perceived in some way. If it is not to be perceived in terms of knowledge, what is the alternative: that it be perceived or felt in terms of power? Frye: It is a good mystery, because it does not prevent you from finding all you can about it; it is just that there is always more behind. Q: I was interested in the “popular” literature you spoke of [The Secular Scripture, 29; CW 18: 23–4]. Am I right in seeing the difficulty of identifying popular literature in our own time, when so much of it is manipulated? I’m thinking of the packaging on television, which is popular in a different sense than the popular stories and songs of another time. Frye: Yes. I was trying to unravel those two meanings of the word “popular,” that is, I suggested that there was a popular literature which demands the minimum of previous literary education from a reader: that’s the “popular” of the folktale or the ballad, and it does turn up in literature in all categories and levels. And then, of course, there is what is popular in terms of being mass produced. I think that the word “popular” is an example of how perilous it is to rush into value judgments before you’re ready, because something you read at the age of seven perhaps may have a tremendous impact which never leaves you all life long: it represents a permanent imaginative achievement on your part and that can come from anywhere, at any time. And, of course, it depends also on the vitality of the imagination. I’m thinking of the appalling silent movies I used to see when I was a child in Moncton, New Brunswick. I remember getting quite an

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imaginative experience out of them, because the things they dealt with were new to me and they represented genuine imaginative experiences. Gerald MacGuigan: You shouted too: “look out behind you, Tom!” Frye: Yes. Q: Do you see the recreation then as just new to me? Frye: Yes. That’s where it starts. If it’s new to you, that’s the beginning of an experience, which ends by you possessing the kind of thing that is yours, in what you are reading or seeing. Q: Is this going beyond the dead-drunk point you mentioned? Frye: Yes. That’s the cycle of modes I was talking about in the Anatomy, where you start with the mythical: stories about divine beings. You then go down to romance, where the heroes are human beings, but the laws of nature are a bit suspended. Then you go down through the different levels of mimetic literature. Then you go down to irony, where the reader is above what is happening and looks down on it. And then what you find is that by the very logic of irony itself, the story becomes mythical again. And you can trace irony from Zola’s time to our own: the gradual re-establishing of mythical patterns. Q: Does it have to do with identity? Frye: There’s that. And there is also myth as the structural principles of literature emerging very clearly. That is, to me, the myth of the poem is the structural principle of that poem. And you see these structural principles at their most concentrated in these stories that we think of as myths, like St. George killing the dragon and the story of Oedipus. And, consequently, the return of myth to literature is very similar and parallel to the return of the structural pictorial elements in abstract painting and Cubism and so forth, which are turned away from representation, just as literature is turned away from realism. Q: Is there something that helps in the transcending phase, moving beyond the sulking phase and the attachment phase. What about the transcending phase? Frye: Yes. But I’m not sure what the implications of transcend would be at that point. Certainly, the feeling that you are looking at the very centre of literary structure does perhaps provide you with what Kant would call a transcendental perspective––I’m not sure. I think, again, of music and of the example I’ve given that at a certain level, say, of the Bach B Minor Mass, or the Jupiter symphony, or Schumann or Tchaikovsky, you are listening to what music was made to say: this is the voice of music, this is the fundamental authority that that art is all about. And that is what you get, say, in Shakespearean romance.

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Helene Loiselle: But this knowledge is only going to come with persistence and experience? Frye: Certainly, it does have to be a habit; it has to be built up by practice. But it has to be a very relaxed form of experience, because it’s a matter of continually exposing yourself to impacts. Q: Is it just this structure of romance that you have in The Secular Scripture? Frye: I think the structure of romance does provide you with a remarkably clearer view of the structural principles of storytelling generally, of what there is in a story. And I think that what I was trying to set up in that book, as I try to set up in the article that you are reading [“Expanding Eyes,” in Spiritus Mundi, 99–122; CW 27: 391–410], I was trying to set up a context for the individual romance, which communicates a kind of resonance to the individual work. Very often, if you go into a theatre or pick up a novel you think that you have seen this kind of play or read this kind of story many times before. Very often you have a negative feeling: you get nothing from it. But I think there is a positive aspect to the same feeling. I think the positive aspect comes when you realize that this is that great story once again. Eric O’Connor: When you say that there are only a certain number of plots— you quote Carlo Gozzi [The Secular Scripture, 38; CW 18: 27]—what do you mean by that? When you generalize that statement of a plot, well, you can say simply that there is only one plot: there is a beginning and an end. Now, obviously, I haven’t gained anything by saying that. Frye: Yes. I know that. And I would be very leery of constructs like Gozzi’s about the thirty-six possible dramatic situations. I think it is all right to work that kind of thing out, but I would be very doubtful about saying that there were X number of plots. What I do feel is that you find yourself pulled towards a kind of centre of literary experience, where you feel that this is what your kind of literary experience has been all about. It’s that centralizing feeling that attracts me about good romance. Q: So the roles are typed: like male and female—given out from long ago? Frye: Every character you read about in literature has been there since the Tertiary Age. Eric O’Connor: But has not been written down? Frye: No. There are hundreds of thousands of years when nothing is written down, but they are always there. Helene Loiselle: Is this back, then, to the beginning? Where would you begin your schema of mythology.

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Frye: Well, I wouldn’t begin it, you see. You can have a creation myth in a mythological universe; you have to have one; but I don’t think there is any chronological or historical beginning. Patricia Coonan: Can you create one? Frye: That is what you have to do, you see. You have to admit that you weren’t around in the Tertiary Age, and you don’t know how it all began. Patricia Coonan: But I couldn’t do anything new. I couldn’t change the universe into a new myth. Frye: Again, take the analogy of the human being: in a sense, everything is new. In a sense, every baby born is an individual, unique human being. In another sense, nothing is new. Patricia Coonan: But, in history, don’t we have different eras with different myths about creation that get a little more sophisticated? Frye: They get a bit displaced and they get accommodated to realism. But different races and different peoples have had their mythologies and yet there is such an extraordinary family likeness among all these mythologies. And I’ve noticed with religion, that it is the doctrinal and conceptual elements of religion that make one religion different from another. But mythologically a lot of these distinctions disappear. So you begin to suspect that in the study of mythology you are learning a language, and a language which is intelligible, roughly, all over the world. Patricia Coonan: I’m thinking of Eric Voegelin and his distinguishing different stages in history by the mythological universes that were envisioned. Frye: But I think that what would happen there would be a distinctive emphasis on things that were potentially present elsewhere but not so emphasized. Patricia Coonan: But would it allow human nature or rather human beings to develop differently, if your myth is more open rather than closed? Frye: Yes. And it would make Roman mythology different from Greek; and Greek different from Hebrew; and Hebrew different from Egyptian. But they are not so different that they are unintelligible to each other. Eric O’Connor: In the romance, you are especially thinking of European romance and European civilization? Frye: Yes. That was my general area. Eric O’Connor: You would expect though, whenever you have explored outside, you would expect to find, at the mythic level, the same resemblances?

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Frye: In the very limited reading that I have done, I would not only expect to find, but I have found it. I mentioned the Indian play Sakuntala [The Secular Scripture, 103; CW 18: 68], showing the same kind of progression that you get in Shakespeare’s Pericles. I said in a very early article, one that I wrote about thirty years ago, that if we discover a new civilization and its literature in ancient Crete or wherever, it may not have plays like King Lear, but it certainly will have plays like Pericles or Sakuntala. Charlotte Tansey: Does this extended treatment of romance take it out of the springtime? It seems to me it overflows a bit your earlier distinctions. Frye: Oh! The mythoi—yes. Well, of course, the four seasons was really a mnemonic device. I was trying to give my reader something they could remember, something they could take in––the universe generally. And I think there are various elements in it. There is a historical element, according to which medieval romance comes along, after a mythological period, and before a mimetic one. And then there is also the sense, which I am using in The Secular Scripture, that romance is one of these perennial things that are always there. But it is always to some extent the mythos of summer, even if it is written in the mid-twentieth century. Eric O’Connor: These categories, myth, irony, and the like, seem to be part of a mandala that you work with. Would it be as accurate to say––I can see a reason that it wouldn’t be––that your theory of modes is a heuristic structure. But ordinarily you say “heuristic” for concepts, while “mandala” seems to be an equivalent thing for symbols? Frye: Yes. It is heuristic in the sense that if you have a general structure of this kind, if you know that that is there, then you can perhaps deduce that this is down here, and check whether it is. I found that very valuable heuristically. Gerald MacGuigan: I would like to ask about the recovery of myth. I am aware of two authors, apart from secular romance, that in a way speak of the recovery of myth. One is Marx’s concept of religion, where religion is the alienation, the projection onto the sky of everything that is good and creative and right in the human being and only what is evil and bad can come from the human. The humanizing effort then would be to destroy the myth. The other author is Blake. Blake’s illustrations of the book of Job, where Job does emerge as Pope and Emperor at the end, with potentialities fulfilled: he is now using the musical instruments that in the first place were hanging on the trees. But the turning point in Blake is not where Job is tortured but the later one, where God appears to him in the Whirlwind. And we know from the text that what God says to Job at that time is all about creation. And yet, apparently, accepting the creation myth Job

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is liberated and comes to the freedom, the creativity that properly belongs to the human being. Frye: Yes. I think the process in Blake is a little more complicated. That is, if you have time as a horizontal line, which is the way in which it is always symbolized, where you are dragged backwards, away from the past towards the future so that your fundamental category of reality, which is time, consists of three dimensions that don’t exist: the past, the present, and the future. And when you are hit by a disaster, as Job is, the natural tendency is to say: well what caused this? why did this happen to me? And the place to put the cause is here at the beginning of time. In other words, at the Creation. So that in the Book of Job, God says to Job: were you around when I made the world? Well, you weren’t, so why are you asking questions about my administrative competence? And it sounds as though God were just bullying Job, but actually, I think, what God is saying in the Book of Job is: don’t look there; that’s just a chain; it’s just what binds you. And what’s important for you to know is not how you got into this mess, but how you can get out of it again. And that sets up a different perspective altogether. So that in Blake’s “Book of Job” you have, first of all, God coming down to Job in the form of the Whirlwind [Plate 13]. That is followed by the vision of the Creation [Plate 14]: “the Sons of God shouting for joy”; and so forth, where a human a world is over on top of the created order. And after that, Job sees Behemoth & Leviathan [Plate 15]. And then, after that [Plate 16] God turns human, i.e., he turns into the form of Jesus and becomes the essential part of Job himself. Gerald MacGuigan: And this would be completely opposed to the Marxian recovery of myth? Frye: It would have analogies, I think, to the Marxist view. The Marxist view would be that as long as you keep projecting your notions of divinity onto a creator up there in the sky, you are, of course, doing nothing about the situation and have to recapture it for yourself. I think that Blake would say the same thing, but they would differ on the nature of the human being that did the recovering. Q: What does the recovery have to do with the genuine earth story that you mention in the third chapter? Frye: The descent to the lower world theme? Q: No. It’s “when the cyclical conjunctions of divine birds and human women are finally broken, and the human imagination has passed beyond the empty heavens into its original earth” [The Secular Scripture, 93; CW 18: 63]. Frye: There I was taking Yeats’ figure. According to Yeats, history shows an al-

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ternation of cycles of two-thousand years each. One cycle is tragic and heroic and the other cycle is comic and altruistic. So you have two-thousand years of a classical cycle followed by two-thousand years of a Christian cycle. That would be succeeded by a third one which would go back to the Greek tragic and aristocratic pattern. These are always symbolized by the conjunction of the bird and the woman: Leda & the Swan were the Classical; the Virgin and the Dove were the Christian. And the Heron in the Irish marshes and the Priestess in Yeats’ play [The King’s Threshold] convey it. What I was suggesting there was that the ultimate recovery of myth gets man out of the bind of the historical cycle: the kind of thing that Vico and Spengler talk about. Q: But not necessarily projecting? Frye: Projection is what starts the cycle, you see? As soon as Marxism becomes a social institution, then you are told that the real explanation of the power struggle going on in Peking is that this man is a capitalist rogue and he has to be got rid of. And if that is not the opiate of the people I don’t know what is. But it’s a projection again which starts another cycle turning. Q: Would you see the recreation of the classical order, according to Yeats, as a return to myth? Frye: A return to myth, perhaps. But not a return to the particular emphasis in classical myth that Yeats found in the Oedipus story. Q: So do you see that as a form of an increase in consciousness because you held the poet as the hero rather than the work he creates? Frye: Of course, there is another stage where the reader becomes the hero. I think what Yeats would call a Christian cycle, from the literary point of view, is perhaps a culture where you get more and more of the shift over to the poet as hero. Perhaps in the immediate future we are shaping up more or less to a community of letters, where more and more is entrusted to the reader. Patricia Coonan: Who then becomes the poet? Frye: No. Who then becomes the reborn poet––in a sense, who possesses what the poet has. Helene Loiselle: What signs do you see of that? Frye: I would think, for one thing, in the greater explicitness that writers set forth their mythical patterns. That’s one thing. It throws more responsibility on the reader. And in proportion it is a kind of compensation for the passivity of the mass produced art of the television set. And the literary development seems to me to keep demanding more and more of the reader.

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Q: Do you think this is conscious on the part of the poet or the writer? Frye: It depends on where his consciousness is. Some people just write with their conscious minds; others, write with whatever is underneath it. It just depends. Q: That’s what I was wondering: is it a conscious trend or is it something that is happening in the psyche. Frye: These things are never a sort of either/or set up. It is always consciousness mixed up with other things. And if it were a conscious movement then it would tend to be a trend or a vogue. I think that it is something which articulates itself in highly conscious acts, but the actual drive itself is among other things. Q: Would you care to name any of the people you think are writing this way? In the book you admit that self‑recognition comes from what you read [The Secular Scripture, 157; CW 18: 104]. Frye: What the important thing is is not who is writing or even what is being written, but what the reader is doing. It is conceivable that you would have nothing in the contemporary scene except trash. And, yet, if you had sufficiently lively and imaginative readers they could make something out of that. Dante hadn’t read Homer but he could make something out of two bad lines in Lucan. And that is the way great writers operate, and it is the way we should start thinking in terms of the great reader. Q: In the first chapter you looked at popular literature for the signs of what is coming next and what the reader can do for himself. Frye: I’ve noticed too in studying the biographies of great writers that the most fertilizing influences seem to be very often second or third rate writers. Because what they inspire is: well, I could do as well as that. Gerard Manley Hopkins said something extremely sensible when he said that the effect of great masterpieces on him was to make him admire and then do something else.1 Charlotte Tansey: Could you say a little about the use of the word “vision” or “visionary.” How is one a visionary? Frye: The term started in the writing of my early book on Blake where, first of all, I had to get rid of all the stuff that had been written on Blake, which was almost entirely trash. There was only one book that was at all useful at the time when I was starting on Blake’s Prophecies, and that was Foster Damon’s.2 And so many of these books said that Blake was a mystic and mystics do this, that, and the other thing. And I wondered why Blake wasn’t doing any of these things, and why he talked so insistently about his being a poet, an artist, a painter. I arrived therefore at a distinction, in fact, almost a contrast between a mystic like, say, John of the Cross, who eventually moves in the direction of getting rid of images,

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and the visionary who goes after images. And that is what I mean by visionary. It’s rather like the visions of plenitude and vacancy in Eliot’s Quartets. Gerald MacGuigan: Would the images then be either/or or perhaps both/and. Would they be presented to us by the artist as symbols of experience or instruments of thought? Frye: They could be either, because it is very important that literature is the focus where experience and thinking meet. That has been the classical Aristotelian view of poetry: it is where the moral precept and the historical example come into focus. So they would have to be both images of experience and instruments of thought. Eric O’Connor: I don’t know if this is a fair question, but I catch these two things in your writing. You are saying criticism should be different. You are also saying most explicitly that one should creatively criticize. Frye: Creatively criticize criticism? Eric O’Connor: No. Operate as a critic. Frye: I think the general point of view there is what I said in the Anatomy, that I am not attacking different critical procedures if I am satisfied that they are valid procedures. What I am attacking is the barriers between the procedures. I was trying to set up a conspectus for all forms of critical activity. But that was back in the fifties, even the forties when I was thinking about the issue. Then you had the New Critics, who were forming a group of themselves and setting themselves up over against the historical people, and then there was the new crop––Frye and his myth criticism and so forth. I felt that this was a terrible waste of time, when one could see what criticism as a whole was getting at, even if you were temperamentally drawn to certain techniques rather than others. Gerald MacGuigan: It goes back to the thirties, when A.S.P. Woodhouse in a Milton class would make a reference to that Blake scholar over at Victoria College. Frye: Sure! And I remember the time when E.K. Brown came back from Chicago and had an evening with Woodhouse on the explication of texts, where he said that he had spent sixteen periods on Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes; and Woodhouse said, “What did you say in the other fifteen?” Those are two radically different critical procedures, each of them valid. Martin O’Hara: You refer here to the movement into linguistics as one pole and into sociology as the other. Do you see these as the two strong camps? Frye: They are strong in the sense that they are quite well organized. I think they

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have got hold of a sufficiently concrete subject matter perhaps to put them in a rather stronger position than the different schools of criticism had. Patricia Coonan: You talk about the dream world: “we are not awake when we have abolished the dream world: we are awake only when we have absorbed it again.” [The Secular Scripture, 61; CW 18: 43]. But then there is also the sleeping, the trapped demonic lower world of dreams and sleep. Frye: Yes. The descent quest is a perilous quest. There is a quite remarkable poem by the New Brunswick poet, Alden Nowlan, about going down into the cellar of the mind and coming up covered with blood and he says that two examples of people who have made that descent are St. Francis of Assisi and Bluebeard. And he says the same experiences “instruct the evil as inform the good.”3 When I said that we are awake only when we have absorbed the dream world again, I meant that it appears to be a fact of literature that all creative power seems to demand an organizing of the mind, which includes the consciousness but isn’t wholly conscious, and which includes something we call the subconscious or unconscious but isn’t wholly that either. Helene Loiselle: How about the vision that “must be kept unspotted” from the actual world [The Secular Scripture, 58; CW 18: 42]? Frye: In what I was talking about there, I wound up by referring to the book, The Treason of the Clerks, La Trahison des clercs, the betrayal of the intellectuals. I mean the kind of writer who instead of focusing on his vision carries it into the world of social activity and gets it mixed up with that. The locus classicus of that kind of thing in English literature is the treatment of Rousseau in Shelley’s poem, The Triumph of Life. He studies Rousseau in that poem as an example of the kind of flawed genius that confuses his vision by the way in which he relates it to activity. I don’t mean that vision should never be related to activity but there are premature ways of doing it. And that explains, for example, why poets who have also been men of action have been great poets partly because they were so hopeless as men of action. Milton, for example, took a very active part in seventeenth‑century revolutionary politics, but if he had ever understood the first thing about what was happening in the seventeenth century, he wouldn’t have been Milton. Charles II did; but he didn’t write Paradise Lost—he was just a king who died in his bed. Roberta Machnik: Would you say the same thing for William Morris? Frye: William Morris, again, had a rather clearer notion of the way in which an artist’s vision can be used and in which social action can take place; I don’t think that he mixed the things up in a way which confused both.

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Helene Loiselle: And Yeats? Frye: Yeats had his moments of confusion. He couldn’t tell the difference between what was happening in Ireland and what the Blue Shirt movement was going to do to Ireland. He pulled out of it in time, but if he had gone along with that, it would have been another example of the treason of the clerks. It would have been a completely wrong mixing up of poetic vision and social action. Gerald MacGuigan: But is there a way of affecting or influencing social action that would not be guilty of what Arnold accuses Carlyle of: down in the cockpit mixing it up, who’s ever going to trust Carlyle again? Frye: I think that is irreparable as far as Carlyle is concerned, but it is possible for the poet to think of himself as both a poet and as a man living in the world and yet to keep the two things functioning by themselves and even uniting with one another. I think there are good ways and bad ways of doing it. Gerald MacGuigan: But the transformation of the world is not a transformation in the world out there, in society. As with Blake’s vision, so with Jesus’ vision. At the time, they did nothing in society; it didn’t lessen any of the exploitation of the laborers in the mills or the armies or the commerce men or the kings or the priests. Frye: But again, there is the realization that poetic vision cannot do that, it doesn’t necessarily prevent you, on another level, working in that area. Martin O’Hara: I’m thinking of Auden saying: “For poetry makes nothing happen” (In Memory of W.B. Yeats, pt. 2, l. 5.), but then, on other occasions, writing poems with strong messages about the war and poverty. Are these the two sides? Frye: Yes. I think so. And that’s what I mean by keeping the vision unspotted from the world. Patricia Coonan: Is it part of the reader’s job then to get the vision? Frye: It is one of the reader’s jobs, I think, to see when a writer has confused these two things, as Carlyle did. Martin O’Hara: Do writers tend to confuse a bit more as they grow into the centre of what you refer to in one part as the elitist literature? Frye: Very often they do. Martin O’Hara: More than the popular writer? Frye: Yes. I think that’s true. I think it’s often a help for a writer not to have any social influence at all and not to be able to get any. That’s one reason why

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Blake came through to me with such a blinding clarity because everybody just assumed he was a nut. Martin O’Hara: Some thought he was mad? Frye: Yes. Cathleen Going: One of the social functions of this book, it seems to me, would be that it makes the convention visible and valuable. But, on the other hand, I go back to the prophet and the moment where the word takes over, which you are studying now––to say nothing of the moments of the taking over of the music examples. The awareness of the convention has the function that if someone knows what he is doing, the visionary knows that there is such a thing as a vision, and it helps not to confuse them. But, on the other hand, the seemingly praiseworthy moment of the word taking over makes it difficult for the man to know what he is doing. Frye: Yes. I think that is true. You remember what happened to the prophets in the Bible. They all got stuck in prison. Cathleen Going: Probably socially ineffective, temporarily? Frye: Yes. You remember the story of Micaiah in the Book of Kings [1 Kings 22], where Ahab and Jehoshaphat have all their court prophets say unanimously go up and attack the king of Syria because you are certain to win. And then Micaiah says: if you go up and attack the king of Syria, he’ll take you to the cleaners. And so the king says: put this fellow in prison until I come back. So he went up; and he was taken to the cleaners. And I would say that all these court prophets were examples of betraying intellectuals. Q: They didn’t let the Word take over? Frye: No. They knew that the prophet was supposed to go into a trance and speak with a different voice, but they also knew that they should not go too far under to forget what the king wanted to hear. Eric O’Connor: Is a fanatic, a psychotic, an example of what you are saying about one who has an idea and is going to make it happen? Is that what you are saying? Frye: Yes. I think the notion that you can make something happen is a very dangerous notion to get hold of, especially if it starts out as some kind of imaginative vision, because it does drive you into a narrower and narrower corner. Martin O’Hara: Should the reader and the writer be very different on this score? Is it better, given the choice, that the writer should know more of the structure or that the reader should?

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Frye: Oh! The reader should. And if you think of the people that you most instinctively think of as prophetic, people like Blake, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Kafka, they are people who have no sense of wholeness or integration; they are people who get smashed up by their time; and fragments get rescued from the smash of a terrific intensity. But those prophets have sacrificed themselves for something else of which the reader benefits. Patricia Coonan: Why do they write, if they don’t expect anything to happen? Frye: You see, there are two kinds of community. There is a community of individuals sharing a vision and certainly poetry happens in that area. . . . Patricia Coonan: You talk about the imagination and its otherness: “for the imagination it is rather some kind of force or power or will that is not ourselves, an otherness of spirit” [The Secular Scripture, 60; CW 18: 43]. Frye: I’m talking about Wallace Stevens there, am I not? Yes, it is Wallace Stevens. There I’m really saying what I just said that there are two kinds of community. There is a community which is man in nature and there is also a community of the spirit: a community that the imagination directly addresses. And I think that in the actual work of building up culture and civilization you are always up against the otherness of nature. As Father O’Connor said at the beginning [when setting up the tape recorder], you can’t rewire certain things in this room without doing certain concrete things; you can’t just use a metaphor. And that is where the otherness belongs to this nonhuman, nonconscious, amoral world that we call the order of nature. But within the circle, which the arts address, religion and philosophy and so forth, you become aware of another kind of otherness. Wallace Stevens, who described himself as a desiccated Presbyterian, quotes the theologian Karl Barth on the conception of God as the wholly other; and that is obviously something he has in mind.4 And, as I say, you do pass from a world where the otherness is not of nature, which is really below that, as far as consciousness or morality is concerned, to a world where the otherness is the spiritual otherness, which is much harder to define. Patricia Coonan: Which the secular scripture then has to struggle with? Frye: Yes, as Jacob has to fight the angel. Q: Would a very early myth, like Beowulf, have been concerned with the world of nature? Frye: Yes, and yet there are other things there too, I think. In the last part of Beowulf, when Beowulf is the old man—the old king—the dragon comes and lays waste the country and Beowulf goes out to fight this dragon because it’s his dragon––because, in a sense, it’s his death. It is not that he is the hero, it is just that he is the man the dragon has come for.

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Q: In that sense the myth does seem to have two distinct parts. Frye: Yes. I think there is an otherness of spirit there very definitely. Grendel, on the other hand, is from the race of Cain, and represents something of the mindlessness of the order of nature. Martin O’Hara: There are two parts as well––you point out in the Iliad and the Odyssey, how the violence and fraud contrast [The Secular Scripture, 65; CW 18: 44]. Frye: Yes. Helene Loiselle: On page 58 of The Secular Scripture, you suggest it is the reader’s world; it is not the writer’s world. Frye: It is not the reader’s world, qua reader; it is rather the workaday world, where you work for six days and then play one day or, first you are awake and then you dream. That is, in ordinary experience, you are aware of these continual antitheses: awake at day, dreaming at night, and working X-hours and playing X-hours, and so on. Gerald MacGuigan: A concept of the arts then, Dr. Frye, as merely aesthetic liberation would be quite foreign to your presentation? Frye: Oh, very much, yes. That leads to the situation that I was glancing at at the end of that “Expanding Eyes” article about the people, such as Hannah Arendt, who get so bewildered because they find that very evil men can have a very polished taste in the arts [CW 27: 391–410]. To me, that’s not a problem at all. But when that happens it means that this person with the taste in the arts is keeping it rigidly in the aesthetic sphere; there’s nothing he’s being committed to. Q: It’s going beyond art as meditation? Frye: When it becomes part of something that you really have to do in a very, very profound sense. Charlotte Tansey: When you talk about the particularity of the rising motion; it seems to me right, but I don’t know why. “As we go up, we find ourselves surrounded by images of increased participation” [The Secular Scripture, 183; CW 18: 120]. I was thinking of particularity and it isn’t–– it’s more social, more differentiated? Frye: Yes. The whole process of ascent is being delivered from isolation, from psychosis, from the feeling of being all alone in the dark. And as that happens other shapes begin to form around you and you find that you are in a human community and on further levels, the whole order of nature becomes responsive in the way it was in the garden of Eden. You find yourself interested in concep-

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tions like evolution or you feel that you are part of an ongoing process, which is also a cooperative process. Charlotte Tansey: Perhaps I misread it as being more concrete, more unique. Frye: That is true, because the more egocentric your perception, the hazier and more general is what you see; and the less so, then the more sharply particularized is what you see. That is Blake’s doctrine of the minute particulars: when the ego has collapsed then you are in a world of particulars. Helene Loiselle: It is something you get on the seventh day? Frye: It is an ideal; it is something you are moving towards. Q: Do you think you should take a story down with you, as you go down, or you write it as you go or you create it as you go. Frye: I suppose people do that to some extent. I think, if you are a writer, you more or less have to go where you are writing. Q: If you are not a writer, you pick a good story? Frye: You pick your story. Helene Loiselle: Your story then becomes part of the particular? Frye: I think that the story would become, with increasing practice and skill, and so forth, it would become increasingly particularized. The one thing I have experienced in literature, that convinces me that I’m on at least some of the right track, the more deeply impressed I am by what I read, the more clearly I see in it the whole shape and substance of what among other things come out less clearly. Eric O’Connor: What’s more clear, the mythological universe? Frye: Yes. Eric O’Connor: Would that be your mythological universe? Frye: It’s first of all mine, yes; and then it’s something that I share with others. Eric O’Connor: But as it’s yours, there are some parts that you will never share; everybody’s will be somewhat different? Frye: O! Yes. But out of that some kind of community emerges. Martin O’Hara: I get frightened by an increasing number of students who are not capable of responding to a story, where there’s a numbness. I haven’t seen it before, but from what you are saying, they would have difficulty in making community.

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Frye: Yes, they do. Because we live in a very introverted society: a superhighway where the main danger is falling asleep is obviously a much more introverted place than an unfrequented country road would be. And it is that kind of introversion that we can’t escape from: the introversion of high rise apartments and all these streets with the cars going down the middle, and the sense of community obliterated constantly, which makes it very hard for children not to adopt that kind of pacing, because it is a very rigorous pacing that is demanded. And to listen to a story, you’ve got to just clip that right off, you’ve got to relax and lose all that sense of panic, all that sense of timing and marching. Martin O’Hara: The moment of getting caught, a phrase that came up earlier of “being new to me.” Frye: Once a thing is genuinely new to you, you are delivered from the march of time. Eric O’Connor: Is Conrad’s book, Romance, a book you are familiar with? Frye: Not immediately, no. Chance I remember. Eric O’Connor: It is one I read when I was very young. Frye: Sorry, I’m not that clear on it. Gerald MacGuigan: But the insight into Blake must have come through, you said a blinding flash but that must be an understatement. Frye: I suppose. It was fifteen years and five complete rewritings that book [Fearful Symmetry] had. Gerald MacGuigan: The certainty that it gave you: I have seen this, and now that I have seen this, I am able to see this, this, this and this. And then you worked out your chapters, section by section, for the Anatomy of Criticism, including the basic work on romance. And what comes through to me, from your writing, from the very first that I know of your writing, the Fearful Symmetry through the others, even to the occasional convocation lectures and others, is this reassuring confidence that you have. For instance, when you say in your book on romance here that institutional Christianity has got the two judgments mixed up [The Secular Scripture, 150; CW 15: 99], that hit me like that! And I said, of course, that’s exactly what has been bothering me practically all my life about this. And here this man has come and, out of literary studies, solved this problem for me. It’s a sort of a spill-over and it shed light not just on literature, not just on literary criticism, or a theory of literary criticism, it sheds light everywhere, doesn’t it? Frye: Yes. It’s part of what I mean by the unspotted [The Secular Scripture, 58; CW 18: 42]. You deal with very pure and intense imagination in the study of litera-

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ture. Whereas in the history of any social institution, you are also dealing with a great many anxieties. And so the pure imagination throws a very sharp light on the anxiety. Gerald MacGuigan: I have a Christian family movement and we meet every two weeks. At one session they asked me to present the recent Roman document on some problems of sexual ethics or something like that. And I did give them a presentation on that, but I put that to one side and I gave them what you have there in your book about the unwilling knowledge of self as more terrible than death [The Secular Scripture, 123; CW 18: 82]. We had our best session in five years. We made it into intimacy, married intimacy, etc. This just brought in an atomic explosion of light into this area. Helene Loiselle: The distinction between comedy and romance. Frye: Comedy usually remains on a social level. In the last scene of a comedy all the characters are on the stage at once and a new society gets born. And when a romantic comedy like A Midsummer Night’s Dream goes wandering off into the fairy woods, near Athens, it does so in order to come back to Athens and force that kind of wish thinking on that stupid ass, Theseus, so that he can do something about Athens and his marriage law. But the reference in comedy is usually social. Whereas, clear romance always points in the direction of the Garden of Eden or the Song of Songs: the reintegrated nature, the recreated world. Helene Loiselle: Is that part of the recovery? Frye: Yes. It’s a higher part of recovery because we can easily imagine a renewed society with all the curmudgeons reconciled and the hero getting the heroine; but it is harder to think in terms of green pastures and still waters and a restored soul, that’s more rarified. Eric O’Connor: Why did you choose this book, why did you choose to work on romance? Frye: I don’t know, except that I wanted to––I’ve been fussing around with a book on the Bible for quite a while, and ever since, I recognized that I had to write that. And then these Norton Lectures came up; and it suddenly struck me that this might be part two. So that was how it originated. Charlotte Tansey: It is hard to know that this is part of an open-ended romance? Gerald MacGuigan: For the sake of my scientist friend [Eric O’Connor] down there, Dr. Frye, you do speak of criticism in terms of science. And Anatomy of Criticism is very definitely a scientific analogy. I would think that your thinking,

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your mind works in a very scientific way. It is a very precise way that you do get insights, possible understandings, and that you do go about verifying. Now, how does your process of verification differ from the man who works in the lab? Frye: I suppose it is in the degree of communicability; that is, I can verify it for myself and I can suggest that the experiment can be repeated by anyone I talk to, but the process of repeating it is much more subtle and indirect. That is, the repeated experiment is something where you know what the level of repetition is: you simply do the experiment over again and if it works that’s fine. But when you are transferring something like an experience of literature to somebody else it is a more indirect process. It demands a kind of less conventionalized personal attitude, because emotional attitudes and that kind of thing get mixed up with it. Gerald MacGuigan: But that would be the presentation of your personally confirmed insight or theory. Now, in the confirmation, is it simply self-consistency? Frye: As far as I can see, there is a kind of consistency in the sense that one’s experience fits another’s, that is, it belongs to the same kind of body. And also that there is a consistency of odd experience, a linear consistency through one’s experience of literature. Gerald MacGuigan: And perhaps harmonious relationships, if not coincidences, with the experience of what we might call other mysteries? Frye: Oh, yes, very much so. Gerald MacGuigan: I choose those two terms the “self-consistency” and the “other mysteries” because this is what theologians tell us they do, when they are speaking of their work as a science. But they are in a way literary critics? Like criticizing the Word? Frye: Yes. Q: Aren’t all schools of criticism, though, consistent within the system they set up to criticize within; and, if that is so, how is yours, your consistency better than any other consistency? Frye: I wouldn’t claim that it was. Q: But obviously you believe in it? Frye: Yes. But the thing is, I believe in the other critics too, if their systems make sense. But I think that ultimately anything which is consistent with itself will also be consistent with something else that is also consistent with itself. That is why I say that I am not opposed to other schools of criticism but I am opposed to the barriers that separate them.

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Helene Loiselle: When you use the word “interpenetration,” at one stage, is that similar? Frye: I use the word interpenetration because, for one thing, I’ve grown to distrust the word reconcile. I think that if you reconcile A with B, you water down both A and B so much that you haven’t really got anything at all. And so I don’t want to reconcile literary criticism with psychology. But I would like to interpenetrate with psychology and anthropology. And that is a word [interpenetrate] that I got actually from Zen Buddhism, from Suzuki’s writings on the Lankavatara sutra, and the way in which in the height of vision for the Buddhist, everything is everywhere at once, and everything interpenetrates with everything at once. And that to me was a much clearer explanation of what the apocalyptic vision was than I ever found in the West. Eric O’Connor: Lonergan expresses the movement to mature science as a movement from relating things to us to relating things to one another. And actually, they are almost your words also: relating things in literature to other things in literature. Frye: Yes. That’s right. But then, of course, there comes the problem of critic A saying to critic B, look this is how these things are related to one another. And that process is a little more difficult than it is in the sciences. Martin O’Hara: The interpenetration goes through time as well. Just as everything is somehow present at once; it is timeless in a way. Frye: There is only a pure present and presence. Q: Your notion of having earned the right to silence [The Secular Scripture, 188; CW 18: 124] again, sounds more Eastern? Frye: Perhaps it is, in that context, yes. I meant by silence really the possession of literature, where you don’t need to talk anymore. That is, I began the Anatomy of Criticism by saying that the reason why you have to have criticism is that criticism can talk; and all the arts, including the arts of words, are dumb: they show forth but they don’t speak. So that the end of criticism is perhaps the entering into that kind of silence. Charlotte Tansey: I took it that you were saying in answering my question that beyond the vision is something that doesn’t need a vision? Frye: Yes. In a sense, you are the vision. Eric O’Connor: Supposing someone said to you, who hadn’t had too much literary experience, that the Faerie Queene is just a little too much for me to master and I’d like to do something that is a great romance and covers the whole scope of it. What would you suggest?

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Frye: I would suggest, first of all, that a reader should fundamentally follow his own nose, that is, follow his own instinct. He should stick to what sticks to him, in other words. And if he finds his kind of thing in Tolkien, then he should read Tolkien, and if he finds it in William Morris then that’s the man for him. And if he finds it in Borrow, it will help him but . . . Cathleen Going: Who is more surprised, the social scientists or the literary critics, when you suggested that the literary critics were social scientists? Frye: The social scientists, of course, don’t like what I say next, which is that the social sciences are the applied humanities. Eric O’Connor: One of the great insights for me in your “Expanding Eyes” was where you said you were so sure Frazer and Spengler were literary critics [Spiritus Mundi, 111; CW 27: 401]. And I spent a whole day trying to see how you were so sure, and it was so obvious because it couldn’t have been anything else. I mean, apart from your verifying, that was an experience in itself. Q: How can you explain that in Latin American cultures or Spanish and so on, there isn’t much criticism? Octavio Paz, in one of his lectures, berates the Spaniards and the Portuguese for not entering criticism [“On Criticism,” 35–9]. And yet it seems to me that Latin American writing is very, very lively and quite interesting and speaks to me personally. Frye: I simply don’t know why there isn’t criticism, more prominence given to criticism in Latin American countries. It may be that there is a much lower proportion of young people going to university. And, of course, the university is a great employer of critics. But, on the other hand, I’ve read criticism of Borges, who is one of the few Latin American authors I have looked into and that must have come out of something and there must be a tradition behind that. Charlotte Tansey: Rather more English background than some of the others. Frye: Yes, perhaps. He read a great deal of English literature. Helene Loiselle: Would it have to do with the kind of anxiety these people have? Frye: It could. But I think probably the main thing is just the economic market of critics. Gerald MacGuigan: May I suggest that one of the reasons might be that if their manuals of literature are similar to French manuals of literature, then they are not descriptive; they are prescriptive: that every art becomes the art of rhetoric and you learn the techniques for it, manipulation for creating effects, for getting results. And the manuals––I have one on my desk and I look at it every so often and it is complete, but it is prescriptive. It is the training of the faculty for do-

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ing this, and poetry is just rhetoric in four-inch columns rather than in five-inch columns. It might well be that. Perhaps the shock they would experience coming into a kind of literary criticism like this, the experience that a graduate of one of the collèges classiques that had studied, say, economics or sociology in a collège classique, then goes to Harvard and comes up against the empirical method and the case method for the first time. He has to dismantle his thinking apparatus and rebuild it. The Roman approach. Frye: That sounds very likely. Patricia Coonan: The word interpenetration would be an absorbing of the green world. Would integration be a closing word? Frye: As it is generally used, it tends to be, yes. In fact, I got to distrust the word integration because of the way it was used in educational theory where, thirty years ago, everybody was saying: don’t stand there, get yourselves integrated. It came to have the wrong overtones to it. Patricia Coonan: But then the structures just point, they don’t frame? Frye: Structure is an architectural metaphor which I use because I can’t think of a word that would be less confusing. Patricia Coonan: But it would be more of an arrow than a frame? Frye: It would be more like a skeleton, perhaps; something that is inside, that does the articulating but which is not the life. Martin O’Hara: You can add to a structure too, build on to it? Frye: Yes. Eric O’Connor: What about the word “radical”; what is your image of that—a radical of something? Frye: The image is that of the root, the radix. Eric O’Connor: I was thinking of the square root side of it. Frye: Yes. Well, that’s a root. Eric O’Connor: You mean root, rather than square root? Frye: Well, yes. But there is a metaphor in square root as well. Helene Loiselle: I love the image of the world pulled inside out. I was wondering if that’s your idea of the skeleton inside. I loved the idea but I didn’t know what to do with it: the notion of the world pulled inside out [The Secular Scripture, 174; CW 18: 114].

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Frye: Dante comes into the presence of God and suddenly realizes that the universe is God centred and not Earth centred. It connects with the image of the vortex, the gyre that seems to run through all literature: that you are continually passing from one realm of reality into another one, which is the first one turned inside out. And that’s what happens in the descent theme when it turns into the ascent theme. charlottle tansey: “Romance as the kernel of fable” [The Secular Scripture, 183; CW 18: 120], could you say something about that? Frye: I was thinking, among other things, of the fable as one of the democratic and revolutionary forms of literature. That is, the fable, like the proverb, is the expression of popular wisdom and popular energy. There is that wonderful poem of Hart Crane’s on the black man in the cellar of the Chicago suburb and thinking of Aesop who, of course, was black too.5 And the feeling of the fable as somehow or other a thing of the people. It keeps clutching to their hearts. And the fable is the source of the parables of Jesus, and so on. These are the essentially popular forms which humanity clings to when they are starting to recover myth. Eric O’Connor: And that is really what you are looking for. Stan Machnik: Is it the fable writers, would you say, who are the first literary critics or philosophers? Frye: The fable writers are the popular philosophers, just as the maker of proverbs is. Aesop is a black slave––that’s the legend about him. Phaedrus, who collected the Roman fables, is a slave, and he says so at the beginning of his book. And there is something in the fable that makes it a popular possession and a potentially revolutionary form. Stan Machnik: How far back do you take literary criticism? You take it to Aristotle here, but where are its roots? Frye: It goes back into a simpler society, where things are much harder to distinguish from other things. And I think the differentiation of criticism from creation probably begins with the kind of thing that was growing up around the time of Plato, the kind of thing that Eric Havelock has studied, of the thing that happens with the writing culture, when the poets are no longer in the oral tradition, when they are no longer the teachers of society but you need somebody else to do the teaching. And you have a polarization between the poet and the teacher of the poetry. Q: How would you say the ballad form or its story fits into any kind of romantic context?

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Frye: The ballad usually tells an intensely romantic story. Q: Is there no place you could fit it in here with your concept of romance? Frye: Oh! Yes, I would. I was dealing, for tactical reasons, mainly with prose romance, but I would not exclude the ballad as a form of romance. And the types of stories that you find, if you look through a child’s book of ballads or Grimm’s Fairy Tales, again, they are very much the same kind of thing. Q: It’s a kind of romantic tale, with every third line left out. Frye: I always think of the ballad as giving you just the sketched situation, that is, a ballad like Sir Patrick Spens. I think of Valéry’s principle: that whatever in poetry has to be said is never said well. So that in Sir Patrick Spens, which is a poem about a shipwreck, the shipwreck is what you have to talk about. Consequently, there isn’t one syllable about the shipwreck in Sir Patrick Spens. You see, first of all, going out into the storm, and then you see the hats floating on the water. Eric O’Connor: That is something like what I was talking in the car with you, about reading Pericles quickly one night. And just being caught by the story, without any of the images except as you read them fast and tired, but the story caught. And that’s what you are saying here. That’s what ballads get at somehow. Frye: And that’s what is so remarkable about Pericles; and it is so remarkable when you see it on the stage too: what an astonishingly actable play it is. Because all the things that you have to do are just ignored. Q: What you have to do is what you have to do for yourself? Frye: No. What you have to do is connect the tissue, what you have to describe and say, “and then” you see this is what happened “because.” Q: Aren’t you doing that all the time? Frye: I think your mind is really responding to the action, which, according to the opening page, is set dispersedly in various eastern Mediterranean countries. First of all, there’s this, and there’s that, and you just watch the procession of things. There’s certainly a connective tissue that builds up in your mind, that’s true. But the thing is that it is not presented in the play. Q: But this is where the onus in on the reader? Frye: That’s right. The same thing that happens in The Waste Land, where I think Eliot got his ideas from Pericles in large part: I mean, something just stops and something else starts and it is up to the reader to make the connection.

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Charlotte Tansey: Do you remember that statement in one of your other books––I think it was from the lectures in Hamilton––that the “Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create” [The Modern Century, 122–3: CW 11: 69]. This, you said, was a demonstration of what a myth is. Now, I haven’t connected that up with the way you are talking about myth here but it seems to me that it is not quite the same. Frye: It’s not quite the same no, but there is a connection. One’s social life is an action which to the degree that it is intelligent and consistent action, is informed by a vision. That is, a social worker in Montreal must have at some level of her mind, a vision of a cleaner and a healthier and saner and more just Montreal. And, it is in the light of that vision that she does her social work. And it is that quality of informing vision that I was speaking of there. Charlotte Tansey: Vision which is not visual somehow. Frye: Not visualized as such, no. But nevertheless has a capacity to be realized. Q: Would the analogy there be the state “in between” the world of what is and what is not [The Secular Scripture, 166; CW 18: 108]? Is that where we find the vision? Frye: The “in between”––the neither is nor is not––is where the vision is. Gerald MacGuigan: The mysterious imaginative world. Helene Loiselle: Is the danger in thinking of that mysterious world as somewhere “out there” [The Secular Scripture, 154; CW 18: 102], when it is really left for you to create? Frye: It’s the danger of projection, yes. And, of course, a great many revolutionary and utopian schemes are founded on exactly that. That is, they have got their model and they say, it says here that you have to do so and so. Cathleen Going: That’s what I thought you were saying very early about the difference between the existential archetype and the literary archetype. Patricia Coonan: If we see them as being somehow imaginative then we can’t say: it says here you’ve got to do this. It’s a vision that can’t be seen, but it is a vision. Frye: Yes. I think that this kind of informing vision can actually produce tremendous energy but it doesn’t lead to the thing we were talking about earlier about the betrayal of the intellectual. Cathleen Going: The line of the quest is from past to future, not the quest caught up in the other movement. I was thinking of the statue of the young Gotama that

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was given to us here. He has large ears to listen. He isn’t yet Buddha but he’s on the quest. Frye: Of course, quests have a tendency to go either up or down; that is why I spoke of the four movements of plot as either coming from an upper world or going to a lower world or reversing. Eric O’Connor: Eric Voegelin uses the word “Metaxy” for the “in between” state, which he gets from Plato. By using the word, he gives it an objective sense for us who need something “out there” to start with, but he doesn’t make it any more objective in the bad sense [“Reason,” 289–90; Order 408]. Martin O’Hara: It seems like in Don Quixote you are going to keep going as long as there is land under you? Frye: But he is on a parody quest. And I have always been very touched and very deeply moved by the scene, where Don Quixote meets some Spanish peasants and they share their dinner of acorns with him. And, then, he starts talking about the Golden Age, and then you realize, suddenly, that this is what Quixote is all about. And his own psychotic dream of rescuing beautiful maidens from giants is all overlaid on top of this. But there is a real vision there. He wouldn’t be so unforgettable a madman if it weren’t.

15 Preface to Spiritus Mundi (1976)

Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

This is a collection of my more recent essays, most of them written since 1970. As with most such collections, there is a cer­tain amount of repetition, much of it unavoidable because the argument is decentralized, and some things need to be stated more than once to fit into their different settings. At the same time, the book as a whole possesses a unity and can be read consecutively, and the repeti­ tions then become like similar repe­titions in music, thematic returns to the same subject after a new context has been established for it. There are twelve essays, divided into three groups of four essays each. The first four deal with general issues related to literary criticism; the next four with general issues within liter­ary criticism itself; the final four with more specific criticism of authors who have turned up constantly in my writing, Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Every essay was a response to a specific request and usually, also, was first orally delivered to a meeting or conference on a specific occasion. I have not tried to obliterate the sense of these occasions, and some account of them may be useful if the reader is interested in the question of why certain topics were selected. The first and second parts both begin with articles that might be described as autobiographical, in the sense in which John Stuart Mill speaks of a “mental his­ tory”: that is, they attempt to show how certain ideas and concepts have taken shape geneti­cally in my work. The opening essay, “The Search for Accept­able Words” (the title refers to Ecclesiastes 12:10), was contributed to an issue of Daedalus devoted to research in the modern univer­sity.1 I accepted the invitation to contribute with some misgiv­ings, feeling that what I had done was not strictly “research,” and certainly did not illustrate how a university fostered and encour­ aged research. But as I went on I felt that my own experiences were more rel­ evant than I had thought to the question, and that my work did at any rate show

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how the university functions as a special kind of community for a humanist. The article contains a number of obiter dicta about the contemporary university which express my own opinion but have no special knowledge behind them. The other three papers in the first section deal with the kind of issues that are discussed a good deal in connection with literary criticism, but are still on the periphery of the subject as usually treated. “The University and Personal Life”2 was a contribution to an educational conference dealing, more or less, with the edu­cational problems connected with what I still think of as the Age of Hyste­ ria, the period between, roughly, 1968 and 1971. I had little sympathy with the kind of activism then going on, however much I had with its antagonism to the Vietnam war and to racism. I felt that the movement was fundamentally sick, so sick that it could really do nothing but die. It did very soon die, but its existence manifested something that seems to me still very much alive. This is the political side of what I describe in “Ex­panding Eyes” as the crisis of distinguishing the mythological from the empirical consciousness. I had already discussed other aspects of the same crisis in an earlier book, The Critical Path (Indiana University Press, 1970). “The Renaissance of Books”3 deals with books as a physical element in com­ munication, a theme brought to public awareness through the work of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, George Steiner, and others. The article is designed mainly to make two points: first, that the book is one of the most efficient technological instruments ever devised, and second, that it is the technologi­cal instrument that makes democracy a working possibility. The latter is a principle applicable to countries that are so often said to be “not yet ready for democracy,” a phrase that seems to me to be either a pretext for tyranny or a racist euphemism. The paper was contributed to a publishers’ conference at Williamsburg in Virginia, and its publication in Visible Language appears to have brought me some new readers whom I was delighted to acquire. It was written while I was engaged on a series of lectures later delivered at Harvard on the Charles Eliot Norton Professor­ship of Poetry, and some of its arguments run parallel to those lectures (now pub­ lished as The Secular Scripture). “The Times of the Signs”4 was written for a special conference of the Royal So­ ciety of Canada to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Coper­ nicus, held in Ottawa in No­vember, 1973. My paper is an attempt to outline one of the chief assumptions of the present book, as well as of my work generally, that all literature is written within what I call a “mythological universe” constructed out of human hopes and desires and anxie­ties; that this mythological universe is not really a protoscientific one, even though it is often believed to have scientific va­ lidity; and that literature is written within this universe because litera­ture contin­ ues the mythological habit of mind. The latter, being an imaginative habit, is quite as subtle, profound, and in touch with “reality” among Australian aborigines as

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among twentieth-century poets. All attempts to deal with mythological thinking as “primitive,” based on hazy analogies to biological evolution, are in my view totally mistaken. Copernicus is the great symbol in our culture of the beginning of the separation of the mytholog­ical from the scientific universe, a separation which has com­pleted itself and has now to seek new ways of recombining. This conception of a mythological universe is taken up again in the second autobiographical article, “Expanding Eyes”5 (the title is from Blake’s Four Zoas, and the passage is quoted in the body of the essay). This article was contributed to the journal Critical Inquiry, after an article on me by Angus Fletcher had ap­ peared in the same periodical. My reasons for writing the kind of article I did instead of “replying” to Mr. Fletcher’s are given at the beginning. In a sense this article is the keystone of the book, raising most of the assumptions around which my work at present revolves. Two aspects of it, which are barely mentioned, need further development. One is the reference to structuralism, which interests me because it seems to me a movement heading in the direction of what I call interpenetration, the interrelating of different subjects in a way that preserves their own autonomy, instead of subordinating them to some grandiose program of mental imperialism. The other is a political inference from the conception of a mythological universe: the fact that without such a universe we have only the relation of man to his natural envi­ronment, and the question of human freedom (as Sartre says in Being and Nothingness) cannot be worked out within that rela­ tion alone. “Charms and Riddles”6 was a paper read to the New England Stylistics Club at Northeastern University in Boston early in 1975. It was read at the invitation of Professor Morton Bloomfield, whose PMLA article on “The Complaint of Deor” as a charm poem entered largely into its argument. The article was written out soon afterwards, but has not been published elsewhere. “Ro­mance as Masque” was read at a conference on Shakespeare’s romances held at the University of Alabama in October, 1975.7 It is preceded by a short discussion of Old and New Comedy, a revised version of an older article of mine with that title, origi­nally a paper read to a group meeting at Stratford, England, some years earlier.8 As will be seen, both this article and the preceding one on charms and riddles use the same “mandala,” as I call it in “Expanding Eyes,” of descending and ascending movements of imagery, a contrast which also underlies the more familiar con­ trast of tragedy and comedy. The Spengler article,9 which uses material from some very early writings of mine, was contributed to another Daedalus issue on “Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited,” to which the open­ing paragraphs refer. Spengler, as is obvious from other refer­ences to him in this book, has always been a formative influence in my own thinking, for reasons which have often puzzled me, he being, as a creative personality, so antithetic to me. This article is, so to speak, an effort to lay a ghost

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to rest, along with an attempt to show where Spengler belongs in twentieth-cen­ tury criticism and poetic imagery. Of the four essays in more practical criticism, the reading of Samson Agonistes was contributed to a conference at the Univer­sity of Western Ontario in 1971.10 The title of the book in which the conference essays appeared, The Prison and the Pinnacle, referred to the fact that 1971 was the tercentenary of the publication of both Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, and most of the other papers dealt with both. I had already written a long article about Paradise Regained, which is why so little is said about it in this one; I have for the present book, however, added a sentence or two which bring the two poems more closely together. Paradise Re­gained in its turn is a poem of testing and ordeal for which the chief model is the Book of Job. The essay on Blake’s Job illustra­tions11 was contributed to a Festschrift in honour of Foster Damon, to whose 1924 book on Blake I have many times recorded my considerable debt. The original article was written quickly, un­der the pressure of many other commitments, and has been com­pletely rewrit­ ten for the present volume. The article on Yeats’s A Vision12 originally appeared in a book of essays on Yeats called An Honoured Guest, edited by Denis Donoghue and J.R. Mulryne. Yeats’s Vision has baffled and exas­perated me for many years: this essay is by no means completely successful in laying a second haunting ghost to rest, but it sup­plies some analogical context for Yeats’s schematisms which may be useful. Its relation to the rest of this book, more particularly the second part, is perhaps worth a comment. If the conception of the mythological universe is necessary, as I think it is, to any resolution of the problem of freedom, the critic is involved once again in what Milton calls the “rule of charity” in interpreting the Bible: whatever interpretation rationalizes human slavery and bondage is wrong, how­ ever unwarranted the statement that it is wrong may logically sound. The universe I sketch out in the second part of this book contains a cyclical movement in which tragic actions descend to a low point of death and comic ones rise to a high point of vision. The association of tragic movement with de­ scent is at least as old as the metaphor in the word “catastrophe.” In Yeats, on the other hand, comic actions descend through the “primary” gyre to an indis­ tinguishable mass of primitive society, and tragic actions rise out of them, up the “antithetical” gyre, to the height of the heroic act. For reasons that I hope a study of my second part would make clearer, such a reversal of movement encloses the whole mythological universe in a mechanism of fatality, a closed trap. The vision of life that results is admirable for Yeats’s more ironic poems, such as “Blood and the Moon,” but grotesquely inappropriate for, say, the two Byzantium poems. A Vision keeps bringing me back to the passive state of mind in which Yeats produced it, and what seems to be its irresponsible fatalism also seems to me the inevitable result of that state of mind.

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Yeats describes his instructors as being, or behaving like, disembodied intel­ ligences, without caring much whether we take this metaphorically or descrip­ tively. Accepting it as at least a metaphor, I should say, if the reader will detach the statement from moral disapproval or superstitious frisson, that Yeats’s in­ structors were obviously devils. That is, all they knew was the vision of life as hell, and hence, like other devils, they lacked a certain comprehensiveness of perspective. In Yeats himself their influence, though destructive, was not disas­ trous; but they were of the same family as those who have produced so much of the terror and hysteria of our time. The Wallace Stevens essay13 was read, in a much shorter version, at a confer­ ence in Istanbul, and the longer version, the one re­printed here, was contributed to a Festschrift for W.K. Wimsatt, for whom my great affection and admiration are now saddened by the fact that he is no longer with us. It is the second of two essays I have written on Stevens, and as compared with the first, it concentrates less on the Collected Poems and more on the letters and the Opus Posthumous. Stevens seemed to me an appropriate topic for a Festschrift for Professor Wim­ satt, whose point of view was basically a conservative one, and though Stevens’s conserva­tism was of a very different type, he is a useful counterweight to the sometimes exclusive radicalism of the tradition that is embry­onic in Milton, fully developed in Blake, and, perhaps, already decadent in Yeats. Traditionally, God is the creator, man is a creature, and man’s creative power is confined to secondhand imitations of the nature which, according to Sir Thomas Browne, is the art of God. For Blake and Yeats, on the other hand, there is nothing creative ex­ cept what the human imagination pro­duces. Stevens polarizes the imagination against a “reality” which is otherness, what the imagination is not and has to strug­gle with. Such reality cannot ultimately be the reality of physical nature or of constituted human society, which produce only the “realism” that for Stevens is something quite different. It is rather a spiritual reality, an otherness of a cre­ ative power not ourselves; and sooner or later all theories of creative imagination have to take account of it. The title, Spiritus Mundi, from Yeats’s “Second Coming,” was suggested by my friend Mr. William Goodman, formerly of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, as a title for the book of essays published with them which was eventually called Fables of Identity.

16 Victoria College’s Contribution to the Development of Canadian Culture (1977)

The following talk was presented at Victoria College on 10 November 1977. The title comes from a holograph annotation in the top margin, which is in the hand of Frye’s secretary, Jane Widdicombe. The typescript is in the Northrop Frye Fonds of the Victoria University Library, 1988 accession, box 6, file Y. On the somewhat abrupt conclusion to the talk, see the introduction to the present volume.

My three predecessors in this series have built up a picture of a highly rational ethos and a lively atmosphere of debate and argument, sometimes good humoured and sometimes acrimonious. The axiom of any liberal arts college with a church connection must always be that faith and reason are complementary and not contradictory. When faith and reason collide, as unfortunately they keep doing with the greatest regularity, the community becomes polarized. By one group, reason is seen as under­mining faith, and so, eventually, morals. By the other group, the insistence on faith which contradicts instead of fulfilling the demands of reason is seen as stifling all liberal knowledge and intellectual honesty. This issue became particularly acute in Victoria College after Darwinian evolution had begun to make its impact and the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible had begun. Victoria adopted an “if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em” attitude to evolution. This approach to the Bible was preoccupied with the question of whether the account of Creation in Genesis was poetic or scientific. Many people in the Faculty of Theology1 had been trained in science and brought to the study of the Bible minds that had been brought up in such areas as chemistry and biology. For my purposes I have to begin with this issue, and isolate in it a cultural dimension that I think is likely to be overlooked. The average Victoria student in the nineteenth century, coming from a Methodist background, found himself in a world that was split imaginatively rather than intellectually. In front of him was a tough, gritty, competitive world of nineteenth-century Upper Canada. Tucked away in a corner of his mind, and given an airing on devotional occasions, was a

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world of magic, wonder and mystery, in which Jonah could spend three days in a fish’s belly and Elijah could go up to heaven in a chariot of fire. The split between the two worlds enabled most students to deal with the contemporary world before them very effectively on its own terms. But having the other world on their minds helped to keep a cultural balance. The Massey family bulks very large in early Victoria history, and although Vincent Massey was a graduate of University College, he did a great deal for the Victoria community both during his term as Senior Tutor in Burwash and later. He became, of course, a major cultural influence for the whole of Canada, particularly through the Commission which he chaired, and which brought out the “Massey Report” in 1949.2 The introduction to this report, almost certainly written by Massey himself, spoke of the roots of cultural life in nineteenth‑century Canada, with strong emphasis on the role played by the church. He begins with a tribute to the expert and dedicated church organists who came from England to Canada. My own music teacher3 was, one of them, and I well remember how the congregation of St. John’s United Church in Moncton used to make their way out of the church with no notion that they were being wrapped up in something like the St. Anne’s Fugue. He then goes on to speak of the roots of literature: Not only in music but in letters did the church make important contributions to the life of the community. The rector or the pastor of the church lectured on Dante or on Browning, on Victor Hugo or on Lewis Carroll; he was in wide demand with his lantern slides of London or the Holy Land, and in many of the smaller places his was the only library for many miles.

When I reread this, my eye paused on the phrase “lantern slides of the Holy Land.”4 It indicates the way in which the Bible was not simply a source of faith and morals, but an imaginative and cultural focus as well. The controversies between faith and reason are usually presented simply in their own terms, and as late as the novels of Grace Irwin, some of them written in 1969, that is how they were still being presented as the realities of faith colliding with the unrealities of human rationalizing.5 But I think that the cultural dimension in the display is in the long run more important. Perhaps the rationalizers and higher critics of the Bible, however admirable their motivation, did not realize the extent to which, in assigning the magic and miracle of the Bible to unreality, they were making the entire world as tough and gritty and competitive as the world of ordinary life. One of the earlier poems of E.J. Pratt, which appeared in Newfoundland Verse, is called “The Epigrapher”: His head was like his lore—antique, His face was thin and sallow-sick,

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Victoria College’s Contribution to Canadian Culture With god-like accent he could speak Of Egypt’s reeds or Babylon’s brick Or sheep-skin codes in Arabic . . . And every occult Hebrew tale He could expound with learned ease, From Aaron’s rod to Jonah’s whale. He had held the skull of Rameses–– The one who died from boils and fleas . . . From that time onward to the end, His mind had had a touch of gloom; His hours with jars and coins he’d spend, And ashes looted from a tomb,— Within his spare and narrow room . . . And thus he trod life’s narrow way,— His soul as peaceful as a river— His understanding heart all day Kept faithful to a stagnant liver.

This poem puzzled me for many years, partly because of the curious virulence of the tone, which was unusual for Pratt. What was it about epigraphers that he disliked so much? When the poem appeared, the best known scholars in that sort of area were Charles Currelly, whom I shall return to shortly, and S.H. Hooke, the great Old Testament scholar who after a somewhat turbulent career at Victoria College, went to the University of London. But neither of them had stagnant lives: Currelly was a person of extra­ordinary drive and energy, and Hooke was an athlete of professional competence in several areas, who was still writing books with unabated enthusiasm in his nineties. It seems to me that the antagonism is real to the kind of pedantry that unconsciously attempts to take out of life everything that the imagination needs to nourish it. Again, in James Reaney’s play, Colours in the Dark, a certain Dr. Button is introduced, who lectures on the Bible and finds great delight in telling his students that the Bible contains nothing except the most primitive and repulsive forms of superstition. One distressed student says: “But don’t you believe in anything?” Dr. Button says: “No, not since I caught old Professor So-and-so putting twelfth‑century shards in a ninth‑century dig.” Here again the issue is presented as one of faith against reason, but the real issue is that of imagination against minimal reality.

17 Seeing, Hearing, Praying, Loving (1985)

On 3 December 1985 Frye presented a lecture, “The Dialectic of Belief and Vision,” at the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto. I asked Frye if he would permit me to send the typescript to Shenandoah (I was on the board of the journal at the time). He consented, and the talk appeared in Shenandoah 39, no. 3 (1989): 47–64. It was reprinted in Myth and Metaphor, and it appears in the Collected Works, vol. 4, 344–59. Nicholas Graham had made a tape of the lecture, following which members of the audience addressed a series of questions to Frye. Graham was able to capture these up to the point when his tape ran out. What follows is Graham’s transcription, slightly edited, which is published here with his kind permission. The title has been added.

q: Could you explain further, Dr. Frye, the relation of sound, hearing, and sight? frye: I spoke of them as metaphors and as metaphors that enter into the two stages in which we experience art. First, literature moves in time. The words are heard, if you are listening to somebody read them. They are heard silently in your own mind if you are reading them. But, then, we start using metaphors of seeing when it comes to total understanding, and that is because it all pulls together in a single structure, which is there in a way that a painting is there. Music is the same. You listen to the music when it is performed, but if you have a score of the music, you spread it out in front of you and see it all there at once. And these metaphors get incorporated into things like the experience of God in the Bible, where after the Fall we hear the voice of God from the burning bush on. But we hear it because the voice which is heard is the starting point for a human action, whereas what is seen brings you to a halting place, to a stopping point. You are there. That is one reason why there is a bit of recurrent suspicion in the three religions based on the biblical tradition––Judaism, Christianity, Islam––about representation of the Godhead. The visibility of such things seems to imply a total understanding, which, of course, they don’t get. But as metaphors they do refer

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to the power that the moving arts and the stationary arts play respectively in our experience. The visibility of the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, where the author is continually saying what he saw in a vision, is designed to express the fact that the narrative of the Bible is moving up towards the suggestion of this total simultaneous apprehension. q: This seems to be beyond hearing––or other than hearing. Does it include hearing? frye: I would suppose that it includes both continuous hearing and seeing of which the actual hearing and seeing that we know about are again metaphors. We are told that playing harp is a compulsory cultural accomplishment in heaven. Perhaps that symbolizes a continuous hearing as well as a continuous seeing. Both of these things have as their metaphorical kernel the thing that we do when we hear and see. But in their spiritual dimension they mean something else again. q: Dr. Frye, when you approach to the Bible on this plateau, how has this affected your prayer life? When one approaches the Bible in a literary way, how is one’s prayer life affected, how does one now pray spiritually? frye: Well, when somebody asked me what I thought prayer was, I said that it was the only form of self-awareness that did not involve introversion. In other words, it is the attempt to place in the center of one’s experience something which is neither subjective nor objective but like a work of literature, only in a different way. It forms a potential community of vision. And if you are producing anything, whether it is a work of criticism or literature or music, you are at the same time conscious of or at least sensitive to the religious implications of what you are doing. You will think of it as an offering, and the value of what you are doing will depend on the acceptance of that. I don’t know that the activity of prayer really differs in quality from that, though it may in a different context. q: In the study of the Bible on the literary plateau, how does form criticism apply to scriptural studies? frye: Well, it applies very relevantly in that it indicates the units out of which the Bible was put together. In trying to look into that, however superficially, I have been very struck with the way in which the elements explored by Form Criticism seem to be put together by the editors of the Bible in a way that makes, from one point of view, a complete unity and, from another point of view, a completely decentralized structure which has passed beyond the unity. I don’t think we would have ever got to this stage without the analysis of the various conventional form‑structures which these critics have examined.

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q: How can we achieve peace in a world of conflicting ideologies? frye: As I say, the deadlocks in the world today have been caused by conflicting ideologies. And the reason why ideologies conflict is that they have conflicting languages. If you use the language of creed or doctrine and say that there is a God, you have already suggested the possibility of saying there is no God, and you have already defined the people who are going to say that as enemies. The ideological approach either to religion or to politics seems to me to have burnt itself out. As I said in my paper, the work of the literary critic is to try and integrate the centrality and the relevance of what the creative imagination has to say to the world, because the creative imagination is always at peace. As Shelley said in his Defence of Poetry, the language of the imagination is always the language of love, and we have Paul’s authority for it that that language is going to last longer than most of our human communication. That is why in such a country as Canada, for example, the curious chaos that one sees in both its political and its economic structure doesn’t really matter so much. What you look for is culture, because that is what the people in the year 2300 are going to be concerned with: that is the only thing that they will care about. And culture, as I think of it, is the total production of the creative imagination. It has nothing to do with a social elitism—that is an ideological fantasy. It has to do with the attempt to see the life and culture around one with an eye that is not out to prove this, to rationalize that, and to make out a case for the other. In short, what I am concerned with, in connection with the creative imagination, is a model of the forms of charitable activity. If I didn’t think of it as charitable, of course, I would have no interest in it whatever. q: I read in an interview with you, where you were discussing the poet Blake, that he helped to consolidate some of your own views on religion. Could you say something about that? frye: Well, Blake was the person who, of course, has really taught me everything I know. But apart from that, what struck me forcibly about his own religious views was, first of all, that they didn’t step on the toes of anybody else’s religious views. . . . [end of tape]

18 The Soviet Union and Russia (1989)

The following text comes from an audio-recording of a talk that Frye presented following a luncheon for Victoria College graduates, 10 December 1989. Because the recording begins in midsentence, the audiotape operator was apparently a bit late in turning on the recording machine. Just how much of the tape is missing is uncertain. I received the tape from Frye’s secretary, Jane Widdicombe. It is presently in the Robert D. Denham Collection of Frye materials in the Moncton, New Brunswick, Public Library.

. . . and flunkies of the Politburo. Things are very different now but it is still a society in Moscow where the writers of the Soviet Union are given the official recognition that goes with their kind of regime. The visits of people like myself to the Soviet Union are part of a vast program. There are 145 languages spoken within the Soviet Union itself. Then there are the visitors from the Warsaw Pact countries––East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, as well as other places like Cuba and Angola. Within the last two or three years there has been a great ex‑ pansion into the Western democracies as well. I was asked to lecture in Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad and also to meet with the editors of foreign language journals. One thing that I did not know about Rus‑ sia was the size and prestige of what we should call learned journals. It’s almost as if the editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly were given a full‑time job with a salary and an office and a private car at his disposal, and were running a magazine of a circulation of about 100,000. They tell me that that is a long‑stand‑ ing tradition in Russia––it goes back to prerevolutionary times––when to learn what was going on in the world they had to learn it through the languages of Western Europe. There was, as I was rather surprised to learn, a good deal of interest in Canada. I don’t claim to have much scholarly competence in Canadian literature, and I re‑ alized that there was always at least one person in the audience who knew more than I did. The favourite Canadian there is Farley Mowat, who visits the country

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very frequently and comes and goes as he pleases. There is some knowledge also of Canadian writers. I was told that Margaret Atwood’s Edible Woman was translated into Russian with a title that means literally tidbits. Somehow or other it makes it less appetizing. They asked me what I knew, in my turn, about modern Russian literature, and I said, cautiously, that of course you must understand that in the current politi‑ cal situation the Russian writers who are best known in our part of the world are the dissidents––people like Pasternak and Bulgakov and the poet Joseph Brod‑ sky and Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. And they said, but those are the important people, those are the people we’re interested in too. Well, when I met with the editors of journals, I was drawing on fifty years of practice not merely of answering questions but of listening to the assump‑ tions in the questions and answering the assumptions rather than the questions. The assumptions in the questions I was asked were certainly not Marxist ones. Whenever I visit an American or Canadian or British university, there is always at least one Marxist intellectual in the audience, who tries to catch me in a trap of Marxist jargon. But there was no trace of that anywhere in the Soviet Union. I began actually to worry about this because that is the whole intellectual structure that they’ve been brought up with, and if they no longer have any interest in that, what is going to replace it? And I’m told in the Canadian Embassy that the same thing is true of the trade talks, that the economic discussions no longer fol‑ low Marxist assumptions about commodities and the like but are using the same language we are using on this side of the Atlantic. When I was in Kiev in the Ukraine, I was asked very naturally what all the Canadians of Ukrainian origin had contributed to Canadian culture. I told them what I knew about the painting of Kurelek and the dramas of George Ryga and others, and then I went back into time––back to the twenties and thirties of this century––and told them about Andriy Babiuk, who came out to western Canada in the 1920s from the Ukraine as a Communist missionary and poured out a great flood of short stories, novelettes, articles in the Winnipeg press, and then re‑ turned in 1933 to the Ukraine where he obviously expected to be treated with the greatest reverence for his work among the heathen. He was snapped up almost instantly by the Stalinist goon squad and died in a Siberian prison camp a year or two later. I realized that I could tell them this story without any hesitation. They said more or less, well that figures, Stalin having consistently treated Ukraine much as the English treated Ireland in the eighteenth century. Then they asked me what I knew about Mikhail Bulgakov, who had spent most of his life in Kiev. I knew his novel White Guard, which is a vivid picture of the kind of misery and chaos in Russia during the winter of 1918. I’ve also read his novel The Master and Margarita, which I regard as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.1 I also knew something about Bulgakov’s life. He was a very successful writer

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in the 1920s. When the Stalinist steamroller got around to him, all of his works were banned. He became what Orwell’s 1984 calls “an unperson.” He finally got in personal touch with Stalin, asked him if he could emigrate from the country, and failing that, could he get any kind of job just to keep himself alive? Stalin answered by telephone that he was on no account to leave the Soviet Union and said nothing about any job, so he staggered on for a few years and went blind and died. The great masterpieces that he wrote towards the end of his life had to be shoved away in a drawer. About twenty‑five years after his death he was rehabilitated, and very cautiously his books began to reach, first of all, the West in translation and, finally, were released in his own country. A woman in Kiev said, “I am going to take you to the house that Bulgakov was living in when he wrote The White Guard,” because a scene in the novel is laid in that house. So she took me there, and before telling me anything about the house she went out with a bouquet of flowers she had brought along and put it beside the door. In other words, it wasn’t a matter of admiring a novelist; it was a visit to a shrine to somebody who had become for her a saint and a hero, because he had spent his life in resisting the tyranny in his own country. That is a measure, I think, of the degree to which the general cultural attitudes have changed. It’s not so much a matter of changing, perhaps, as a release of things which are always there but which were never allowed to emerge. We noticed, of course, that it was still a hierarchical society. We couldn’t help noticing that, when we were asked to lunch, the quality of the food and the ser‑ vice was exactly proportional to the rank of our host. That didn’t surprise us. But what I found more vividly noticeable was the crowded bookshops. Someone had bought a copy of an English dictionary and was holding it, and everybody that went by was eyeing this book as though they wanted to eat it. There is almost a physical hunger for books, especially the books which they are only just being allowed to get hold of. So all this tended to confirm me in my somewhat oversim‑ plified view of human society, which is that there are only two branches of the human race, those who belong to the bourgeoisie and those who wish they did. When the Marxist revolution began, it began with the assumptions that a new kind of human consciousness was going to develop, and bourgeois acquisitive‑ ness and idealism and sentimentality and so forth were going to disappear from human history forever. There is no such thing as a proletarian consciousness, and the great mass of Russians are bourgeoisie who have been deprived of the normal privileges belonging to the middle class and who have really reached the end of their endurance in lining up in long queues for second-rate and shoddy goods. So of the two buzzwords in the Soviet Union today perestroika, the reconstruc‑ tion, is undoubtedly a genuine one, because it is being carried on for the sake of self‑preservation and not to impress the West. Along with that goes a pulling

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back from an imperialistic and ideological expansion, just as there has been a similar pulling back from ideological expansion in the United States. The question I was interested in was the other buzzword, glasnost, and whether the atmosphere of freedom of thought was a genuine thing or not. After all, there have been in the past many falls, as they have been called, and they have been carefully organized by the authorities with a view to finding out who the danger‑ ous people were. It was part of Lenin’s strategy also to advise periodic waves of friendliness and rapprochement within bourgeois countries in order to lull them into thinking that some kind of coexistence was possible. It seems to me, though, that this new freedom of expression is also a genuine movement, because of the point I made that the assumptions of the discussion were as objective and judi‑ cious as they could ever be in this country or any other of the democracies. The same thing was true of the one newspaper I could read, The Moscow News, on the rare occasions I could get up early enough in the morning to get a copy in the hotel before they were all snapped up. Similarly, my interpreter not only spoke flawless English but spoke it with an impeccable BBC accent, which he could only have learned from the radio because he had never been out of Russia. There is another issue in the Soviet Union which interests Canadians in partic‑ ular, I think––the issue of cultural separatism. It has always been my observation that political and economic movements tend to centralize and to build up bigger and bigger units, whereas culture tends to decentralize and to break down into smaller areas. So that a movement in Quebec for the autonomy of French culture seems to me quite normal as a cultural movement. As a political and economic movement, I think it is mostly nonsense. I think also that a cultural movement attached to a political and economic centralization produces nothing but a pomp‑ ous and meaningless kind of art. This is a problem which the Soviet Union is struggling with, of course, now, and its various ethnical units in the Baltic states, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and further east are of course beginning to increasingly develop their own ethnical idioms, and they have to decide whether it’s to their economic advantage to stay within the Soviet Union or break away from it. The central authorities will have to make the corresponding decisions. One sees monuments of Lenin, of course, and pictures of Lenin everywhere. He is still a sacrosanct figure, and the line‑up of people waiting to see his mummy in Red Square is extraordinary, and you could probably still get in trouble if you started taking Lenin and his policies apart. He is still a figure beyond criticism. But the polarized perspectives which he held in the years 1917 to 1924––that the triumph of Communism was inevitable and imminent and that there was a total war to the knife between Communist and bourgeois societies––does not fit the facts of the 1980s, because the last seventy years have gone in a totally different direction. So there is a very bitter opposition to what is happening in Russia, some of it outside Russia, coming from more conservative countries like Czecho‑

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slovakia and Cuba, and much of it coming from within. And by no means is all of it foolish, because if one starts to reverse a trend which has been going for so long, the smallest error in timing can create a quite disproportionate degree of chaos and anarchy, as China has already discovered. So far from discovering that travel is broadening, I came back feeling that I had done what every tourist does: I had seen what I had expected to see and came back with my prejudices much more solidly confirmed than they were before. I saw one or two examples of the kind of thing people are complaining about. There was a wonderful woman who organized a great deal of our tour with tremendous efficiency. She was second in command, and over her was some‑ body whose function it was obviously to sit in his chair and make welcoming addresses. He was, in other words, the kind of bureaucrat that is almost carica‑ tured in Russia now. I noticed two things about him. One was how defensive he was––he even made the statement that he worked from 9:00 to 5:00 every day. And the other was, when we suggested a change in our schedule, he said that four years ago it was possible to organize a trip like this in advance––many years in advance––without the slightest deviation from schedule when you ar‑ rived. But now with all this perestroika everything was at sixes and sevens, and you weren’t quite sure what you could do about anything. All that, of course, is part of a social change which I don’t know more about than you do. I can merely say from my own experience what I have believed all my life, which is Milton’s freedom to know and to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, which is above all liberties, and the one that will lead the Soviet Union into its rightful place in history.

19 Notes for The Double Vision: Notebook 51 (1990)

This small holograph notebook was not included in Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, Collected Works, vol. 6. Notebook 51 is one of the few examples of Frye’s using a holograph notebook as the basis for his typed notes. Notes 53 and Notes 54–1 contain a number of passages that are parallel to what is in Notebook 51. These passages are marked by the numbers in square brackets at the end of some entries, the numbers referring to the paragraph numbers in Notes 53 and Notes 54-1, both of which are published in the Late Notebooks. Notebook 51 is in the Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library, 1997 accession, box 2. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

[1] Fiction. Cena form.1 Characters meet in a house with mind-bending characteristics. Paradoxes of time-space (bilocation) and life-death involved. Characters as Jungian archetypes: house is unity of social and individual body. [2] Romantic archetypal characters: enough realism for a novel: cena form but an individual as well as group enlightenment. Some things take on a curious importance; Charles Williams, Mary Johnston’s Sweet Rocket [1920], things in other contexts I’d call second rate. [3] Something to think about: not necessarily something to write. [4] Myth absorbing history: prophecy and the sense of the “historical[.]” Not absorption but confrontation. Extreme of Egypt; extreme of pan-historical view now, when there’s a terrific itch for the “historical” Jesus. [194] [5] Domination of history by myth: Egypt. In that nothing happens. Wonder if I should take the Byron epigram seriously,2 & interpret my whole 8th ch. complex as history. [195] [6] Two levels of history: aggressive and cultural. The aggressive is imperialistic & seeks the reconciliation of the pax Romana: agreement or the linguistically aggressive dogma. Cultural history interpenetrates: variety & unity, but no uniformity. [196]

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[7] If so, then why “go into the world & preach the gospel”? Because the gospel was primarily aimed at Rome (Acts) & so, eventually, at the taking over of the Roman Empire, the Beast & Whore of Revelation. Of course this initiated what Blake calls the ages of Constantine & Charlemagne (Jerusalem, plate 75; Milton, plate 37). (Blake’s 27th church is Luther; it should be Loyola.) [8] Joachim: age of the Son or dividing Word up to 2000: age of the Spirit after that.3 [197] [9] Logos from Heraclitus to Philo doesn’t mean word: it means a human consciousness linked to some principle of divine origin immanent in nature.4 So the John logos, which returns to the Hebrew DBR,5 is an extension. [198] [10] Two: go on to Keats, G.U. [Ode on a Grecian Urn] (Wedgwood).6 In Blake it’s the trdnl. [traditional] spiritual–physical duality. Anyway an impersonal-objective vs. a personally-involving world. Connected by puns on law. Personal world imports a creator God––unless it’s the other way round. Yes, the disengagement of personal from impersonal worlds affects purifying of religion. Providence. [199] [11] Spengler’s “decline” applies to the empires who conclude the cultural process: as they decline they move towards a confrontation, or historical judgment. Three.7 [200] [12] The Islamic revelation was a counter-apocalypse, which arose as a part of the Christian failure to separate the two worlds. They failed because science hadn’t developed far enough. Three. [201] [13] Trace dialectic of the two worlds from the beautiful-true to the spiritualphysical. [202] [14] One is the dialectic from “I believe that that really happened (in the past),” the red herring of discursive language, to “I see that that’s the way it has to be.” Study of poetry of course is training for us. All three form a larger dialectic running through language, space and time. [202] [15] Orwell’s doublethink is the soul-body civil war where the consciousness hypnotizes itself into thinking it believes what the repressed consciousness knows to be nonsense. Fear of external authority creates internal repression. All genuine imgn. [imagination] is doublethink as Orwell defines it.8 [203] [16] I suppose Blake’s distrust of memory is linked to the red herring of the past. [202] [17] Red herrings: (1) it really means (2) it’s really there (3) it really happened. From metaphor to spiritual reality. [204]

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[18] Imperial monuments follow the law of Ozymandias: they crumble. Genuine culture is tribal & regional. [205] [19] Literature is the art of inscribing verbal patterns within a mythological cosmos. It starts as rhetoric, or the figuring of speech: as rhetoric passes into ideology it becomes kerygmatic or spiritual language. [206] [20] Myth is the abstract form of narrative; later, in historical writing, it becomes the continuing form of narrative (“decline & fall” stage). Then it’s Weltgeschichte, & moves on to its confrontation in Heilsgeschichte. [207] [21] Esse est percipi;9 but we know the world keeps on existing whether we see it or not: hence, for Berkeley, we trust that God keeps on watching it, as, to be consistent, the world must be an idea in God’s mind. It’s a good thing that, as the Psalmist says, God neither slumbers nor sleeps [Psalm 121:4]. [208] [22] Lewis Hyde: we instinctively speak of cultural abilities as “gifts” (i.e. of the spirit).10 [209] [23] Law, besides the option of obeying it or not, may be just or unjust, logical (the original sense of logos) or arbitrary. [210] [24] Feminism and metaphor: man for men & women. [211] [25] If the Sabbath was made for man, the Church was too. [212] [26] The ideologue identifies truth with whatever promotes his cause: the trouble is the mortality of causes. Truth, like the classic in literature, is whatever won’t go away, & keeps returning to confront us. I don’t know what “the truth” is in most matters, only that it’s likely to be connected with whatever returns until we deal with it. [213] [27] (Logical positivism failed because it was the exact opposite of “the truth”: only statements that make no sense have any validity.) [213] [28] Interpenetration of belief is unity with variety, like metaphor: reconciliation, conversion, agreement, are all forms of (imperialistic) compulsion. [214] [29] Truth is in the repeating pattern which forms the structure of knowledge. Unique experience has its own kind of truth, but it has no pattern. [215] [30] Symmetry is the characteristic of the aesthetic-teleological world: occultism. [216] [31] The feminist objection to “man” for “man & woman” is part of the literal fallacy. [32] Conspiracy theories of history are fostered, first of all, by the paranoids in establishments. [216]

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[33] Two worlds: one way of relating them is to consider the imgve. [imaginative] or made one as the real form of the other. Only this is usually a creation myth, where it’s God who makes both worlds. [218] [34] Look up The Domain of Arnheim again:11 Eco 57.12 [217] [35] Look up [E.M.] Forster’s “only connect.”13 Eros connects. [217] [36] Eco’s comprehensive sendup of conspiratorial theories of history.14 Of course, since Jacobins (and Jacobites) there have been conspiracies. Halfway between history & myth. [216] [37] Three: immense importance of the imgve. [imaginative] way of life. Interpenetration & mythical history are subordinated to that. [219] [38] Pagan sequence: first nature-gods reflecting the uncertain temper of nature: remote & unconcerned universal god (Lucretius later). Animals numinous: transformations of Zeus. [Notes 54–1, par. 62] [39] Transfer from nature to social gods (not a sequence). War, “wisdom” (cunning). Eventually some few realize that the true “god” is a Muse or Angel, an aspect of human creative power (Vita Nuova). This true “god” is transitional from idolatry to monotheism. [Notes 54–1, par. 63] [40] Only why gods of mousike rather than techne? [Notes 54–1, par. 63] [41] Man turning back on a million crosses in war cemeteries to explain how aggression has profound survival value. [Notes 54–1, par. 64] [42] Fraternity: aristocracy: snobbery. Sense that a real community has to be a minority, a small group. Link with tribal complex maybe. Also with the difficulties of the “king” metaphor about God. [Notes 54–1, par. 65] [43] The Jehovah of the O.T. is a humanized being, as violent & unpredictable as King Lear. We read in Plato & Plutarch about the “hyponoia” & other efforts to make the gods behave themselves & be proper role-models. The central image of man trying to make this creature into a decent God is Jacob wrestling with the angel. [Notes 54–1, par. 66] [44] Aristocracy: ancestor-worship: efforts to keep a time of continuity with our ancestors as (temporal) authors of our being, nature-gods in a true sense. Virgin Birth & pushing aside Joseph essential for the myth of the spiritual Father. [Notes 54–1, par. 67] [45] China & its heaven-earth axis: also featured in the Lord’s Prayer. [Notes 54–1, par. 69]

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[47] Essays from the valley: the pleasant valley [Faerie Queene 3.5]], the Tao Te Ching valley [bk. 1.6], the valley of dry bones [Ezekiel 37:2], of the shadow of death [Psalm 23]. Probably a fifth. [48] Who the hell is Arturus Rex? No evidence that he was ever a god or had a cult; the British fighter of Saxons is totally irrelevant. I mean the Arthur of Camelot, presiding over the Round Table, sending knights out on quests and collecting their defeated giants. Nobody like him before or, really, since. [49] The two views of Tempest as (a) profound (b) potboiled not incompatible.

20 Notes on Miscellaneous Subjects

1. Jung This is a transcription of the first of two pages of holograph notes on Frye’s reading of Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious. They precede the notebook entries themselves of Notebook 42, published in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance. The references in square brackets to Jung B are to Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991). Frye was using the 1916 edition, published by Moffat, Yard. The notebook is in the 1993 accession, box 3, file 10 of the Frye Fonds. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

Psychology of the Unconscious [1] Jung: human libidinous source of mythopoeic power. Libido & Eros. [Above “Eros”: “147”] Blake’s insistent human source of all gods: libido & Luvah. Orc expands from “Generation” Eros into energy (organic). [Written above last two words: “Rising into heart & head 177”] Phallic symbols central (arrow, ray of sun, hair[)] [2] Orc begins with desire to possess virgin mother & hatred of father. Pr. to A [“Preludium” to America: A Prophecy]; MT [Mental Traveller]. Jung’s Oedipus complex. In Jung all allegorists of the differentiating libido are lumped in with the mother in a rather confusing way: e.g. Rahab, Tirzah & Vala are all the same thing & as the mother is androgynous, it includes both Satan & Urizen. [3] Libido in emergence of power projects itself as God, hence mystic identification 97–8. Thus variety of external objects syncretized and eventually become human 107. Hence a correspondence of libidinous & solar heat 99 ff. Blake’s globe of blood: cf. 128. [4] Jung himself indicates the importance of the teacher of the libido in his re-

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marks about Wagner’s [Mime?] & the Classical Cabiri, the teaching smiths [on Cabiri see Jung, B, 119–20] who form Blake’s Los complex 132 [5] Libido is Schopenhauer’s will 136, 146. Sch. [Schopenhauer] & Hauptmann 198 [Jung, B, 173] [6] Roots of the wood 137 (libido) materia (174); Vala 276 [7] {I think my point about nature’s contraceptive apparatus goes at the end, discussing the integration of the self as individual ego}. [8] sexual nature of origin of fire & Prometheus cult 162, 186–7. [9] serpent with tail in mouth & Jung’s “opening up the autoerotic ring” 177 [Jung, B, 156]. Cf. Silberer [10] furnace is incubating mother 184 [Jung, B, 162]. [11] identity of fire & soma (Dionysius) [A brace is to the right of pars. 10 and 11 pointing to: “perhaps a note on the JungMarx link; cf. plough [soil?] 514 (23) {Phallic significance of weapons including firearms}.”] [12] materia; hence wood, the thing burned, as female (II, iii, 17; 513); hence trees as female. [13] hermaphroditic nature of the inert principle (male within female) 515 (30). Tirzah: for Rahab [cf. 1.10?] [14] {libido & mother really expand, as Jung hints once or twice, into a Yang-Yin dialectic.} [above “Yang-Yin”: “MMSS 28”] [15] (the life-giving mother we move away from in Enion). Water of life in Jung 244–5 & death. [16] passion of inertia 195 vs. Blake’s death-wish. [17] Jung’s Discouri point is another Los anticipation, stated to be such 553 (131). 218–225 [Jung, B, 191 ff.]. [18] City as mother or harlot 234-5 [Jung, B, 202-3]. Babylon as terrible mother 243 [Jung, B, 210]. [19] Orc cycle derived by Jung from Frobenius 238 (fall into mother, fight with dragon, etc.) [20] Tree as mother 246 (life) hermaphroditic (248)

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[21] Distinction between pure inertia & withdrawal to return reborn 251 f. Dodges Silberer issue, regarding symbol as bridge for sublimation into empirical reality. [22] Tree of death, coffin, corse (womb & tomb) 264 [Jung, B, 235]. Dismemberment as reverse of birth, hence death 268. [23] Mother-wife-mother sequence 272. Rebirth in son 272. Embracing and entwining (tree & serpent) 272. [24] Devouring at close of cycle 275 (referred to Blake elsewhere).

2. Blake and Jung These entries are from Notebook 30m, which is in the 1991 accession, box 25 of the Frye Fonds.

[1] Blake & Jung [2] Medieval mandalas cfd. w. [compared with] Blake’s Jesus surrounded by 4 Zoas (in MA [Middle Ages] evangelists). [3] Mandala in Blake as symbol of one form or body of Jesus. Cf. Dante. [4] Jung leaves it vaguely as individuation. Residue of humanism in mysticism, potential magic in occultism (Tao). Cf. Huxley’s “same or like.”1 Perhaps I can use my super-Lockian argument to show that Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious the Self is in touch with & the ego split off from reconciles him with Blake’s body of Jesus. Ambiguity in Dante. [5] Dilemma of cyclic & anagogic vision in Blake expressed in Jung by the transition from neurosis therapy, or freeing of the will to a “normal” level (Freudian bondage of law) to a mental training & testing with normality (yoga & Tao, also Jesuitism). [6] Original sin & total depravity are psy/ly [psychologically] ways of dethroning the complacency of the ego. [7] 3 & 4 in Jung also in Blake: the dark fourth, or Los proceeding from Urthona, is the redeemed Ulro, the alchemic stone or prima materia, the roots of the mountains in Morris. It’s the shadow of man in Dante, or rather man as the shadow of Christ. So in Blake. [8] I don’t know if Jung understands the dangerous old wise man. Archimago, the first appearance of Satan in P.R. [Paradise Regained], Urizen. Cf. the two animas.

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[9] Function of art in both: in Jung art is a technique of extending the understanding: in Blake this is more explicitly a technique of criticism. In both the key question about truth is: how do you visualize (or concretize) it? Concretize is a barbarous locution, but gives some idea of it. [10] SGF [The Secret of the Golden Flower]: consciousness torn from archetypes is Urizen fallen from Eternals. Father-figure of Cartesian man developed by brothers Freud & Jung. [11] I start here, really, Blake’s attack on reason as the superficies (outward bound) of consciousness being carried on by the rc. [romantic] “unconscious” which Jung finally identifies as the total Self. [12] Wonder if Freud is the pattern up to nel mezzo del camin,2 then Jung? Blake’s break is about 40 (1796 on). [13] Wind bloweth where it listeth: we do not do things, but try to let them happen & remove obstacles {mainly parental ones, as in Milton}. Wu wei is Keats’ negative capability: I can’t find it yet in Blake. We must imitate Milton’s God in withdrawing from causation & watching. This faithful watching is the literal apprehension of the work of art. For this taking out of conscious obstructions, cf. Bergson. [14] Progress from Beulah to Eden: the green world breaking into a fiery rose. Jung compares it to the fiery Christmas Tree. Cf. a flower: ovary in depths of unconscious, style as chain of being, stigma as the Church, the female body of receptive souls, above them the male principles of Paradise, the sperm of the others scattering down, & out of all this a new birth. The ovary must be a furnace if the whole plant is to be a burning tree. [15] Goal of vision the union (yoga) of life consciousness: Tao means “head-­ going.” [16] Establishing of temenos the same thing as opening the center.3 [17] Polytheism is projected schizophrenia. That which is projected dissolves into abstractions, thence into an indefinite cycle. Nothing to do but go back home, & collect all the gods again into one personal form. War, the struggle of the brothers, is also projection.

3. Shakespeare Notes for the introduction to Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. The typescript is in the 1991 accession, box 25, file 4 of the Frye Fonds.

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[1] World more relevant to human needs then than now: knowledge of herbs, e.g., based on assumption that everything in nature must have a human use. Nature does nothing in vain. [2] Melancholy as a physical disease, as well as an emotional state, is what the original audience would recognize at once in Hamlet. Courtly Love and its conventions would be recognized in the first appearance of Romeo and in Polonius’ theories about Hamlet’s madness. [3] Magic and science very close together then: Prospero. Astrology. Disasters in the sun. [4] Don’t take pop references to groundlings as though they were the main audience seriously: they weren’t. The people whose attendance paid for the theatre were reasonably well educated. Not many women, though: macho jokes probably funnier then (O happy horse).4 [5] Wooden theatre illuminated by open candles or torches would give a modern fire inspector ulcers in a couple of days. The Globe did burn during a performance of H8. [6] Puritan establishment in City of London kept theatres out of there until 1950, except for areas like Blackfriars out of their jurisdiction. Long plague intervals: in one of them Shakespeare seems to have given up the idea of a theatrical career altogether and took to narrative poems with a patron. [7] One would have thought he’d know how good he was, but he seems never to have read a Quarto proof, and left two of his associates to go through a long, tedious, complex process of clearing copyrights and the like for all his plays (except Pericles and TNK).5 Nor does he seem to have complained when plays like A Yorkshire Tragedy6 were ascribed to him. [8] Popular and well liked as dramatist and person: Falstaff a smash hit; King Lear only “kind Lear”7 (Rowse). Comedies more popular than tragedies, perhaps (Gabriel Harvey). [9] Theatrical tradition broke in 1642.8 Restoration brought in “improved” versions. [10] Kept to public theatre, vs. Jonson. Jonson unique too in wanting his plays printed (1616): had an unusual sense of media. [11] Operatic effect of a very elaborate musical background. [12] Documentary material dug up about Shakespeare still doesn’t give us much about his personality. Carlyle view of poet as great man won’t wash; poet isn’t a particular kind of person.

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[13] Shakespeare’s proved output extends from about mid-twenties to mid-forties: no real youth or old age. Drama not a genre for infant prodigies. [14] Conflict with social anxieties: pulpit apt to squall; the law curbing swearing (2H4: Before God vs. Trust me).9 Vigilant and not stupid censorship. Sir Thomas More. Richard II. [15] Knew French, Latin, perhaps Italian, but used English when he could. [16] Quartos good and bad like people; like people, that can get oversimplified. RJ [Romeo and Juliet] [17] Ad libbing of clowns, vs. silly productions today. [18] Juliet under 14: part taken by boy perhaps not much older. Vs. Cleopatra. [19] Words: a film version of RJ could give us a shot of the apothecary’s shop that Romeo remembers, showing us everything he mentions and a lot more much more simply. But what we’d miss would be the “woodspurge has a cup of three” [Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Woodspurge, l. 12] feeling about it: the sense of hallucinated clarity that’s so dramatically right just there. [20] Highbrow humanists in Shakespeare’s day: prejudice against mixing social classes in plays (quote Hall) and not observing unities. Also the dislike of the contrapuntal contrasts in mood, class, rhythm and tone: the grave-diggers in Hamlet, the oscillation of blank verse stuffed shirts and Falstaff, etc.

4. Notebook 29. Shakespeare This notebook contains a brief series of notes for Frye’s Shakespeare lectures, as they were taped and edited in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. The editorial notes signalled at the end of the paragraphs point to the expanded or parallel passages in that book, where such expansions and parallels exist.

[1] H [Hamlet]: We’re imprisoned by what we’ve done, but unless we’ve committed a major crime like Claudius we’re not too crippled by it: we adjust to the gradual narrowing of our abilities and interests. But there’s a deeper imprisonment in what we are (“characterological armor”10 or whatever), and Hamlet is the most impressive example we have in literature of a titanic spirit thrashing around in the prison of what he is. [2] H [Hamlet]: there are a lot of pointless puzzles in the play of the L.C. Knights variety,11 though so many even of those that they seem to make some point. But why does Hamlet say “I loved you ever” to Laertes [5.1.314] forgetting that he’s

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exterminated his family? He apologizes to Laertes for this, blaming his act on his madness [5.2.237–43]: but the killing of Polonius took place in precisely the scene where he adjures his mother not to think he is mad [3.4.] Besides, if he can be “not guilty by reason of insanity,” Ophelia is not guilty of (watch what you’re doing, you fool)12 suicide, and both the grave-diggers and that crappy priest say she is [5.1.1–28, 249–54]. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 85; CW 28: 533.] [3] H: is there any reason for Hamlet’s resenting Laertes’ very moderate expression of grief for his sister [5.1.], except that in himself he’s come to associate big talk with doing nothing? (“Show me what thou’lt do”) [5.1.297]. Ophelia has had nothing but hectoring from her father, priggish harangues from her Laertes, and brutality from Hamlet, so all this love comes rather late in the day. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 85; CW 28: 532.] [4] IL [Introductory Lecture]: Shakespeare has no precedents for tragedy except Seneca, who may not have written for the stage. TA [Titus Andronicus] is a very Senecan tragedy: even those who would detest it for its brutality and crude melodrama would have to admit that it was superb theatre. That tells us something important about Shakespeare: that for him the actable and theatrical element comes first, not the qualities we think of as more typical of a major poet. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 5; CW 28: 460.] [5] The same is true of the H6 plays [Henry Sixth, pts. 1-3], even though they do need editing for a modern audience less fascinated with the civil war period. (Some notice of the H6–R3 [Richard the Third] sequence, and why it had such an appeal, should go here in IL).13 [6] AC [Antony and Cleopatra]: When we see Cleopatra & Antony maltreating messengers the irony goes deeper than with Lear or Hamlet: the latter belong to legend and A and C are puppets of history. Hence it marks the first steps toward the puppet techniques of the romances. But the five‑fold division of divine, romantic, social, ordinary & ironic is much clearer in AC, so the expanding of the stage to include divine and romantic perspectives is also clearer, as sovereigns of Egypt were divine beings. That too is a feature of romance, except for T [The Tempest], and except that A & C both have of course fake gods. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 132–3, 155; CW 28: 574, 580.] [7] AC: The serpent of the Nile, with the serpent-baby at her breast (the only thing she’s ever expressed any maternal feeling about), whose bite is like a lover’s pinch that hurts and is desired––the points of birth, death & sexual union are all the same point. The old dispensation figure: a Herodias holding Herod’s head in contrast to Salome holding John’s. Check to see what Plutarch says about Herod: the white goddess has forgotten him. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 139; CW 28: 580.]

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[8] KL [King Lear]: By “nothing” Shakespeare means the loss of identity, not of existence. Lear and R2 are kings & A = B, the king’s two bodies. And if A = B, then A – B = 0, an O without a figure, as the Fool says. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 64; CW 28: 513. The Fool’s line is in 1.4.212.] [9] WT [The Winter’s Tale]: the F-P [Florizel-Perdita] recognition opens up the future; the L-H [Leontes-Hermione] one closes up the past. Time is the Demeter renewal-of-nature myth; the other is the Pygmalion triumph-of-art one. (Romano link with P’s plea in Ovid to have a girl “just like” his statue.[)] [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 164, 167; CW 28: 602–3, 605.] [10] Maria is the vice of TN [Twelfth Night], & disguised her handwriting. Perhaps Toby’s marrying her is an admission that she’s better at manipulating people than he is. He’s such a slug: he only challenges Sebastian because he thinks he’s “Cesario” & will be easy pickings. Marriage to Maria again: he hangs on as a parasite in Olivia’s ménage by marrying a servant, & calls it condescension. [Frye’s lecture on Twelfth Night was not included in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare.] [11] MND [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] gives the impression of being commissioned for a festival, probably a marriage: in short, of being the kind of thing Theseus is looking for from the very opening of the play. One gets the impression that the offerings are pretty sparse that Philostrate comes up with. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 38; CW 28: 490.] [12] Each world has its own music: one the mermaid, the other the cry of hounds. (We don’t think of the latter as a kind of symphony orchestra, but that’s because we don’t know a Renaissance prince’s feeling about the hunt.) [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 46–7; CW 28: 498.] [13] R2 [Richard the Second] is as much a madcap prince as H5 [Henry the Fifth], and the parallel is emphasized by H4 to his son. But we see R2 only in the last few months of his reign; we get only a token scene of his loafing buddies & his extravagance, & he programs himself as a loser. Cf. Marlowe’s E2 [Edward the Second], where the brutality of E’s treatment swings our sympathies. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 66; CW: 515.] [14] H5 [Henry the Fifth], when a prince, is flanked by Hotspur & Falstaff. The rashness & cowardice of that are extremes of courage. The first part is the tragedy of Hotspur, & his dying speech shows he’s been running away from something. The second is the “tragedy” of Falstaff, & his behavior on the eve of the coronation shows the corresponding rashness. [Frye’s lecture on Henry the Fifth was not included in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare.] [15] WT: glimpse of myth of mother hiding a returned child from a jealous father. [See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 164; CW 28: 602.]

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[16] (These colored pens don’t work very well.)14 2H4 [Henry IV, pt. 2]: Falstaff has promised marriage both to Mrs. Q. [Quickly] & a certain Ursula. So he’s in the MW [Merry Wives of Windsor] situation, only more successful. One of Falstaff’s less attractive characteristics is the lack of any sense of women as human beings: he regards them as supply depots for food & drink, sex, and (if they’ve got any) money. The MW legend is probably wrong because F can’t love women, & Queen E [Elizabeth] would have been quite sharp enough to see that F. [Falstaff] in MW is only on the prowl for money.

5. Providence of God These notes, written in ink on a small (ca. 4 x 5) card, are in the 1991 accession, box 28, file 3 of the Frye Fonds.

I have not spoken of the providence of God, because it seems to me that the p. [providence] of God operates only in its own sphere, not in the sphere of the folly & frivolity of man. I think the world could be redeemed by a Xy [Christianity] that was no longer aghast with the chains of history clanking behind it, that was no longer crippled by notions of heresy, infallibility, exclusiveness of the “I’m right & you’re wrong” type, & all the fixations on a [?foul] historical record that should not be the Christ [?that reported] in sack cloth & ashes. Such a Xy might represent the age of the spirit that the 13th c. Fr. J of F [Joachim of Floris] saw as superseding the O.T. age of the F[ather] & the N.T. age of the Logos. Such a Xy would be neither an inglorious rear-guard action nor a revy. [revolutionary] movement creating suffering & death instead of life more abundantly, but a Xy of a Father who is not a metaphor of male supremacy but the intelligible source of our being; of a Son who is not a teacher of platitudes but a Word who has overcome the World; & of a Spirit who speaks with all the tongues of men & angels and still speaks with charity. The Spirit of creation who brought life out of chaos brought death out of it too, for death is all that makes sense of life in time. The Spirit that broods on the chaos of our psyches brings to birth a body that is in time & history but not enclosed by them, & is in death only because it is in the mind of life as well.

6. The Great Code The material here is from Frye’s Notebook 16. Frye wrote “Notes” at the top of two of the verso pages and “Text” at the top of three recto pages. The transcription represents notes Frye jotted down as he was reading through one of the many versions of the manuscript for The Great Code.

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The third entry under “Notes,” for example, is a summary of material found in a note on page 241 of that book. The jottings Frye has made under “Text” apparently refer to additions to and questions about the text of the manuscript itself. Compare, for example, paragraph 15 with this sentence from page 178 of The Great Code: “The visit of the wise men to Christ is the antitype of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon, the connecting link being Isaiah 60:6.” Frye is apparently using the planets (Mars, Saturn, Uranus) as a mnemonic device for referring to chapters of The Great Code.

Notes [1] Bercovitz or whoever on Psm & B typology, law Uranus. [2] Bed trick story in Josephus for the Ezra-Nehemiah point in Uranus 2. [3] Deal with Hebraic-Hellenic as a contrast because of later influence. Doesn’t follow their origin is separate: see Cyrus Gordon.15 [4] Oo-la-la stuff in Gaster’s Thespis. [5] “Unhandy people.” Josephus, c. Apion, ii, 15, quoting Apollonius of Rhodes.16 [6] Ta Biblia: 1 Macc. 1:56; [Greek for “little books”] in 2 Macc. 8:23.17 [7] Baruch’s law among & wisdom within is 2B: 48:24.18 [8] Japan: Samson, VI.19 Text [9] Revolution in Uranus: polytheistic religions have to have statues & pictures to distinguish one god from another. [10] Mars urban: engineering imgn. [imagination] in Isaiah & the highway.20 [11] Wisdom individualizes law; gospel internalizes it. [12] Where does recreating go? Can I do without a conclusion? [13] Saturn: Isaiah & Micah uttered the same oracle.21 [14] Uranus 2: St. Ignatius ct. [contemporary] N.T. [15] Mars: the link between Q[ueen of] Sheba & Matthew’s magi is Isa. 60:6.22 [16] Uranus intro: stressing enlightenment rather than morals. [17] D.H.L. [D.H. Lawrence]: in details I’m sure I’m wrong. Earth. [18] All metaphors, except the royal metaphor, are in the subsidiary or “just metaphor” class.

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[19] The 144000 “chaste” army in Revelation is the antitype of the saving remnant & Gideon’s army & the law in Deut. about continence during a holy war. Put in where it belongs, & don’t shoehorn it into Uranus.23 [20] Similarly with the loss of fire of life at creation: in your present arrangement it doesn’t go where you’ve got it. [21] End of Mars: Oxyrhynchus papyri S: Christ is Blake’s grain of sand who is also the world.24 [22] Uranus-wisdom: add a sentence about the power of consistency as a primitive force: doing the honest thing because dishonesty would spoil the pattern. [23] Hebrews 11:1 on faith: where does it go?25 [24] The whole question of recreation has got squeezed out. [25] Scandal of the cross in Galatians 5:11, not “theologians.”26 [26] Early Xn writers took a more liberal view of the O.T. canon than we do (opening of SUN [Saturn Uranus Neptune?]) [27] Did you get apocryphon in? [28] Jacob’s ladder. [28] Three-day rhythm is lunar.

7. Notebook 25 Because of the reference to the paper on Thomas More “being written,” this brief holograph notebook dates from 1986 or 1987. The “chapter” referred to in paragraph 1 is what became Words with Power, and several of the sketchy entries have parallels to material in The Late Notebooks. Paragraph 7 is an outline of a collection of essays Frye intends to put together.

[1] 3rd chapter: Symbol as indication of context. [2] The work of lit. as the symbol of lit. [3] (Glacken).27 Plutarch has the male sky (with the sperm) & female earth (De plaintis philosophorum, I vi, 11). Diogenes of Apollonia says air is intelligence (Fr. 4) {Prana & Spirit}. [4] Irenaeus: Recapitulation.28

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[5] Augustine: Epist. LV, 10: Jericho means moon, & Ps.72:7. [6] Hauptmann (diary cited by Jung (ST [Symbols of Transformation] 303.) from Stekel: Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word sound through the common word. [7] More’s Utopia (being written)29 Castiglione30 Vico (?) Vico, Bruno & the Wake31 William Morris32 Wagner’s Parsifal33 Wiegand lecture34 Royal Society paper35 Samuel Butler (?) (to be written?)36 Ghosts, Fairies & Elementals (?) to be written (?) [not written] Maybe expanded lyric paper37 [8] Thought HJ’s occult stories (SP [The Spoils of Poynton] & TS [The Turn of the Screw] especially).38 [9] Spenser: Faerie is the apparatus of romance made a Utopian analogy of England.

8. Milton From Notebook 30m, which is in the 1991 accession, box 25 of the Frye Fonds.

1. Milton was a revy. [revolutionary] & experimental genius, who grew metamorphically. Cf. Beethoven & Michelangelo. 2. He inherited the old Humanist theory of ed. [education] based on Prince & Courtier, which was encyclopedic. 3. Xn [Christian] humanism sees the eter. [eternal]. M. [Milton] was neither Prince nor courtier, but saw Christ as the king. Christ reveals himself in the Bible. The Bible as a definitive encyclopedia. Extending from it is all other learning. 4. Polarized by two great principles, liberty & bondage. God wills liberty for man & man naturally resists it. 5. Spiritual authority: the bishop & the autonomous church. 6. The bastard sacrament: the question of divorce.39

380

Notes on Miscellaneous Subjects

7. The censor of the Word: the sin against the H.S. [Holy Spirit] 8. The divine king or Head of the Church. 9. The dictator: Cromwell. Milton vs. Carlyle. 10. The return to the people & preservation of Parliament as a Senate. 11. Rationalization of each move, yet constantly an attempt to define its revy. [revolutionary] logic. This was the logic of the Ref. [Reformation]: liberty which comes from God & not from man. Impossible for a M. [Milton] to survive in our day. 12. The doctrine of liberty placed inside the great cycle of P.L. [Paradise Lost]. The Arthurian or heroic theme made Satanic. 13. S.A. [Samson Agonistes] Samson knocking down three idols (the father figure, the female will & the secular giant) & thereupon goes through a peripeteia & destroys the entire temple of Philistinism. Capturing of M.’s [Milton’s] own experience through blindness to an inner light. Also of the terrible strain of waiting until the time for the exertion of great strength led to “easy” dictation.

9. Reading Program From Notebook 30m, which is in the 1991 accession, box 25 of the Frye Fonds.

For the next book (the so-called “Second Essay”)40 I want to examine the relation of literature to conceptual thought, which implies that for the third the relation to history is involved. The book should, I think, begin with a development of the study of prose fiction I’ve already made, & then go on through Plato & others. So I start by reading or re-reading all the novels & related works of fiction in English, enlarging the scope to France & Germany, & of course America. Meanwhile I can be picking up hints for my own creative magnum opus.

10. William Morris From Notebook 30m, which is in the 1991 accession, box 25 of the Frye Fonds.

[1] Morris. Incompetent criticism of Morris: little boy in suit of armour stuff. [2] Morris’ early treatment of romance concentrates on ironic aspect of chivalry: 15th c., capture & torture

Notes on Miscellaneous Subjects

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waiting females; love vs. war (opposite of chivalry) pleasing dreaminess. The nomadic (imperialistic) as evil. [3] What romance is: dream vs. wish-fulfillment. The one a debased or proletarian form. liberation of romance in revolution. [4] The “hollow land” myth in Morris: its antecedents in Spenser & Shakespeare. its symbolism of recurrent life & final alchemic marriage.

21 The Victoria Chapel Windows

In the notes he typed for this talk about the chapel windows, Frye made some holograph additions and deletions to the typescript. Below, the deletions are marked by a strike‑through, and the ad‑ ditions are followed by an asterisk. The beginning of each page of notes is marked by a bold‑face number in square brackets. The order in which Frye spoke from these pages is uncertain. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

[1] Get gown, stupid* Introduction: Text from Wisdom (get the quote) [see end of this entry] Some of you will have been before ––quiet desperation ––old‑fashioned but in good faith ––not to criticize but define your own. Coat of arms: fourfold division ––still exists: art science, religion ––social sciences as law Four people. Three universities In the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, the seventh chapter, the fifteenth verse: “God hath granted me to speak as I would, and to conceive as is meet for the things that are given me: because it is he that leadeth unto wisdom, and directeth the wise.” [2] John 18:20. “I spake openly to the world, and in secret have I said nothing.” Building: height of modernity in 1892

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Chapel: Methodist belief in no sharp separation of church and world: worship and auditorium: liturgy and doubtful jokes Architecture: faces north: Corinthian columns: harsh light and me invisible Can see the windows: central one the coat of arms Other four leaders in Nonconformist tradition [Milton, Wesley, Newton, Luther] Nothing wrong in other traditions, but a quiet pride in our own [3] Luther: picture and motto Diet of Worms: speech in Latin and German Ready‑made drama at time––Emperor understood neither [?] Erasmus on* What he did not say: conscience and p.j. beyond him What he said: get quote [apparently the quotation at the end of this entry] Christian law: ––not police or rules but integrity of life ––sacramental law crossing both worlds* ––profession of students one of detachment ––broke power and saved R.C. as well as reformed Ch.* ––when you’re through you know it’s life and death ––raised gap between God & man: freed man by linking human powers* ––intellectual honor most difficult in peace ––fight against the total human institution, as today* ––war on the self‑sufficient institution ––unconscious influence on democracy* ––isolation of Christ: Peter and Paul Nicer man (Erasmus) wouldn’t work: power of Church ––saved both churches negative mighty lunge It is impossible for me to recant unless I am proved to be in the wrong by the testimony of Scripture or by the evidence of plain reason.1 [4] Milton: Career: civil war and blindness: world full voices Collapse of hopes at Restoration. P.L. [Paradise Lost] motto One thing clear not doing God a favor––quote Christian art: ––broken dejected gouty blind––where did he get all this energy2 * ––driving energy of mighty poem ––not doing God a favor*

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The Victoria Chapel Windows

––offering taking its merit from acceptance ––dilemma: self, public, posterity* ––all writing on the same level for God ––hence cheerfulness (get quote) cf. Haydn “As those Priests of old were not to be long in sorrow, or if they were, they could not rightly execute their function; so every true Christian in a higher order of Priesthood is a person dedicated to joy and peace, offering himself a lively sac‑ rifice of praise and thanksgiving, and there is no Christian duty that is not to be seasoned and set off with cheerfulness.”3 Bach to follow. [5] Jim Carscallen*4 Bach: German musical tradition Luther started Petty sniping: subversive harmonizing; strange females Chance he wanted: Kapellmeister Brilliance and beauty of secular music Back to organist ––cut in salary (20 children) and (harder) rank ––loss of fame––Samuel Wesley5 ––got Passion and Mass out of it Not imitate but sign of integrity: class by itself Three levels: Beethoven and Mozart ––God composes: portal to real music Truant poem ––“We will not join” can be positive Attachments within rather than without.6“We will not join” can be positive [6] Newton: mathematical achievement familiar ––calculus, optics, motion, gravitation Cambridge and the Mint––latter more time for Bible7 ––Mathematics all very well but Bible test ––serious man––only once uproariously amused––quote ––get quote. Solid, conventional, institutional ––vs. Pascal––get quote8

The Victoria Chapel Windows End of life––get quote9 ––last phrase on window the key ––not moral mock modesty ––not superstitious fear of jealous god Christian science: ––not knowledge but right to search ––greatest empire except Aristotle* ––looks forward amiably to bottom blown out 1905 ––vision of law never final* ––not failure––only when trust to wrong things ––exhilaration of ignorance: cf. St. T.A. [Thomas Aquinas] [7] Wesley: motto at end of life Tumultuous family: 2 sons and drs. extraordinary ––talented weak foolish father ––ed. dissenting academies V.C. [Victoria College] descended from ––back in Church; John at Oxford ––Susanna (Annesley name) held family.10 Holy Club––priggish rather than saintly. Georgia: yoke hard and burden heavy11 ––bungling love affair with girl he didn’t love ––marriage; refusal of communion; libel; flight12 ––shipboard; cabin boy; learning something ––motto and under law: find quotes.13 place where something happened* ––conversion to gospel Methodist revival––mistakes; not moving with caution ––like a man possessed* ––insensitivity to persecution, rain, fatigue at that time wild parts of the country* Christian religion: ––not belief in God but humanity of God ––best human standards minimum of divine ––hence no worship of ourselves, but doubt ––Wesley moral not mental doubter––18th c. ––but opens infinite horizons to mind

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Notes

Introduction   1 Letter to Ross Woodman, 31 October 1968. Frye also discusses his objections to the Macpherson Report in an interview with Bruce Reynolds. See CW 24: 358–9.   2 “Incidentally, have you seen a novel called The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov? Bulgakov was a much persecuted writer in Soviet Russia who produced this extraordinary story a year or two before he died. It’s about a man who is writing a book on Pontius Pilate” (Selected Letters, 163).   3 See Wagenknecht, Six Novels. In one of his diaries Frye writes, “I wonder about extra-sensory perception of books—I don’t mean simply the capacity of people hag-ridden by erotic fantasies to open any book at whatever erotic passage it contains. I have had some experiences of having the books I wanted fall out of the shelves at the time I wanted them. Four years ago I bought, on a pure impulse, a Viking Library collection of novels of the supernatural. I regretted the impulse instantly, kicked myself for wasting the money, &, trying to salvage the purchase, dawdled through de la Mare’s Return & Machen’s Terror, also an opening story by Mrs. Oliphant [A Beleaguered City] which actually gave me a calendar idea, though it was more an instance of an idea than the idea itself. Yesterday, for no reason at all, I suddenly pull the book out of the shelves & read Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie, which I’d completely ignored before, & it turns out to be an anima story that may be an opening lead into my romance study” (CW 8: 107–8).   4 Johnston (1870–1936) is not much remembered today, but To Have and to Hold, her second novel, broke existing publishing records: it sold 60,000 advance copies and more than 135,000 copies during its first week, making it the biggest popular success in the eighty-four years between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind. For a thoughtful survey of Johnston’s twenty‑three novels see Wagenknecht, “The World and Mary Johnston.” 1.  1932 Notebook   1 Crashaw’s metaphors for tears in these lines have often been berated.

388

Notes to pages 5–17

  2 Elsie Venner, one of Holmes’s “medicated novels,” was published in 1861 when he was a professor at Harvard Medical School.   3 Echoes of Spengler are in this and the previous entry. Spengler continues to appear in the entries that follow.   4 George Jeffreys, First Baron Jeffreys of Wem (15 May 1645–18 April 1689), also known as “The Hanging Judge.” He rose to prominence during the reign of King James II.   5 Albrecht Dieterich was the author of the influential Abraxas: Studien zur Religionsge‑ schichte des spätern Altertums (1891). Frye’s source is unknown. It is highly unlikely that he is translating from Dieterich’s German text. It is more likely that he is quoting the exact same translation by Bertram Lee Woolf in Martin Dibelius’s From Tradition to Gospel.   6 Frye refers to Collins’s book in his letter to Helen Kemp of 15 July 1932.   7 An allusion to T.S. Eliot’s line in Morning at the Window: “I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids,” l. 3.   8 The Grande valse brillante in E-flat major, Op. 18, was composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1833.   9 Hotspur describes this man in Henry IV, Part 1, 1.3.28–68. 10 The Bishop of Rochester in England, known for having created an astonishingly long curse. 11 Above “aristocrat” Frye wrote “snob.” 12 Frye’s variation on the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional: “God of our fathers, known of old— / Lord of our far-flung battle line—.” 13 In 1775 Johnson wrote a letter to Lord Chesterfield after a rift developed between them over the issue of the latter’s support, or rather lack of support, for Johnson’s Dictionary. Johnson claimed that Chesterfield’s patronage was too little and too late. 14 The reference to Themis is perhaps further evidence for a post‑1934 dating of the notebook. Frye appears not to have read Jane Ellen Harrison until he was a student at Emmanuel College. 15 In 1945 the lawyer and modernist poet F.R. Scott defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover before the Supreme Court of Canada. In spite of Scott’s efforts, the book was banned in Canada. Frye is doubtless referring to the banning of the book in the United States, which happened in 1929. 16 The allusion is to T.S. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service, ll. 21–4: “Under the penitential gates / Sustained by staring Seraphim / Where the souls of the devout/ Burn invisible and dim.” 17 Frye’s question mark. 18 In August 1803 Blake removed John Scofield, a drunk soldier, from his Felpham garden. Scofield later accused Blake of damning the King and claiming that all soldiers were slaves. On the basis of this testimony, Blake was charged with high treason. After he was acquitted, he left Felpham for London. 19 In July of 1877 Ruskin, in his magazine Fors Clavigera, had criticized Whistler’s Noc‑ turne in Black and White, saying that Whistler had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face” and that the price of the painting was exorbitant. Whistler filed suit for libel,

Notes to pages 17–28

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asking for £1,000 in damages; he won the case, the jury awarding him a farthing, but was driven into bankruptcy by the legal costs. 20 The merchant in Ben Jonson’s Everyman in His Humour. 21 A leading character in John Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife (1697). 22 The Book of Jubilees 2:7. 23 Frye himself had begun a subscription to Étude in 1924. 24 The “long cross” coins were introduced in England under Henry III. The cross on the verso made it easier to cut the coin into halves and quarters, thus producing halfpennies and farthings. 25 During his student days at Emmanuel College Frye had read Glover’s The Jesus of History, about which he had a rather low opinion, and he had used Glover’s The Con‑ flict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire in a student paper he wrote on “St. Paul and Orphism.” 26 Frye is referring to Régis Michaud’s The American Novel Today. The only other reference to Michaud in Frye’s work is in his 1933 review of The Art of the Novel, by his Victoria College mentor, Pelham Edgar. 27 The reference is to Anthony Comstock (7 March 1844–21 September 1915), a U.S. postal inspector and politician who dedicated himself to policing the moral conduct of American citizens. 28 Whether or not Frye is taking the phrase from Thomas Fuller is uncertain. H. Rogers records the phrase in his Essay on the Life and Genius of Fuller (1857). 29 The Three Voices appeared in Carroll’s Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869). Princess Ida is a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera (1884). 30 “An objective, spatial, dynamic art form would naturally be symbolized by a sphere, while a subjective, spatial, static art form would be better represented by a ring. Hence, Browning’s great drama (it has nothing to do with epics), which the Roman gold ring so symbolizes, as the poet expressly tells us [The Ring and the Book, ll. 1–31], presents modern literature with the technique of the modern drama worked out in full. The characters illuminate the subjectively conceived theme like floodlights––that is all they exist for––and a perfect modelled drama would have the complete balance of the ring.” This passage actually comes from Frye’s student essay on Romanticism (CW 3: 80). He doesn’t use the sphere as a symbolic form in his essay on Browning but uses rather a circle and a radiation figure (see CW 3: 106). A separate essay on Browning and drama is not extant. 31 Puff is an author in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Critic; Or, A Tragedy Re‑ hearsed (1779). See act 2, scene 2. 32 In Lord Chesterfield’s well‑known letter of advice to his son, he recommends that said son not take up fiddling as it leads to bad company and is a waste of time. 33 “ ‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him’ ” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ch. 7). 34 A 1931 British musical film directed by Victor Saville and starring Renate Müller, Jack Hulbert, and Owen Nares. 35 “Elstree” refers to one of several film studios based in or around the towns of Borehamwood and Elstree in Hertfordshire, England.

390

Notes to pages 29–48

36 Characters in The Mikado and Patience, respectively. 37 “There was a moment’s pause. Horror! his path ended in a fathomless abyss. . . . A rush a flash a crash all was over. Three drops of blood, two teeth, and a stirrup were all that remained to tell where the wild horseman met his doom” (Carroll, “Photography Extraordinary,” 31). 38 Franck’s Chorals were written for the intimate sound of the organ in the Basilica of St. Clothilde, Paris. 39 Above the line here Frye inserted “cannot possibly be all Shakespeare.” 40 The popular engraving that serves as the frontispiece for the First Folio (1622), executed by Martin Droeshout. 41 See entry of 19 March. 42 In this form of the cinquain the lines contain respectively 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 stresses and 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables. 43 The Pathétique sonata. 44 Which of Ernest Bloch’s four string quartets Frye is referring to is uncertain. 45 The reference is to Still’s Shakespeare’s Mystery Play. 46 The reference is to the allegorical garden episode in Richard II, 3.4. 47 Oswald Spengler claimed that cultures were like organisms: they got born, matured, declined, and then died. See Spengler 1: 93–113. 48 See Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. 49 The title of some early editions of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. 50 Titian and Wagner come under Twain’s gaze in A Tramp Abroad. 51 Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley was a New Brunswick politician. He became minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first government. With the fall of Macdonald in 1873, Tilley was appointed lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick. With Macdonald’s return to office in 1878, Tilley became minister of finance. See Macdonald,   Correspondence. 52 A soprano aria by Händel. 53 Above the line here Frye wrote, “ ‘discordant’ as though discord were the opposite of music.” 54 The cenotaph was originally built after World War I to commemorate Torontonians who lost their lives. It also commemorates those who died in World War II and the Korean War. Unveiled on 11 November 1925, it was modelled on the Cenotaph at Whitehall in London, England. 55 As indicated in the introduction, a more developed version of this passage appears in the “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism. 56 The Georgian poets generally, so named because the anthologies of their poetry were edited by J.T. Squire. 57 The reference is to the Fowlers’ The King’s English, where they explain that Slipshod Extension “is especially likely to occur when some accident gives currency among the uneducated to words of learned origin, & the more if they are isolated or have few relatives in the vernacular; examples are protagonist, recrudescence, optimism, meticu‑ lous, feasible, dilemma.”

Notes to pages 49–63

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58 Above the line here Frye wrote, “Augustinian––Manichean––ascetic.” 59 In 1609 Philip III of Spain decreed the Expulsion of the Moriscos, the descendants of the Muslim population that converted to Christianity under threat of exile from Ferdinand and Isabella in 1502. From 1609 through 1614, the Spanish government systematically forced Moriscos to leave the kingdom for Muslim North Africa. 60 Here Frye inserts above the line several indecipherable words in minuscule script. 61 Ibid. 62 “What about the malleable sort of people––and we’re all more or less malleable, we’re all more or less made as well as born? What about the people whose characters aren’t given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type? A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones. After the run has gone on long enough (and it’s astounding the way such runs persist), the character will be formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it’s the individual who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness. But before he had a definite character to distort events into the likeness of––what then? Who decided the sort of things that should happen to him then?” (Huxley, Point Counter Point, 282). Frye refers to the same passage in a letter to Helen Kemp, 22 May 1935 (CW 1: 443), as well as in his citation “Stanley Llewellyn Osborne” (CW 4: 296). 63 Hamlet, 2.2.564. 64 The Pass Course was a three‑year non-specialized program leading to the B.A. degree at Victoria College, as distinguished from the four‑year Honour Course. 65 Characters in Dickens’s Hard Times. 66 Frye is referring to Spengler’s thesis that the new Russian culture is “a plane without limit.” Both its architecture and its religion express a “denial of height.” See Spengler 1: 201. 67 Donald Clark Amos, B.A., Victoria College, 1932; B.D., Emmanuel College, 1935. 68 John Stinson, B.A., Victoria College, 1935. 69 John William Witzel, B.A., Victoria College, 1932; B.A., Emmanuel College, 1936. 70 The book by E.K. Broadus was actually titled The Story of English Literature. 71 Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from Horace’s Odes (3.2.13). 72 The references are to chapters 19 and 26 of Erewhon. 2.  Intoxicated with Words: The Colours of Rhetoric   1 In the top margin at this point Frye wrote: “Shift of stress to first syllable except in verbs with prefix in Germanic separation from Latin. Cf. love, lover, loveliness, etc. with family, ‑iliar, -iliarity. Hence accenting of poetry in Old English is trochaic. / Enormous number of synonyms for sea in Beowulf, not a sea‑faring people then, but had been when they distinguished them. / Euphemism and alliteration in Wulfstan, especially in Homilies, to enormous extent, especially in descriptions of hell.”   2 In reflecting on what he had said––ecce locusta, “look at the locust”––Gregory determined it was a sign from heaven because the similar sounding loco sta means “stay in place.”

392

Notes to pages 63–90

  3 This double acrostic serves as the preface to St. Aldhelm’s De Laude Virginitatis, a thirty‑eight-line poem which begins with the thirty‑eight‑letter line “Metrica Tirones nunc promant carmina castos.” The first letters of each of the thirty-eight lines spell out these same words when read vertically, and the last letters of each of the lines spell out the same message when read from bottom to top.   4 In the margin here Frye wrote: “nervous rather metaphysical nature of Saxon MS painting.”   5 In the top margin here Frye wrote: “The paganism of the author of Beowulf is not behind him but ahead of him: he anticipates the medieval spiritualized conquest of pagan life by absorbing it into its own synthesis.”   6 “The Tale of Adrian and Bardus”: book 5 of Gower’s Confessio Amatis.   7 See Warren, Dance of Death.   8 To the right of these lines towards the margin Frye has copied the following lines, which are from a medieval liturgy, In Assumptione: “Luce floret hodierna / Flore iugi ad sapema / Flos devectus et materna / Iura dat in filio.”   9 “Q” is the symbol Frye often uses in his notebooks and other holograph manuscripts to indicate the insertion of a quotation. The passage here from Eliot is uncertain, but it seems likely to be one of two remarks about Browne in his essay “Verse and Prose”: “[I]n the prose of Sir Thomas Browne only a commonplace sententiousness is decorated by reverberating language”; “There is more essential poetry in Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, even in translation, than in the whole of Sir Thomas Browne or Walter Pater” (Rainey, Annotated “Waste Land,” 162, 163). “Verse and Prose” was originally published in Chapbook 22 (April 1921): 3–10. 4.  Neoclassical Agony: On Wyndham Lewis   1 Colonel Blimp was a British cartoon character who satirized the reactionary views of the British establishment. 6.  On T.S. Eliot and Other Observations: From Notebook 13   1 This paragraph, which Frye picks up in entries 5 and 6, has been cancelled. Other paragraphs that have been cancelled are preceded by an asterisk.   2 “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” wrote Eliot in Burnt Norton, pt. 1, ll. 44–5.   3 “Dissociation of sensibility” was Eliot’s term for what he saw as the separation of intellect from feeling in seventeenth‑century poetry. It comes from his essay “The Metaphysical Poets.”   4 See Sinclair, who had written a highly sympathetic review of Prufrock and Other Ob‑ servations.   5 “This passage I find very obscure, but it may be the fact that I cannot identify, under the disguise of this metaphor, any experience of my own, that makes me suspect that ‘cleaning up the verbal situation’ is, in plain English, eyewash” (Eliot, “Introduction” xxi–xxii).

Notes to page 90

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  6 “But let criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper soon after reading Roebuck:—‘A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.’ Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Adderley and Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines! ‘Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!’––how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has anyone reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ‘the best race in the world’; by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And ‘our unrivalled happiness’;—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,—how dismal those who have seen them will remember;—the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child! ‘I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?’ Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the final touch,—short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or, shall I say? the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed!” (Arnold, “Function,” 389–90).   7 Frye apparently means either Cleanth Brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) or F.R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932).   8 Books and articles that Frye wants to look into in preparation for writing his book on Eliot: F.O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (1958); George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot (1953); Williamson had written an earlier study, The Talent of T.S. Eliot (1935), and Frye apparently assumes, because that book had appeared eighteen years earlier, it was written by a different Williamson; Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot (1949); Leonard Unger, ed., T.S. Eliot: A Selected Critique (1949); Hugh Kenner, T.S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet (1959); Philip Wheelwright, “Pilgrim in the Wasteland,” in The Burning Fountain (1954); Reid MacCallum, “Time Lost and Regained: The Theme of Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets,’ ” in Imitation and Design and Other Essays, ed. William Blissett (1953); Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T.S. Eliot (1964); Roy Daniells, “T.S. Eliot and His Relation to T.E. Hulme,” University of Toronto Quarterly 2, no. 3 (April 1933): 380–96; William Blissett, “Pater and Eliot,” University of Toronto Quarterly 22 (1953): 261–8; Friedrich W. Strothmann and Lawrence V. Ryan, “Hope for T.S. Eliot’s ‘Empty Men,’ ” PMLA 73 (1958): 426–32; Anne C. Bolgan, “Mr. Eliot’s Philosophical Writings, or ‘What the Thunder Said,’ ” a University of Toronto Ph.D. dissertation (1960), written under Frye’s supervision; Elizabeth Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design in His Poetry (1949).

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Notes to pages 90–3

  9 This is perhaps the echo passage Frye has in mind: “Word is unspoken, unheard; / Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, / The Word without a word, the Word within / The world and for the world” (pt. 5, ll. 3–6). There are other candidates. 10 This is perhaps a reference to one of the forms of the lyric that Frye arranges in a circle, like the dial of a clock, in essay four of Anatomy of Criticism. 11 See the concluding lines to part 3 of The Dry Salvages. 12 “(The lengthened shadow of a man / Is history, said Emerson / Who had not seen the silhouette / Of Sweeney straddled in the sun)” (Sweeney Erect, ll. 29–32). 13 In a famous passage from his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” T.E. Hulme characterized Romanticism as “spilt religion.” 14 A character from “Fragment of a Prologue” in Sweeney Agonistes, Wauchope was a former soldier from the Canadian Expeditionary Force. 15 The concluding lines of Sweeney Agonistes:

“Specially when you got a real live Britisher A guy like Sam to show you around. Sam of course is at home in London, And he’s promised to show us around.”

16 “[I]t would appear to be for the better that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born” (Notes towards the Definition of Cul‑ ture, 1948, in Christianity and Culture [New York: Houghton, 1960], 125). 17 Frye has a somewhat different diagram of the twelve phases on the following page. 18 Compare this and the following two entries with a passage from Frye’s “The Imaginative and the Imaginary”: Spenser had a disciple in the next generation, Phineas Fletcher, who produced a long didactic poem called The Purple Island (i.e., the body of man, traditionally formed of red clay). Half of it consists of an expansion of Spenser’s House of Alma, an exhaustive survey of anatomy under the allegory of a building. Fletcher finds the same three divisions in the brain that Spenser found: he seems in fact to be merely cribbing from Spenser, but when he comes to Phantastes he makes a significant change:

The next that in the Castles front is plac’t, Phantastes hight; his yeares are fresh and green, His visage old, his face too much defac’t With ashes pale, his eyes deep sunken been With often thoughts, and never slackt intention: Yet he the fount of speedy apprehension, Father of wit, the well of arts, and quick invention.

Here, we see, Phantastes is the source of the arts, and of the creative aspect of the mind generally. The change may be sheer inadvertence, or it may mean that an actual change of emphasis is beginning to make itself felt on the level of informed but unspecialized opinion represented by such a poem. If so, it was not for another century that the change becomes generally perceptible. (CW 21: 428–9)

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19 “I have been reading Wells’ Kipps, unable to shake off the feeling that Wells in spite of all his perfect accuracy doesn’t quite bring his characters to life, and Dickens, though he’d bungle and hack up & have Kipps doing all sorts of incongruous & untrue things, somehow would. I don’t like ‘somehow,’ or reflections about the mysterious transmutations of the alchemy of genius (75%) as distinct from high talent (a 74 that the Revising Committee refuses to raise). I think it may be something in the unvarying accuracy, in which every aitch is conscientiously dropped, something in the complete objectivity of presentation. Part of Dickens’ faults as a novelist are virtues of a creator of character: occasionally he sees a character from the character’s own point of view. This shocks the reader, but with a little sympathy he can see its kind of truth. Dickens would have Kipps burst into articulate torrents of eloquence, threaten suicide & never think of ‘self-pity,’ make him frequently Byronic & even intellectual, in all of which he would be wrong as a novelist, yet, in letting Kipps do once in a while what he wanted to do, he gives the reader a glimpse of different mental planes. Shakespeare goes all out for every character, & so gets the objective pattern in reverse, with all its positive virtues intact” (CW 25: 115–16). 20 Written above “Emily Dickinson” in pencil is “Jane Austen.” 21 Frye did comment on forms of vision and on the Frankenstein myth in his Romanticism paper. See “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” CW 17: 75–92. 22 The allusion is to the final line of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, where he calls poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the World.” 23 The reference apparently is to Frye’s story “Interpreter’s Parlour” (CW 25: 84–6). 24 That is, the lecture that became chapter 3 of The Well‑Tempered Critic. 25 “Hawthorne’s inhibitions seem to be at least in part self-imposed, as we can see if we turn to Poe’s Ligeia, where the straight mythical death and revival pattern is given without apology. Poe is clearly a more radical abstractionist than Hawthorne, which is one reason why his influence on our century is more immediate” (CW 22: 128). 8.  Notes on the Massey Lectures, Yeats, and Other Topics: From Notebook 9   1 “Introduction.” Design for Learning: Reports Submitted to the Joint Committee of the To‑ ronto Board of Education and the University of Toronto, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962), 3–17. Rpt. in On Education, 46–61, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, CW 7: 127–42.   2 Frye gave the Inglis Lecture at Harvard on 18 April 1972. It was published as “The Developing Imagination,” Learning in Language and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963), 31–58; rpt. in Reading the World, 80–98, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, CW 7: 143–59.   3 In April 1962 Frye presented a paper on Blake, “The Road of Excess,” at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Central Renaissance Conference, University of Nebraska. It was published under that title in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963), 3–20; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 160–74, and in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, CW 16: 316–29.

396

Notes to pages 98–9

  4 Frye lectured at the University of Rochester in 1962 where he presented a version of his paper “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts,” first published in The Hidden Harmony: Essays in Honor of Philip Wheelwright, ed. Oliver Johnson et al. (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), 13–22.   5 In May 1962 Frye gave an address, “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” at the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, which met in Toronto. It was published as “Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” American Journal of Psychiatry 119 (October 1962): 289–98; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 151–67, and in “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963, CW 21: 420–35.   6 This refers to Frye’s paper “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” which he gave at a conference on Romanticism he chaired at the English Institute. It was published under that title in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), 1–25; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 200–17, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 75–91.   7 Frye gave the first of six Massey lectures at McMaster University on 9 November 1962.   8 In February 1962 Frye gave a talk on “The Two Worlds of Art and Science” at Ryerson Collegiate Institute.   9 In 1962 Frye received an honorary D.Litt. degree from Mount Allison University. 10 On 18 May 1962 Frye gave an address to the graduating class at Queen’s University, at a convocation at which he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. 11 The manuscript for this talk, if there was one, is not extant, and no published version has been found. 12 See n. 5, above. 13 See n. 3, above. 14 See n. 6, above. 15 “Introduction,” Design for Learning: Reports Submitted to the Joint Committee of the To‑ ronto Board of Education and the University of Toronto, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962), 3–17; CW 7: 127–42. 16 The sequel to the Anatomy––the “Third Book”––was never realized, at least as a single book. 17 This lecture is not extant. It may have been the lecture Frye gave on Blake during the fall of 1957 at the Thomas More Institute. 18 Beginning here, the numbers following some of the entries refer to one or more of the six Massey Lectures. 19 Frye did use it. See The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 445–6. 20 “Man has always wanted to fly, and thousands of years ago he was making sculptures of winged bulls and telling stories about people who flew so high on artificial wings that the sun melted them off. In an Indian play fifteen hundred years old, Sakuntala, there’s a god who flies around in a chariot that to a modern reader sounds very much like a private airplane. Interesting that the writer had so much imagination, but do we need such stories now that we have private airplanes?” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 443).

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21 “All around you is a highly artificial society, but you don’t think of it as artificial: you’re so accustomed to it that you think of it as natural. But suppose your imagination plays a little trick on you of a kind that it often does play, and you suddenly feel like a complete outsider, someone who’s just blown in from Mars on a flying saucer. Instantly you see how conventionalized everything is: the clothes, the shop windows, the movement of the cars in traffic, the cropped hair and shaved faces of the men, the red lips and blue eyelids that women put on because they want to conventionalize their faces, or ‘look nice,’ as they say, which means the same thing. All this convention is pressing towards uniformity or likeness. To be outside the convention makes a person look queer, or, if he’s driving a car, a menace to life and limb. The only exceptions are people who have decided to conform to different conventions, like nuns or beatniks. There’s clearly a strong force making toward conformity in society, so strong that it seems to have something to do with the stability of society itself. In ordinary life even the most splendid things we can think of, like goodness and truth and beauty, all mean essentially what we’re accustomed to. As I hinted just now in speaking of female make‑up, most of our ideas of beauty are pure convention, and even truth has been defined as whatever doesn’t disturb the pattern of what we already know” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 465–6.) 22 “We think of things as up or down, for example, so habitually that we often forget they’re just metaphors. Religious language is so full of metaphors of ascent, like ‘lift up your hearts,’ and so full of traditional associations with the sky, that Mr. Krushchev still thinks he’s made quite a point when he tells us that his astronauts can’t find any trace of God in outer space. If we’re being realistic instead of religious, we prefer to descend, to get ‘down’ to the facts (or to ‘brass tacks,’ which is rhyming slang for the same thing). We speak of a subconscious mind which we assume is underneath the conscious mind, although so far as I know it’s only a spatial metaphor that puts it there. We line up arguments facing each other like football teams: on the one hand there’s this and on the other hand there’s that” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 482). 23 “What is true of the relation of literature to history is also true of the relation of literature to thought. I said in my first talk that literature, being one of the arts, is concerned with the home and not the environment of man: it lives in a simple, man‑centred world and describes the nature around it in the kind of associative language that relates it to human concerns. We notice that this man‑centred perspective is in ordinary speech as well: in ordinary speech we are all bad poets” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 482). 24 “The essential thing is the power of choice. In wartime this power of choice is greatly curtailed, and we resign ourselves to living by half‑truths for the duration. In a totalitarian state the competition in propaganda largely disappears, and consequently the power of imaginative choice is sealed off. In our hatred and fear of war and of totalitarian government, one central element is a sense of claustrophobia that the imagination develops when it isn’t allowed to function properly” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 490). 25 “Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from

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Notes to pages 99–103

the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time. So it’s natural to swing to the opposite extreme and say that literature is really a refuge or escape from life, a self‑contained world like the world of the dream, a world of play or make-believe to balance the world of work” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 470). 26 “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH 23 (June 1956): 144–52; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 130–7, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centu‑ ries, CW 17: 7–15. 27 On censorship, see The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 469. 28 Apparently a reference to the lecture Frye gave at the University of Rochester in 1962, an early version of “Design as a Structural Principle in the Arts.” 29 On pastoral myths, see The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 489. 30 “The author of a recent book on Blake, Hazard Adams, says he gave this poem to a class of sixty students and asked them to explain what it meant. Fifty‑nine of them turned the poem into an allegory; the sixtieth was a student of horticulture who thought Blake was talking about plant disease” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 462). 31 A reference apparently to Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. 32 That is, the February 1962 lecture at Ryerson Collegiate Institute. 33 “In an Indian play fifteen hundred years old, Sakuntala, there’s a god who flies around in a chariot that to a modern reader sounds very much like a private airplane. Interesting that the writer had so much imagination, but do we need such stories now that we have private airplanes?” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 443). 34 On Peacock, see The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 443–4. 35 “No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams” (William Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 1, 395–400). 36 “But suppose your imagination plays a little trick on you of a kind that it often does play, and you suddenly feel like a complete outsider, someone who’s just blown in from Mars on a flying saucer. Instantly you see how conventionalized everything is: the clothes, the shop windows, the movement of the cars in traffic, the cropped hair and shaved faces of the men, the red lips and blue eyelids that women put on because they want to conventionalize their faces, or ‘look nice,’ as they say, which means the same thing. All this convention is pressing towards uniformity or likeness” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 465–6). 37 “The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way. That’s why it’s important for Canadians to pay particular attention to Canadian literature, even when the imported brands are better seasoned. I often think of a passage in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’ The Gettysburg address is a great poem, and poets have been saying ever since Homer’s time that they were just following after the great deeds of the heroes, and that it was the deeds which were important and not what they said about them. So it was right,

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in a way, that is, it was traditional, and tradition is very important in literature, for Lincoln to say what he did. And yet it isn’t really true. Nobody can remember the names and dates of battles unless they make some appeal to the imagination: that is, unless there is some literary reason for doing so. Everything that happens in time vanishes in time: it’s only the imagination that, like Proust, whom I quoted earlier, can see men as ‘giants in time’ ” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 482). 38 “Here was Gibbon, sitting on the steps of the capitol hill in Rome—a comfortable little eighteenth century agnostic suddenly being picked up by some mysterious force that he never turned around to look at and stuck in a library to scribble frantically for the rest of his life about the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Well, the operation confronted him with a vast, amorphous pile of documents. But he had the magic wand: he had the myth of ‘decline and fall.’ That was the principle on which he selected his material. That was the magic wand by which he could make this vast mass of documents obey his will. Without the myth the book would have been entirely shapeless and, of course, would never have been written at all. So whether a story is factual or regarded as such or not has no effect on its possession of myth. That is what it must have, regardless of anything else” (“Reconsidering Levels of Meaning,” CW 25: 320). 39 “But the poem [Blake’s The Sick Rose] is not really an allegory, and so you can’t feel that any explanation is adequate: its eloquence and power and magic get away from all explanations. And if it’s not allegorical it’s not allusive either. You can think of Eve in the garden of Eden, standing naked among the flowers—herself a fairer flower, as Milton says—and being taught by the serpent that her nakedness, and the love that went with it, ought to be something dark and secret. This allusion, perhaps, does help you to understand the poem better, because it leads you toward the centre of Western literary imagination, and introduces you to the family of things Blake is dealing with. But the poem doesn’t depend on the Bible, even though it would never have been written without the Bible. The student of horticulture got one thing right: he saw that Blake meant what he said when he talked about roses and worms, and not something else. To understand Blake’s poem, then, you simply have to accept a world which is totally symbolic: a world in which roses and worms are so completely surrounded and possessed by the human mind that whatever goes on between them is identical with something going on in human life” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 462–3). 40 “A more common way of indicating that an image is literary is by allusion to something else in literature. Literature tends to be very allusive, and the central things in literature, the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton, are echoed over and over again. To take a simple example: many of you will know G.K. Chesterton’s poem on the donkey, which describes how ungainly and ridiculous a beast he is, but that he doesn’t care because, as the poem concludes:

I also had my hour, One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet.”  (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 459)

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Notes to pages 103–6

41 See Jastrow, Story of Human Error. 42 “So, you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 464). 43 “In ordinary life, as in literature, the way you say things can be just as important as what’s said. The words you use are like the clothes you wear. Situations, like bodies, are supposed to be decently covered. You may have some social job to do that involves words, such as making a speech or preaching a sermon or teaching a lesson or presenting a case to a judge or writing an obituary on a dead skinflint or reporting a murder trial or greeting visitors in a public building or writing copy for an ad. In none of these cases is it your job to tell the naked truth: we realize that even in the truth there are certain things we can say and certain things we can’t say” (The Edu‑ cated Imagination, CW 21: 485). 44 Aria 5 of Bach’s Hunting Cantata (“Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd”). 45 “I think of sheep because I’ve just heard, on the radio, someone singing an aria from a Bach cantata, which begins: ‘Sheep may safely graze where a good shepherd is watching.’ This was on a programme of religious music, so I suppose somebody must have assumed that the sheep meant Christians and the good shepherd Christ. They easily could have meant that, although by an accident this particular cantata happens to be a secular one, written in honour of the birthday of some German princeling, so the good shepherd is really the prince and the sheep are his taxpayers. But the sheep are allegorical sheep whether the allegory is political or religious, and if they’re allegorical they’re literary” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 458). 46 The titles for the six Massey Lectures that Frye finally settled on were: “The Motive for Metaphor” (phrase from title of a Wallace Stevens poem); “The Singing School” (phrase from Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium); “Giants in Time” (phrase from the last sentence of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu); “Keys to Dreamland” (phrase from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake); “Verticals of Adam” (phrase from Dylan Thomas’s “Altarwise by Owl-light”); and “The Vocation of Eloquence” (phrase from St. John Perse’s Anabase). “Strange Angels,” a lecture title that Frye did not use, is perhaps a reference to the last lines of D.H. Lawrence’s Song of a Man Who Has Come Through: “What is the knocking? / What is the knocking at the door in the night? / It is somebody wants to do us harm. / No, no, it is the three strange angels. / Admit them, admit them.” “Heart of Light” is a phrase from Eliot’s The Waste Land, pt. 1, l. 41, and from Burnt Norton, pt. 1, l. 37. 47 See n. 46. 48 For this and the next entry, see n. 46.

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49 “Even the details of literature are equally perverse. Literature is a world where phoenixes and unicorns are quite as important as horses and dogs—and in literature some of the horses talk, like the ones in Gulliver’s Travels. A random example is calling Shakespeare the ‘swan of Avon’—he was called that by Ben Jonson. The town of Stratford, Ontario, keeps swans in its river partly as a literary allusion” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 466–7). 50 Frye used a version of this chart in his essay on Yeats’s A Vision. See “The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Spiritus Mundi, 245–74; rpt. in Northrop Frye on Twentieth Century Literature, CW 29: 252–77. 51 A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (1965). 52 This is the sentence Frye anticipates using in his essay on Yeats’s A Vision. He opened his essay in another way. 53 “Many of Yeats’s examples are writers who, like Whitman at phase 6, have made their lives conform to literary patterns, or who, like Shakespeare at phase 20, are described by the kind of poetry they produced and not personally. The primitives of phases 2 to 7 are much easier to understand as archetypes of pastoral or Romantic conventions in literature; Dostoevsky’s Idiot is the only example given of phase 8; and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra fits better into the ‘Forerunner’ position of phase 12 than Nietzsche himself. Phase 15 would then become intelligible as the phase of the poet’s ideal or male Muse: the Eros of Dante and Chaucer, the ‘Ille’ of Ego Dominus Tuus, the beautiful youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the like. The high antithetical phases would be much more clearly represented by characters in Shakespeare or Irish legend, and the high primary ones by characters in Balzac and Browning, than they are by Galsworthy or Lamarck or ‘a certain actress’ ” (“The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Northrop Frye on Twentieth‑Century Literature, CW 29: 269). 54 “Yeats’s own interpretation of the Axël passage is indicated in ‘The Tables of the Law’: ‘certain others, and in always increasing numbers, were elected, not to live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour; and . . . these have no father but the Holy Spirit’ ” (“The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Northrop Frye on Twentieth‑Century Literature, CW 29: 277). 55 What Frye is referring to is Madame Blavatsky’s cosmic view that our world is attached to another one, which she sees as the shape of a dumb-bell or hourglass, the stem of the two figures symbolically connecting the worlds of Generation and Beulah—an image Frye picked up from reading Yeats’s Trembling of the Veil. 56 “In this perspective the whole cycle of nature, of life and death and rebirth which man has dreamed, becomes a single gigantic image, and the process of redemption is to be finally understood as an identification with Man and a detachment from the cyclical image he has created. This ultimate insight in Yeats is the one expressed in his many references (one of which forms the last sentence of A Vision) to a passage in the Odyssey where Heracles, seen by Odysseus in hell, is said to be present in hell only in his shade, the real Heracles, the man in contrast to the image, being at the banquet of the immortal gods” (“The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Northrop Frye on Twentieth‑Century Literature, CW 29: 277).

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Notes to pages 111–13 9.  Introduction to Fables of Identity

  1 “The Archetypes of Literature,” Kenyon Review 13 (Winter 1951): 92–110. Incorporated into Anatomy of Criticism, Second Essay; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 7–20 and in CW 21: 120–35.   2 “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,” Dædalus 90 (Summer 1961): 587–605; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 21–38 and in CW 21: 401–19.   3 Presented as a paper at Cornell University, April 1958; published as “Nature and Homer,” Texas Quarterly 1 (Summer–Autumn 1958): 192–204; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 39–51, and in CW 21: 254–66.   4 Presented as a paper at Harvard University, April 1960; published as “New Directions from Old,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York: George Braziller, 1960; Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 115–31; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 52–66, and in CW 21: 307–21.   5 “The Structure of Imagery in the Faerie Queene,” University of Toronto Quarterly 30 (January 1961): 109–27; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 69–87, and in CW 28: 53–72.   6 “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature 23 (1959): 44–55; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 119–26, and in CW 16: 24–34.   7 “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH 23 (June 1956): 144–52; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 130–7, and in CW 17: 7–15.   8 “Blake after Two Centuries,” University of Toronto Quarterly 27 (October 1957): 10–27; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 138–50, and in CW 16: 290–302.   9 “Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” American Journal of Psychi‑ atry 119 (October 1962): 289–98; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 151–67, and in CW 21: 420–35. 10 “What I say in this connection will be familiar enough to you, but I need to establish some common ground between an association of psychiatrists and a literary critic” (CW 21: 420). 11 “George Gordon, Lord Byron,” in Major British Writers, vol. 2, enlarged ed., gen. ed., G.B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), 149–234; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 168–89, and in CW 17: 50–71. 12 “Emily Dickinson,” in Major Writers of America, vol. 2, gen. ed., Perry Miller (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 3–46; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 193–217, and in CW 17: 245–70. 13 “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (October 1947): 1–17; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 218–37, and in CW 29: 54–73. 14 “How True a Twain,” in The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Edward Huber (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Basic Books, 1962), 25–53; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 88–106, and in CW 28: 95–113. 15 “The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens,” Hudson Review 10 (Autumn 1957): 353–70; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 238–55, and in CW 29: 129–46. 16 “curved dominions never found in fables”; “Hail of identity” (ll. 7, 38). See Collected Poems of E.J. Pratt, 2nd ed., ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), 346.

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10.  Response to the Macpherson Report   1 Frye became principal of Victoria College in 1959, a post he held until 1967.   2 The Ontario education system had five years of secondary education, the final one known as Grade XIII, from 1921 to 1984. 11.  Communication and the Arts: A Humanist Looks at Science and Technology   1 See Snow, Two Cultures. 12.  Preface to The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society   1 The three essays are: (1) “The Instruments of Mental Production,” given at the University of Chicago’s seventy-fifth anniversary liberal arts conference on the topic “What knowledge is most worth having?” 1 February 1966; published in Chicago Review 18, nos. 3–4 (1966): 30–46; rpt. in The Knowledge Most Worth Having, ed. Wayne C. Booth (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967), 59–83, in The Stubborn Structure, 3–21, and in CW 7: 261–78. (2) “The Knowledge of Good and Evil,” given at the inauguration of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, 27 October 1966; published in The Morality of Scholarship, ed. Max Black (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1967), 1–28; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 22–37, and in CW 7: 281–96. (3) “Speculation and Concern,” presented as a lecture at a conference titled “The Humanities and the Quest for Truth” at the University of Kentucky, 22–3 October 1965; published in The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, ed. Thomas B. Stroup (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1966), 32–54; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 38–55, and in CW 7: 242–58.   2 “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts,” in The Hidden Harmony: Essays in Honor of Philip Wheelwright, ed. Oliver Johnson et al. (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), 13–22; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 56–65, and in CW 27: 228–37.   3 I deeply regret having to say now the late Philip Wheelwright. [NF]   4 “On Value Judgments,” Contemporary Literature 9 (Summer 1968): 311–18; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 66–73, and in CW 27: 258–65.   5 “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” was given at a conference at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut––“Sequence and Change in the College Curriculum: Northrop Frye’s Critical Methods,” April 1964; published in College English 26 (October 1964): 3–12; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 74–89, and in CW 27: 147–61.   6 “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” was presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 29 December 1963; published in PMLA 79 (May 1964): 11–18; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 90–105, and in CW 7: 192–206.   7 “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Dædalus 94 (Spring 1965): 323–47; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 109–34, and in CW 27: 191–214.   8 “The Revelation to Eve,” in Paradise Lost: A Tercentenary Tribute, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969), 18–47; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 135–59; and in CW 16: 134–55.   9 “The Road of Excess,” presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Lan-

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Notes to pages 135–45

guage Association and the Central Renaissance Conference, University of Nebraska, April 1962; published in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963), 3–20; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 160–74, and in CW 16: 316–29. 10 “The Keys to the Gates,” in Some British Romantics: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye et al. ([Columbus]: Ohio State UP, 1966), 3–40; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 175–99, and in CW 16: 337–59. 11 “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), 1–25; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 200–17, and in CW 17: 75–91. 12 “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” presented at the English Institute, September 1967; published in Experience in the Novel, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia UP, 1968), 49–81; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 218–40, and in CW 17: 287–308. 13 “Old and New Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 1–5. Incorporated into part 1 of “Romance as Masque,” in Spiritus Mundi, 148–56, which is rpt. in CW 27: 285–92. 14 “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century,” in Literary Views: Critical and Historical Essays, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964), 145–58; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 241–56, and in CW 17: 271–86. 15 “The Top of the Tower: A Study of the Imagery of Yeats,” presented at the Sligo (Ireland) conference on Yeats, 12 August 1968; published in Southern Review 5 (Summer 1969): 850–71; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 255–77, and in CW 29: 283–303. 16 The study of image‑clusters was to be one of the features of the book that Frye planned to write following Anatomy of Criticism and that he laboured over with a great deal of intensity––the “Third Book.” For the full story of this unfulfilled project, see Michael Dolzani’s edition of The “Third Book” Notebooks (CW 9). 17 “Conclusion,” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed., 3 vols., ed. Carl Klinck (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976), 3: 318–32; rpt. in Divisions on a Ground, 71–80, and as “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Can‑ ada,” in CW 12: 448–65. 13.  Notes on Romance (56b)   1 Telephone conversation with Jane Widdicombe, 5 January 1993.   2 A Gnostic text embedded in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas; also known as The Hymn of the Pearl.   3 A link to the scenes on Keats’s Grecian urn, with all of its piping and other revelry.   4 In the Cherry‑Tree Ballad, a Christmas carol, the infant Jesus commands the tree to yield its fruits to Mary.   5 Father of Nausicaa and King of the Phaeacians who welcomes Odysseus after he is shipwrecked on their shore.   6 Frye says nothing more in these notes about the Wise Woman.   7 “Three phases in Daphnis and Chloe: first, the exposed infant and the talismans of recognition. These are laid out as burial ornaments, as the child isn’t expected to live. Cf. the frankincense and myrrh in the birth of Christ. Second, the pre-sexual love of

Notes to pages 145–52

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hero and heroine. Fear of incest hangs about this because of uncertain parentage and such. Third, the world of experience, symbolized by pirates and the like, though they don’t come to anything. Daphnis and Chloe can’t fuck until their parentage is established, and Chariclea in Ethiopica says explicitly she won’t until she knows who the hell she is. Virginity as something magical: Tempest, Comus, etc.; Marina in brothel. It has two aspects: deliberate lifelong virginity and virginity preceding a marriage that can’t take place until the anxiety of continuity has been looked after” (CW 15: 197–8). See also the final paragraph of the next entry, notes on Hadas’s Three Greek Romances.   8 “But when they knew that he was a Jew, all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians” (Acts 19:34).   9 “So Silla was now constrained perforce her will to yield to love, wherefore from time to time she used so great familiarity with him, as her honour might well permit, and fed him with such amorous baits as the modesty of a maid could reasonably afford; which when she perceived did take but small effect, feeling herself outraged with the extremity of her passion, by the only countenance that she bestowed upon Apolonius, it might have been well perceived that the very eyes pleaded unto him for pity and remorse. But Apolonius, coming but lately from out the field from the chasing of his enemies, and his fury not yet thoroughly dissolved, nor purged from his stomach, gave no regard to those amorous enticements, which, by reason of his youth, he had not been acquainted withal” (126–7). 10 Shakespeare changes the name of the lovestruck shepherd in Lodge’s Rosalind from “Montanus” to “Silvius.” 11 See n. 7, above. 12 The underlying reference here is to the similarities and differences between As You Like It and Rosalind, which was the source of Shakespeare’s play. Thus, the “usurping duke” is Duke Frederick, the brother of Duke Senior in As You Like It. The parallel character in Lodge’s Rosalind is the King of France. 13 The reference apparently is to Rosamond (also Rosamund) Clifford, a woman of exceptional beauty who became the mistress of Henry II. In order to keep her hidden from Queen Eleanor, the king placed her in a palace at Woodstock that was surrounded by a labyrinth. 14 The links here are between Rosalind and As You Like It. 15 “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale,” in Fables of Identity, CW 28: 115. 16 “But, when a lady descends to marry a groom, is not the groom her head, being her husband? And does not the difference strike you? For what lady of quality ought to respect another, who has made so sordid a choice, and set a groom above her? For, would that not be to put the groom upon a par with themselves?” (Samuel Richardson, Pamela, 447). 17 “Pandosto, calling to mind how first he betrayed his friend Egistus, how his jealousy was the cause of Bellaria’s death, that contrary to the law of nature he had lusted after his own daughter, moved with these desperate thoughts, he fell into a melancholy fit, and, to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem, he slew himself; whose death being many days bewailed of Fawnia, Dorastus, and his dear friend Egistus, Dorastus, taking his leave of his father, went with his wife and the dead corpse into

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Notes to pages 152–86

Bohemia, where, after they were sumptuously entombed, Dorastus ended his days in contented quiet” (85). 18 Frye is referring to ll. 77 ff. of the “Introduction,” not the “Prologue,” to The Man of Law’s Tale. 19 Gene Stratton‑Porter, Freckles (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1904). Freckles, who had lost a hand, was a plucky waif who guarded the Limberlost timber leases and dreamed of angels. 20 Emaré is a Middle English lay that preserves one version of the Constance saga. There are more than sixty versions of the tale. 21 That is, the tale of Constance in Nicholas Trivet’s Anglo‑Norman Chronicle. 22 We learn of Thisbe’s death in book 2. 23 At this point, Frye turns to Lamb’s translation. 24 A reference apparently to the quotation, not in the second, but in the third of Frye’s Norton lectures, “Our Lady of Pain”: “I may be sure by Theagenes’ oath, that he shall not fleshly have to do with me, until I have recovered my country, and parents, or if the gods be not content herewith, at least until I by mine own free will be content he shall marry me. Otherwise never” (CW 18: 49). 25 John Ford, ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (1633). 26 B.E. Perry, The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of their Origins (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967). 27 That is, Laurence Twine, The Pattern of Painful Adventures (ca. 1594), a prose romance based on a story in the Gesta Romanorum. 28 Horace Meyer Kallen, The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1918). 29 The reference is to Harold Bloom’s theory that the initiating force behind all strong poetry is misprision or misreading. The pastoral, Frye speculates, may be a misreading of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. 30 DeWitt was a professor of Latin at Victoria College when Frye was an undergraduate. 31 An apparent reference to Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1966). 32 It occurs in the Second Period, First Narrative, ch. 8, and in the Third Narrative, chs. 5 and 8. 33 That is, from Plautus’s play Rudens (The Rope), the archetype of the girl reunited with her father after having been stolen by pirates. 34 Just before meeting Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through the Looking-Glass, Alice comes upon a “wood of no names,” where she realizes that she doesn’t know the name of anything around her, and she doesn’t even remember her own name. 35 Horkos: the spirit of oaths, who inflicted punishment upon perjurers. 36 “Most of us feel that there is something else in Dickens, something elemental, yet unconnected with either realistic clarity or philosophical profundity. What it is connected with is a kind of story that fully gratifies the hope expressed, according to Lewis Carroll, by the original of Alice, that ‘there will be nonsense in it.’ The silliest character in Nicholas Nickleby is the hero’s mother, a romancer who keeps dreaming of impossible happy endings for her children. But the story itself follows her specifi-

Notes to pages 186–259

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cations and not those of the sensible people. The obstructing humours in Dickens are absurd because they have overdesigned their lives. But the kind of design that they parody is produced by another kind of energy, and one which insists, absurdly and yet irresistibly, that what is must never take final precedence over what ought to be” (“Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” CW 17: 308). 37 The Three Cuckolds, Anonymous, 79–144. 38 “When I wish for some general idea which will describe the Great Wheel as an individual life I go to the Commedia dell’Arte or improvised drama of Italy” (Yeats, A Vi‑ sion, 83–4). 39 “The Werewolf” in Hope Arnott Lee and Alvin A. Lee, ed., Wish and Nightmare (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 78–81. Frye was general editor of the thirteen-volume set of textbook anthologies of which this was volume 1. The Lees got the story from French Legends, Tales & Fairy Stories, retold by Barbara Leonie Picard (New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1955). 40 See The Secular Scripture, CW 18: 96. 41 George Polti quotes Goethe as saying, “Gozzi maintained that there can be but thirty‑six tragic situations. Schiller took great pains to find more, but he was unable to find even so many as Gozzi” (Polti, Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, 7). 42 In As You Like It, Touchstone remarks to Audrey that “honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar” (3.3.31). 43 “They rowed her in across the rolling foam, / The cruel crawling foam, / The cruel hungry foam, / To her grave beside the sea” (Charles Kingsley, The Sands of Dee, ll. 19–21). 44 Green Mantle, the beautiful young woman with whom both Alan and Darsie fall in love. 45 That is, the story of Blondel the Minstrel and King Richard the Lionheart. 46 “‘Tis weakness, / Too much to think what should have been done” (5.2.339–40). 47 The reference is to Frye’s brief study of Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross in Notebook 41, published in CW 15: 87–9. 48 Violence and fraud. 49 “No white nor red was ever seen / So amorous as this lovely green” (ll. 17–18). 50 That is, the archetype of the Battle of Bosworth Field, the penultimate battle in the War of the Roses. 51 Frye’s comment on the problem he is having with his electric typewriter. 52 Sten Bodvar Liljegren and William Empson. 53 An apparent reference to Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet El Desdichado. 54 An apparent reference to Alfred Lord Tennyson. 55 The reference is to Margaret Alice Murray, The God of the Witches (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960). 56 If Frye had checked, according to Michael Dolzani, he “would have found that the Te igitur is one of the service‑books of the Catholic Church, so called from the first words of the canon, ‘Te igitur, clementissime Pater’ ” (“Therefore, most merciful Father”) (CW 15: 430). 57 “In Scott’s Anne of Geierstein the heroine engages in a certain amount of moonlight flitting, and it is suggested that she is descended from a fairy or elemental spirit,

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Notes to pages 259–87

and has acquired by this heredity the ability to transport herself through space without the usual physical movements. A long inset tale is told about her grandmother to lend emotional weight to this suggestion; but eventually everything she does is explained on more or less plausible grounds. The implication in such a device is that fairy tales are for children: the mature reader will want and expect a more matter‑of‑fact account. The fantasy here is introduced because the action of Anne of Geierstein takes place in the fifteenth century, and such fantasy illustrates the kind of superstitions that people at that time had. However, the real effect of the device is to put the undisplaced and displaced versions of the same event side by side. Its significance, then, is not in any child‑and‑adult value judgment about beliefs, but in the fact that undisplaced versions present the narrative structure more abstractly, just as a cubist or primitive painting would present the geometrical forms of its images more directly than straight representation would do” (CW 18: 29). 58 The reference is to the word “los.” Earlier, Oxford has said, “Is there not immortal los and honour—the trumpet of fame to proclaim the sovereign, who, alone in a degenerate age, has united the duties of a generous knight with those of a princely sovereign?” (356). 59 “Unifable” is a term Frye uses throughout his notebooks––though not in The Secular Scripture––to refer to the basic underlying structure of all romance, or perhaps even all narrative. It is similar to what Joseph Campbell calls the “monomyth,” a term Frye does use elsewhere with some frequency. 60 The reference is to Hiawatha’s painting on birch bark a series of symbolic and mystic images: the egg of the Great Spirit, the serpent of the Spirit of Evil, the circle of life and death, the straight line of the earth, and other ancestral totems in the great chain of being. Frye elaborates his Great Doodle in a similar way, the Hiawathan “shapes and figures” becoming for him points of epiphany at the circumference of the circle–– what he twice refers to as beads on a string (CW 9: 241, 245). The beads are various topoi and loci along the circumferential string. They can be seen as stations where the questing hero stops in his journey or as the cardinal points of a circle. 61 In one of the advertisements for White Rock sparkling water in the 1940s, a half‑nude nymph is kneeling on the White Rock and peering into the water. 62 “By the way, there was a review of the Wood”—his romance of The Wood beyond the World, which had been issued from the Kelmscott Press the year before, and of which an ordinary edition had recently been published—“in last week’s Spectator, which was kind and polite, but amused me very much by assuming that it was a Socialist allegory of Capital and Labour! It was written with such an air of cock-certainty that I thought people might think that I had told the reviewer myself; so I wrote a note to explain that he was wrong” (Mackail, Life of William Morris, 2: 316). 63 Here a line is missing from the typescript. 64 Anodos: rising up; kathados: descending. 65 Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750). 66 “In the course of developing his own style out of that of Hoffmann, MacDonald borrows many of Hoffmann’s images, but most of his borrowings are not true allusion since a study of the originals does not appreciably enhance one’s understanding of MacDonald’s text” (Docherty, “Sources of Phantastes,” 46).

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67 Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat. 68 MacDonald had served Congregational churches earlier in his career. 69 Rimbaud in a letter to George Izambard, 13 May 1871 (Complete Works, 100). 70 Most likely MacDonald’s A Dish of Orts (1893) 71 Bzoom: bosom. Here’s the passage: “I saw the worm-thing come creeping out, white-hot, vivid as incandescent silver, the live heart of essential fire. Along the floor it crawled toward the settle, going very slow. Yet more slowly it crept up on it, and laid itself, as unwilling to go further, at the feet of the princess. I rose and stole nearer. Mara stood motionless, as one that waits an event foreknown. The shining thing crawled on to a bare bony foot: it showed no suffering, neither was the settle scorched where the worm had lain. Slowly, very slowly, it crept along her robe until it reached her bosom, where it disappeared among the folds” (ch. 39). 72 That is, the South to East quadrant in Frye’s chart of forms and themes, which he called his Great Doodle. In his Notebooks on Romance he writes: “This area (S to E) is the stage in the cave of Trophonius where one recovers the power of laughter; here goes also Baubo and the obscene jokes that made Demeter laugh. That’s the basis of Aristophanes, whose fundamental play, from this point of view, is the Frogs. Note on this play the theme of descent to a lower world to secure a poet as a palladium for the city. I don’t know why birds and frogs seem to haunt this area, but they certainly do. When not frogs, serpents” (CW 15: 233). 73 An apparent reference to John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” 74 Ernest Jones, Nightmare, Witches and Devils (New York: W.W. Norton, 1931). Frye owned––and annotated––the 1971 edition (New York: Liveright). 75 The reference is to Frye’s diagrammatic schema, described briefly in n. 72. 76 The reference is to the thirty‑two dream‑visions that De Quincey, according to a manuscript found after his death, intended to include in Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to Confessions of an English Opium‑Eater. See paragraph 2 of Frye’s notes, above. 77 “The word motive is here used in the sense attached by artists and connoisseurs to the technical word motivé applied to pictures, or to the separate movements in a musical theme” (646). 78 The reference is to the furtive life of the German-born Canadian novelist and translator Frederick Philip Grove. 79 Timothy Leary, a central figure in the drug culture of the 1960s and proponent of the spiritual and emotional benefits of LSD. 80 A reference to the turbaned and mahogany‑skinned Malay. 81 “Dreaming” is the second part of Suspiria de Profundis. 82 The number 32 had special significance for Frye. See Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary, 224–32. 83 This and the headings that follow––“Vision of Life,” “Savannah-la-Mar,” “Levana,” “Who Is This Woman that Beckoneth? Who She Is,” and “The Dark Interpreter”––are separate essays in Suspiria de Profundis. 84 The western point of Frye’s Great Doodle. See n. 72, above. 85 See above, notes on De Quincey, par. 2. 86 Stheneboea (“strong cow”): the daughter of Iobates, king in Lycia; she took a fancy to

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Notes to pages 309–48

Bellerophon but was repulsed. As in the myth of Potiphar’s wife, she falsely accused Bellerophon of advances and even attempted rape; her husband sent him on a deadly mission to Iobates. 87 The opening line of ch. 5 of E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey. 88 The translator, S. Gaselee, says in a note, “Clitophon shewed a very proper spirit in waiting for Leucippe’s absence before propounding this dubbio amoroso” (Loeb edition, 122). 89 “And yet more med’cinal is it than that Moly / That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave. / He [the shepherd boy] called it Hæmony, and gave it me, / And bade me keep it as of sovran use” (John Milton, Comus, ll. 636–9). The plant seems to have been Milton’s invention. 90 The heroine of Scott’s Ivanhoe. 91 Menander, The Girl Who Gets Flogged and The Girl Who Has Her Hair Cropped (Perikeiromene). 14.  Romance as Secular Scripture: Interview and Discussion at the Thomas More Institute, Montreal   1 “The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree” (“Letter to Robert Bridges,” 210).   2 William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924).   3 In CW 12: 490 Frye quotes the line from Nowlan’s Genealogy of Morals.   4 The essay in Opus Posthumous in which the phrase “wholly other” appears was not actually written by Stevens but copied out by him. See CW 29: 319, 411n.22.   5 The reference is to Crane’s Black Tambourine:

The interests of a black man in a cellar Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door. Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle, And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.



Aesop, driven to pondering, found Heaven with the tortoise and the hare; Fox brush and sow ear top his grave And mingling incantations on the air.



The black man, forlorn in the cellar, Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies, Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall, And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies. 15.  Preface to Spiritus Mundi

  1 “The Search for Acceptable Words,” Dædalus 102 (Spring 1973): 11–26; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 3–26, and in CW 27: 310–30.   2 “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Con-

Notes to pages 348–53

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tract,” in Higher Education: Demand and Response (The Quail Roost Seminar), ed. W.R. Niblett (London: Tavistock Publications, 1969), 35–59; (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970), 35–51; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 27–48, and in CW 7: 360–78.   3 Presented as a paper, “The Renaissance of Books,” at the Fergusson Seminar, Williamsburg, Virginia, 16 November 1973; published as “The Renaissance of Books,” Visible Language 8 (Summer 1974): 225–40; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 49–65, and in CW 11: 140–55.   4 “The Times of the Signs: An Essay on Science and Mythology,” in On A Disquieting Earth Five Hundred Years after Copernicus (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1974), 59–84; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 66–96, and in CW 27: 357–68.   5 “Expanding Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 2 (Winter 1975): 199–216; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 99–122, and in CW 27: 391–410.   6 “Charms and Riddles” was first published in Spiritus Mundi, 123–47; rpt. in CW 27: 369–90.   7 “Romance as Masque” was first published in Spiritus Mundi, 148–78; rpt. in CW 18: 125–51.   8 “Old and New Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 1–5. Incorporated into part 1 of “Romance as Masque,” in Spiritus Mundi, 148–56; rpt. in CW 27: 285–92.   9 “The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler,” Dædalus 103 (Winter 1974): 1–13; rpt. as “Spengler Revisited,” in Spiritus Mundi, 179–98, and in CW 11: 287–314. 10 “Agon and Logos: Revolution and Revelation,” in The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 135–63; rpt. in Spiri‑ tus Mundi, 201–27, and in CW 16: 156–78. 11 “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job,” in William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969), 221–34; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 228–44, and in CW 17: 366–86; rev. version, 387–401. 12 “The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in An Honoured Guest: Essays on W.B. Yeats, ed. Denis Donoghue and J.R. Mulryne (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 8–33; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 245–74, and in CW 29: 252–77. 13 “Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form,” in Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1973), 395–414; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 275–94, and in CW 29: 309–25. 16.  Victoria College’s Contributions to the Development of Canadian Culture   1 That is, the faculty at Emmanuel College, which, along with Victoria College, makes up Victoria University.   2 The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, often referred to as the “Massey Commission,” was established by Privy Council Order on 8 April 1949 and was chaired by Vincent Massey, who later became the first native-born Governor General of Canada. The report can be found at: http://  canadachannel.ca/HCO/index.php/Report_of_the_Royal_Commission_on_  National_Development_in_the_Arts,_Letters_and_Sciences,_Part_One_I-III.

412

Notes to pages 353–66

  3 George Ross, the organist at St. John’s Presbyterian (later United) Church in Moncton, NB. He had been a student of Sir Hubert Parry.   4 Lantern slides allowed photographic images to be projected from glass plates, thus permitting the viewing of the images by a large audience.   5 Grace Irwin, a teacher and novelist, graduated from Victoria College in 1929, the year that Frye entered as a freshman. 18.  The Soviet Union and Russia   1 Annotated copies of both novels are among the books in Frye’s own library, now housed at the Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. 19.  Notes for The Double Vision: Notebook 51   1 That is, the fictional form arising from people sitting at a banquet and pouring out all manner of erudition. Such an encyclopedic farrago was a favourite of the Menippean satirists and would include such works as Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists and Macrobius’s Saturnalia.   2 Frye is referring to Byron’s remark that history is the devil’s scripture (The Vision of Judgment [1821], l. 689 [stanza 87]).   3 The Italian abbot Joachim of Floris (also Fiore or Flora) (ca. 1132–1202), who makes more than three‑dozen appearances in Frye’s published and unpublished writings. Joachim developed the doctrine of the Three Ages––the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the impending Age of the Spirit.   4 Above “linked to” Frye wrote “cognate with.”   5 DBR YHWH: Dabar Yahweh or Word of God.   6 Keats’s ode was said to have been inspired by a Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek vase. See The Double Vision, CW 4: 196.   7 Such numbers at the end of entries refer to the number of the lecture that Frye would be giving at Emmanuel College. The three lectures became the first three chapters of The Double Vision, to which Frye added a fourth, “The Double Vision of God.”   8 That is, the imagination feeds on the paradox of the “is” and the “is not,” which dialectic is the fundamental principle of metaphor.   9 “To be is to be perceived.” The phrase appears throughout Bishop Berkeley’s writings. See, e.g., The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (London: Thomas Nelson, 1953), 1: 53. 10 See Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1983). 11 “Then there’s the whole complex I stumbled over in the Wiegand lecture: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the revival of the notion I’ve been avoiding about the beauty of nature, Jung’s geometrical mandalas as symbols of the integrated mind, and the kind of creation that meets nature halfway in Poe’s Domain of Arnheim. Notable by the way in that story how insistent Poe is on finding one particular spot somewhere—the Utopian fallacy—instead of realizing that in an interpenetrating world everywhere is the one particular spot” (CW 6: 431).

Notes to pages 366–74

413

12 The reference here may be to the concluding line of chapter 8 of Umberto Eco’s Fou‑ cault’s Pendulum (Harcourt, 2007): “If you can’t even decide what the story is, better stick to editing books on philosophy” (57). 13 “Only connect” is the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910). 14 See Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1989), a novel in which three characters investigate the idea of a Templar conspiracy, along with other esoteric and occult lore, and eventually develop their own plan of the hidden history of the world. An annotated copy of the novel was in Frye’s own library, now housed in the Victoria University Library. 20.  Notes on Miscellaneous Subjects   1 “[M]an possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit” (Aldous Huxley, “Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita” [New York: Penguin, 2002; orig. pub. 1944], 13).   2 “Midway in life’s journey”: the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy.   3 Temenos: sacred space. For Jung temenos was the inner space where soul-making occurs.   4 “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!”: Cleopatra’s joke in Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.21.   5 Two Noble Kinsmen (1612–13) by John Fletcher, a romantic comedy on which Shakespeare is thought to have collaborated.   6 A domestic tragedy published in 1608. Thomas Middleton is the leading candidate for authorship.   7 “The great tragic roles [in Shakespeare] were mostly taken by the actor Richard Burbage, and when he died a contemporary wrote a eulogy of him that mentioned some of the roles he had acted, including ‘the grieved Moor’ (Othello) and ‘kind Lear.’ When a book appeared recently that misquoted this passage as ‘king Lear,’ a reviewer remarked that the change in the one letter, a ‘g’ for a ‘d,’ had wiped out the whole of the contemporary criticism of the play” (CW 28: 466).   8 Parliament closed the theatres in 1642.   9 In the quarto of Henry IV, pt. 2, the second scene of act 2 begins with Prince Henry saying, “Before God, I am exceeding weary.” In the folio version his speech begins “Trust me.” 10 The phrase is Wilhelm Reich’s. See his Character Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1963), 44, 145–9, 314–27. 11 See Knight’s How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (Cambridge: G. Fraser, The Minority Press, 1933). 12 Frye is castigating himself for making a mistake after “guilty of,” where he began to write the wrong word, which he then marked through. 13 If Frye included this point in his “Introductory Lecture,” it was edited out of the published version.

414

Notes to pages 376–8

14 Here Frye changes to a pen with a finer nib. 15 In a note on p. 241 of The Great Code (CW 19: 306n.28), Frye says: “I am treating, in Matthew Arnold fashion, ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hebraism’ as a contrast, because that is what they were as a joint influence on Western culture, increasingly from the sixteenth century on. It does not follow that they were a contrast in origin: see Cyrus H. Gordon, The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1963).” 16 Frye’s note on p. 243 of The Great Code (CW 19: 337n.3) cites the source of “unhandy people” as “Josephus, contra Apion, bk. ii. 15.” Frye’s own source for this is likely not Josephus’s Against Apion but a footnote to vs. 117 of “The Letter of Aristeas” in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R.H. Charles, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 106. See Frye’s notes on his reading of Aristeas in CW 13: 317, where he cites the same passage from Josephus on “the mechanical ineptness of the Jews.” 17 See note to p. xii, line 39, of The Great Code (CW 19: 269–70n.2). 18 The reference is to 2 Baruch: “One of the pseudepigrapha, II Baruch, speaks of the law among us and the wisdom within us (48:24)” (The Great Code, 131; CW 19: 151). 2 Baruch is technically an apocryphal, not a pseudepigraphal, work. 19 The reference is to G.B. Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931), which Frye cites for a passage about the tension between Buddhism and the Shinto religion in Japan. See The Great Code, 115; CW 19: 134. 20 The reference is to the passage in Isaiah (11:16) prophesying a highway to bring the people of Israel back from Assyria. See The Great Code, 160; CW 19: 181. 21 The references are to Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3: “and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” 22 Cf. The Great Code, 178; CW 19: 199: “The visit of the wise men to Christ is the antitype of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon, the connecting link being Isaiah 60:6.” 23 Cf. The Great Code, 119; CW 19: 139: “Closely associated with the purge is the idea of the saving remnant, a curiously pervasive theme in the Bible from the story of Gideon’s army in Judges 7 to the exhortations to the seven churches of Asia Minor in Revelation.” 24 The saying of Christ from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri that Frye has in mind is: “Raise the stone and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and I am there.” See The Great Code, 167: CW 19: 188. 25 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Frye’s discussion of this passage did not get into The Great Code, but he examines it in other places, e.g., Myth and Metaphor, 98–9. 26 See The Great Code, 91; CW 19: 110. 27 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1976). Frye owned and annotated a copy of this book. 28 Recapitulation (“summing up” or “restoring”) is a central theme in Irenaeus. He takes the idea from St. Paul (Ephesians 1:10, “to gather together in one”) but attaches his own meaning to it: the new beginning that brings about communion between

Notes to pages 378–84

415

God and man. See Irenaeus, Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. Joseph P. Smith (New York: Newman Press, n.d.), 51, 67, 71, 108. 29 “Natural and Revealed Communities,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 288–306; CW 28: 625–41. 30 “Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 307–21; CW 28: 346–60. 31 “Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 356–74; CW 29: 356–74. 32 “The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris,” published in Myth and Meta‑ phor, 322–39; CW 17: 309–25. 33 “The World as Music and Idea in Wagner’s Parsifal,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 340–55; CW 17: 326–40. 34 “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 168–82; CW 18: 230–44. 35 “The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 28–43; CW 18: 327–41. 36 “Some Reflections on Life and Habit,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 141–54; CW 17: 341–53. 37 “Approaching the Lyric,” published in The Eternal Act of Creation, 130–6; CW 18: 245–51. 38 “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult,” published in The Eternal Act of Cre‑ ation, 109–29; CW 29: 350–70. 39 Some Protestants referred sarcastically to marriage as the “bastard sacrament.” 40 Frye is referring here to his plans for his post‑Anatomy book, the “Third Book.” 21.  The Victoria Chapel Windows   1 Luther’s answer at the Diet of Worms to Charles V, who had demanded that he recant: “If the emperor desires a plain answer, I will give it to him. It is impossible for me to recant unless I am proved to be wrong by the testimony of Scripture. My conscience is bound to the Word of God. It is neither safe nor honest to act against one’s conscience. Here I stand. God help me. I cannot do otherwise.”   2 Cf. “An original purchaser, standing at a bookstall with the surge and thunder of the mighty poem breaking over him, might well have asked: But this is a blind, defeated, disillusioned, gouty old man: where did he get all this energy? It is a fair question, even if it may not have an answer” (The Return of Eden, 110; CW 16: 110).   3 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in The Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Robert Fletcher (London: Westley and Davis, 1835), 130.   4 James Carscallen, an accomplished musician and Frye’s colleague at Victoria College, may have been playing the organ for the service.   5 A reference, apparently, to the English organist and composer (1766–1837), sometimes referred to as the “English Mozart.” He was the son of Charles Wesley, nephew of John Wesley.   6 “No! by the Rood, we will not join your ballet.” The final line of E.J. Pratt’s The Truant.

416

Notes to pages 384–5

  7 In 1696 Newton left Cambridge for London, where he became Warden of the Royal Mint.   8 On the first page of this series of notes, Frye has typed out three quotations, which he labelled in pencil “Speeches.” Two are by Newton. The first is “We are, therefore, to acknowledge one God, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, the creator of all things, most wise, most just, most good, most holy. We must love him, fear him, honour him, trust in him, pray to him, give him thanks, praise him, hallow his name, obey his commandments, and set times apart for his service” (Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts, ed. H. McLaughlan [Liverpool: University Press, 1950], 51). The second is the “great ocean of truth” passage reproduced in the next note. The third is from Blaise Pascal’s “Mystic Amulette”: “The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November . . . From about half-past ten in the evening until about halfpast twelve, midnight, FIRE.”   9 See the Introduction. 10 Susanna Annesley was John Wesley’s mother. Frye may be suggesting the connection between Wesley’s mother and Victoria University’s Annesley Hall, the oldest women’s residence in Canadian higher education. 11 John and his brother Charles sailed to the Province of Georgia in 1735 at the request of the governor, James Oglethorpe. 12 Wesley had proposed marriage to Sophia Hopkey but broke off the engagement. His relationship with her came to a head when he refused her communion, after which she and her new husband filed suit against Wesley. After the proceedings ended in a mistrial, Wesley escaped back to England, his sojourn in Georgia having been more or less a disaster. 13 The motto is apparently the words encircling Wesley’s head in the stained‑glass window: “the best of all is, God is with us.”

Works Cited

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Index

Abraxas (Dieterich), 388n.5 Achievement of T.S. Eliot, The (Matthiessen), 393n.9 Achilles, 103, 155, 166, 220, 312 Achilles Tatius (fl. 2nd cent. c.e.), xxiv, xxv, 169, 308–14 Actaeon, 189, 216, 226 Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena, 146 Adams, Hazard (b. 1926), 101, 398n.30 Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), 308 Adonis, 40, 162, 175, 189, 233, 297, 310 Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, The (Achilles Tatius), xxiv, xxv, 308–14 advertising, xv, 26, 81, 128, 308 Aeneas, 162, 191, 214, 218, 226 Aeneid, The (Virgil), 175, 176, 225 Aeschylus (ca. 525–ca. 456 b.c.e.), 174 Aesop (6th century b.c.e.), 343 Aethiopian History, An (Heliodorus of Emesa), xxiv, 154–61, 169 After Strange Gods (Eliot), 14, 83, 92 Against Apion (Josephus), 173 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 174 “Agon and Logos” (Frye), 411n.10 Agnostos Theos (Norden), 174 Alcmaeon (Euripedes), 163 alcohol, 19, 303 Aldhelm of Malmesbury (ca. 640–703 c.e.), 63, 392n.3 Alexander Lectures, xx Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 25, 389n.33

All Hallow’s Eve (Williams), xxx All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare), 14 Altarwise by Owl-light (Thomas), 400n.46 America: A Prophecy (Blake), 368 American English, 47–8 American Novel Today, The (Michaud), 389n.26 Amos, Don, 3, 56, 391n.67 Anabase (Perse), 90, 400n.46 analogy, 7, 44, 66, 99, 103, 154, 161, 301, 304, 318, 320, 325 anatomy (form of prose fiction), xiv, xxx, 3, 26, 37 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), xiv, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, xxxii, 95, 98, 111, 134, 322, 323, 330, 337, 338, 340 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 37, 53, 96 Ancient Romances (Perry), 161, 162, 406n.26 Anderson, Sherwood (1876–1941), 33 Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Nicholas Trivet, 152, 406n.21 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 245 Anglosaxony: A League that Works (Lewis), 83 anima: figure, 316; figure in mirror, 287; hero’s own figure, 286; subconscious, 108; symbol, 303; vision, 305 Anne of Geierstein (Scott), xxiv, 258–60 Annesley, Susanna (1669–1742), 385, 416n.10

422 Antiquary, The (Scott), xxiv, 194, 202–8 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 37, 374 Apes of God, The (Lewis), xix, 80, 84 aphorisms, 20 Apollonian culture, 321 Apollonius of Tyre, xxiv, 137, 161–4, 174 Apolonius and Silla (Riche), 145 applause, 46 “Approaching the Lyric” (Frye), 415n.37 Apuleius, Lucius (ca. 125–ca. 180 c.e.), 146, 174, 299 Aquinas, Thomas (1225–1274), 122 Arabian Nights, 147, 308 Arcadia (Sidney), xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, 213–44 archetypes, xxvi–xxvii, 108; Alcinous, 141; amaranth, 264; amnesia, 143; Andromeda, 159; Barabbas, 191; Battle of Harlaw, 207; biblical writing, 53; birthmark, 183; Bosworth, 225; Buddha, 171; the calumniated heroine, 179; Calypso, 277; cherry-tree carol, 141; cipher in the lower world, 185; cruel crawling foam, 203; Crusoe, 184; Damion, 109; Damon and Pythias, 224; death and rebirth, 214; Depression Doodle, 248; disdainful mistress, 217; displaced storm or boar, 142; dragon-swallowing-heroine, 184; educated-by-father, 253; Eros, 141; Esau, 257; Eunuchus, 219; Everyman, 170; existential, 316, 345; frozen statue, 303; Gadarene swine, 140; gentlemen of Verona, 143; Gonzalo, 226; gunpowder plot, 185; Hercules and the snakes, 282; Hippolytus, 155, 156; horkos, 183; hunting, 303; imaginative, 316; ingenu, 146; Jungian, 316–17; Ligeia, 230; literary, 345; literary character, 108; loathly lady, 215; Lotus Land, 276; master-to-father, 142; mouse-trap play, 179; Noah, 277; Odyssey, 157; omphale, 218; Orpheus and Eurydice, 288; Phaedria, 155; Philomela, 236; Pilate’s wife, 262; Rasselas, 169–70; Richard I and Blondel,

Index 210; Rudens, 180; sacrifice, 242; Samson, 151; Sarah, 142; sea-parallels to land, 254; shadow-substance, 149; sleeping beauty, 298; titans around infant Zeus, 201; twin, 216; underworld giants and dwarfs, 265; Venus-Psyche, 220; wild man, 199 “Archetypes of Literature, The” (Frye), 111, 402n.1 Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975), 335 aretalogy, 176 Aristophanes (ca. 448–ca. 388 b.c.e.), 190, 314, 409n.71 Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), xxxii, 62, 102, 103, 166, 385 Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888), 57, 89, 90, 95, 393n.6, 414n.15 art: Anglo-Saxon, 63; authority of, 323; Byzantine, 63; chaos of, 101; and ecphrasis, 191, 310; emblem of, 286; function of, 371; healing, 126; literary, 365; meaningless, 361; as meditation, 335; modern, 101; nature as, 351; official, 101; popular-primitive, 100; of prose, 78; and religion, 100; of rhetoric, 341; and science, 102; self-reflecting, 81; unpopular, 82; and vision, 102; Wyndham Lewis’s opinions about, 78 Art of T.S. Eliot (Gardner), 393n.8 Arturus Rex, 367 Ascham, Roger (1515–1568), 122 Ash-Wednesday (Eliot), 90, 394n.9 aspects of knowledge, centrifugal and centripetal, 125 Astrolabe (Chaucer), 66 Astrophel and Stella (Sidney), 220 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 38, 54, 147, 149, 216, 405n.12, 407n.41 At a Solemn Music (Milton), 62 Athenaeus (fl. 200 c.e.), 412n.1 Atlantis, 123 Atwood, Margaret (b. 1939), 359 Auden, W.H. (1907–1973), 294, 332 Augustine (354–430 c.e.), 11, 154, 379

Index aureate diction, 61–74 Austen, Jane (1775–1817), 21, 37, 48, 100 automobile, 21 Ave Maria (Gounod), 55 Axel’s Castle (Wilson), 90 Babiuk, Andriy (1897–1937), xxiii, 359 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750), 54, 323, 384, 400n.44 Back to Methusaleh (Shaw), 273 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), 28, 31 Bacon, Roger (ca. 1214–1292), 31 Balder, 40 Balla, Giacomo (1871–1958), 101, 398n.31 ballad, 43, 55, 198, 207, 322, 344 Ballad of Agincourt, The (Drayton), 43 Ballad of Our Lady, A (Dunbar), 71 Bampton Lectures, xx, xxxi, 107 bardo, xxx, 295, 306 Barlaam and Ioasaph, xxiv, 169–72 Barth, Karl (1886–1968), 334 Bartholomew the Englishman (Bartholomew de Glanville) (ca. 1203–1272), 31 Baruch 2, 414n.18 Baudelaire, Charles (1821–1867), 91 Beaumarchais, Pierre (1732–1799), 190 Becket, Thomas (1118–1170), 41 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803–1849), 135 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827), 19, 22, 39, 52, 54 Behn, Aphra (1640–1689), 48 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 349 Beleaguered City, A (Oliphant), 387n.3 belief, 19, 35, 94, 104, 111, 118, 123, 224, 249, 253, 365, 383, 385 Benda, Julien (1867–1956), 331 Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948), 321 Bentley, Eric (b. 1916), 187 Beowulf, 100, 334–5 Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), 35, 82 Berkeley, George, Bishop (1685–1753), 13, 31, 365, 412n.9 Bible, xvii, xx, 53, 54, 59, 106, 148, 153, 291,

423 301, 304, 318, 333, 338, 350, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 379, 384 biographical criticism, 26 Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 37 Black Tambourine (Crane), 410n.5 Blake, William (1757–1827), xv, xxxii, 17, 34, 35, 43, 52, 100, 101, 107, 108, 112, 113, 131, 136, 293, 322, 329, 350, 357, 370–1, 388n.18 “Blake after Two Centuries” (Frye), 112, 402n.8 Blake’s Job illustra­tions, 326, 350 “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job” (Frye), 411n.11 Blast (periodical), 81 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (1831–1891), 109, 401n.55 Blimp, Colonel, 392n.1 Blissett, William (b. 1921), 90, 393n.8 Bloch, Ernest (1880–1959), 40, 390n.44 Blood and the Moon (Yeats), 350 Bloom, Harold (b. 1930), 319, 406n.29 Bloomfield, Morton (1913–1987), 349 Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von (1742– 1819), 52 Bluebeard, 331 B Minor Mass (Bach), 323 Boethius (ca. 480–524 c.e.), 62 Boethius (Chaucer), 66 Bolero (Ravel), 25–6 Bolgan, Anne C. (1923–1992), 90, 393n.8 Bonheur, Rosa (1822–1899), 48 Book of Genesis, 13, 174, 352 Book of Isaiah, 40, 76, 174, 175, 377, 397 Book of Job, 162, 311, 327, 350 Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, The (Kallen), 406n.28 Book of Jubilees, 389n.22 Book of Kings, 13, 308, 333 Book of Revelation, 40, 153, 322, 356, 364, 378 Book of Wisdom, 382 books, xviii, xx, 5, 20, 31, 79, 80, 125, 297, 302, 319, 348, 360

424 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), 341 Borrow, George (1803–1881), 251 Boswell, James (1740–1795), 13 Boucher, François (1703–1770), 53 Bouvard et Pecuchet (Flaubert), 79 Bradley, F.H. (1846–1924), 89 Brahms, Johannes (1833–1897), 54 Brandeis, Robert, xiv Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956), 179 Bridge of Sighs, The (Hood), 43 Broadus, E.K. (1876–1936), 57, 391n.70 Brodsky, Joseph (1940–1996), 359 Brooks, Cleanth (1906–1994), 393n.7 Brown, E.K. (1905–1951), 330 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–1682), 37, 56, 62, 67, 72, 351, 392n.9 Browning, Robert (1812–1889), 25, 34, 43, 44, 51, 52, 54, 62, 353, 389n.30 Bryant, William Cullen (1794–1878), 33 Buddha (ca. 563–ca. 483 b.c.e.), 43 Budgen, Frank (1892–1971), 307 Bulgakov, Mikhail (1891–1940), xxiii, 359–60, 387n.2 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1803–1873), 210 Bunyan, John (1628–1688), xvi, 9, 17, 34, 38, 52, 53, 170, 289 Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (Eliot), 91 Burke, Edmund (1729–1797), 51, 53 Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715), 37 Burnt Norton (Eliot), 90, 392n.2, 400n.46 Burns, Robert (1759–1796), 12, 38, 54 Burton, Robert (1577­–1640), 37, 53, 96, 308 Bush, Douglas (1896–1983), xviii, 76–7 Butler, Samuel (1839–1902), 59 Byrd, William (composer) (1543–1623), 60 Byron, George Gordon Lord (1788–1824), 12, 17, 100, 112, 113, 363, 412n.2 Byzantine art, 63 Byzantium poems (Yeats), xxxii, 108, 109, 110, 350 Cabell, James Branch (1879–1958), 33 Caesar, Julius (ca. 100–44 b.c.e.), 42, 51

Index Calvin, John (1509–1564), 10 Campbell, Joseph (1904–1987), xviii Canada, 6, 47, 128, 136, 345, 353, 357, 358–9 Canadian literature, 136, 358 Canadian National Railways, 55 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 41, 54 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), 82, 101, 332 Carroll, Lewis (1832–1898), 25, 29, 389n.29, 390n.37, 406n.34 Carscallen, James, 384, 415n.4 Cassiodorus (ca. 485–580 c.e.), 62, 63 Castiglione, Baldassare (1478–1529), 223 “Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano” (Frye), 425n.30 Catholicism, 23–4 Catullus (ca. 84–ca. 54 b.c.e.), 51 Cavell, Edith (1865–1915), 45 cena, 363 censorship, 58–9, 100 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616), 9, 37, 192 Cézanne, Paul (1839–1906), 67 Chaereas and Callirhoe (Chariton of Aphrodisias), xxiv, 168–9 Chalk Circle, The (Brecht), 179 Chaminade, Cécile (1857–1944), 48 Chance (Conrad), 337 Chaplin, Charlie (1889–1977), 81 Chapman, George (ca. 1559–1634), 76 Character Analysis (Reich), 413n.10 Chariton of Aphrodisias (fl. 4th century c.e.), xxiv, 168–9 Charlemagne (ca. 742–814 c.e.), 109, 148, 364 Charles II (1630–1685), 331 Charles Eliot Norton Lectureship, 348 “Charms and Riddles” (Frye), 349, 411n.6 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345–1400), xxiv, 57, 64, 65, 66, 67–8, 107, 152–4, 401n.53, 406n.18 Cherry-Tree Ballad, 404n.4

Index Chesterfield, Lord (Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield) (1694– 1773), 24, 27, 388n.13, 389n.32 Chesterton, G.K. (1874–1936), 15, 33, 103, 399n.40 Childermass (Lewis), xix, 84 Chopin, Frédéric (1810–1849), 9, 12, 45 Chorals (Franck), 390n.38 Chorle and the Bird, The (Lydgate), 69 Christ, 60, 76, 87, 91, 107, 109, 170, 217, 370, 378, 379, 385. See also Jesus Christianity, 9, 15, 31, 49, 53, 59, 62, 87, 93, 94, 102, 171, 173, 176, 301, 337, 355, 376 Cibber, Colley (1671–1757), 55 Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.), 51, 121, 133, 173 Circus Animals’ Desertion, The (Yeats), 110 Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature (Bush), xviii, 76–7 Clementine Recognitions, xxiv, 161, 167–8, 171 Clerk’s Tale, The (Chaucer), 64 Cleveland, John (1613–1658), 48 cleverness, 5, 39, 84 Clifford, Rosamond, 405n.13 Clitophon and Leucippe (Achilles). See Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon Cocktail Party, The (Eliot), 92 cognitio, xxv, xxvii, 184, 191, 192, 205, 206, 207, 211, 268, 275, 284 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834), 44, 82, 291, 301 Collected Poems (Stevens), 112 Collins, Joseph (1866–1950), 7 Collins, Wilkie (1824–1889), xxiv, xxv, 177–86 Colloquies (Erasmus), 146 colour symbolism, 7, 11–12 Colours in the Dark (Reaney), 354 comedy, 28, 106, 194, 237, 245, 313; complete, 216; as enclosing a tragedy, 152; grotesque, 60; of intrigue, 367; of masks, 187; New, 134, 145, 164, 176, 179, 240, 349; non-melodramatic, 29; Old, 179,

425 349; and romance, 139, 146, 338; romantic, 154, 215, 338; Shakespearean, 216; social level of, 338; strained situation of, 216; and theory of humours, 93; and tragedy, 350; with tragic stratagem, 150; tragic theme of, 194; truncated, 160; twenty-first century, 22; of understatement, xxx, 338 Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 145, 192 commedia dell’arte, 187, 407n.38 communal art, 55 communication, xxii, 127–9 “Communication and the Arts” (Frye), xxii, 120–32 communion, 129–30 Communism, 51 community, 130–1, 334 Compend of Alchemy, The (Ripley), 69 “Complaint of Deor, The” (Bloomfield), 349 Compton-Burnett, Ivy (1884–1969), 319 Comstock, Anthony (1844–1915), 24, 389n.27 Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), 35 Comus (Milton), 234 conceit, 8 Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra in C Major (Mozart), 25 “ ‘Conclusion,’ Literary History of Canada” (Frye), 404n.17 Confessio Amantis (Gower), 152, 392n.6 Confessions (Rousseau), 38 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey), xxiv, xxvii, 300–5 Confidential Clerk, The (Eliot), 199 Congo, The (Lindsay), 54 Congreve, William (1670–1729), 37 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain), 41, 390n.49 connotations, xv, 8, 185 Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924), 337 Contra Apion (Josephus), 173, 377 Controversiae (Seneca), 163 convention, 70, 76, 88, 109, 135, 146, 185,

426 190, 214, 217, 231, 235, 236, 245, 264, 302, 318–19, 333 Coonan, Patricia, 315, 317, 325, 328, 331, 332, 334, 342, 345 Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473–1543), 121 Corelli, Marie (1855–1924), 48 Coriolan 1: Triumphal March, The (Eliot), 91, 92 Cornford, F.M. (1886–1960), 190 Corvo, Baron (1860–1913), 293 cosmetics, 38–9 Country Wife, The (Wycherley), 17 courage, 14, 52, 84, 193, 242, 253 Courtier, The (Castiglione), 223 Cowley, Abraham (1618–1667), 62 Crabbe, George (1754–1832), 8 Crane, Hart (1899–1932), 343, 410n.5 Crashaw, Richard (1612–1649), 5 creation, xxix, 30, 73, 99, 250, 378; of art, 6; centre of all, 287; as datum, 93; differentiation from criticism, 343; divine, 290; Genesis account of, 352; harmony as reflex of, 291; Job’s vision of and God’s response, 326–7; the light that starts, 322; of a myth, 110; myth of, 325, 366; of nature, xx; promises of, 129; spirit of, 376; of the world, 92 Critic, The (Sheridan), 199, 389n.31 Critical Path, The (Frye), 348 critics, xvi, xix, 26, 29, 33, 44, 47, 49, 96, 111, 199, 202, 319–20, 341, 343, 353, 356 criticism, xxi, 76, 131, 175, 330, 340, 342, 347, 348; of the Bible, 75, 78, 153, 301, 318, 338, 350, 352, 354, 356; biographical, 78; of Borges, 341; differentiated from creation, 343; disarming of, by Twain, 42; egotistic, 6; Empson’s, 76; English, of American literature, 33; as evaluative, 134; form, 356; inadequate, 16; as intelligent reading, 49; as interpenetrating with other disciplines, 340; in Latin America, 341; New, 76, 330; as a new discipline, 321; the New Testament, 18; origin of, 343; practical, 350; realism

Index in, 320; religious implications of, 356; schools of, 331, 339; slipshod, 12; social context of, xxi, 136; as a kind of social science, 321; as the study of literature, 131, 132; technique of as a function of art, 371; theory of, 134, 135 “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (Frye), 135, 403n.5 Crosland, T.W.H. (1865–1924), 31 cross, the, 6, 20, 76, 199 cultural separatism, 361 culture, 6, 8, 19, 27, 40, 46, 47, 76, 82, 84, 94, 95, 102, 103, 104, 113, 120, 124, 125, 131, 215, 321, 322, 334, 343, 357; Canadian, 352–4, 359 Cupid and Psyche, 139 Currelly, Charles (1876–1957), 354 curriculum: medieval, 116; university; 121 “Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake” (Frye), xx, 415n.31 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 100 Cynewulf (fl. 9th century), 63 Damon, S. Foster (1893–1971), 225, 329, 350, 410n.2 Dance of Death, The (Warren), 392n.7 Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, The (Dunbar), 70 Daniells, Roy (1902–1979), xxiii, 90, 329, 393 D’Annunzio, Gabriele (1863–1938), xv, 42 danse macabre, 68, 295 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 9, 42, 89, 108, 329, 401n.53 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus), xxiii, xxvi, 138–42, 147 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882), 31, 35 Davideis (Cowley), 62 Davies, Sir John (1569–1626), 62 Dead March (Händel), 54 Death in the Desert, A (Browning), 52 “Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, The” (Frye), 411n.9 De Dea Syria (Lucian), 162

Index Defence of Poetry, A (Shelley), 357, 395n.22 Defensio Prima (Milton), 179 Deipnosophists (Athenaeus), 412n.1 de la Mare, Walter, 387n.3 Deloney, Thomas (1550–1600), 103 de Man, Paul (1919–1983), xviii Demosthenes (384–322 b.c.e.), 121 De Quincey, Thomas (1784–1859), xxiv, xxvii, 181, 300–8 descent quest, 331 “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts” (Frye), 396n.4, 398n.28, 403n.2 detective story, xv, 5, 11, 36 “Developing Imagination, The” (Frye), 395n.2 DeWitt, N.W. (1876–1958), 175, 406n.30 Diabolical Principle, The (Lewis), xix, 82 “Dialectic of Belief and Vision, The” (Frye), xxviii, 355 Diana of the Ephesians, 146, 405n.8 Diary (Evelyn), 38 Diary of Samuel Pepys, The, 37 Dickens, Charles (1812–1870), 21, 32, 55, 80, 93, 96, 135, 181, 186, 209, 319, 391n.65, 406–7n.36 “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours” (Frye), 404n.12, 406–7n.36 Dickinson, Emily (1830–1886), xxi, 19, 112, 113 Dieterich, Albrecht, 388n.5 Dio Chrysostom (40–120 c.e.), 146 Dionysian culture, 321–2 Dionysos, 93 Directeur, Le (Eliot), 91 Dish of Orts, A (MacDonald), 409n.69 displacement, xxvi, 95, 105, 111, 142, 145, 157, 160, 163, 177, 181, 182, 189, 190, 195, 196, 197, 203, 206, 207, 217, 246, 247, 253, 259, 271, 277, 278, 284, 287, 290 320, 325 dissociation of sensibility, 89, 392n.3 Dithyrambic Spectator, The (Lewis), xix Divine Comedy (Dante), 107 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), xviii, 85–8 Dolzani, Michael, xix, xx, xxiii, xxx, 59

427 “Domain of Arnheim, The” (Poe), 366, 412n.11 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 13–14, 41, 49, 346 Donne, John (1572–1631), 38 Double Vision, The (Frye), xxv, 363–7 doublethink, 364 Douglas, Gavin (1475–1522), 71–2, 73 Drayton, Michael (1563–1631), 43 Dream of Vasavadatta, The, 189 Drew, Elizabeth (1877–1965), 90, 393n.8 Droeshout, Martin (1601–1650), 30, 390n.40 “Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism, The” (Frye), 394n.21, 396n.6, 404n.11 Dry Salvages, The (Eliot), 390n.11 Dryden, John (1631–1700), 54, 62, 90, 93 Dubliners (Joyce), 54 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), xxv, 215 Duke of Marlborough (John Churchill) (1650–1722), 54 Dunbar, William (ca. 1456–ca. 1513), 69–71, 73 Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308) 122 Dvo“ák, Antonín (1841–1904), 54 Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Balla), 398n.31 Earle, John (ca. 1601–1665), 37 Earthly Paradise, The (Morris), 224, 266, 273 East Coker (Eliot), 91 Eco, Umberto (b. 1932), 413n.12 and n.14 ecphrasis, 191, 310 Edible Woman, The (Atwood), 359 Educated Imagination, The (Frye), xx, 97– 106, 396n.19 and n.20 Edward II (Marlowe), 375 Edward III (1312–1377), 250 Ego Dominus Tuus (Yeats), 401n.53 Egyptian Book of the Dead, The, xx, 306 Eikonoklastes (Milton), 68 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 124 “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” (Frye), 403n.6

428 Eliade, Mircea (1907–1986), 107 Eliot, George (1819–1880), 21 Eliot, T.S. (1888–1965), xix, xxi, 14, 66, 72, 78, 81–2, 89–93, 164, 194, 199, 330, 344, 388n.7, 388n.16, 392n.2, 393n.3, 400n.46 Elizabeth I, Queen (1533–1603), 94, 122, 217, 376 Elizabeth II, Queen (b. 1926), 129 Elmer Gantry (Lewis), 15 Elsie Venner (Holmes), 5, 388n.2 Elstree, 389n.35 Emaré, 153, 406n.20 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–1882), 19, 91 Emile (Rousseau), 38 “Emily Dickinson” (Frye), 402n.12 Emmanuel College, xiv, xvii, xviii, 3, 4 Empson, William (1906–1984), 76 Enclosed Garden, The (Stewart), 406n.31 Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895), 51 English Mail-Coach, The (De Quincey), xxiv, xxvii, 306–8 ensemble performance, 55 Ephesiaca (Xenophon of Ephesus), xxiii, 142–5 Epigrapher, The (Pratt), 35–4 Epistle of Karshish, The (Browning), 52 Epithalamion (Spenser), 59 Erasmus, Desiderius (ca. 1466–1536), 9, 37, 76, 146 Erewhon (Butler), 59, 391n.72 Essay on the Imagination (MacDonald), xxiv, 290–1 essay, the, 4, 20, 33, 37 Étude Music Magazine, 19, 389n.23 Euclid (fl. 300 b.c.e.), 62 Euphues (Lyly), 147 Euripides (ca. 480–406 b.c.e.), 7, 174 Eve of St. Agnes, The (Keats), 330 Evelyn, John (1620–1706, 38 Everyman in His Humour (Jonson), 207, 389n.20 “Expanding Eyes” (Frye), 335, 341, 349, 411n.5

Index fable, 56, 150, 222, 240, 305, 343 Fables of Identity (Frye), xx, xxi, 351 fads, 27–8 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 149, 191, 289 faith vs. reason, 352–3 Family Reunion, The (Eliot), 92 Farewell to the Military Profession (Riche), 146 Fearful Symmetry (Frye), xxxii, 112, 337 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), 35 fiction, Frye’s, xxx Fielding, Henry (1707–1754), 37 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), xix–xx, 96, 113, 213, 227, 307, 308, 400n.46 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–1880), 79 Fletcher, Angus (b. 1930), 349 Fletcher, John (1579–1625), 413n.5 Fletcher, Phineas (1582–1660), 93 Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, The (Dunbar), 70 Ford, John (1586­–ca. 1639), 161, 406n.25 form criticism, 356 Forster, E.M. (1879–1970), 366, 410n.85 Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco), 413n.12 and n.14 Four Quartets (Eliot), 91, 330 Four Zoas (Blake), 107, 349, 370 Fowler, H.W. (1858–1933) and F.G. (1871– 1918), xvi, 47–8, 390n.57 fragmented visionaries, 334 Fra Lippo Lippi (Browning), 51 Franck, César (1822–1890), 29, 390n.38 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), 125 Franklin’s Tale, The (Chaucer), 64 Frazer, Sir James (1854–1941), 235, 270, 341 Freckles (Stratton-Porter), 406n.19 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 124, 371 friendship, 18, 144, 217, 220, 229, 238 Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938), 369 Frost, Robert (1874–1963), 130 Frye, Elizabeth Eedy (1912–1997), xxx Fuller, Andrew (1754–1815), 37 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), 121

Index Garbo, Greta (1905–1990), 58 Garden of Eden, 76, 92, 214, 275, 387, 304, 307, 335, 338, 371, 399n.39 Garden, The (Marvell), 219 Gardner, Helen (1908–1986), 90, 393n.8 Gaster, Theodore H. (1906–1992), 176, 377 Gauguin, Paul (1848–1903), 80 Genealogy of Morals (Nowlan), 410n.3 Genesis, Book of, 13, 174, 352 “George Gordon, Lord Byron” (Frye), 402n.11 Gerontion (Eliot), 89 Gesta Romanorum, 146, 161 Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794), 51, 76, 399n.38 Gift, The (Hyde), 412n.10 Gilbert, W.S. (1836–1911), and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), 18, 28–9, 42, 389n.29, 390n.36 Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1266–1337), 42 Girl Who Gets Flogged, The (Menander), 410n.89 Girl Who Has Her Hair Cropped, The (Menander), 410n.89 Glacken, Clarence J. (1909–1999), 414n.27 “Glad Ghosts” (Lawrence), 25 glasnost, 361 Glover, T.R. (1869–1943), 20, 389n.25 Gneisenau, August Neidhardt von (1760– 1831), 52 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749– 1832), 7, 12, 35, 82 Going, Cathleen, 333, 341, 345 Goldoni, Carlo (1707–1793), xxiv, 186–9 Goldyn Targe, The (Dunbar), 71 Goodman, William, 351 Gospel of Nicodemus, 146 Gounod, Charles (1881–1893), 55 Gower, John (ca. 1325–1408), 64, 68, 152, 392n.6 Goya, Francisco (1746–1828), 318 Gozzi, Carlo (1720–1806), xxiv, 186–9, 196, 324 Graham, Nicholas W., xxviii, 315, 355

429 Grande Valse Brillante (Chopin), 9 Graves, Robert (1895–1985), 108, 270 Gray, Thomas (1716–1771), 62 Great Code, The (Frye), xxxii Greek language, 51 Greene, Robert (1558–1592), xxiv, 149–52 Gregory the Great, Pope (ca. 540–604), 63 Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 344 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 265, 401n.49 Guy Mannering (Scott), xxiv, 194–202 Gwynne, Frederick, 135 Hadas, Moses (1900–1966), xxiv, 145–7, 172–6 Haggard, Rider (1856–1925), 144 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 14–17, 18, 54, 373–4 Hamlet (character), 89 Hammerclavier Sonata (Beethoven), 27 Hammond, Eleanor Prescott (1866–1933), 68 Händel, George Frideric (1685–1759), xv, 43, 54, 59, 390n.52 Handley Cross (Surtees), 407n.46 Hard Times (Dickens), 55, 290, 391n.65 Hardy, Thomas (1849–1928), xv, 37, 42, 57 Harlequin, The (Goldoni), xxiv, 186–9 Haroun al‑Raschid (763–809 c.e.), 109 Harrison, Jane Ellen (1850–1928), 14, 388n.14 Havelock, Eric (1903–1988), 343 Hawes, Stephen (ca. 1475–1511), 72–3 Hawkins, John (1532–1595), 29 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864), 95, 395n.25 Haydn, Joseph (1732–1809), 39 Hegel, G.W.F. (1770–1831), 35 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), xxv Helen of Troy, 108 Heliodorus of Emesa (3rd or 4th century c.e.), xxiv, 154–61 Hellenistic Culture (Hadas), xxiv, 172–6 Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961), 81 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 38, 376 Henry V (Shakespeare), 375

430 “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult” (Frye), 415n.38 Heraclitus (ca. 540–ca. 480 b.c.e.), 107, 364 Herakles, 110 Herbert, George (1593–1633), 75­–6 Hero and Leander (Marlowe), 220 Heywood, Thomas (ca. 1574–1641), 17 higher consciousness, xxv–xxvi Hippolyta, 317 Hippolytus (Euripides), 174 History of English Literature (Broadus), 57 history: cyclic view of, 327–8; levels of, 363; and myth, 363; spectral analysis of, 11 Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 42 Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 7, 31 Hoccleve, Thomas (1368–1426), 69 Hoffmann, E.T.A. (1776–1822), 287 Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809–1894), 5, 388n.2 Homer (8th century b.c.e.), 43, 103, 121, 329 Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 175, 406n.29 Honour Course, xxii, 115 Hood, Thomas (1799–1845), 43 Hooke, S.H. (1874–1968), 354 Hopkey, Sophia, 416n.12 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–1899), 329 Horace (65–8 b.c.e.), 51, 58, 173, 175–6, 391n.71 House by the Churchyard (Le Fanu), 251 Housman, A.E. (1859–1936), 103 “How True a Twain” (Frye), 402n.14 How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (Knight), 413n.11 Howard, Henry, the Earl of Surrey (1517– 1547), 17 Howarth, Herbert (1900–1971), 90 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 41 Hudson Review, The, xviii Hugo, Victor (1802–1885), 353 Hulme, T.E. (1883–1917), 394n.13 Human Age, The (Lewis), xix, 79, 84 humanism, 121–2

Index humanities, 76, 102, 104, 117, 122, 124, 134; and the sciences, 120–1; teaching the, 114–16 Hume, David (1711–76), 31 Hunt, Leigh (1784–1859), 17 Hunters of Euboea (Dio Chrysostom), 146 Hunting Cantata (Bach), 400n.45 Hunting of the Snark, The (Carroll), 5 Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963), 391n.62 Hyde, Lewis (b. 1945), 365, 412n.10 Hymn in Honour of Beauty, A (Spenser), 219 Hymn of the Soul a.k.a. Hymn of the Pearl, 139, 153, 177, 404n.2 Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), 43 Idea of a Christian Society, The (Eliot), 92 identity, 99, 103, 108, 158, 163, 179, 185, 186, 192, 214, 259, 260, 270, 287, 288, 292, 323, 369, 375 ideologies, 357 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 108, 401n.53 idolatry, 94, 100, 171, 366 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 41 Iliad, The (Homer), 174, 234, 236, 335 imagination: as the basis of mental health, 93; for Blake and Yeats, the only creative faculty, 351; candle image applied to, 291; as compatible with common sense, 291; as directly addressing the spirit, 334; as doublethink, in Orwell’s sense, 364; educated, xxviii, 99; feeds on the paradox of “is” and “is not,” 412n.8; fight of against excessive demands, 105–6; fight of against illusion, 105–6; informing of thought by, 97; intensity of in literature, 337–8; its language, the language of love, 357; not creative, 72; the nourisher of life, 354; the object of the critic’s study, 357; the object of the mirror theme’s appeal, 287; pathology of, 93; as patterns developed by the mind, 132; the poetic, 136; poverty of, 127; pregnancy of, 234; as the presence of the spirit of God, 291; problem of

Index teaching and training it, 102; the producer of culture, 357; reflexions on, xix; relation to sense, 100; romantic, 204; Romantic world that exists below, 290, 301, 308; self-directed, 106; in Stevens, the struggle with otherness, 351; stretching the, 103; theory of games in, 99; total lack of, 44; as total mind, 110; uncultivated, 291; vitality of, 322; working of the historical, 291 “Imaginative and the Imaginary, The” (Frye), 112, 394n.18, 366n.5, 402n.9 imperialism, 21; mental, 349 Indian drama, xxiv, 189–92 Inferno (Dante), 108 inspiration: poetic, 105, 282; of muse, 173; musical, 288 “Instruments of Mental Production, The” (Frye), 403n.1 interpenetration, xiv, xxi, 38, 340, 349, 365 “Interpreter’s Parlour” (Frye), 395n.23 “Intoxicated with Words” (Frye), xvii, 61–74 “Introduction,” Design for Learning, 395n.1, 396n.15 “Introduction to Fables of Identity” (Frye), 111–13 introversion, 303, 337, 356 Irenaeus (ca. 130–ca. 200 c.e.), 378 Irving, Washington (1783–1859), 33 Irwin, Grace (1907–2008), 353, 412n.5 Isaiah, 40, 76, 174, 175, 377, 397 Islam, 355 Italy, 42, 49, 151 Ivanhoe (Scott), xxiv, 244–51 “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” (Joyce), 30 James, Henry (1843–1916), xxx, 13, 25, 26, 27, 33, 177, 179, 214 James, William (1842–1910), 89, 319 Japan: A Short Cultural History (Sansom), 414n.19

431 Japp, Alexander H. (1837–1905), 308, 357, 417 Jastrow, Joseph (1863–1944), 103, 400n.41 jazz, 10, 22–3 Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) (1763–1825), 95 Jeffreys, George (1645–1689), 6, 388n.4 Jehovah, 366 Jerusalem (Blake), 136, 293 Jesus, 7, 11, 21, 43, 50, 53, 327, 332, 343, 368, 370. See also Christ Jesus of History, The (Glover), 389n.25 Joachim of Floris (ca. 1135–1202), 364, 376, 412n.3 Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–1431), 45, 94 Job, Book of, 162, 311, 327, 350 Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784), 13, 48, 388n.13 Johnston, Mary (1870–1936), xxx–xxxi, 363, 387n.4 Jolly Beggars, The (Burns), 38 Jones, Ernest (1879–1958), 300, 409n.73 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637), 154, 206, 389n.20, 401n.49 Josephus (ca. 37–100 c.e.), 173, 414n.16 Joyce, James (1882–1941), xvi, xix–xx, xxi, 78, 81, 82, 90, 96, 113, 305 Jubilees, Book of, 389n.22 Julie, or the New Heloise (Rousseau), 38 Jung, Carl (1875–1961), xxxii, 270, 316–17, 370–1 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), 334 “Kairos and Logos,” 294 Kallen, Horace (1882–1974), 174, 406n.28 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 35 Kapital, Das (Marx), 31 Katz, Leon (b. 1919), 187 Keats, John (1795–1821), xv, 22, 37, 44, 54, 135, 141, 330, 364 Kenner, Hugh (1923–2003), 90 Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630), 121 Kerényi, Karl (1897­–1973), 175 kerygma, xxv

432 “Keys to the Gates, The” (Frye), 404n.10 Kierkegaard, Søren (1813–1855), 302 King Arthur, 122 King Lear (character), 122 King Lear (Shakespeare), 14–15, 95, 110, 326, 374 King Stag (Gozzi), 188, 196 Kings, Book of, 13, 308, 333 King’s English, The (Fowler and Fowler), xvi, 47, 48, 390n.57 King’s Threshold, The (Yeats), 108 Kingsley, Charles (1819–1875), 407n.42 Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936), 57, 90 Kipps (Wells), 93 Klee, Paul (1879–1940), 101 Knight, G. Wilson (1897–1985), 16, 413n.11 Knight’s Tale, The (Chaucer), 64 “Knowledge of Good and Evil, The” (Frye), 403n.1 Knox, John (1513–1572), 24 Kurelek, William (1927–1977), 359 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 14, 388n.15 Laforgue, Jules (1860–1887), 89, 90 Lament for the Makers (Dunbar), 70 Langland, William (ca. 1330–ca. 1400), 57 language: aureate, 69, 70, 71; of the Bible, 301; changes to, 65, 67; Chaucerian, 73; of convention and tradition, 76; diseased, 88; doctrinal, 357; English, 47; grammar of, 75; hieratic, 67; of the imagination, 357; inductive, 31–2; inflected, 121; intentionally vague, 69; of love, 357; musical, 54–5; mythological, 325; of ordinary speech, 106; of philosophy, 121; of poetry, 22, 34, 73; pugilistic, 51; of science, 74, 121; sexist, xvi; sonorous, 69; technical, 8, 48, 66, 89, 121; T.S. Eliot’s, 66; universal, xvi, 235; untranslatable, 85; William Morris’s, xxvi; words added to, 66 Lankavatara sutra, 340 Lascia ch’io Piange (Händel), 43

Index Later Story of Rama, The, xxv, 191 Latin, xvi, 47, 51, 62, 63, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 121, 125, 161, 162, 373, 383 Laude, Virginitatis, Die (St. Aldhelm), 392n.3 Lavengro (Borrow), 251 Lavoisier, Antoine (1743–1794), 121 Lawrence, D.H. (1885–1930), 24–5, 47, 79, 80, 102, 103, 377, 388n.15 Lawrence, W.W. (1876–1958), 41 Layton, Irving (1912–2006), 104 Lear, Edward (1812–88), xv, 39 Leary, Timothy (1920–1996), 407n.77 Leavis, F.R. (1895–1978), 90, 393n.7 Lee, Hope (1928–1998) and Alvin (b. 1930), 188 Le Fanu, Sheridan (1814–1873), 181, 251 Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924), 42, 361 Leucippe and Clitophon. See Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon levels: of the academic vision, 104; of ascent, 335; of history, 363; of the imagination’s fight, 105, 106; of knowledge, 101; of literature, 322; of meaning, 99, 101; of mimetic literature, 322; of the mind, 102; narrative, 222; of the new paradigm, 99–100; in Romanticism, of the mind, 301 Lewis, Sinclair (1885–1951), 15 Lewis, Wyndham (1882–1957), xviii–xix, 42, 78–84; his satiric style, 78–80 Leyden Papyrus, 6 liberal arts, 120, 350 liberalism, 22 libido, 368–9 library(ies) 10, 21, 287, 292, 297, 302 Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, The (Paltock), 287, 408n.64 Life of Cowley (Johnson), 76 Life of Demetrius (Plutarch), 162 Ligeia (Poe), xxvii, 230, 395n.25 Lilith (MacDonald), xxiv, 291–6 Liljegren, Sten Bodvar (1885–1984), 234, 407n.51

Index limerick, xv, xvi, 39 Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865), 103 Lindbergh, Charles (1902–1974), 58 Lindisfarne Gospels, 63 Lindsay, Vachel (1879–1931), 54 Lion and the Fox, The (Lewis), xix Liszt, Franz (1811–­1886), 19, 54 literal meaning, 320 literary history, xvii Literary History of Canada, 135–6 literature: analogous to music, 54; AngloSaxon as most advanced in Europe, 63; art of inscribing verbal patterns, 365; not an assemblage of virtues or faults, 53; Canadian, 136; classical influences on Renaissance, 76; confessional, 38; connection with history, 29; contemporary, 24; convention for expressing character in, 109; as always conventional, 318; critics of, 29; democratic and revolutionary forms of, 343; different levels of mimetic, 323; as displaced myth, 105; Dunbar’s as unlike Chaucerian, 70; effects of great migration on Latin, 62; English criticism of American, 33; English, depends on contrast and variety, 32; evaluation of, 134; experience of, 339; fashionable poetic diction in, 61; as filling in of myth, 97; forms descending from, 100; as the focus of where experience and thinking meet, 330; greatest fallacy in, 30; history of English, xvii; how to read, 101; humanists’ search for, 121; as hypothetical, 316; of the later eighteenth century, 112; Lear’s limericks as, 39; Lewis’s Human Age as having no place in, 84; as made out of other literature, xxvii; male-dominated conventions of, 151–2; miserable Soviet record in, 88; modern Russian, 359; as a movement in time, like music, 355; myth as structural element in, 112, 323; myths in, 101; participation as its end, 102; popular, 169, 322; possession of,

433 340; presents a vision of possibilities, 104; relation to conceptual thought, 380; relation to other things, 99, 124; rhetorical aspects of, 102; Romantic movement in, 113; sketches of, 57; study of, 132; theory of comparative, 113; tradition of, 24, 49; vital part of contemporary, 124; vortex of, 343; words added by Lydgate, 66; as written within a mythological universe, 348 “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason” (Frye), 415n.34 “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas” (Frye), 112, 402n.6 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 185 Little Gidding (Eliot), 107, 194 Livy (59 b.c.e.–17 c.e.), 51 Locke, John (1632–1704), 31 locus amoenus, 176, 214, 217, 221, 287, 309 Lodge, Thomas (1558–1625), xxiv, 147–9, 150, 405n.10 Logos, 364 Lohengrin (Wagner), 41 Loiselle, Helene, 315, 324, 328, 331, 332, 335, 336, 338, 340, 341, 342, 345 Lonergan, Bernard (1904–1984), 340 Longest Journey, The (Forster), 410n.85 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807– 1882), xxiv, 263–5 Longinus (ca. 1st century c.e.), xxxii Longus (3rd century), xxiii, xxvi, 138–42 Lorna Doone (Blackmore), 280 Lost Chord, The (Sullivan), 18 Love Romances (Parthenius of Nicaea), xxiv, 164–7 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The (Eliot), 89, 90 The Lover for Shamefastness Hideth His Desire (Wyatt), 69 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 147, 216 Loyola, Ignatius (1491–1556), 364 Lucan (39–65 c.e.), 329 Lucian (ca. 117–180 c.e.), 162, 175 Lucretius (ca. 99–55 b.c.e.), 9

434 Luddites, 125 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), xxviii, 10, 383, 385, 415n.1 Lycidas (Milton), 140 Lydgate, John (ca. 1370–ca. 1451), 65, 66, 68, 69, 73 Lyly, John (1554–1606), 48, 147 Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800–1859), 30 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 14–15, 17, 44 MacCallum, Reid (1897–1949), 90 MacDonald, George (1824–1905), xxiv, 142, 285–300, 301 Macdonald, Sir John A. (1815–1891), 43, 390n.51 MacDowell, Edward (1861–1908), 12 MacGuigan, Gerald, 315, 319–20, 321, 322, 323–8, 328–9, 330, 332, 335, 337, 345 Mackail, J.W. (1859–1945), 270, 279 McLuhan, Marshall (1911–1980), xxi, xxii, 348 Macpherson, Jay (1931–2012), xiv Macpherson Report, xxi–xxii, 114–19 Machen, Arthur, 387n.3 Machnik, Roberta, 315, 331 Machnik, Stan, 315, 343 Macrobius (fl. 400 c.e.), 412n.1 Magic Flute, The (Mozart), 188 Maiden without Hands (Brothers Grimm), 153 Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842–1892), 90 Malory, Sir Thomas (1405–1471), 33, 41 Man of Law’s Tale, The (Chaucer), xxiv, 152–4, 406n.18 Man Who Lost Himself, The (Sitwell), 24 mandala, 370–1 Manet, Édouard (1832–1883), 318 Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923), 47 Mantegna, Andrea (1431–1506), 42 Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), 130 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1876–1944), 81–2 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–1593), 72

Index Marriage of Figaro, The (Beaumarchais), 190 Marston, John (1576–1634), 53 Marvell, Andrew (1621–1678), 219 Marx, Karl (1818–1883), 31, 44, 124 Marxism, xv, 35, 42, 327, 328 Masefield, John (1878–1967), 57 Massey, Vincent (1887–1967), 353 Massey Commission, 411n.2 Massey Lectures, xx, 97–106 Massey Report, 353 Massinger, Philip (1583–1640), 53 Master and Margarita, The (Bulgakov), xxiii, 359, 387n.2 Matthiessen, F.O. (1902–1950), 91, 393n.8 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 14, 218, 317 “Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris, The” (Frye), 415n.32 melancholy, 225, 260; Albion’s, 136; contemplative, 247; high-minded, 256; of love, 222, 223; muse of, 193; as physical disease, 372; reclusive, 205; of Shakespeare’s clowns, 188; of tyrant, 225; in Vaughan’s poetry, 64 Mélange Adultère de Tout (Eliot), 92 Meleager, 173 Melville, Herman (1819–1891), 33 Men without Art (Lewis), xix, 79, 90 Menander (342–291 b.c.e.), 410n.89 Mencken, H.L. (1880–1956), 8 Mental Traveller, The (Blake), 107 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 10–11, 41, 170 Merlin, 122 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare), 187 Messiah (Händel), 59 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 140 metaphor, 97, 99, 106, 334, 351, 364, 365; architectural, 342; battle, 52; in “catastrophe,” 350; father, 52; God-is-king, 366; hunting, 221; and interpenetration, 365; of a labyrinth, 180; machine, 80; mixed, 200; and myth, 101; and natural

Index cycle, 103; puppet, 80; seasonal, 32; of seeing and hearing, 355–6; in square root, 342; swallowing, 249 Micaiah, 333 Michaud, Régis (1880–1939), 23, 389n.26 Michelangelo (1475–1564), 109 Microcosmography (Earle), 37 Middle Ages, 55 Middleton, Thomas (ca. 1570–1627), 413n.6 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 144, 159, 217, 269, 304, 317, 338, 375 Mikado, The (Gilbert and Sullivan), 390n.36 Mill, James (1773–1836), 290 Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873), 30 Milton, John (1608–1674), xiv–xv, xxviii, xxxii, 7, 24, 44, 46–7, 52, 53, 54, 57, 59, 62, 67, 72, 108, 135, 140, 331, 347, 350, 379, 383–4 Milton (Blake), 364 Miró, Joan (1893–1983), 101 Miss Julie (Strindberg), 152 Modern Century, The (Frye), 306 Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Brooks), 90, 393n.7 modes, theory of literary, 323 Modest Proposal, A (Swift), 302 Mohammedanism, 49 Molière (1622–1673), 32 Moltke, Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von (1800–1891), 52 Moncton, New Brunswick, xxxi Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533– 1592), 9, 37, 76 Montanus’ Vow (Lodge), 147 Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven), 44 Moonstone, The (Collins), xxiv, xxv, 177–81 More, Thomas (1478–1535), 99 Morning at the Window (Eliot), 388n.7 Morris, William (1834–1896), xxiv, xxvi, xxxii, 224, 261, 266–85, 331, 341, 380–1 Moses, 13, 92, 173, 176, 200 Mother-goddess, 94

435 movies, xxxi; silent, 322 Mowat, Farley (1921–2014), 358–9 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–1791), 39, 54, 318 Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service (Eliot), 66, 388n.16 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 144, 168 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 92 Murray, Margaret Alice (1863–1963), 246, 407n.54 Murry, John Middleton (1889–1957), 27 music: atonal tendency, 45–6; binary form, 186; Bolero, 25–6; Cassiodorus’s views of, 62; ensemble vs. virtuoso performances, 55; as the epitome of life, 59; ethereal vs. atmospheric, 25; Frye’s teacher, 353; jazz, 22; Liszt and Beethoven’s, 19; major and minor concords, 46; need for a twentieth-century Gilbert and Sullivan, 28; poetic and piano analogies, 54; Protestant conceptions of, 60; Rachmaninoff, 50; Ravel and Mozart, 25; review of Dubinsky recital, 44–5; Sullivan’s The Lost Chord, 18; as temporal and spatial form, 355; thematic returns similar to critical repetitions, 347; theory of “musical” verse, 44; of the two worlds of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 375; in The Winter’s Tale, 191; works of fundamental authority, 323 Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe), 183 mystery, 40, 62, 64, 72, 162, 175, 185, 211, 288, 318, 322, 353 myth, 56, 107, 124, 170, 173, 335, 345, 361, 366; Actaeon, 216; Adonis, 189; alienation, 287; Beowulf, 334; creation, 325, 326, 366; criticism, 111, 330; Cupid and Psyche, 139; Demeter renewalof-nature, 375; of the fall, 124; fascist, 279; Frankenstein, 94; and history, 364; hollow-land, 381; of infallibility, 87; of king’s threshold, 110; of mother hiding

436 child, 375; narrative form of, 365; open, 325; pastoral, 178; Pluto-Proserpine, 233; recovery of, 326–8, 343; return of, 323, 328; of the spiritual Father, 366; as structural element of literature, 111, 323; of virgin-eating dragon, 88 “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (Frye), 111, 402n.2 mythological universe, 336, 348, 349, 350 mythology: as containing a universal language, 325; fulfilled by poetry, 102; leading to literature, 106; literature as displaced, 111; Norse, 265; primate, 309; as a reservoir of belief, 94; revolutionary, 270; totality of a society’s myths, 124 Nabokov, Vladimir (1899–1977), 359 Nashe, Thomas (1567–1601), 14, 220 Nathan, Robert (1894–1985), xxx, 387n.3 “Natural and Revealed Communities” (Frye), 425n.29 Natural Perspective, A (Frye), xx natural theology, 76–7, 89 “Nature and Homer” (Frye), 111, 402n.3 Nature’s Questioning (Hardy), 42 Necessary Angel, The (Stevens), 112 “Neoclassical Agony” (Frye), 78–84 New Bearings in English Poetry (Leavis), 393n.7 New Comedy, 134, 145, 164, 176, 179, 240, 349 New Critics, 76, 230 “New Directions from Old” (Frye), 111, 402n.4 New Testament, 18 New Yorker (magazine), 42 Newfoundland Verse (Pratt), 353–4 News for the Delphic Oracle (Yeats), 175 News from Nowhere (Morris), 279 Newton, Sir Isaac (1641–1727), xxviii, xxx, 384, 416n.7 Next Time, The (James), xxx Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 12, 110, 401n.53

Index Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910), 45 Nightmare, Witches and Devils (Jones), 409n.73 “1932 Notebook,” xiv, 3–60 Norden, Eduard (1868–1941), 174 Nordics, 42, 57–8 Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, xvii “Notebook 13” (Frye), xix, 89–95 “Notes for The Double Vision” (Frye), 363–7 “Notes on Miscellaneous Subjects” (Frye), 368–81 “Notes on Romance” (Frye), xxiii–xxvii, 138–314 “Notes on the Massey Lectures, Yeats, and Other Topics” (Frye), 97–110 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Eliot), 83, 92, 394n.16 Novalis (1772–1802), 95, 296 Nowlan, Alden (1933–1983), 331, 410n.3 obscenity, 5, 39, 59 O’Connor, Eric, Fr. (1907–1980), 315, 318, 320, 324, 325–6, 330, 333–4, 336–8, 340–4, 346 Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats), 364, 404n.3, 412n.6 Odyssey, The (Homer), 188, 335, 401n.56 Oedipus, 16, 107, 109, 323, 328, 368 Offenbach, Jacques (1819–1880), 10 ogdoad, Frye’s, xvi, xvii O’Grady, Jean, xxvii, 3 O’Hara, Martin, 315, 330, 332–3, 335–7, 340, 342, 346 “Old and New Comedy” (Frye), 404n.13, 411n.8 Old Comedy, 349 Old Testament, 18, 75 Oliphant, Margaret, 387n.3 Omand, Douglas N., 120 “On Finnegans Wake” (Frye), 96, 113 On the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke), 53 “On T.S. Eliot and Other Observations” (Frye), 89–95 “On Value-Judgments” (Frye), 134, 403n.3

Index Ong, Walter (1912–2003), xi, 348 Opus Posthumous (Stevens), 351, 410n.4 Orchestra (Davies), 62 Origin of Species (Darwin), 31 Orphism, 173 Orwell, George (1903–1950), 364 Ossian (James Macpherson) (1736–1796), 85, 193, 207–8 Othello (Shakespeare), 14–15, 187 Our Lady’s Child, 153 Ovid (43 b.c.e.–17 c.e.), 140 Owl and the Nightingale, The, 65 Ozymandias, 365 Paleface (Lewis), xix Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da (ca. 1525–1594), 60 Paltock, Robert (1697–1767), 287, 408n.64 Pamela (Richardson), 405n.16 Pandosto (Greene), xxiv, 149–52 Paracelsus (1493–1541), 305 Paradise Lost (Milton), 59, 67, 92, 135, 331 Paradise Regained (Milton), 172, 350 Pardoner’s Tale, The (Chaucer), 284–5, 295 Pareto, Vilfredo (1848–1923), 28 parody, xv, 4, 5, 18, 25, 38, 41, 79, 80, 87, 168, 188, 214, 228, 302, 346 Parry, Sir Hubert (1848–1918), 412n.3 Parthenius of Nicaea (d. 14 c.e.), xxiv, 164–7 Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960), xviii, 85–8, 359 Pater, Walter (1839–1894), 33, 34, 51, 90 Patience (Gilbert and Sullivan), 390n.36 Pattern of Painful Adventures, The (Twine), 406n.27 Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 321 Paul, St., 174, 314, 357, 383 Paz, Octavio (1914–1998), 341 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866), 88, 102 Pearl, The, 64 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703), 37 perestroika, 360–1

437 Pericles (Shakespeare), 144, 152, 162, 164, 310, 311, 326, 344, 372 Perry, B.E. (1915–1970), 161, 406n.26 Perse, Saint-John (1887–1975), 90 Petronius (d. 66 c.e.), 79 Peveril of the Peak (Scott), 153, 202, 255 Phaedrus (ca. 15 b.c.e.–ca. 50 c.e.), 343 Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (Carroll), 389n.29 Phantastes (MacDonald), xxiv, 285–90 Phèdre (Racine), 174 Phidias (5th century b.c.e.), 109 Philip Sparrow (Skelton), 73 Philip III (1578–1621), 391n.59 philosophy, 6, 24, 31, 32, 38, 51, 53, 66, 89, 90, 93, 112, 122, 123, 130, 131, 304, 334 “Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry, The” (Yeats), 112 “Photography Extraordinary” (Carroll), 390n.37 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), xvi, 52, 170 Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936), 150 Pirate, The (Scott), xxiv, xxvi, xvii, 251–7 Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 b.c.e.), 7, 62 Plautus (ca. 250–184 b.c.e.), 106, 206, 276, 406n.33 Player Queen, The (Yeats), 188 Plutarch (ca. 46–120 b.c.e.), 162 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849), xix, 54, 95, 302, 395n.25 poetic diction, xvii, 61–74 poetic thought, 24 poetry, language of, 34 Point Counter Point (Huxley), 391n.62 Polti, George (1867–1946), 407n.40 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), 62 popular: approval, 55; art, 28, 100, 101; assembly, 156, 243; attitude, 55, 83; belief, 253; character 372; comedies, 372; demand, 160; Egyptian representations, 175; feeling, 201; fiction, 126; jazz instruments, 22; Latin, 173; literary forms, 343; literature, 169, 322, 329; philosophers,

438 343; possession, 343; stories and songs, 322; symbol, 26; wisdom and energy, 343; writer, 332 Portent, The (MacDonald), xxiv, 296–300 Porter, Katherine Ann (1890–1980), xxx Portrait of Jennie (Nathan), xxx, 387n.3 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 54 possession, 46, 95, 103, 188, 281, 340, 343 Pound, Ezra (1885–1972), 78, 82, 91, 92, 122 Pratt, E.J., (1882–1964) 113, 353, 415n.6 prayer, 234, 235, 242, 243, 356, 366 “Preface to Spiritus Mundi” (Frye), 347–52 “Preface to The Stubborn Structure” (Frye), 133–6 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 302, 398n.35 Prelude in C-sharp minor (Rachmaninoff), xvi, 50, 54 Princess Ida (Gilbert and Sullivan), 25, 389n.29 “Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century, The” (Frye), 404n.14 projection, 108, 151, 183, 184, 199, 218, 241, 252, 326, 345, 371 Prose Edda, xx, 42 prose rhythm, 33 prosody, 21, 68 Prospice (Browning), 52 Protestantism, 23–4, 31 providence of God, 376 Provoked Wife, The (Vanbrugh), 389n.21 Psalm 91, 172 Psychology of the Unconscious (Jung), 368–70 Ptolemy, 62 Purgatorio (Dante), 293 Puritanism, 23 Purple Island, The (Fletcher), 93 Pygmalion theme, 286 Pythagoras (6th century b.c.e.), 62

Index “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake” (Frye), xx Rabelais, François (ca. 1494–1553), 37, 79, 80 Rachmaninoff, Sergei (1873–1943), xvi, 50 Racine, Jean-Baptiste (1639–1699), 32, 174 Radcliffe, Ann (1763–1823), 183 radical: kind of changes in Eastern Bloc, xxiii; and image of root, 342; kind of social protest, 125; force the imagination consolidates with in the university, 100; Wyndham Lewis as, 81; radio, 10, 23, 127, 361 railway, steam, 55–6 Raleigh, Sir Walter (ca. 1554–1618), 291 Ramayana, 191, 192, 294 Rasselas (Johnson), 158, 170 Ratnavali, 189, 190 Ravel, Joseph-Maurice (1875–1937), 25 reader, the, 328, 332, 334 Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot, A (Williamson), 393n.8 Reading of George Herbert, A (Tuve), xviii, 75–6 reading program, 380 “Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens, The” (Frye), 402n.15 Reaney, James (1926–2008), 354 “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (Frye), 405n.15 recovery of myth, 326, 327, 328, 338 Redgauntlet (Scott), xxiv, 208–13 Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957), 413n.10 “Relation of Religion to the Arts” (Frye), xiv religion: Anglo-Catholic, xxi; art as expressed form of, 6; Aztec, 279; Christian, 124, 385; Coleridge’s ideas about, 301; conservatism in, 94; doctrinal elements of, 325; of Eros, 147; and false tradition, 244; fundamentalism in, 320; genuine, 290; Greek, 102; ideological approach to,

Index 357; legalistic, 28; of love, 174; Marx’s concept of, 326; mysteries of, 15; myths of, 132; natural, 255; nominally Christian, 281; otherness in, 334; pagan, 278; patterns of, 124; poetic alliance with, 106; pre-Christian, 247; purifying of, 364; respect for, 118; sacred books of, 173; satire on, 59; “spilt,” 92; taught as an academic subject, 118; truth and reality in, 123 Religious Knowledge course, 118 “Renaissance of Books, The” (Frye), 348, 411n.3 “Rencontre” (Frye), xvii Republic (Plato), 104 Requiem Mass, The (Skelton), 74 “Response to the Macpherson Report” (Frye), 114–19 Return, The (de la Mare), 387n.3 Return of Eden, The (Frye), 92, 135 Revelation, Book of, 40, 153, 322, 356, 364, 378 “Revelation to Eve, The” (Frye), 403n.8 Rhapsody on a Windy Night (Eliot), 90 Ricardo, David (1772–1823), 301 Richard I (1157–1199), 245 Richard II (Shakespeare), 41, 375, 390n.46 Richards, I.A. (1893–1979), 90 Richardson, John (1796–1852), xxvi, 208 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761), 37, 104, 405n.15 Riche, Barnaby (ca. 1540–1617), 146 Rimbaud, Arthur (1854–1891), 288, 291, 409n.66 and n.68 Ring and the Book, The (Browning), 389n.30 Ripley, Sir George (ca. 1415–1490), 69 Rire, Le (Bergson), 82 “Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision, The” (Frye), 401n.50, 411n.12 “Road of Excess, The” (Frye), 395n.3, 403–4n.9 Robbe-Grillet, Alain (1922–2008), 319 Robin Hood, 246 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 37, 179

439 Robinson, Edward Arlington (1869–1935), 8 Rock, The (Eliot), 90 Rogers, Ted (1933–2008), 90 romance: seems to require an anti-realistic style, 208; good forms pull toward the centre of literary experience, 324; contrast with epic, 146; displaced identity in, 301; divine beings as feature of, 374; dream vs. wish-fulfillment in, 381; often ekphrastic, 208; faeries as apparatus of, 379; fear of incest as a structural principle of, 147; Frankenstein as, 126; its heroes motivated entirely by love, 146; seeks affinity to historical writing, 231; knight-errant, 49, 85; lovers must have equal social status, 151; Morris’s early treatment of, 380–1; has mystical snobbery about birth, 139; naïve vs. sentimental, xxiii; paradoxically is both reactionary and revolutionary, 178; has persistent night-world theme, 177; pessimistic nature of, 23; points toward the recreated world, 338; requires love as a real sickness, 157; Shakespearean forms contain the fundamental authority of art, 323; structure of, 324; telos is sexual conquest, 180; has two kinds of narrative movement (“and then” and “hence”), 162 Romance (Conrad), 337 “Romance as Masque” (Frye), 349, 411n.7 “Romance as Secular Scripture” (Frye), 315–46 romantic comedy, 154, 215, 338 Romanticism, xix, xxi, 94, 95, 99, 103, 113, 135, 301 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 161, 174, 373 Roots of the Mountains, The (Morris), xxiv, 278–81 Rosalind (Lodge), xxiv, 147–9, 150, 405n.10 and n.12 Ross, George (1875–1967), 412n.3

440 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778), 7, 9, 35, 38, 124, 331 Royal Society, 56, 379 Rubenstein, Arthur (1888–1982), 45 Rudens (Plautus), 406n.33 rugby, 56–7 Ruskin, John (1819–1900), 17, 388–9n.19 Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970), 7, 31, 89, 91 Russia, xxii–xxiii; learned journals in, 358 Ryan, Lawrence V., 393n.8 Ryga, George (1932–1987), 359 Sacrifice, The (Herbert), 76 Sailing to Byzantium (Yeats), 110, 400n.46 St. Ann’s Fugue, 353 St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), 331 St. John Damascene (676–749), 172 St. John’s United Church, 353 Sakuntala, 189, 326 Samson, 151, 377 Samson Agonistes (Milton), 27, 185, 187, 350, 380 Sandburg, Carl (1878–1967), 30, 58 Sands of Dee, The (Kingsley), 407n.42 Sansom, G.H. (1883–1965), 414n.19 Sappho (ca. 630–570 b.c.e.), 173 Sartre, Jean Paul (1905–1980), 349 Satire, xxv, 5, 41, 59, 79–80, 84, 174 Saturnalia (Macrobius), 412n.1 Saul (Browning), 62 Schick, Joseph, 67 Schoolmaster, The (Ascham), 122 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), 10, 290, 301 Schubert, Franz (1797–1828), 54 Schumann, Robert (1810–1856), 12, 22 science, 120–1, 131–2 Scott, F.R. (1899–1985), 388n.15 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, xxxi, 21, 100, 192–257 Scottish theology, 31 “Search for Accept­able Words, The” (Frye), 347, 410n.2 Second Coming, The (Yeats), 351

Index Secord, Laura (1775–1868), 45 Secret of the Golden Flower, The (Jung), 371 Secular Scripture, The (Frye), xxiii, xxv, xxvii, 315–46 “Seeing, Hearing, Praying, Loving” (Frye), 355–7 Selected Letters (Frye), xxii Self Condemned (Lewis), 84 self-respect, 8 Seneca (ca. 4 b.c.e.–65 c.e.), 163 Sense of the Past, A (James), xxx Sensitive Plant, The (Shelley), 299 separatism, 130, 250, 361 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson), 76 sexuality, 7 Shadowy Waters, The (Yeats), 107, 108, 110 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), xiv–xv, xix, xx, 9, 12, 14–15, 17, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46–7, 53, 54, 134, 148, 151, 152, 154, 162, 187, 291, 304, 321, 371–3, 401n.49; All’s Well That Ends Well, 14; Antony and Cleopatra, 37, 374; As You Like It, 38, 54, 147, 149, 216, 405n.12, 407n.41; Comedy of Errors, 145, 192; Cymbeline, 100; Hamlet, 14–17, 18, 54, 373–4; Henry IV, 38, 376; Henry V, 375; King Lear, 14–15, 95, 110, 326, 374; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 147, 216; Macbeth, 14–15, 17, 44; Measure for Measure, 14, 218, 317; The Merchant of Venice, 10–11, 41, 170; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 187; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 144, 159, 217, 269, 304, 317, 338; Much Ado about Nothing, 144, 168; Othello, 14–15, 187; Pericles, 144, 152, 162, 164, 310, 311, 326, 344, 372; Richard II, 41, 375; Romeo and Juliet, 161, 174, 373; Sonnets, 112; The Taming of the Shrew, 162, 190; The Tempest, xxv, 54, 162, 164, 191; Timon of Athens, 17; Titus Andronicus, 374; Troilus and Cressida, 17; Twelfth Night, 149, 156, 375; Two Gentlemen of Verona, 143, 144, 149; The Winter’s Tale, xxv, 40, 139, 151, 160, 191, 192, 195, 288, 374, 375

Index Shakespeare’s Mystery Play (Still), 390n.45 Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Lawrence), 390n.48 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), 7, 8, 33, 52 She (Haggard), 144 Sheep May Safely Graze (Bach), 104 Shelley, Mary (1797–1851), 125 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), xiv–xv, 22, 46–7, 54, 76, 91, 135, 331, 395n.22 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 389n.31 Ship of Fools (Porter), xxx Sick Rose, The (Blake), 101, 398n.39 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–1586), xxiv, xxvi, 213–44 Signet Ring of Rakshasa, The, 190 Silberer, Herbert (1882–1922), 369, 370 silence, 57, 200, 202, 340 Sinclair, May (1863–1946), 89, 392n.4 Sir Orfeo, 65 Sir Patrick Spens, 344 Sitwell, Osbert (1892–1969), 24 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 150 Six Novels of the Supernatural, xxxi, 387n.3 Skelton, John (ca. 1460–1529), 73–4 skeptic, the, 9 Smith, Logan Pearsall (1865–1946), 20 Snow, Sir Charles P. (1905–1980), 124–5 Social Contract (Rousseau), 38 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr (1918–2008), 359 “Some Reflections on Life and Habit” (Frye), 415n.36 Sonata Pathétique, The (Opus 13) (Beethoven), 39, 390n.43 Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow), xxiv, 263–5 Song of Songs, 338 Sonnets (Shakespeare), 112 Southwell, Robert (1561–1595), 69 Soviet Union, xxii–xxiii, 358–62 “Soviet Union and Russia” (Frye), 358–62 Spain, 49

441 “Speculation and Concern” (Frye), 133, 403n.1 Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903), 35 Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936), 7, 8, 35, 41, 44, 49, 82, 328, 341, 349–50, 364, 388n.3, 390n.47, 391n.66 Spenser, Edmund (1552–1599), 53, 58–9, 61, 65, 93, 108, 112, 149, 219, 289 Spinoza, Baruch (1632–1677), 12, 28 Spiritus Mundi (Frye), xx, xxi, 47–51 Spoils of Poynton, The (James), 379 stained-glass windows, 21, 382–6 Stalin, Joseph (1879–1953), 92, 359, 360 Staple of News, The (Jonson), 207 Statues, The (Yeats), 187 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 78, 81 Steiner, George (b. 1929), xxi, 348 Sterne, Laurence (1713–1768), 37, 38, 301 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), xxi, 112, 113, 334, 347, 351, 410n.4 Stewart, Stanley (b. 1931), 176, 406n.31 Still, Colin (b. 1888), 40, 390n.45 Stinson, John (b. 1910), 3, 56, 391n.68 Story of the Glittering Plain, The (Morris), xxiv, 275–7 Strabo (ca. 64–ca. 24 b.c.e.), 173 Stratton-Porter, Gene (1863–1924), 406n.19 Strindberg, August (1849–1912), 12, 152 Strothmann, Friedrich W. (1904–1982), 393n.8 structuralism, xxi, 349 structure, 103, 128, 147, 150, 182, 183, 202, 294, 302, 318, 319; archetypes of, 184; architectural metaphor of, 342; binary, 186; of the clinch-tease, 147; cultural, 9; decentralized, 256; economic, 357; general, 326; heuristic, 326; ideal, 154; of imagery, 108, 112; implicit, 95; intellectual, 359; of knowledge, 365; literary, 320, 323; logical, 41; main, 98; of Menippean wash, 147; of metaphor, 103; mythical, 100, 150; organizing ideas of, 285; prodigal son, 148; of romance, 287, 324; single, 355; social, 320; of society,

442 110; total, 186; of towns, 127; university, 111; of wanderings, 144 “Structure of Imagery in the Faerie Queene, The” (Frye), 402n.5 Stubborn Structure, The (Frye), xx, xxi, 133–6 Study of English Romanticism, A (Frye), xvii, 135 Suckling, Sir John (1609–1642), 24 Sullivan, Arthur (1842–1900), 18, 28, 29 Sundering Flood, The (Morris), xxiv, 281–5 Sunshine Susie (film), 28 superstition, 50 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of (1517– 1547), 17 Surtees, Robert (1805–1864), 189, 217, 407n.46 “Survival of Eros in Poetry, The” (Frye), xxvii Suspiria de Profundis (De Quincey), 308, 409n.75 and n.81 Sweeney Agonistes (Eliot), 90, 394n.13 and n.14 Sweeney among the Nightingales (Eliot), 92 Sweeney Erect (Eliot), 394n.12 Sweet Rocket (Johnston), xxx–xxxi, 363 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), 26–7, 302 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837–1909), 54 “Symbol as a Medium of Exchange, The” (Frye), 415n.35 symbolism: alchemical 254–5; of Blake’s prophecies, 135; colour, xv, 11; doublegyre, 292; earth-mother, 192; emanation, 299; faulty, 313; as field of interpenetration, 38; “if-it-die,” 295; interpretation of, 52; lunar, 90; Old Testament, 75; Pasternak’s, 88; phallic, 12; of recurrent life, 381; sexual, 26 Symbols of Transformation (Jung), 379 Symons, Arthur (1865–1945), 89 Tale of Adrian and Bardus, The (Gower), 64 Tale of Genji, 224

Index Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 162, 190 Tam o’ Shanter (Burns), 38 Tansey, Charlotte, 315, 318, 319, 322, 326, 329, 335–6, 338, 340–1, 343, 345 Tarr (Lewis), 84 Taussig, Walter (1908–2003), 54 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), xxv, 54, 162, 164, 191 Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1809–1892), 8, 22, 54 Terror, The (Machen), 387n.3 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy), 37 Testament (Lydgate), 68 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811– 1863), 21, 37 theme: anxiety of continuity, 147; beauty and the beast, 267; bed trick, 190; calumniated female, 157, 192; communication, 207; cuckolding, 17; death-to-rebirth, 190; defense of the virgin, 314; demonic parody, 168; descent from the gods, 280; descent to the underworld, 176, 327, 330, 343; disguise, 212, 240; dramaacted-by-spirits, 191; drug, 178; ekpyrosis, 182; farmers and fences, 130; Fascist, 91; fatal beauty, 143, 158; grateful dead, 185; Hamlet, 90; hero from over the sea, 231; Herod, 224; incest, 150, 163, 318; invulnerable chastity, 143; isolation, 91; jealousy, 110; Jonah descent, 175; magic mirror, 287; magical portrait, 190; metamorphosis, 188, 216, 217, 262; mirror, 288; mock death of heroine, 144; money from sea, 146; music master, 190; night world, 177; obsession, 212; Odyssey, 188; opium, 177; oracle design, 232; pirate, 254; Pygmalion, 286, 288; renunciationof-magic, 268; reproach, 140; return of the thrall, 263; revolutionary, 184; selfimprisonment, 289; Serena sacrifice, 145; shadow-substance, 149; shipwreck and treasure from the sea, 214; shipwrecked heroine of romance, 307; snow maiden,

Index 287; sun and moon, 155; supremacy of friendship over love, 144; time, 181; trace of disguise, 170; transformation of ship into vines, 140; treasure from the sea, 163, 252, 309; twin, 187, 225, 259; two brothers, 217, 298; unfreezing of the statue, 151; Utopias, 135; Wagner Ring, 177; wandering in forest, 148; withdrawal, 180 Themis (Harrison), 14, 388n.14 Theocritus (fl. 270 b.c.e.), 146 Theodoric the Great (454–526 c.e.), 62 thinking, 20 Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (Polti), 406n.40 Thistle and the Rose, The (Dunbar), 71 Thomas, Dylan (1914–1953), 106, 400n.46 Thompson, James (1700–1748), 62 Thompson, Stith (1885–1976), 154 Three Cuckolds, The (anon.), 407n.37 Three Greek Romances (Hadas), xxiv, 142–5, 404–5n.7 Three Voices, The (Carroll), 25 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 109, 406n.34 Thucydides (ca. 469–ca. 400 b.c.e.), 51 Tibetan Book of the Dead, The, 306 Tilley, Sir Samuel Leonard (1818–1896), 43, 82, 390n.51 Time and Western Man (Lewis), xix, 82 “Times of the Signs, The” (Frye), 348, 411n.4 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 17 ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), 161, 406n.25 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) (1488–1576), 41, 390n.50 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 374 To the Terrestrial Globe (Gilbert), 42 “To Come to Light” (Frye), xxix To Have and to Hold (Johnston), 387n.4 Tolkien, J.R.R. (1892–1973), xviii, 272, 341 Tolstoy, Count Leo (1828–1910), 100, 101 Tom Jones (Fielding), 37

443 “Top of the Tower: A Study of the Imagery of Yeats, The” (Frye), 404n.15 “Towards De­fining an Age of Sensibility” (Frye), 112, 398n.26, 402n.7 Towards the Last Spike (Pratt), 113 Tower, The (Yeats), 110 Toy Cart, The, 190 Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Glacken), 414n.27 tragedy: of Abelard and Heloise, 37; blood ties in, 263; Book of Job as, 174; conflict in Hamlet, 16; contrast with comedy, 349; enclosed in comedy, 152; of Hardy’s Tess, 37; in IV Macabbees, 173; in Old Testament, 174; and pathos, 15; precedents for in Shakespeare, 374; in Scott’s Waverley, 194; Senecan, 374; and torture, 14; of unlicensed sex, 162; of virginity in Ophelia, 16 tragic: action, 350; archetypal formulae, 67; the background theme in Scott’s Waverley, 193; category in Yeats’s A Vision, 107; lurking possibility of metamorphosis, 189; as opposed to pathetic, 15; when sexual partners are socially unequal, 151; result of patriarchal society, 174; situation of artist at centre of civilization, 113; truncated comic story, 160; one of Yeats’s historical cycles, 328 Trahison des Clercs (Benda), 331 Trembling of the Vale (Yeats), 401n.5 Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, The (Dunbar), 70 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 13, 37, 53, 96 Triumph of Life, The (Shelley), 331 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 17 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 73 Trophonius, cave of, 303, 304 Troy Book (Lydgate), 66 Truant, The (Pratt), 415n.6 True History (Lucian), 175 Tschaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich (1840–1893), 22 T.S. Eliot (Drew), 390n.8 T.S. Eliot (Unger), 393n.8

444 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 25 Tuscan Disputations (Cicero), 133, 173 Tuve, Rosemond (1903–1964), xviii, 75–6 Twain, Mark (1835–1910), xv, 41, 390n.49 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 149, 156, 375 Twine, Laurence (16th century), 406n.27 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare), 143, 144, 149 Two Noble Kinsmen [TNK] (Fletcher and Shakespeare), 372, 413n.5 typology, 75–6, 377 Ulysses (Joyce), xvi, 53–4, 90, 318 Under Ben Bulben (Yeats), 110 undergraduate education, 114–19 Unger, Leonard (1916–2006), 90, 393n.8 unifable, 263, 408n.58 United Church of Canada, 6, 118–19 “University and Personal Life, The” (Frye), 348, 410–11n.2 Unspeakable Scot, The (Crosland), 31 Usk, Thomas (ca. 1354–1388), 65 Utopia (More), 104, 159, 379 Utopias, 28, 103, 104, 105, 124, 135, 159, 176, 196, 379 Valéry, Paul (1871–1945), 90, 344 value judgments, 317 Vanbrugh, John, 389n.21 Van Gogh, Vincent (1853–1890), 12 “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (Frye), 403n.7 Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 319 Varro (116–27 b.c.e.), 173–4 Vaughan, Henry (1622–1695), 73, 76 Velázquez, Diego (1599–1660), 318 Venus of Urbino (Titian), 41 Venus of Willendorf, 94 vers libre, 34 Vico, Giambattista (1688–1744), 328, 379 Victoria, Queen (1819–1901), 25 “Victoria Chapel Windows, The” (Frye), 382–5 Victoria College, xiii, xxviii, 114, 116–19

Index “Victoria College’s Contribution to the Development of Canadian Culture” (Frye), xxviii, 352–4 Virgil (70–19 b.c.e.), 121, 173 Visible Language, 348 vision, 67, 86, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 113, 124, 127, 132, 154, 286, 306, 345–6, 350–1, 356, 371 Vision, A (Yeats), 107, 110, 187, 350 “Vision and Cosmos” (Frye), xxvii Vita Nuova, La (Dante), 366 Voegelin, Eric (1901–1985), 325, 346 Volsunga Saga, xxiv, 261–3 Voltaire (François-Marie d’Arouet) (1694– 1778), 9, 10 von Kluck, Alexander Heinrich Rudolph (1846–1934), 52 Voyage Out, The (Woolf), 291 Wacousta (Richardson), xxvi, 208 “Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form” (Frye), 411n.13 Wagenknecht, Edward, 387n.3 Wagner, Richard (1813–1883), 390n.50 Wanderer, The, 63–4 “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (Scott), 209 war on poverty, 126–7 Warkentin, Germaine, xxviii Warren, Florence, 392n.7 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 90, 91, 92, 164, 318, 344, 400n.46 Water of the Wondrous Isles, The (Morris), 283 Waverley (Scott), xxiv, 192–4 Waves, The (Woolf), 48 Way of the World, The (Congreve), 37 Webster, John (ca. 1580–ca. 1626), 17 Well at the World’s End, The (Morris), xxiv, 270–5 Well-Tempered Critic, The (Frye), xxvi, 395n.24 Wells, H.G. (1866–1946), 93 Wesley, Charles (1707–1788), 416n.11 Wesley, John (1703–91), xxviii, 416n.11

Index Wesley, Samuel (1766–1837), 384, 415n.5 Wheelwright, Philip (1901–1970), 90, 134, 393n.8, 403n.3 Whistler, James Abbott McNeil (1834– 1903), 17, 388–9n.19 White Devil, The (Webster), 17 White Goddess, The (Graves), 270 White Guard (Bulgakov), 359–60 Whitman, Walt (1819–1892), 19, 43, 108 Why so Pale and Wan, Fond Lover? (Suckling), 24 Widsith, 62 Wilde, Oscar (1854–1900), 15, 17, 48 William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Damon), 410n.2 Williams, Charles (1886–1945), xxx, 363 Williamson, George (1898–1968), 90, 393n.9 Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972), 90 Wilson, Milton (1923–2013), 90 Wimsatt, William K., Jr. (1907–1975), 351 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), xxv, 40, 139, 151, 160, 191, 192, 195, 288, 374, 375, 405n.15 wisdom, 5, 28, 84, 127, 173, 263, 343, 366, 377, 378 “Wisdom and Knowledge” (Frye), xxix Wisdom of Solomon, Book of, 173, 382 Wise Woman, The (MacDonald), 142 Witzel, Jack, 57, 391n.69 Woman in White, The (Collins), xxiv, xxv, 182–6 Woman Killed with Kindness, A (Heywood), 17

445 Wood beyond the World, The (Morris), xxiv, 266–70 Woodhouse, A.S.P. (1895–1964), 135, 330 Woodman, Ross, 387n.1 Woolf, Virginia (1882­–1941), 48, 291 Words with Power (Frye), xxv, xxxii Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), 69, 315–16 Works (Fuller), 37 “World as Music and Idea in Wagner’s Parsifal, The” (Frye), 415n.33 wu wei, 371 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503–1542), 69 Wycherley, William (1641–1715), 17 Wyclif, John (ca. 1329–1384), 31 “Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian” (Frye), xix Wyndham Lewis (Wagner), xviii–xix, 78–84 Xenophon of Ephesus (fl. 2nd–3rd centuries), xxiii, 142–5, 163 Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), xxi, 107–10, 112, 113, 135, 187, 188, 224, 327–8, 332, 347, 350–1, 400n.46 “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism” (Frye), 402n.13 Yorkshire Tragedy, A (Middleton), 372, 413n.6 Zanoni (Bulwer-Lytton), 210, 273 Zarathustra, 110 Zeno the Stoic (333–264 b.c.e.), 173 Zola, Émile (1840–1902), 323